[Upcoming] ams2-c7-1 upgrade

This is an upcoming maintenance announcement for any customer who has a website hosted on our ams2-c7-1 Direct Admin shared hosting server.

Unfortunately, the CentOS 7 operating system powering this server is end of life so we must upgrade it to continue to offer a secure and stable hosting environment.

We have provisioned a new server to replace it, ams1-r9-1 running Rocky Linux 9 and we will be migrating all accounts and the server’s IP address to it.

All accounts running any version of PHP 7 will be forced on to a new minimum of PHP 7.4 and MariaDB 10.4 will be replaced with MySQL 8.0. We estimate that 99% of sites will run without any problems on this new environment but are aware that a handful may not.

We hope to be able to shut down ams2-c7-1 completely but in the event that any sites have any significant hurdles, ams2-c7-1 could be kept up with a LAN IP only and restricted access FTP server for clients to access via VPN for these specific sites to continue operating.

We will need to shut down ams2-c7-1 for the whole maintenance period. As sites are migrated one by one to ams1-r9-1 by the Direct Admin backup/restore tool as part of a batch scheduled job they will come back online as the IP address will already be ready and waiting on ams1-r9-1. It is hard to predict exactly how long this will take but we expect it to complete within 4-8 hours.

We will be heavily monitoring site HTTP responses, error logs and support tickets for any signs of problems and proactively intervening with problematic sites, starting with basic troubleshooting and we will reach out to you if required. We will be conducting manual tests against samples of sites running various software platforms and PHP versions. Please if you have any issues with your site when it comes back online, contact us by emailing support@anu.net to discuss your options with us.

Date of maintenance: 2nd February 2025
Maintenance start: 10 AM (10:00) UK time
Maintenance end: 6 PM (18:00) UK time latest, depending on restore times.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us by emailing support@anu.net.

[Complete] Scheduled Maintenance Amsterdam 1 data center

Update 2024-12-09 15:30 UTC: we have not observed any issues since this change was carried out. Maintenance concluded successfully.

Update 2024-12-07 12:45 UTC: maintenance work is complete. The change plan was executed flawlessly, with down time of just 96 seconds. We are now entering the monitoring phase, with engineers on standby in case any unforeseen effects arise.

On Saturday 2024-12-07 starting at 12:00 UTC we will be performing scheduled maintenance in our Amsterdam 1 data center facility. During this maintenance window, IP transit services will be migrated to a new carrier. Disruption to connectivity is unfortunately unavoidable. The duration of the disruption will largely depend on how long your ISP takes to update BGP routing information. The best estimates provided by the engineers involved in this change is that 90% of connectivity will be back online within 30 minutes.

Services affected:

  • Hosted Email – including our support@anu.net address
  • ams1-c8-1 DirectAdmin server
  • DNS management control panel
  • Anu customer portal
  • Customer VMs with public IPs starting with 193.189.141.

Our apologies in advance for this unavoidable disruption.

Background: 19 years ago (on 3 May 2005 to be precise) we provisioned IP connectivity for our Amsterdam facility. After multiple mergers and acquisitions of service suppliers, we find ourselves in the position where our existing contract cannot be renewed, and services therefore need to be migrated to another provider.

Our engineers and service providers have been hard at work preparing for this change. New fiber patches have been installed and tested. Direct BGP peering of old and new carriers at mutual Internet exchange points has been established in order to speed up route propagation. A change plan is in place with detailed steps, testing protocols and fall-back procedures. If all goes smoothly, disruption may be as little as a few minutes, but please be prepared for the potential of a longer disruption on the day if routes take longer than anticipated to propagate.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns please contact us on support@anu.net

[Resolved] SpamTitan web interface inaccessible

Update 2024-08-18 11:40 UTC: A hot fix has been applied and https://spamtitan.anu.net/ is accessible again.

Please be advised: Quarantine reports – Links in prior reports will not be actionable, all future reports will work as normal. Any required mail in previous reports can be released via the UI from the link above.

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Update 2024-08-17 21:30 UTC: SpamTitan have advised a fix is anticipated by 10:00 UTC tomorrow (18 August)

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We are currently experiencing an issue with our SpamTitan email filtering appliance. While email continues to flow normally, the Web interface is currently inaccessible. This means you can’t manage your quarantine or filter settings, or release email that has been blocked.

SpamTitan are aware of the issue and are working on a fix. We do not yet have an ETA.

Apologies for the inconvenience caused.