Author: Ashley Lipscombe

[Resolved] ie1-c8-1 Direct Admin server outage

Our ie1-c8-1 Direct Admin server is currently down due to a hardware related issue.

We are investigating this as we speak and hope to have it back online as soon as possible.

We will post a further update within 30 minutes.

We are really sorry for any inconvenience.

Please do not hesitate to contact us by emailing support@anu.net if you need to reach us.

Update 1 @ 2025-05-23 9AM UK/IE: We have been unable to bring the server back online remotely. We have engaged on site staff to take a look at the server in person. We are also looking at our disaster recovery plans in case they need to be activated. We have backup copies of the server but they will need to be restored to a suitable place. We will provide a further update by 9:30AM UK/IE time.

Update 2 @ 2025-05-23 9:30AM UK/IE: On site staff are working to try to bring the physical server back online. At the same time, we have initiated our recovery plan and have begun the process of bringing the server back online from our most recent backup. We will update you again by 10:00AM UK/IE time.

Update 3 @ 2025-05-23 10AM UK/IE: We have managed to get the physical server back online, we have reviewed it and everything now seems to be healthy and in an optimal state. We will conduct further investigation to try to figure out the cause, will write up an incident log and review our disaster recovery plans for any lessons to learn! Once again, we are very sorry for the inconvenience – please do reach out to us if you have any follow up questions or concerns.

[Complete] 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.

Update 2nd February 2025 @ 10:10AM UK: This work has now started. ams2-c7-1 will be offline shortly and we will provide an update on this work in a couple of hours.

Update 2nd February 2025 @ 1PM UK: This planned work is going well and according to schedule. The first batch of sites are already back online and we expect to see more sites coming back up soon.

Update 2nd February 2025 @ 4:15PM UK: All sites except a handful are back online. We are continuing to work on these sites and will provide another status update soon.

Update 2nd February 2025 @ 4:40PM: All sites are now back online so this maintenance is now complete. If you still have any issues with your specific site, please do get in touch and we’d be happy to help.

[Complete] SpamTitan upgrade

We will be upgrading SpamTitan to the latest version.

As this is a major version change it requires us to set up a new instance of SpamTitan and switch over to it.

We will performance this maintenance at 11PM on Saturday, 1st July 2023 and it is expected to be completed by 1AM on Sunday, 2nd July 2023. There may be up to 60 minutes of downtime during this window.

Any quarantined emails will remain on the old SpamTitan instance for 14 days after the upgrade which is our standard deletion period. If you need to release anything from this old server at any time during the 14 days, please contact us at support@anu.net and we will be happy to help you. All new quarantined emails can be released as normal via the SpamTitan interface or quarantine summary emails.

If you have any concerns or questions do not hesitate to contact us by email on support@anu.net.

Update 1st July 2023 @ 11PM: This work is now in progress.

Update 1st July 2023 @ 11:55PM: This work is now complete. Please see advice above re releasing emails from the quarantine over the past 14 days that are not available on the new SpamTitan instance. If you have any issues at all do not hesitate to contact support@anu.net or if your emails are affected and you can’t do that, you can open a live chat at https://anu.net to reach us.