(Daylight Saving Time begins on the second Sunday of March ands on the first Sunday of November.
However, from 1986 through 2006 DST began the first Sunday of April and ended the last Sunday of October.)
- Fraud Alert
Tue Dec 4 20:23:23 MDT 2012
Be aware of email that appears to come from the IRS at irs.gov. The message body also refers to j2.com, a company that offers fax software. If you open the attachment it will attack your system. This campaign is also associated with telephone calls.
-
Outtage
Mon Nov 26 MDT 2012
The cause of a short-lived, hardware-related outtage on 25 Nov was difficult to diagnose, and we apologize for the delay in making that diagnosis.
- Phishing
Wed Jun 8 18:36:21 MDT 2011
There's increased phishing activity of late, enough that several people
have called in to verify.
We will never ask for your password by email.
If you do receive a phishing email, please report it.
If you have been phished, please change your password immediately and do not tell anyone what it is.
- Power outtage (delayed post)
Sun Oct 3 05:49:00 MST 2010
We had a power outtage Sunday but recovered nicely. Apologies if you could not get through. If trouble persists something new is amiss. Please be sure to notify support, if this is the case.
- Spam Virus Alert
Thu Mar 19 00:00:00 MST 2010
If you see a message with a subject that pertains to the US Dept of Homeland Security (DHS)
it is probably spam. US-CERT advises not to follow links within it.
- outages
Thu Feb 18 10:53:53 MST 2010
This morning, there was a connectivity issue with our ISP, then later the surge
in traffic following restoration of connectivity caused some services to limp along until
one tripped and fell over on its nose. The rest of the services pointed and
laughed and so got little work done until somebody yelled at them and threatened
them with violence.
- sporadic outage
Wed Nov 18 13:53:47 MST 2009
A dead fan made the main DB server fail intermittently.
- network outage
Mon Sep 14 02:27:04 MDT 2009
An ethernet switch went bad.
- network outage
Sun Jan 18 14:51:22 MST 2009
There was a network outage yesterday. One of our fellow colocatees'
ethernet cards failed, creating a storm of malformed packets which overwhelmed
the switch that's common to his router, our router and the ISP's router.
- imap upgrade
Mon Jan 5 16:49:54 MST 2009
Over the holiday, we upgraded the imap server.
- power outage
Mon Jun 2 16:27:31 MDT 2008
There was a power outage at the power company's colocation facility, where our ISP
puts their primary equipment for Fort Collins. It was from 1:30pm to 2:10pm.
(The power company is also in charge of the county's fiber loop, thus the co-lo facility
for ISPs.)
- tornado
Thu May 22 12:24:28 MDT 2008
There's a tornado in the area.
We've experienced a few brief network outages as a result of power outages in the area.
Updates:
Multiple tornados.
Roofs gone, cars and tractor trailers blown off highway.
Irony: State Farm's building completely destroyed.
Power unstable at our datacenter. And office.
Major damage in the next town over.
Power lines down at nearest interstate interchange.
Reports of tennis ball sized hail.
Road closures, including parts of HWY-34 and I-25.
Phones out in some areas (both POTS and mobile).
One death reported.
Six tornados touched down.
Major damage to town of Windsor.
- network outage
Sat May 17 09:29:23 MDT 2008
We had a network outage from 6am to 9am.
Several months ago, our network service provider disconnected one point
of the fiber ring we're on. They also neglected to turn on a UPS for another
point on the ring, and today there was a power outage that took
down that UPS-less point on the ring, leaving us and several other customers
without service. And you, of course.
- chromalist corruption
Mon Apr 23 18:49:21 MDT 2007
The Chromalist database was corrupted. We're restoring from backup, but you should
expect some of your more recent chromalist entries to be missing. You should also
expect some formerly deleted entries to reappear. Sorry about this.
We will update this entry when the database is restored.
Restore will take most of the night.
Meanwhile, chromalist is working, albiet with a very limited database.
We were able to restore a little data. More than none, but not by much.
The backup was basically useless. We'll be fixing that for the (hopefully
nonexistent) next time, but I'm sure
that's little consolation. Very sorry.
BTW, for those of you unfamiliar, the Chromalist database keeps track
of black- and white-lists for pro users. It also holds data for greylist.
- DoS attack
Sat Jul 1 08:21:39 MDT 2006
There was a denial of service attack this morning.
