Mail Server upgrade: kay.blacknight.ie

By on February 26, 2008 in Hosting, irishblogs, Maintenance, Service Issue

Summary: Kay.blacknight.ie (one of the windows shared hosting servers) is going to be moved to new hardware. The highlights are:
a) More memory
b) 64bit Windows 2003 server
c) Faster disks
d) Newer version of Smartermail
Time lines:
@22:00 on the 27th of Feb 2008 we’ll be shutting down the smartermail service.
Once we’re sure the service is stopped and all end users disconnected we’ll be syncing the config, mailboxes and spools to the new server. Once we’ve moved everything we’ll do some extensive testing to make sure all is well.
We estimate around 3 hours or so for the change over to take place, if it’s looking like it’ll take longer, we’ll abort the move but keep syncing the data.
I’ll post more info tomorrow when I know more. Mark one of our Windows engineers will be on-site for the duration of the change over.
Please address any queries regarding this to the support desk http://support.blacknight.ie, support@blacknight.ie
Update @ 7:30am Thursday 28th:
Mark aborted the transfer during the night as it was taking far too long. We’re re-scheduling this for this weekend coming and we’ll try an alternative means of syncing the data. Can I urge people to download all their e-mail and not leave it on the server for the next few days as this will help us migrate the data faster.
Update @ 14:30 Friday Feb 29th:
We’ve been investigating this further over the last few days and we’ve found a faster method to complete the transfer and replicate the data. The tests we’ve run indicate between 1 and 2 hours to sync the changes since the major file copy on Wednesday last. So starting at 22:00 tonight the mail server kay.blacknight.ie will be unavailable for 2-3 hours to complete this migration. I’ll update the blog on Saturday morning with more information.
Update @ 23:49 Friday Feb 29th:
We have completed this move. There is a noticeable performance increase which can be attributed to new software, 64 bit OS and Mail services and better hardware.
Changes:
* New Webmail interface with a built in RSS reader
* New Antispam measures in the back end
* ClamAV now installed by default
* Better attack mitigation features
* Improved accessibility built into the webmail interface itself (Daragh please comment on how good/bad Smartermail got it this time)

About Paul Kelly

I'm the CTO and Co-Founder of Blacknight. I've got a deep rooted interest in hosting and technology, especially what's on the cutting edge. From day to day I dream up new products, ways to reinvent products and services.
View all posts by Paul Kelly →

, ,

2 Responses to Mail Server upgrade: kay.blacknight.ie

  1. Victor Reus February 28, 2008 at 03:32 #

    Hi There,
    Its 3:30 and mail server is not up.
    Did you move the DNS MX resolution to another machine. Some of our customer have sent emails and we are loosing these.
    Could you please post some news?

  2. Paul Kelly February 28, 2008 at 07:38 #

    Hi Victor,
    No mail was lost during this attempt. It’ll simply queue on the senders side until the mail server comes back up. I updated the blog a few minutes ago.