DCN911.COM Off-Network Support

UPDATE: Rescheduled for 9:00 PM Central 11/20/08 - Due to unforeseen scheduling conflicts early this morning, we are rescheduling these upgrades to run and complete between 9-10 PM Central time. We will post here once the work has been completed. Thank you! ##

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We will be performing routine maintenance on the server ’svensbluff’ early Thursday morning, including a kernel upgrade and an Apache/PHP recompile. The purpose of these upgrades are to close potential security holes, as well as to implement several standards required for PCI DSS compliance.

A short period (10-15 minutes) of downtime is possible but not expected during the Apache rebuild. We will need to reboot the server to complete the kernel upgrade. Rebooting usually takes only a few minutes, so you may see 5-7 minutes of downtime as the server restarts all of its services.

Although our shared servers are not yet PCI-compliant, we are working to make them PCI compliant within the timelines required for Level 4 Merchants. We will post confirmation once PCI DSS compliance has been achieved on our shared servers. ##

UPDATE - 11/03/08, 3:42 AM Central: Project completed!

All software has been upgraded to current versions as outlined below. cPanel has been re-upgraded to version 11.24.0, and this time it did not kill Apache. (This was the ultimate goal behind the software updates - that this new major version of cPanel would play more nicely with current versions of server software rather than the old versions we were running.)

We’ve verified everything is running correctly, except for the couple of sites which had old scripts or modules which are not PHP 5 compliant. (Such are very few & far between.) We will be working with those clients directly to get those issues resolved.

All systems are “Go” and the upgrade project has been completed! :) If you have any questions or need assistance with anything, please contact us anytime. We are always happy to hear from you! ##

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9:24 AM RESOLVED - We’ve rolled-back cPanel to 11.23.6 and Apache is magically running fine!!  :) We’re opening a ticket with cPanel to have them repair whatever is wrong with 11.24.0 that is breaking legacy Apache.

In the meantime we have disabled this cPanel upgrade so it will not run again before we have this bug sorted out.

We are considering this case “closed” for the sake of this posting, however we will post here further as we continue to work on it later today.

Again we are very, very sorry for the trouble this morning!! If we had known cPanel’s handiwork was going to kill the server, we would not have allowed it to update.

Thank you for your patience!!

DCSN Support Team

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9:14 AM - We’re still working on this with no ETA as of yet. We will post further updates as we know more. ##

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Good morning,

This morning our server ’svensbluff’ auto-updated to cPanel 11.24.0, which appears to have killed Apache (the web server). Despite a thorough investigation, we’ve been unable to determine why exactly Apache will not run, other than it obviously appears related to the cPanel update.

We are recompiling Apache as we speak in an attempt to restore service.

We will post further updates here as they become available. Thank you for your patience!!

7:56 PM Central - UPDATE - RESOLVED

All servers and sites are back up as of this time. External monitoring showed routing returned after 7:36 PM. The issue is resolved and service has been restored to normal. Thank you for your patience! ##

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7:25 PM Central

At 6:58 PM Central, our servers at the GNAX data center became unreachable. This is a network outage affecting all of our servers hosted at the GNAX data center; it is not limited to one or two servers.

It does appear to be an issue at the data center, as traceroutes are reaching the border routers.

We have notified the data center and will update you as soon as we know more.

Impact: This affects only some dedicated server customers who are hosted at GNAX. This does not affect dedicated servers nor our shared servers which are hosted in Denver.

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UPDATE: 7:35 AM: Great news! :) The DNS issue on svensbluff has been resolved. No accounts had to be moved. Rebooting the server appeared to resolve the problem, which would suggest there was a tmp file corruption that needed to be flushed out of the system via a power cycle.

If you notice any irregularities with your account, please let us know. We were not made aware of the issue until 3:30 AM Central time. We feel terribly that we weren’t aware of it sooner.

Unfortunately our monitoring system did not pick up on it because it monitors by IP address, and asks each service for a response at the IP. The services were all up, even DNS, and responding … but DNS wasn’t processing requests correctly. Monitoring just asks “are you responding?” — it doesn’t ask and analyze custom requests. That’s why our monitoring system didn’t pick up on this problem. :( I am very sorry for the trouble this caused you. We are going to look into our options for monitoring, in order to be able to better detect situations like this.

We always love to hear from you. We’d rather receive a false report than no report at all. :) So if you see anything weird, please let us know by opening a support ticket right away. We want your service to be top notch, A-#1 !!!

Thank you for all the feedback as we worked on this, it was very helpful to us and helped us to iron out what was/was not going on. ##

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Good morning,

Around 3:30 AM Central time, an as-yet unidentified DNS issue caused websites on the server ’svensbluff’ to become inaccessible.

We have been trouble-shooting this issue since that time.

At this point we have been unable to find the exact cause.

We will restore DNS service to down websites as quickly as possible. We have a list of nameservers that we know are not working, and these are the nameservers that we will assure are answering authoritatively like they are supposed to be, as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience! We will post updates here as soon as they are available.

DCSN Team

Uptime

• evensonfarm
• svensbluff