The phone system upgrade has been completed

It *should* be working properly - if you encounter any issues please let us know

Posted by Michele Neylon at 1:35 PM | Permalink

Our phones are currently offline for an upgrade.

They should be working again in about 10 - 20 minutes

If you need anything in the meantime please email support@blacknight.ie or sales@blacknight.ie

Posted by Michele Neylon at 1:02 PM | Permalink

I don't want to bore people with security, but unfortunately I have to keep coming back to it time and again...

Over the past few days there has been a spate of attacks on websites using the Joomla CMS (Content Management System)

If you are using Joomla we would urge you to check that you are using the most recent version available and if you aren't to upgrade.

Even if you cannot upgrade immediately we would urge clients to check that the configuration file is not writeable.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:13 PM | Permalink

Nominet, the registry for .co.uk domains, will be conducting maintenance over the weekend of July 28th and 29th.

From the official notification:
The first outage will be from 09:00 on Saturday 28 July and will last for one hour. During this time, all messages to the Automaton will be queued and they will then be processed at the end of this period. The DAC and Whois services will not be available. The online services, normally available through our web site, will not be available either and a notification page will be displayed in place of these systems.

The second outage will be from 09:00 on Sunday 29 July and will again last for one hour. The same services will be affected during this second outage.

Although the outages are scheduled to last a total of two hours they may last longer.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 10:10 AM | Permalink

Since we still have a number of clients using MS SQL 2000 we have made available both myLittleAdmin and MyLittleBackup for the older platform

MyLittleAdmin is accessible here

I'll post details of MyLittleAdmin as soon as they are available

For MS SQL 2005 users please see our previous announcement

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:01 AM | Permalink

A lot of people signup for hosting using free email accounts or maybe their "current" work email address.

Unfortunately nobody on our end can possibly know if those email addresses are valid weeks, months or years later.

If you change your email address or telephone number you can easily update it via the control panel, or contact our accounts team and get them to do it for you.

If you don't keep the details up to date you may miss important emails from us about your hosting account, your domain renewal or even the chance to get something for nothing :)

Seriously, though, it is important that people keep their contact details up to date.

If you change jobs or stop using your free email account you do run a very serious risk of missing an important email from your hosting provider, registrar or ISP.

Take the time to check that the details on your .com domains are correct, especially if you have transferred them from another provider.

Under ICANN rules the WHOIS data has to be accurate at all times.

With other registries, such as Eurid, only a very small amount of personal data is viewable to the public via standard whois. It is very hard to spam the contacts on a .eu domain, for example, so please do not let a fear of spam lead to you losing out on a domain's renewal.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 4:49 PM | Permalink

We have been notified by clients of a new domain scam.

The emails come from a company calling themselves "Domain Renewal"

These emails are not from us and should be ignored. If you want to forward them to us please do.

The emails follow the following format:

It is time to renew your domain name www.domain.com

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your domain name www.domain.com will expire within 90 days.
You may renew your domain automatically with Domain Renewal. Click on the link in this
e-mail to renew the domain for another year. You should renew your domain as soon as
possible in order for it to continue to be registered in your name.

Click here if you wish to renew your domain
--------> http://www.domainrenewalonline.com/for.php?d=domain.com

As soon as we have received your payment, you will receive a confirmation that your domain
has been renewed.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Services and information about Domain Renewal
Domain Renewal maintains domain addresses, and registers and consults companies in
relation to Internet domain ownership. We inform businesses about which domains are
registered, and remind them if a domain is due to expire, or when it is time to renew a domain.
If you want Domain Renewal to extend the domain for you, we ask you to click on the link in
this e-mail. If you do not wish to use your domain after the due date for renewal, you may
disregard this e-mail. When Domain Renewal extends your domain no information will be
changed in the “Whois” information section. The domain will be extended for 1 year. You will
therefore continue with your current supplier. You may also request your Internet Service
Provider to renew the domain for you. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate
to contact our customer service centre by sending an e-mail to
support@domainrenewalonline.com

DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK

The insecure website it takes you to will ask you for your credit card information and will try to charge you USD69 for the domain renewal. (We only charge EUR8.25)

If you have any queries about the status of domains registered through our services please feel free to contact us.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:39 AM | Permalink

EURid accredited Irish domain registration and hosting company Blacknight Solutions as an EU registrar. Blacknight Solutions is one of Ireland's largest hosters with over 18 thousand domains hosted.

"Becoming an accredited .eu registrar allows us to offer the best level of service to our clients", explained Blacknight's CEO Michele Neylon.

"Being a .eu registrar benefits our clients because Blacknight Solutions can register .eu domains faster and more efficiently. It also allows us to deal directly with EURid."

A .eu domain is essential for businesses operating in the EU and allows the market to be served with a single domain.

Since the launch of .eu in April 2006 over 2 million names have been registered.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:13 PM | Permalink

Our new UK telephone number is live.

