Our hosting division now has its own dedicated website which will report network status, updates and information. Unfortunately, we no longer will be providing server maintenance information via sonassi.com.

Visit sonassihosting.com now!

Front end node sms-sagat has suffered a hard drive failure causing its RAID array to temporarily run degraded. An engineer has been appointed to carry out the replacement, but at this point we do not have a confirmed time.

At this point we can confirm there has been no data loss and backups are being performed offsite more frequently to ensure a level of redundancy for any customer data stored on this machine.

The server will need to be powered down for approximately 25 minutes during the replacement.

Sms-sagat is the front node for our network (all internal/external traffic is filtered through this server), as a result, there will be network-wide downtime affecting all customers

UPDATE [Friday 7th May 17:19]
The replacement has now been scheduled for Monday 10th May 8:00am > 9:00am. Between these hours, ALL services will be unavailable.

Please check back for latest updates. We apologise for any inconvinience this may cause. As always, we reccomend you follow our twitter updates for any network related issues http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+%23sonassi_network+from%3Asonassihosting

After the system was deemed non-responsive, the system was immediately power cycled (restarted) – upon bringing the system back on line, as a matter of course, we felt it necessary to perform a file system check to verify the integrity of the disk due to the forced shut down.

Thanks to our quick response and pro-active monitoring we managed to keep the unscheduled downtime to a maximum of 35 minutes, we apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.

As always – we recommend following sonassihosting for the latest network information.

We have always tracked any network complications internally via www.theclientarea.info, however, we have expanded on that functionality by extending our #sonassi_network status to twitter.

So now you can track the our network easily by a few of the methods shown below:

Web: www.theclientarea.info or #sonassi_network
RSS/Atom: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23sonassi_network+from%3Asonassihosting

Whilst we haven’t had official word from LINX, our tests have shown correct routing to our data centre with no issues.

Once the issue is confirmed, we will update this thread.

UPDATE
More information from LINX, they diagnosed a faulty port on a core switch.

Daily LINX traffic

Weekly LINX traffic

Network status can be tracked via theclientarea.info.

Related:
http://www.tiscaliuser.net/broadband_news/london_internet_exchange_failure_slows.html
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2009/12/11/linx-london-internet-exchange-failure-impacts-uk-isp-internet-traffic.html

It seems that the London Internet Exchange (LINX) are currently experiencing problems. Our connections to LINX are no longer carrying traffic and this is having an impact on some clients who would normally cross LINX to reach us. We do not currently have information on the precise cause but the issue has been reported by other IPs connecting at LINX.

We will provide more information as soon as we have it, but unfortunately it seems that the problem is outside our network and outside our control.

Date: 09/12/2009
Time: 17:20
Effect: Increased latency and packet loss for some routes into the our network

UPDATE: LINX Graphing Report

The highlighted regions show where the network was experiencing significant delays.

Network status can be tracked via theclientarea.info.
Community thoughts can be followed on Twitter: Twitter #linx

http://www.sonassi.com/knowledge-base/sonassi-name-server-access/

But we’ll let the pictures do the talking

As standard, all mail passing through Sonassi Hosting’s mail servers is subject to several security sweeps. But we have felt it necessary to add in another layer of protection. This will be run on a trial basis to see how it effects overall performance and mail delivery – but initial testing has shown great improvements, but time will tell.

To further complement this post, we will be adding a guide on how to better filter your mail using Sonassi Hosting’s excellent webmail facility – watch this space!.

“

Spam Spotlight: Implications of the Increasing Malicious Spam Recent data suggests that the percentage of spam containing malware has increased. In September 2009, an average of 1.3 percent of all spam messages contained malware. When compared with August 2009, this equates to a nine fold increase in the number of messages containing malware month on month. The number of messages containing malware actually hit a peak of 4.5 percent of all spam at one point during September.

”

Excerpt from Symantec

This transition requires migration from the mini_sendmail to ssmtp which complements Apache and Magento stores alike. sSmtp is replacing mini_sendmail to provide 100% compatibility with all PHP scripts, whilst retaining the additional security our hosting environment provides.

The major benefit to this move is that you know longer need to manipulate libraries to suit the previous sendmail client.

But you don’t need to change a thing!

As part of our commitment to quality hosting and support, we have already updated all of our customers stores which had the patch applied to function with mini_sendmail, so you don’t need to change anything.