Server Outage

[Michael]

Hi All. The server became unresponsive this evening. We have attempted a to reboot the server however the server is still failing to return to normal operations.

We have hands on techs running windows repair tasks currently.

We will keep you updated.

[Michael]

Our techs have been working on the issue and found that the primary drive has failed. We are reviewing backup information and will update you further with regards to a server restoration plan.

I apologize for any inconvenience.

[Michael]

We are currently arranging new drives from the server and will proceed with restoring the server. We will be installing a fresh copy of windows and plesk in the process. The process has been delayed due to having to wait to organize new drives.

The drive failure has corrupted our most recent backups. We do have backup information available from the 20th October that we will be restoring once the server has been setup with the new drives.

[Snowman]

because of the nature of the drive failure and the state of the available data we will be bringing forward the IP re-assignment for the server and setting up clients on a brand new Xeon 3040 server, which is significantly more powerful than the old Dual Core Pentium D hardware. We will also provision the server with 4Gb of ram this will see a marked improvement in daily performance.

The server will also be running a RAID1 disk array, so that in the event of a drive failure in the future all data is protected

We are also going to be running with Windows 2008 and Plesk 8.6.0.4 as opposed to the old Windows 2003 configuration. While this may require some .asp websites to have some adjustments made to their web.config files we will work with everyone to get any issues resolved as soon as we can

As soon as we have more details on the progress of the work i will update everyone further

All clients and resellers will be assigned new IP's from our 115.178.21.x range and we will be sending out updated details to everyone in regards to the new IP's later today as we get clients sites restored.

Resellers will need to update their nameserver IP records and we will contact each reseller individually with details on this as soon as possible.

[Snowman]

The new hardware is in place and im currently downloading Plesk ready for install

[Snowman]

Michael is now currently configuring IIs and Plesk services on the server

As soon as we progress to the next step we will update everyone further

[Snowman]

Michael is currently migrating the site data we currently have available across to the new hardware and this will take a couple of hours to complete.

We can then proceed with the restoration of sites

[Snowman]

Michael has so far restored around 25% of the sites to the server.

Email services however have not been restored yet. Due to the loss of the primary drive data we will need to manually create everyone's email addresses from scratch, this will take some time to process and we dont expect email to be back up and running until late tonight at the earliest.

We are also using data recovery software to try and recover missing data from the primary drive, however this process will take a couple of hours, before we will know if the data is salvagable.

As soon as i have more information i will update everyone

[Snowman]

Due to the way the new server has been configured there has been a change to the path to the inetpub vhost folders

on the old server configuration the path was d:/inetpub/vhost/ on the new server it is now e:/inetpub/vhost/

If your script uses paths in its configuration file you will need to adjust it to suit

[Snowman]

As you know the server suffered a fatal crash and we have spent the last 24 hours restoring websites fro the data we were able to salvage from backup. Unfortunately due to corruption only website data was retrievable and this data is dated 22nd October

What we have done is restored all clients and resellers websites to the server. Everyone will have now been sent a new welcome email with updated login details for your accounts.

We ask all clients to login and check over their websites to ensure that all scripts on the accounts are working. Some clients may need to adjust their scripts config files to use the new servers local paths. On the old server configuration the path was d:/inetpub/vhost/ on the new server it is now e:/inetpub/vhost/

Unfortunately email accounts, email forwarders and data were not retrievable from the backup. What we have however done is created a catchall email address to collect all mail for the domains

You can access the email account via POP or webmail using tech@YOURDOMAIN.COM (where YOURDOMAIN.COM is your websites domain name) along with your accounts password as sent out on the new welcome email we have just sent out.

You can also now login to Plesk and recreate email accounts, forwarders etc as required.

Resellers
Resellers will need to login to Plesk and manually reset their clients plesk and plesk ftp passwords and re-assign packages and permissions as required for their clients.

Please also check thru your account list to ensure that all your sites are listed as we have a few domains from the restore that we are unable to identify the owners of

If anyone has any queries or problems with their website please lodge a ticket at the helpdesk and we will be happy to assist in resolving any issues you have.