Gradwell Service News » Completed Hosting Maintenance

COMPLETED CHANGES: Maximum database connection time

David Palmer — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:01:33 +0000

Due to a small number of customers keeping database connections open for a long time, we have implemented a new policy to disconnect any open connection to the customer database servers which is open any longer than 15 minutes. Some code may not handle this correctly, so we would encourage customers to check any scripts they run for backups or log/data processing which takes a long time.

Code which assumes the database connection will stay open indefinitely during the process may need to be altered by customers.

End of Life - Ochre and Newred

David Palmer — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:27:31 +0000

This announcement is intended to serve as an End of Life (EOL) notice
against two of our legacy shell servers, which are running FreeBSD.
Removal from service will occur on 30th April 2009 and all customers are
hereby advised to migrate to ’shell.gradwell.net’ in the next 4-5 weeks.

End of Life
30th April 2009

Affected Hosts:
ochre.gradwell.net
newred.gradwell.net

Any scheduled jobs (via cron) or screen sessions running on these hosts
must be migrated over prior to the removal date, customers should note
that the new shell servers are running CentOS 5.x and not FreeBSD.

Any data which is not located in your home directory on these servers
will *not* be migrated, so please ensure you do not use other locations
on the filesystem (ie: /tmp) for essential data.

Please contact the support team if you have questions.

Telehouse Infrastructure Maintenance

Stuart Herbert — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:22:42 +0000

Starts: 2009/02/26 22:00 Ends: 2009/02/27 6:00

We will be performing the following maintenance on our infrastructure and equipment hosted in our Telehouse suite:

Network switch replacement in rack C4 (affects services running on VMWare ESX)
Memory upgrade for mysqldb4-1 server
Decommissioning of burgundy server
Replacing network cables of the voip-manager and lon-pbx-1 servers

All services may be affected for short periods of time during this maintenance window. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience this may cause, and will endeavour to keep all downtime to a minimum.

Home Folder Maintenance

Stuart Herbert — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:32:43 +0000

Starts: 2009/02/19 05:00 Ends: 2009/02/19 06:00

On Tuesday morning, we will be performing maintenance on lon-file-3 and lon-file-4 to investigate an issue with NFS locking which is affecting the PHP web servers. During this period, all customer websites may be unavailable. We will endeavour to keep downtime to a minimum.

We apologise in advance for any inconvenience this maintenance may cause.

UPDATE 2009/02/17 9:30 This maintenance has been rescheduled for Thursday morning.

PHP 4.4 / PHP 5 Cluster Maintenance - Additional Proxies

Stuart Herbert — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:07:04 +0000

Starts: 2009/02/17 22:00 Ends 2009/02/17 23:00

We will be installing an additional Squid proxy server into both our PHP 4.4 and PHP 5.2 web hosting clusters on Tuesday evening. This will give us three proxies for each cluster, one on each of our web hosting network storage servers, to improve our resilience against future storage server problems.

During this period, websites may be unavailable for a short period of time. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience this maintenance may cause.

Back-end storage issues

David Palmer — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:47:01 +0000

We are aware of an issue with our back-end systems including PHP clusters, affecting live sites and test domains, and are working hard to resolve the problems as quickly as possible. All members of our technical team are currently dedicated to resolving this problem for customers as quickly as possible and drawing up contingency plans for getting services back up and running as quickly as possible. We will be updating customers with a full report as soon as possible.

Update 21 Jan 09 6:30am: All websites and domains were brought back online overnight. If you are still experiencing problems, please contact Gradwell Customer Services.