- line down
Tue Jun 6 13:19:18 MDT 2006
Our primary bandwidth provider is unreachable because our line to them was cut.
We're ramping our secondary provider up to handle the additional load. This should
take effect within the hour. Our primary provider should be back within a day or so.
Update: By "cut" I mean Qwest had a hardware failure in the switch through which
the OC3 carrying our data gets to our bandwidth provider.
Update: It's uncut.
- planned outage
Sat May 13 18:32:42 MDT 2006
Service will be unavailable for brief periods tonight while we move some equipment.
- web services outage
Thu Jan 19 17:57:56 MST 2006
Web services (www and webmail) were down for an hour and a half.
Root cause not yet known, but an upgrade of php libraries fixed it.
- downtime
Tue Oct 11 07:23:38 MDT 2005
There was a power outage yesterday that lasted about an hour. Plus some more time
wrestling a rarely-used CRT into place to diagnose a couple boot problems.
Maybe we should buy a small LCD monitor for the machine room for those
machines that don't take well to serial consoles.
Amazing what a little rain will do.
(Heavy drizzle for several days straight.)
At least it wasn't a lightning strike 7m from the building this time (cf 12 June 2004).
- downtime
Mon Apr 25 17:18:27 MDT 2005
Mon Apr 25 20:58:48 MDT 2005 (updated)
Today the database server crashed. The power supply went bad.
The spare power supply was also bad, but in a much subtler way
(with no load, 5V was 4.5V and 12V was 11.5V). We spent most
of the day assuming the spare was good since it was brand new and
mostly worked, and so spent most of the day looking for other causes.
There are some lingering questions though, so we'll be evaluating
that whole system over the coming week.
Sorry this is took so long. It's embarrassing that a bum power
supply would take this long to diagnose.
- downtime wrapup
Wed Feb 16 09:12:46 MST 2005
First, we're back up and everything seems to be stable. There's still several hours of
email in the process of delivery, so your email for the last couple days will take awhile
to get into your mailbox.
(Update 2005-02-16 15:20: We're all caught up. That was faster than expected.)
A circuit breaker tripped and batteries in the UPSs failed before we figured out what was
going on. The loss of power caused some disks to become marginal; during the array rebuild
they were slow (compared to other disks of the same model) and they were prone to error
under production load.
Once we replaced the marginal disks and got the array rebuilt, the machine was still crashing.
The power failure (actually several in a short period) caused a few errors on the filesystem.
Finding those specific errors and correcting them took a long time.
The symptoms we saw were null pointer dereferences when data was being written out to disk.
We started out thinking memory corruption, various mainboard components, power supply and others.
But none of those bore out in isolation.
We even eliminated disk corruption, but of a different sort than what really caused the problem.
Since we resumed answering the phones this morning, we've had several calls from users wishing
us good will and good sleep. Thank you! Your understanding and good will means a lot to us.
- downtime
Tue Feb 15 21:51:12 MST 2005
A power fluctuation caused hardware to fail. We've been nursing it along for the past many hours.
The hardware problems caused some other "soft" problems that have been more difficult to track down.
Meanwhile they cause us to crash whenever we open general access to the fileserver, which is why
access is spotty.
We think we have a handle on the "soft" problem now and are working to correct it. This will
take most of the night. Fortunately, the computer is doing most of the work, leaving us time
for catnaps. Going on 34 hours without sleep...
We are receiving email. It will be available later, after things are back to normal.
All in all, this is NOT my personal favorite Valentine's Day.
More coherent news later, after some catnaps.
Update 2005-02-16 07:40: We are now bringing the system up. Slowly, and load testing on the way. Access will
continue being spotty for awhile.
Update 2005-02-16 08:00: PRO webmail now available for all pro users. There is a lot of email in local queues
that has not yet been delivered to user mailboxes, however.
Update 2005-02-16 09:00: Webmail, POP and SMTP are now available for everyone. It will be several hours before
all the email we accumulated over the last couple days is delivered to individual mailboxes.
- attack
Sun Dec 5 23:20:33 MST 2004
Major spammer attack this weekend.
The backscatter of a joe-job made our servers miserable. We made some remarkable improvements
in the server while fighting the backscatter, but in the end we had to fall back to a
dumber but lighter-weight mail server. To make matters worse, when we deployed the
most sophisticated of the heavy-weight server improvements, one of the parts crashed
the operating system. Blech!
