We will be performing a number of important system updates at around midnight tonight.  Services affected will be:

• VoIP calls/registrations for some NAT customers - however this does not affect customers on nat.gradwell.net which is the default for most customers.
• SSL sites hosted on uk-ssl.com
• Control Panel logins.
• SMTP/POP3/IMAP email services (should be very minimal impact because only 1 server in the cluster is being updated)
• Zimbra email services.

The services above may all have intermittent outages of a few minutes per service.  Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

UPDATE @ 22:06 :: The maintenance has been successfully completed.

Due to a memory error, we have lost access to the management unit in our main cisco switch stack in Telehouse and therefore need to reboot one of the switch nodes.

Although the switches contain redundant controllers, we cannot be sure that the backup will take over, and there may be a short outage to our core network whilst it reboots.

As a precaution, we plan to shutdown most of our virtual servers to a bare minimum, and specifically we will switch off those providing the email system (as their hard disks are accessed via network based storage), and therefore no email collection or delivery will be available during this maintenance window.

We do expect our voip platform to continue working, although some calls may be dropped.

We expect this work to take under 15 minutes to complete, but please accept our apologies for this interuption to service.

Update - 03:15

The switch was successfully rebooted at 01:30 and nearly all services were fully functional by 02:00.  At the time of writing (03:15) we believe all services are back to normal.

Thank you for your patience during this maintenance and we apologize for any inconvenience caused.

We will be running a full file system check on all mailboxes hosted on our v-mail-file-8 server this evening. If you are unsure whether your mailbox will be affected or not, please check under the mailboxes menu within the hosting control panel, where the server which hosts your email will be displayed, on a per box basis.

We expect this maintenance to last less than an hour. However, we have noticed some minor anomalies in the file system and it is possible that file system checking may take longer than expected.

Update:

The maintenance finished successfully at around 22:25.

As part of our ongoing network upgrades, we are planning to migrate a number of our Disk Storage arrays and VMWare servers onto our new ethernet network in Telehouse.

There will be a few brief interuptions (sub 1 min) to VoIP and Email services whilst cables are moved.

In the event of any unforseen problems, there is the potential that we may experience longer down time, particularly with respect to our disk storage arrays. However, we have already done some migrations onto the new network and are confident we are aware and have managed the potential risks.