Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

As you will know we have been testing a number of new billing systems but have now settled with WHMCS. WHMCS is a complete billing system and support centre which will enable us to manage orders and support requests in a more professional manner.

As an unfortunate side effect of running new software some things are lost and on this occassion we have lost the old news pages.  We do not really see the need of porting over the old news items at this time.

Over the coming weeks we will be sending out new login information so that you may access the support and billing system when your renewal is due.

Should you have any concerns over this announcement please do not hesitate tocontact us

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Monday, June 16th, 2008

Server9 is now back online and will remain online for sometime.

More information will follow within 24 hours or so.

Thank you for your patience.

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Saturday, June 14th, 2008

Things have got to the point where we are seriously not happy with the way our provider is handling this situation and as such we decided to migrate all accounts to our UK based datacentre.

The migration will be starting within the next hour and all accounts will have been moved by 12 noon tomorrow morning. You should not notice any down time during the migration however it may take a couple of hours for your ISP to pick up the new IP addresses.

I cannot apologise enough for the inconvenience this has caused but hope you can understand that we have done everything within our power to reach a resolution.

Our UK servers are of a much higher spec than the USA ones so the accounts affected should notice a much faster response times to their websites, FTP and email.

Thank you once again for your continued understanding, support and patience during this difficult period.

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Thursday, June 12th, 2008

This is to note that the emergency security audit is still on going.

I would like to stress again, please refrain from opening tickets related to server9.

I would like to also make it clear that this security audit is indeed extremely important and urgent. Intermittent downtime is expected until we have the issue resolved.

The issue more specifically is that we have reason to believe that a kernel exploit has resulted in the kernel becoming infected with malicious code.

Fortunately, no serious or noticable damage has been done. We have techs onsite working on this as well as majority of our resources diverted in resolving this issue.

Customers are urged to remain calm and patient (I understand that is easier said than done), but we are working actively on this issue and will be working through the night till the early hours of the morning, probably even for the rest of the day.

All data is intact and secure, there is no reason for alarm at this time as the situation is contained. That said I would like to remind all customers we do have offsite backups of all your data, in addition to secondary weekly backups and we will be making backups of those backups too. I honestly doubt we will even need those backups as apart from an infected kernel, nothing else is affected.

The downtime is due to us recompiling new kernels and also needing to boot the server into a live cd to secure to perform the necessary audit without any possible infected files interfering.

All of the measures we are taking right now are actually more of being pre-cautionary measures as all security issues are taken very seriously.

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Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Just another update. Work is still being done on this server. You may still experience brief outages that can potentially last upto an hour..

We understand customers would prefer not to be on this server while it is being worked on, so below is our plan of action:

• 1. Plug in a new server

This has already been completed. The new server was ordered last night, delivered today and is already plugged in.

• 2. Move all customers across to the new server

This will be the next stage. The new server has been plugged into the same VLAN. Therefore we will be moving all data across locally. As the servers are local and the hard drives are SCSI, this will be fairly fast.

I know many have IP addresses, SSL certificates, custom nameservers etc. *ALL* of this will be moved. The dedicated IP addresses will move along with your account, the SSL certificates and nameservers etc. will all be moved.

We expect no more than a couple of minutes of downtime during this move.

• 3. Reformat new server, reinstall OS and secure

The infected server will be reformatted and everything installed from scratch. At this point anything we do will no longer affect you as you will already be on a different server with your websites up and running.

Once the server is secured up, it will be introduced back into rotation for new customers after Server 13 has filled up (which it almost has)..

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Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Server9  will be undergoing an emergency security audit shortly. This may result in some downtime this evening. We sincerely apologise for the short notice on this but during some general maintenance carried out today we noticed some issues that need to be addressed.

Please do not contact us for an update as this will only slow things down as we need to concentrate on this. We will personally update each customer on this server when this has been completed.

Once again, we sincerely apologise for this short notice. It is very rare that we do not provide atleast 48 hours notice of impending service affecting issues.

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