- new engine
Sat Nov 20 16:25:18 MST 2004
We just started using a new engine for the www.softhome.net website.
Please tell us if you find that anything works worse now than it did yesterday.
- power supply failed
Mon Nov 1 06:19:32 MST 2004
The power supply (or possibly the motherboard -- post-mortem pending) on the main fileserver
failed Monday morning at about 1am. We spent several hours very carefully
replacing the motherboard.
Most services will be sluggish for several hours, as we catch up with all the pending mail.
This same machine had the power supply replaced after the lightning strike. It now
has a new motherboard and another new powersupply.
We won't be answering the phone for much of the day. The caffeine is going to wear off soon...
- DNS SNAFU
Thu Oct 28 18:42:11 MDT 2004
Those of you using AT&T DNS servers (including Comcast and many other
digital cable users) were not able to lookup SoftHome names (such as www.softhome.net
and mail.softhome.net).
This went from about 10PM (26 Oct 2004) until about 6:30PM (MT) (27 Oct 2004).
It looked for all the world like a problem with AT&T's DNS servers, but our
ISP finally figured out that it was a BGP issue.
For some odd reason, AT&T will only route over one
of our ISP's upstream providers, but because of the configuration error, only the
other upstream was available to route AT&T traffic.
- Maintenance
Fri Jul 9 19:01:44 MDT 2004
We will be doing some maintenance this Friday and Saturday nights.
POP and webmail will be unavailable for periods as long as half an hour.
Update: Saturday, not Friday.
Update: Done.
- Struck by lightning
Sat Jun 12 15:22:47 MDT 2004
We were hit by lightning at about 1:30pm. Down time a little over an hour.
(Yes, literally.)
- ChromaList offline for maintenance
Sun Apr 18 05:43:45 MDT 2004
ChromaList
(including blacklist, whitelist and greylist functionalities)
is offline tonight for maintenance. We're optimizing the database table.
It's a very big table.
During this period, you should expect an increased spam load :(
When we turned greylist off for the maintenance, our incoming bandwidth usage
doubled. That's a lot of spam. Wow. I guess that settles the
question of whether greylisting is still effective.
Update: It's back.
- Beagle Worm
Sat Mar 20 20:44:27 MST 2004
We've noticed that the beagle/bagle worm (particularly variant k) has confused
many of you. The message is constructed to appear to be from SoftHome staff and
purports to be a warning about your SoftHome email account. It instructs
you to open an attached file.
Do not attempt to open the attachment. On microsoft platforms, this
will infect your machine and it will use your machine to spread itself
and spam to other people.
If you run a Microsoft Windows operating system, please be a good citizen
and use a virus detection program, and keep it up to date. Users
of other platforms should also seriously consider using virus detection
software.
Please note: Any message from SoftHome will be plain text and may
have an HTML part. Nothing else!
Viruslist.com,
Symantec
and others all have descriptions of this and other viruses.
- Routing Problems
Wed Mar 10 03:23:06 MST 2004
One of our ISPs ISPs ISPs is having some routing problems. This is affecting many people in the UK,
and also some people in the US. And probably some elsewhere.
We contacted the ISP with the problem (wcg.net) with information that should help them
solve the problem. We hope this will be resolved Wednesday (10 March 2004).
If you want to help, please send a traceroute (in MS Windows it's called tracert) to
our support address. Traceroute to mail.softhome.net or pro.softhome.net, depending
which you are having trouble with.
Update (Wed Mar 10 14:36:35 MST 2004): We've had reports that it's fixed.
If not, please send a message to support.
- Downtime
Wed Dec 10 05:41:08 MST 2003
There was downtime last night. We lost an ethernet switch. It took awhile to notice,
then another while to diagnose and fix.
- Power Outage
Sun Oct 19 22:37:51 MDT 2003
There was a power outage down the street (a transformer blew up) and part of the power
in our building was knocked out. We shut down our equipment proactively to avoid
data corruption. We're back up now.
- Maintenance
Fri Sep 12 22:02:00 MDT 2003
We were down for a few hours. An ethernet card in our router
died in a most peculiar way.
- Maintenance
Wed Sep 3 14:20:54 MDT 2003
We will be performing two maintenance activities this weekend.
The first will take an hour or so.
The second will require about 5 minutes.
The first is adding more disk space for the database. Greylisting
uses a bit more than we expected. The second is upgrading the database software.
During each activity, very little will work. The activities will be late either
Friday night or Saturday night, our lowest use periods.
