COMPLETED: Planned Maintenance – CPanel06

Planned Maintenance: cPanel06 Hosting Server

Emergency Maintenance: cPanel06 Hosting Server

Replacement Drives, Migration of Data and Hardware Upgrades

What is being done:

Replacement of SSD Hard Drives and Migration of all existing data to the new disks, following the check/repair/analysis from Emergency Maintenance – CPanel06 on 16/November, and reconfiguration of caching, intrusion-detection systems, extra firewalling and other tweaks.

Who is affected:

Clients with cPanel/WHM Linux Hosting Services (web, email, personal, business hosting packages) on server:

  • cPanel06

The server will need to be completely offline during the maintenance to physically swap hard-drives, and restore all data as quickly as possible.

During the maintenance window you will not be able to access any aspect of your hosting accounts through the Client Portal, via WHM/cPanel or by http/ftp/pop3/smtp/imap etc

The servers will need to be powered down, have all drives removed, duplicated and replaced, and other hardware changed before bringing up with limited access whilst services are started in a controlled manner and the reported disk-io and load investigations are completed.

This will involve a maximum of 6 hours of outage of all services (mail, web, databases etc) on server cp06 and some limited access for an additional 24 hours whilst the impact and improvements are monitored and tweaked.

We are unable to provide an exact time for you to regain any access to your hosting account as it will depend on the type of services you use – email only will be back first, followed by ftp, web, databases – if any ‘prioritisation’ of clients is necessary, then those with the advanced-support levels will be 1st, followed by Enterprise & E-Commerce clients, then Business, Personal and finally any trial and subsidised/discounted/internal services.

Incoming email during this time will ‘queue’ at the sender, Outbound emails will stay on your local machine (where using a mail client) – webmail access will be unavailable until the work is completed.

Websites will be down until the data has been restored, Websites which rely on a database will start to work once the mysql databases are restored and repaired.

FTP upload/download access will return once we have confirmed all data is available.

Access to other services/ports where supported will then be made available again.

When is this maintenance:

Starting Monday 17 November 2014 05:00
Completing Tuesday 18 November 2014 11:00

Why do we need to do this:

A disk-corruption has occurred, which required previous maintenance and downtime to repair. On completing a full scan of all drive arrays, datacentre technicians decided that a full replacement woudl be necessary at some point in the future. In order to minimise any potential loss of client data, we have decided to do that in a controlled manner as soon as possible.

We are therefore going to be migrating to new drives to increase the IO capabilities, add more ram to upgrade caching for overall performance benefits, and some reconfiguration – so that the server(s) can be returned to service at full capacity and elimiate the ‘pending fail’ possibility of the drive array.

updates

2014-11-17 07:55 – Data restore completed – server being returned to service with staff access only
2014-11-17 08:00 – All Email Services returned to service – imap/pop3/smtp – exc. webmail
2014-11-17 08:10 – All static websites returned to service
2014-11-17 08:20 – Webmail returned to service
2014-11-17 09:20 – All MySQL DB services returned to service after full mysqlcheck
2014-11-17 22:00 – All services have been fully operational for 4+ hours load is down, peformance is up

Maintenance is completed – if you are currently seeing any issues with your service on hosting server cpanel06 please open a ticket through the client portal