Category: Announcements

[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

[Complete] ams2-c6-1 changes

This is an announcement for any customer who has a website or email service running on ams2-c6-1. Unfortunately, the operating system running on ams2-c6-1 is end of life and needs replacing.

On 1st of May 2023 we will be transferring all hosting accounts from ams2-c6-1 to a newer web server, ams1-c8-1. This will include email and DNS data but not web data – this will remain on ams2-c6-1 via a secure local proxy. You won’t need to do anything. We will automatically be handling the transfer and after the maintenance everything including your email accounts will operate as normal.

Customers who wish to access their website files and data directly via FTP / MySQL on ams2-c6-1 will need to be connected to our VPN and access it via the local network – please contact support@anu.net if you either do not have a VPN account and need one, or are not sure how to connect to ams2-c6-1 using it.

We expect this maintenance to begin at 8PM Amsterdam Time and be complete 2AM Amsterdam time (6 hours). During this period, email accounts hosted on ams2-c6-1 will be offline throughout, and web/DNS traffic may experience 2-3 outages of up to 15 minutes each.

This only affects clients with websites and email hosted on ams2-c6-1 – we will also be contacting customers directly if this is the case.

Ashley

[Scheduled] PHP upgrades for all Web Hosting customers

As part of our proactive managed service we are working on upgrading PHP for all Web Hosting customers who are still using the 7.X branches which are end of life and no longer supported.

Customers with managed servers will be contacted on an individual basis regarding these upgrades.

Customers using our Web Hosting account plans on our shared DirectAdmin servers will be upgraded to PHP 8 automatically starting from 22 February. PHP 8 maintains good backwards compatibility with 7.X but there are a few backward incompatible changes so there is a small chance that some sites or specific functions within your site may not run properly under PHP 8. In most instances our monitoring servers will detect this automatically. Any site returning a 500 Internal Server Error response will be flagged up by our monitoring system. If your site is flagged up we will investigate whether the site can be easily upgraded to support PHP 8. If it is not possible to run on PHP 8 without extensive modification we will revert to PHP 7.X and contact you to discuss options.

If you have any questions or concerns, or discover any functionality in your site which does not work on PHP 8, please contact us for assistance.