Update: It took longer than expected (forgot to factor in the looong step :( ).
- Email Delay This Weekend
Fri Aug 1 01:10:24 MDT 2003
Email will be delayed for a couple of hours this weekend for Personal accounts.
After that period, we expect a significant reduction in spam and email viruses.
Afterwards, you may notice occasional delays.
If you can't bear the occasional delay, or you want all that spam,
sign up for a Professional account.
Professional accounts will not be affected for another week or two, and will
have the option whether or not to use this system. Professional users: this
system will be on by default, but you will have the option to disable it before
we turn it on. We will send professional users further details by email.
Update: Done Friday night.
- Power Outage
Wed Jul 30 05:52:53 MDT 2003
We don't buy that brand of UPS anymore.
It took a bit less than an hour of driving and fixing.
Our router in particular was affected.
- Network Outage
Mon Jul 21 15:51:09 MDT 2003
There was a partial network outage starting about 1:30pm,
severe around 2-2:30 (MT). It seems
to have been a routing problem, root cause so far unknown.
(It is unlikely to have been the recently announced
cisco vulnerability, however.)
- Database maintenance
Sun Jul 6 17:48:48 MDT 2003
We gave the database more disk to chew on. This caused an outage
for all users of about 10 minutes.
- Network problems
Thu Jul 3 01:54:41 MDT 2003
Our service provider had some problems with BGP. Fixing
the BGP problem uncovered an old OSPF misconfiguration.
Both seem resolved now.
- Continued ... selective outages this weekend
Sun Jun 22 17:37:51 MDT 2003
We are coninuing to migrate mailboxes this evening. We have two sixths
left to go and will probably finish them tonight. If not, then we'll do
the last sixth next weekend.
See the next entry, "Selective outages this weekend" for more details.
Update: All sixths done.
- Selective outages this weekend
Fri Jun 13 17:09:31 MDT 2003
We have a new fileserver and plan to start migrating mailboxes to it
this weekend.
We will migrate in sixths, as in this will affect one sixth of
users at a time. We will move at least two sixths this weekend --
more if there is time. Once all mailboxes are moved we will give the
old fileserver a thorough checkup then move one or two sixths back.
Professional users will see considerably less than an hour of disruption. Personal
users will see several hours of disruption. In both cases, you will have access
to your accounts and mailboxes during the disruption. New email will be delivered
to the new mailbox; any old folders and messages will eventually arrive in your new
mailbox just as they were before this migration.
This whole process will take at least two weekends.
You should see no difference in service during weekdays.
- Network outage 7 May
Wed May 7 09:49:21 MDT 2003
Our upstream provider had some routing (BGP) problems this morning.
Our upstream's main provider added a new provider, but partially lost their BGP routes.
- Downtime Monday Morning
Mon Apr 21 15:47:05 MDT 2003
We had an outage from about 11am to 3:30pm today. A UPS failed dramatically, taking down a couple of
ethernet switches, a couple of servers and our automatic monitoring and alerting system.
It turns out Monday morning is a bad time to go down...
To those of you who called, thank you. Unfortunately, we were all out of range of the
phone for most of that time.
- Downtime Over Weekend
Mon Mar 24 15:05:47 MST 2003
We had a partial outage over the weekend. For some parts of the net, large packets
would not go through. Our upstream provider's provider misconfigured one of their
routers, and it took awhile to convince them of it.
- New Upgrade Processor
Thu Jan 30 02:30:04 MST 2003
The new Upgrade Account is now available.
The backend is more elegant, it sports a new credit card processor
and most importantly it paves the way for direct professional signups.
It currently accepts only MasterCard and Visa. PayPal support coming soon.
- Upgrading Website
Sun Jan 26 01:42:34 MST 2003
We've upgraded the website. The new upgrade (as in pay for a professional account)
part of the site will come online in a couple days.
The big news for now is that the site requires cookies for login.
There will be a few awkward parts until the upgrade is complete, but please do report
any major bugs.
- NOT Affected by "Slammer" / "Sapphire"
Sun Jan 26 01:42:34 MST 2003
Since we don't run any Microsoft software, we weren't directly affected by
this weekend's worm. (The worm invades poorly maintained Microsoft SQL servers.)
You no doubt experienced a slow net though. That's because there's so many
poorly maintained MS-SQL servers out there.
