Recent Posts

The Master Server (83.142.226.228) will be closed down for approximately 1/2 hour at 3am (GMT+1) on 24/06/2008 for a much need disk and memory upgrade. It is being performed at this time in the morning to minimise the disruption to the majority of our UK hosting clients.

International clients will not be inconvenienced by this upgrade as they are hosted on our US based servers.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Mark Smith

Our Master server has been subjected to attempted DoS attacks against a particular clients website. The IP address of this attacker has been notified to the appropriate abuse team and blacklisted at our router.

Normal services are now resumed and speed is as normal.

Please note that DNS services, email services, phone services, Dynamic DNS services, and websites operated throughout this attack as normal. Only MySQL (database), MSSQL (database) and Coldfusion services were affected. If your website does not employ the services of database and Coldfusion, they would have worked as normal with normal response times.

Email, DNS, Dynamic DNS and phone services are powered by other servers, hence why their operation was unaffected.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. If only these type of people would get a life!

Mark Smith

Due to some crettin's out there on the Internet, this service is now terminated. We were getting complaints from ISPs about SPAMmers using our Online Status Indicator within their SPAM they were sending out.

Well done morons, you've done everyone out of a good reliable service!

We will be performing maintenance which will affect your service. This will last about 15 minutes, and during this time, your will experience short interuptions to your service as our network adjusts to alternative paths for traffic.

Date: 26th April 2007
Window: 23:00 for 4 Hours
Duration: < 15 minutes

This maintenance is to add a new management card to our "Cat2" router in Sovereign House.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries or questions regarding this maintenance window.

[UPDATE]

We are currently experiencing problems with our phone system. The lines appear to be ringing to the outside caller but not internally. Even when the odd call occasionally did filter through, it was quickly disconnected again during the first 5 to 10 seconds of the conversation.

We are investigating the root cause of the problem and apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause.


UPDATE - The cause of this problem has been identified and we are undertaking a fix to resolve the issue.


UPDATE - The issues with the phone system have now been resolved and everything is working as it should. It was due to G711 codec traffic corruption occuring across our VLAN network due to a Cisco router failure.

We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Our opening hours throughout the Easter Bank Holiday are:

Friday 6th April : Closed
Saturday 7th April: Open
Sunday 8th April: Closed
Monday 9th April: Closed
Tuesday 10th April: Open as normal

Thank you

Kindest regards

Nicola Smith

We have moved our Forum software from phpBB to SMF due to the continuous and rogue foreign automated signups by sad internet losers who continually insist on trying to advertise their worthless rubbish.

If we wanted Viagra, Cialis, Mortgage Deals, Loans, Porn (and the list goes on), we'd look for it - so go away!

All the previous posts have been transferred into this forum. They have unfortunately all been stamped with today's date and some were lost in the migration.

All users accounts have all been lost in the migration so users with existing accounts will need to sign up for a new one again.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Anyway, to all our normal users, hope you like the new forum software - Have fun! 

As of 11:45pm on the 23rd February 2007, we have upgraded our VoIP server software to the latest version on 3 of our Debian servers.

Due to our clustering implementation of these servers, there was no downtime experienced.

On 21st March 2007 at 20:27 there was an unscheduled outage which affected some routes into our network.

This occured during a scheduled maintenance window on a small section of our network. The small number of clients that this would have affected were informed well in advance as per our usual proceedures.

The course of events that led to the network fault were as follows:

1) We took a layer 3 OSPF Link down as part of the scheduled maintenance window on a small section of our network. This change should have automatically routed around the rest of the network.
2) Problems were observed with some routes by the onsite network team and these were investigated.
3) The link that was taken down was brought back up in order to return to the original configuration.
4) All network devices were investigated for errors. All links were showing as healthy.
5) The Network Team discovered that the CEF table in a core router had entries that had not been properly updated automatically during the course of taking the OSPF Link down.
6) A Layer 2 interface was taken down because of the corrupt CEF tables which were then forced to be cleared. This resolved the problem and all Network Diagnostics show a clear bill of health for routes in and out.

This was resolved at 21:14

This lasted 47 minutes.

After the situation was resolved the Network Team investigated what would have caused the CEF table to have maintained old entries. It is believed at this stage that it was as a result of a Cisco Software Bug as there was no hardware or link failure or error. We will inform Cisco about this immediately and investigate further in the morning during working hours.

Date: 21st March 2007
Time: 20:27
Duration: 47 minutes

We would like to express our sincere apologies for the inconvenience this will have caused and assure all clients that we will be pursuing and seeking a resolution from Cisco regarding the error.

We would like to apologise for the length of downtime. This error was very unusual, in that there was no hardware or network link failure, and the configuration of all network devices was correct. Our network staff checked these aspects of the network in this order. The problem was actually caused by an undocumented bug in the Cisco IOS software, which prevented the routers forwarding tables from being cleared automatically by a layer 3 routing adjustment. This should happen automatically and transparently. The unique nature of this error was why it took quite some time for our staff to track down and put a workaround in place to resolve the error.

Once again, we would like to sincerely apologise for any inconvenience.

At 9:45pm on Friday 22nd February 2007, the following upgrades were applied to all 8 of our Windows based servers:

Helm upgraded to version 3.2.14
All Microsoft Vulnerabilities patches applied
Mail Server software upgraded to latest version
POP3/SMTP proxy server upgraded to latest version
Instant Messenging Presence Server upgraded to latest version

The servers were then rebooted. Due to our clustering configuration, there was no downtime in service.

All servers are operating normally.