[Resolved] Amsterdam 1 Server Failure

2016-02-15 06:00 GMT: 2 hard drives failed at the same time in a server at our Amsterdam 1 datacenter, causing the RAID array to fail. This has resulted in several clients and some internal infrastructure going offline (including our support helpdesk).

We are currently working hard to restore backups on to another server and will provide regular updates. If you want to contact us you can tweet @anuinternet.

Update 08:55 GMT: our support desk is back online, some virtual machines are already back online, others are still restoring from backup.

Update 10:15 GMT: all servers except the anuhosting.net shared/reseller server are now back online. anuhosting.net has been priority #1 since we started the restore procedure 4 hours ago, unfortunately it is also by far the largest and is taking quite some time to restore. We estimate it may take another 2-3 hours to complete.

Update 13:40 GMT: we are working on recovering services on anuhosting.net, we aim to have mail services running very shortly followed by MySQL and Apache/PHP. Apologies for the ongoing service interruption.

Update 14:00 GMT: DNS and mail on anuhosting.net are operational again. MySQL was unable to recover InnoDB to a functional state, so we are restoring the last consistent database snapshot available which is from 04:00 Sunday. We will make the recovered InnoDB databases from the latest backup available to anyone who wants to try to extract missing data from Sunday. Most of the data is there but we were unable to recover it to a fully functional state, so we made the decision to roll back to a known good copy. We expect PHP/MySQL/Apache services to be back online within 30 minutes.

Update 15:30 GMT: we are running into problem after problem with restoring Web functionality and do not currently have an ETA. We are working as fast as possible to recover MySQL, Apache and PHP services on anuhosting.net. All other services are currently operational. Our sincere apologies for the continued downtime on shared and reseller hosting servers.

Update 01:30 GMT: It’s been a very long day, thankfully at this point we can say our anuhosting.net server is finally operational again. We have spent the past half hour testing as many sites as possible and things seem to be running well. We are concerned there may be a handful of InnoDB tables with errors, if your site is not functioning 100% this may be the cause. Please contact support@anu.net ASAP and we will do what we can to help get you back up and running. We will be on hand tomorrow to answer any questions and help with any remaining issues.

A big thank you to all our customers for their patience, understanding and encouragement throughout this difficult day.

We will of course follow up with a detailed review of our storage systems, redundancy measures, backup and disaster recovery plans.

Scheduled replacement of SpamTitan server

As part of our ongoing commitment to replace end of life hardware with ever faster and more reliable equipment, the time has come to replace our SpamTitan server.

After processing over 135.5 million incoming emails, filtering out 80.4% and passing 19.6% as clean, it’s time to retire our SpamTitan hardware appliance and replace it with a newer, faster virtualised SpamTitan.

The upgrade is scheduled for 2016-02-19 at 17:00 GMT.

We expect the service interruption to incoming email processing to last no more than 10 minutes, during which time all existing relay settings, domain and user profiles will be transferred to the new server. However existing quarantined mail will not be transferred, so if you require access to previously quarantined mail after the 19th at 17:00, you’ll need to log in to https://oldspamtitan.anu.net/ instead of https://spamtitan.anu.net/

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Happy holidays

We would like to take this opportunity to wish all our customers a Merry Christmas (if Christmas is something you celebrate) and Happy New Year (for users of the Gregorian calendar).

We’ll be manning our support desk as usual over the holiday period, and keeping an extra watchful eye on our monitoring systems to make sure operations continue to run smoothly.