It sure is a good thing the internet runs a diverse set of operating systems
and server software. Even the small percentage of servers that were infected
by slammer were able to bring large parts of the net to a crawl.
- Network outage
Wed Jan 23 15:17:55 MST 2002
There was an equipment failure on part of our service
provider's service provider. It was from 21:30 to 23:10 MST,
Jan 22.
- Badtrans worm warning
Mon Dec 3 07:53:10 MST 2001
Many of you are infected with the Badtrans worm.
If you already have antivirus software, please update it.
If not, use
Norton's
or Symantec's
description to manually identify and remove the worm.
This worm steals passwords and credit card data from your machine.
This worm only affects users of Microsoft Windows operating
systems. Our favorite fix for that problem
is to switch to a decent operating system.
Update: I'd like to emphasize that SoftHome is not infected
and never has been. The worm is spread via email and, like most worms,
only between computers running MS Windows.
- SMTP AUTH now supported
Wed Oct 17 06:04:11 MDT 2001
You can now use SMTP AUTH instead of POP first to send mail.
- Switched IP Provider
Wed Oct 17 06:04:11 MDT 2001
On Sunday (the 14th), we finished migrating to our new upstream provider.
- Partial Outage
Tue Sep 18 10:43:48 MDT 2001
The new Microsoft worm Nimda has affected (not infected) our
old upstream
provider. We still use them for outgoing DNS queries, so
SMTP is down until we work around the problem.
We expect to return to full operation later this afternoon.
The provider is, of course, addressing it at their end.
We are working to switch the rest of the way to the new
provider today, about two weeks ahead of our planned schedule.
I would like to stress that we are NOT infected by the
worm, nor is our provider. This worm
has infected some of our provider's other clients,
and their infection has caused in effect a denial of service
attack for all the provider's clients.
See slashdot's coverage
of this new worm for more information and further links.
Update: Incoming mail is back up. Outgoing will take
awhile longer.
Update: The worm's name is Nimda. It is not a
strain of Code Red. Updated text.
Update: The service provider fixed their problem
before we finished migrating, so we're back in the old
configuration for another couple weeks.
- Server Back Up
Tue Jul 24 05:15:46 MDT 2001
Everything's back to normal. Mail deliveries caught up some time around 1am.
Advance warning however, there may be brief service interruptions over the
weekend as we futher investigate the incident.
- Server Downtime
Sun Jul 22 11:38:30 MDT 2001
Last night we started having problems with the file server.
We restarted it a couple times, but it kept hanging after awhile.
We've taken the server down to give it a more thorough examination.
This examination will take several hours. Sorry for the delay,
but as the saying goes, better safe than sorry.
Update: It's going to be awhile, folks. Some more problems
have arisen, indicating a possible hardware problem.
Update: It's probably not hardware. I've resurrected
the old array and am copying data over to it. It's
brute force and will take awhile. Hopefully, it won't
be necessary to copy all of it over. In any case it
will take several hours.
Update: We expect to be up around 6am.
Update: We're back. Right on time :).
Sorry about this fiasco, folks.
- Moving Files
Sat Jun 16 17:22:58 MDT 2001
You know the drill. See below.
This is the final sixth.
Update: done. 2am.
- Moving Files
Fri Jun 15 14:21:09 MDT 2001
You know the drill. See below.
Update: done. 3:45am.
- Downtime
Fri Jun 15 14:21:09 MDT 2001
We had a partial outage for an hour or so today, from about noon to 1pm.
There was an error on the fileserver that required a hard reboot.
The moving of files we've been doing will make downtimes much shorter.
They're already reduced significantly. When we get these last two sets moved,
fileserver downtimes will be on the order of five minutes, when they happen at all.
- Moving Files
Fri Jun 1 19:09:57 MDT 2001
You know the drill. See below.
Starting at 2am, this time.
Update: done. 5am.
- Moving Files
Sat May 19 01:51:32 MDT 2001
You know the drill. See below.
Not starting until 4:30am, though.
Update: done. 8am.
- Moving Files
Sat May 12 01:57:14 MDT 2001
See last Saturday's "Moving Files" entry immediately below.
Update: done. 5:15am.
- Moving Files
Sat May 5 00:24:40 MDT 2001
From 2am (MDT) to 5am (approximately), one sixth of SoftHome users
will have only partial access to their email messages. We are moving
the files from an old disk array to a newer, larger, faster one.
Update: done. 6:15am.
