Authentication Service Outage (resolved)

There was a prolonged outage this morning of our authentication and directory service which affected many of our systems, most noticeably email.

Due to a double hardware failure, we scheduled emergency maintenance for two of our servers at 8am this morning, which took part of our virtualisation plaform offline. Affected customers were notified individually.

Unfortunately, for reasons we are still investigating, this led to a cascading failure which took our authentication and directory services offline, which affected other services, including email.

Thank you to all our customers for your patience throughout this extended outage. We are still investigating, and will take remedial steps based on what we find. Our authentication and directory services are critical to our infrastructure and are meant to failover seamlessly in the event of a single failure - today they did not.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvience caused.

Brett Sheffield Talks About Spam and Backscatter

On Wednesday, Brett Sheffield spoke about Spam and Backscatter at Techmeetup Edinburgh.

The talk covers what we know about spam and spammers, and a real world approach to fighting spam.

Subversion Server Maintenance 18:00 tonight

At 18:00 this evening we will be taking down the subversion server for brief maintenance. This is expected to take no more than ten (10) minutes. This only affects customers with subversion repositories and their associated Trac projects.

NetBSD 5.0.2 available

NetBSD 5.0.2 has been released and is available to Gladserv's customers on request.

Short Notice Scheduled Maintenance - 6pm tonight

We're performing some short notice maintenance on 'octave' this evening between 1800 and 1900hrs. We expect downtime to be around 15 minutes.

This will affect some virtual server customers and IMAP services. Affected customers will be contacted individually.

I apologise for the short notice.

Gentoo Virtual Servers Available

I hope everyone is enjoying the festive season. In Scotland we've had a good snow covering for over a week now, which is unusual for here. With the weather so penguin-friendly, perhaps it is fitting that today we have made Gentoo virtual servers available. Give us a shout at Gladserv if you'd like to try one out.

We've been experimenting with FreeBSD virtual servers, but alas, we're not able to make them available to the public yet. FreeBSD support for Xen has been on and off (mostly off since Xen 2.0 days really). We've not seen much demand for them yet, but if you are interested, let us know. If we get enough requests we'll put some more R&D time into making this production-ready.

Cheers, and enjoy the rest of the season!

Brett and the Gladserv Team

Fedora 12 (Constantine) released

Constantine was released yesterday. Want to try out Fedora 12 on a virtual server? Give Gladserv a call.