If you are based in the UK you can now reach us on 0844 4849361

If anyone has any issues with it please let us know ASAP

Posted by Michele Neylon at 4:08 PM | Permalink

PHP4 will be discontinued at the end of 2007.

The PHP developers have announced that they will no more releases of php4 after the end of 2007.

We've been rolling out php5 on both our Windows and Linux servers for the last few months and will be discontinuing support for php4 at the end of 2007.

Most popular 3rd party scripts should work fine on php5, but some older ones may have issues. We'd recommend that people look into upgrading their scripts to support PHP5, as they're probably vulnerable in other ways also.

If you have any queries about this please let us know.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:04 PM | Permalink

We've changed our locall number.

Please use 1850 929 929 from now on.

We currently do not have a UK number, but should have a new one in a few days time.

We've also added a both UK and US fax numbers:

UK Fax: 0845 280 088
US Fax: 213 232 3366

Our contact details page is the best place to get our latest numbers.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:28 PM | Permalink

Since we've had several queries about registering "personal" IE domains I felt it might be prudent to clarify matters.

First off - you currently CANNOT register a personal IE domain such as johndoe.ie

There has been a lot of discussion in the media surrounding personal IE domains (I may have contributed in no little part to this ...), but the important point keeps being missed.

Until the IEDR board makes its decision on the change it will not happen.

We are hoping that it will happen and happen soon, but the change has not been implemented yet.

With regards to what will be allowed:

You will be able to register your full name OR an accepted version of it.

So if your name was Michele Neylon (might as well use myself!) I could register micheleneylon.ie or michelejneylon.ie, as both forms of my name are documented.

I wouldn't be able to register:
micheneylon.ie or neylon.ie or any other derivatives, as none of them are valid and documented ie. I can't prove that they exist officially.

NB:It maybe possible to register all of the above names using other criteria, but I am addressing the specific personal name category.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 1:12 AM | Permalink

I meant to post an update on Friday afternoon, but didn't ....

In any case everything should now be working as before.

All sections of the billing system should be working as normal.

If there are any duplicate invoices on your account or anything odd, please let account@blacknight.ie know.

They may not reply to your email immediately, but they will act on it.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:37 PM | Permalink

I'm almost afraid to say anything at this stage. Two days ago I thought we had had a problem and solved it, then I had to come back to people to let them know that it wasn't fixed .....

So far so good today, however.

Keith, our lead programmer, has been working hard for the last day or so on the problem and worked on until late last night. He's hoping to get this fixed once and for all before close of business today... We'll keep you posted......

Posted by Michele Neylon at 9:19 AM | Permalink

We've re-enabled partial access to our billing system, so we can now take new orders.

If you want to pay an outstanding invoice please bear with us.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:05 PM | Permalink

Our billing and ordering system is currently offline so that we may conduct maintenace. We don't like doing this during office hours, but we've no choice.

Yesterday we made a mistake. I was informed that the mistake had been fixed and that it was all "ok".

It wasn't.

I'm not going to apologise again - I already did - instead we're taking it offline until it is fixed properly.

I don't like "fire fighting", but we've no option again this morning.

Please bear with us!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 9:34 AM | Permalink

One of the things you learn in business is that things will always go wrong when you least expect it.

You can invest as much time and energy as you like in trying to avoid mistakes, but they will still happen.

We had one of those issues this morning with our billing system!

While it might be easier to shove my head in the sand or try to blame someone else when these kind of things happen, I personally couldn't.

I've tried to email as many of our clients as possible who may have been affected by the problem, but it still does not detract from how much inconvenience this may have caused some people.

And now to explain it all .....

A number of our clients were affected by a programming mishap yesterday when our developers synced the IE domain renewal dates with the IEDR.

We are terribly sorry if you were affected by this and as managing director of the company I feel it is my responsibility to contact anyone who may have been affected to offer my apologies and an explanation.

Over the past few months our development team have been working on improving our billing system.

One area that was causing issues were the renewal dates of some IE domains, in particular those that had been transferred from another provider to ourselves.

While fixing this issue our developers managed to break part of the internal logic, which led to invoices being reissued for domains that had already been renewed.

As soon as we realised what had happened we took steps to reverse the issue and will be removing any invoices that were created in error.

I am terribly sorry if this caused you any inconvenience and if I can be of any assistance to you please let me know.

If you have any invoices on your account relating to IE domains with an issue date of July 4th 2007 then they are possibly affected.

Any invoices with dates prior to this should be correct.

We hope to have rectified the issue within the next 24 hours, but if you have any doubts please do let us know.

If you need to contact our accounts team please use accounts@blacknight.ie or contact me directly (michele@blacknight.ie) and I will personally look into the matter for you.

Sorry about this !

Posted by Michele Neylon at 7:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just to let people know that we are doing yet another network upgrade next weekend.

When?
Friday 6th, Saturday 7th of July
Time: 22:00 - 02:00

For full gorey details see this post on our forum

Posted by Michele Neylon at 8:56 AM | Permalink