- Downtime
Mon Apr 30 16:17:43 MDT 2001
The problem with webmail and signup was that the new server
was TOO FAST. Don't you love race conditions?
You might say there was a bug in our earlier configuration,
but it didn't show up because the machine wasn't as fast.
The beta webmail will be back later this evening.
Update: beta webmail is back.
Update: signup is only half working. You can sign up,
but the account isn't initialized. That will be fixed tonight.
Update: signup is fixed.
- Downtime
Mon Apr 30 03:44:20 MDT 2001
The server we were having
problems with late last week crashed on Sunday afternoon,
before we were ready to replace it.
The new server is now online, but since we didn't get
to test our new configuration completely before deploying it,
not all services are immediately available.
POP and SMTP are available, but webmail and signup are not.
We expect webmail and signup to return this afternoon.
The crashes did not affect email data. Your email is safe.
The good news is that the new file server is biggerbetterfaster...
- Downtime
Fri Apr 27 06:52:53 MDT 2001
Motherboard problem. Down many hours.
We worked around the particular problem, but
it will be touch-n-go for a day or two. We don't
expect more downtime, but things will be sluggish at times.
Anyway, we've got this other file server we were
planning on installing this weekend. I guess it
will be the only file server for awhile instead
of the second file server. Sigh.
This has been our longest downtime ever, BTW.
- Downtime
Wed Mar 14 02:52:00 MST 2001
Our services were up and down for several hours yesterday.
Around 3 PM, the telco (Qwest/ICG) broke the interface card for one of our T1s.
(They fried a bunch of other T1 cards at the same time.)
That didn't affect SoftHome much except for webmail and signup.
The broken T1 card was discovered and fixed around 7pm.
Not long after that, our routing went to heck.
We don't know why yet, but we're pretty sure it was set off by the downed T1.
The good news is that our new service provider has arrived. We will be phasing
them in over the next week or so. The old service will stay around for load
balancing and backup.
- Webmail Problems
Mon Feb 12 17:43:53 MST 2001
Our upstream provider broke one of our connections.
Webmail was served from that connection.
We have worked around it for now.
Presumably, this is related to their big move tonight.
See more about that below, under "Expected Downtime".
- Downtime
Fri Feb 9 16:08:38 MST 2001
Our upstream service provider had some difficulties
that broke our connection for an hour or so. Again. Grr.
See "Infrastructure Announcements" below for not exactly related news.
- Infrastructure Announcements
Fri Feb 9 15:41:23 MST 2001
- Redundant connection: In mid-February, we will add a connection
to a second service provider. The new connection is
a fiber link. We will maintain service on both, but
the old connection will act primarily as a backup link.
- Expected downtime early Feb 13. See "Expected Downtime" below for details.
- Expected Downtime
Fri Feb 9 03:37:22 MST 2001
We expect approximately 2.5 hours downtime during the midnight to
6am (MST) period of Feb 13 2001.
Our upstream provider is moving equipment to a new facility.
This is just a couple days before our new net connection
is supposed to arrive. Bad timing, huh? :(
- Server Crash
Fri Feb 2 04:11:38 MST 2001
We were down for most of the night repairing a recalcitrant filesystem.
Your data is safe.
Did you use the time constructively?
One user was very kind and said
she appreciated the imposed family time.
It will take a couple of hours to catch up with local email deliveries.
- Database Switchover
Sat Dec 9 20:03:21 MST 2000
That worked much better.
- Database Switchover
Sun Dec 3 03:09:20 MST 2000
That didn't work so well.
Bad hardware. We think.
We'll find it and try again next weekend.
Update: it was a kernel bug. bleeding edge and all that...
rescheduled for the 9th.
- New Webmail
Sun Oct 15 01:11:52 MDT 2000
Minor changes to make our sponsors happy.
- New Webmail
Mon Jun 5 12:49:01 MDT 2000
The new webmail moved from beta to production last night.
- Downtime planned
Thu May 25 00:40:33 MDT 2000
We are going to move our servers on Friday,
26 May 2000 at 8PM MT (GMT-6).
The move is expected to take four hours.
This move is to facilities with capacity
for more bandwidth, so we can grow further
and serve you better.
Update: changed time from 10PM to 8PM.
Update: done. It went well.
- Missing Onelist?
Tue Apr 11 03:02:15 MDT 2000
Are you missing your onelist.com subscription?
Onelist has stopped accepting bounces from us.
