Netserve Service Status

Our offices are closed today from 12 noon due to the marriage of our senior technician, Anthony. We will reopen for business 10am on Thursday 30th August.

In the mean time, limited email support will be provided for emergency cases only. On call engineers will still be available 24/7 for service related issues.

On behalf of all of the staff of Netserve and Designweb we would like to wish Anthony and Cally all the best wishes for their future together.

Webmail has been taken down for maintainence, we plan on returning it as soon we as we able.

This in no way effects the ability to collect mail from desktop clients, remote webmail clients, or the transit of mail in and out of the service.

We are experiencing a delay on some mail that has been passing over one of our inbound email servers. We are aware of the issue and working on it - due to the clustered nature of our setup this should effect a small percentage of mail only. Thank you for your patience.

We are currently having issue with a number of core systems, what appears to be a denial of service is effecting relay.nsnoc.com and one of the SSL servers. We are aware of the situation and working on it, please resist the temptation to phone in - we will return service as soon as we isolate the cause and make good.

[Update 1029] An automatic defensive shutdown occurred to a server that was being attacked from a massive influx of traffic. The issue was identified, and rectified. Service has resumed.

Customers have made us aware this morning of connectivity issues from selected ISP's within the UK, which appears to have started at 8am this morning.

Investigation into the matter has proved difficult but has now been traced to one of our upstream providers advertising network routes to our network but then failing to deliver the traffic.

Under normal circumstances where a router connection fails, the advertisement to that route is removed automatically. The new routing table should then be updated to other routers that peer with it thereby preventing traffic being passed off to routers which cannot handle it.

We have closed down the peer with the London provider concerned and have raised the issue with them. When we have an explanation for the failed routes we will post further information here.

We would like to apologise to customers affected by this partial routing outage and the length of time it has taken to identify the source of the issue.

*** UPDATE ***

Further investigation suggests that the issue was restricted to a single /25 subnet used for routing transit to three customers and may have started some time after 11pm last night.

At this stage it appears that a reset filter on a single interconnect may have been the cause of the issue.

we have encountered a partial failure of our backup load balancer this morning. So while services have been running without interruption, there has been no means to reach them.

The switch over has taken place back to the primary from the backup, and the opportunity has been taken to make some adjustments to the configuration. We are sorry for the inconvenience for those of you in the office too early this morning. This was rectified prior to 9am this morning.

In addition to the DRoA - we have a new kid on the block of thoughtfully reminding you that your domain is about to expire.

While you are free to move your domain over to whoever you wish, you are best reading all the print on these kinds of emails, and looking closely at their terms and conditions. We have recently had a number of clients who have accidentally moved away and lost control of their domain.

Please be sure that the mail you are dealing with is in plain text from either DomainCity, or DesignWeb - or that you have compared the pricings T&C and what you are agreeing to by clicking the link.

Here is an example of one such mail.



The Domain Registry of America and the Domain Renewal Online are in no way related to us.

We have a current issue with our primary load balancer, and are in the process of bringing our secondary service on line. This will be effecting both mail and web will be effected for some clients, others will see no impact what so ever. We will update this as we can.

[update 1255] - this has been resolved. The primary balancer has suffered a hardware failure, the secondary is now online and operating correctly.


[update 1307] Our previous month independent statistics are showing as 99.94% uptime, and so far this month 99.88% for the six days of August; we are quite pleased with these figures, and thought we would share them with you : )

Despite our requests to our AOL customers not to use the spam report features of their AOL mail accounts when dealing with mail sent through our network we have yet again had our AOL gateway server's IP address blocked. This is now the 5th block in as many months.

AOL have refused to whitelist the IP addresses of our mail servers.

AOL customers now have two options to ensure that they are able to have email services on their domain names.

1) Migrate your ADSL service away from AOL to ourselves. Our prices start at £11.75 per month so we're considerably cheaper than AOL.

2) Have your mail delivered to a POP box on our servers rather than forwarded to AOL.
Prices for mail accounts are available from our web site.

We will configure a new mail gateway today to handle mail bound for AOL customers and will contact all customers using AOL forwarders that the service will not continue to operate from the time AOL next blocks the new IP address.

If you are unhappy with the service provided by AOL please ask them to provide you with a MAC code which you can then forward to ourselves to migrate your DSL service away.

Labels: AOL DSL migration

Customers in IFL2 Manchester can now get 1Mbit of free PA address space with 8 IP's for 12 months. Simply pay the setup fee of £150 and arrange for IFL to install cable from your rack to our Meet-me-room switches to take advantage of this very special offer.

This special offer runs for August only and is limited to 10 new customers.

Additional transit is available at £30 per mbit. The contract can be upgraded to higher a CDR at any time which can reduce the rate to as low as £15 per Mbit.

Full details of the Manchester transit offer are available from our web site.

Labels: Manchester IFL transit

We have been advised by Protx that our payment gateway is currently down due to essential database maintenance and ugprades taking longer than expected.

While the service is unavailable we will be upgrading our own payment pages to support the new 3D-Secure service from Mastercard. We anticipate that the service will be unavailable for most of today.

UPDATE 02/08/07 : 15.00

Card processing services have now been restored. 3D Secure service will be available on Maestro cards within the hour.