Mail Server Speed and Upgrade

Posted 5 months ago

We’ve recently noticed a growing load on our primary mail server and have decided it is time to upgrade the hardware to something quite a bit more powerful. We presently have this upgrade planned for the service window from 11pm to 2am the night of February 7th. This upgrade will take off line access to your email for a period of approx 1.5 hours while the physical mail data is moved. All inbound mail will be queued up for delivery and will arrive once the new server is online.

We apologize for any short delays in email delivery you are presently experiencing (according to our monitoring, the maximum local delivery delay is no more than 3 minutes), and look forward to installing this upgrade.

Update 01/30/2008 – This issue has become more pressing and thus we will be moving this update forward to tomorrow night. Mail will be offline for a short period of time between 11pm and 2am. We will update this ticket when that is complete.

Update 02/1/2008 – 12:12am – This update is starting now. We will post details when it is complete.

Update 12:55am – The mail is copying over to our replacement server. Based on rough time estimates derived from copy speed, this procedure should be complete at 4am pacific at which point the mail server will be brought back online and all queued mail will be delivered.

Update 2:50am – We’re getting closer. The 4am Pacific time estimate should be rather accurate. We will continue to update this post as the time draws nearer.

Update 3:29am – We’re rounding the back stretch with the file transfers, but to be conservative, it appears as we should be all complete by 5am Pacific. We will post here if that changes to be closer to 4am.

Update 4:36am – All files are moved. We’re doing final configuration checks and will bring the machine back online shortly.

Update 5:37am – The mail server was back online at 4:57am. We’re doing some final troubleshooting and testing to make sure everything is operating as expected, but you should have no problems. All queued mail is being delivered now.

- Blue Box Tech Support

Circuit Turn Up

Posted 6 months ago

Over the weekend either on Friday or Saturday night, our upstream provider will be turning up an additional circuits: Time Warner Telecom. This should go unnoticed but may result in a brief 30 second or less BGP re-convergence. This will provide us with bandwidth from an additional tier one providers and should make access to your website much faster. We eagerly look forward to this addition.

We also expect to turn up a Level(3) circuit in the next few weeks, followed by an additional provider we have not yet determined in March.

- Blue Box Tech Support

Data Center Migration - January 5th Update

Posted 6 months ago

We are now 99% complete with our server migration. We now have a single customer with a number of machines remaining to migrate. We have been thrilled with the success of this move and look forward to the new features we will now be able to offer.

Thank you for your patience during this transition. We know it was unexpected and an inconvenience, but we promise exciting things to come.

- Blue Box Tech Support

Stats Server Back Online

Posted 6 months ago

stats.blueboxgrid.com is now back online. It may take it a day or two to catch up to all the new data, but you should be able to see your new data very shortly.

Thanks for your patience.

- Blue Box Tech Support