Why? We have no idea. They won't take our calls.
If they'll talk to you, please ask
them to call us at the number
at the bottom of the page.
Their actions
cause a denial of service situation for us.
It fills up our disks and causes our servers to
waste a lot of time trying to bounce the messages.
Until this is resolved, we can't accept email from
them.
Update: Resolved.
- Downtime Scheduled.
Fri Jan 7 15:06:51 MST 2000
There will be a brief downtime tonight, from 10:00 to 10:30.
POP, webmail and signup services will be affected. Email delivery to
user accounts will not be affected.
Update: The upgrade went well. We now have a new kernel and
a new disk array. Thanks for your patience.
- Web-based email available.
Tue Dec 7 14:05:54 MST 1999
Web-based email
is available.
- Use username, not account number, for pop.
Mon Dec 6 13:35:08 MST 1999
This only applies to users who have been with us a long time.
Thanks for your loyalty, and sorry about the inconvenience.
When checking your email, use your username, not your account number.
Account numbers no longer work for checking email.
For example, test@softhome.net's username is test. Test's account
number is a000005m. If you're using something that looks like
a000005m, it won't work. Send email to support@softhome.net or call
if you need further assistance.
- Web-based email available.
It's in beta.
See http://mail.SoftHome.net/beta.html
- Downtime Thursday, 30 Oct 1999.
An ethernet card failed.
Pop was down from 11pm to 1am.
- We're back up.
We are currently still working on fixing the last of the bugs
arising from this upgrade, so do expect some minor glitches within
the next week.
- Downtime planned for Wednesday, 29 Sep 1999.
We're upgrading!
Starting at 5pm MT (GMT-6) on Wednesday, 29 Sep 1999, POP and new account signup
services will be down for two hours.
This will complete the upgrade we started on the 17th.
Outgoing and incoming email (SMTP) service will remain active for
most of the downtime period.
However, email downloading (POP) will be down for this period.
Because you have to check your mail through POP before sending email with SMTP, many users will not be able to send email during this period.
Users should also expect minor service disruptions over the
following week as we iron out the kinks in the new system.
N.B. If you
check your email every few minutes
, you should not do so frequently during this period;
you will simply get the same error message every time and possibly fill
up your disk. If you are checking your email often enough for
this to adversely affect you, please stop. If this is is the case, you're adversely affecting our services as well.
- Special note for AOL customers
America Online has now taken to blocking the SMTP port, port 25,
coming out of their network.
This effectively makes it impossible for AOL users to send email
through SoftHome.net.
The only current known solution is to redirect your mail client to
a higher port; SoftHome runs an alternate mail service on port
25000 for outgoing mail; this can be changed in Eudora and
Microsoft Outlook. Unfortunately, Netscape doesn't allow users to
change the mail server port, so they will most likely have to
switch mail readers if they'd like to continue to use SoftHome.net.
Sorry for this inconvenience.
- Downtime done for real this time...
We hope.
We reverted back to the old system. The new one was so close.
Just that one little bug.
We did keep incoming email going the whole time, though. So it
should be more or less current right off the bat.
- Downtime finished Saturday, 6:30am.
It took a bit longer than we hoped, but overall it went well.
There were a few glitches. Stubborn hardware. The attacks while
were testing the new setup were very helpful. Thanks for helping
us test. Better now than later, but in the future please ask before
you try to crash our machines!
However, do expect some glitches throughout the weekend. We're
bound to have missed something. Hopefully just minor stuff though.
- Downtime planned for Friday, 17 Sep 1999.
We're upgrading!
Starting at 9pm MT on Friday, 17 Sep 1999, pop and signup
services will be down for several hours.
SMTP service will remain active for most of the downtime period.
You'll still have to pop
first. You'll get the same message every time you pop though,
so for your own sanity please don't pop too often during
this period.
You should also expect some minor service disruptions over the
rest of the weekend as we iron out the kinks in the new system.
We're upgrading the system software on our main server.
The new system will make maintenance a lot easier in the
future and will let us do a few things we've been itching
to do for some time.
For those who are curious, we have been running a manually maintained
and upgraded early Linux Slackware (1.3 Elf beta, I think it was).
We're switching to Debian GNU/Linux.
Our other servers will be upgraded at a later date, after we
get the kinks knocked out of this first system. When we upgrade
the other systems, there will be much less disruption. One thing
we're improving with this new system is service redundancy.