[uklinux-status] Problems this morning and this afternoon

[status@uklinux.net]

   We had serious problems this morning (until about 10:30) on the Mail
   server caused by a mesage bounce getting into a loop - much the same
   problem that we had last Saturday except that it was partially caused
   by the fix to last week and an admin account I was unaware of.

   We also had problems this morning on the server that hosts accounts
   for subscription members which was partially caused by the above. This
   was resolved by about 11:00

   About 15:00 this afternoon it came to my attention that the FTP
   service on the subscription account hosting server had died. Further
   investigation showed that a serious disk error had developed on that
   server on a vital filesystem and teh server was rapidly dropping to
   its knees.

   I have managed to move the contents of the filesystem onto another
   physical diskwhich will hopefully isolate the faulty hardware and
   prevent any further problems as a result - allowing us time to keep
   going until someone can replace the disk.

   This means that there will be downtime on that server some time next
   week while the disk is replaced - this may also require a complete
   re-install. We hope to avoid that if possible.

   We realise that todays problems will have caused a lot of
   inconvenience and we do apologise for this. We are working to roll out
   additional servers so as to reduce the impact that any such problems
   can have in the future and the mailbox quotas are pretty much all in
   place now which should guarantee that such mail bounce loops don't
   occur again.

Jason Clifford
UKLINUX NET