VirtualNames - System Status

This is our system status page. We will report any problems or upcoming maintenance issues here.

Please note: When this page is unavailable, our main telephone number will carry system status information, the number is 0870 165 1416.

Please click here for more information regarding BOGUS RENEWAL NOTICES.

1st Jul 2009 15:11 Mail problems

As customers may know we have experienced serious mail issues today. We believe these have been resolved, but there may still be some delays in delivering mail that is queued on external servers.

The problems were caused by loading issues on our backend database servers that handle the mail system. Unfortunately a massive increase in the amount of incoming spam mail caused problems across the whole of the mail system. We have now taken steps to isolate the backend mailboxes from loading issues caused by incoming mail, and blocked much of the incoming spam.

We sincerely apologise to customers for these problems. We are fully aware of how important reliable email is and we will be taking further steps to reduce the incidence of problems like this in future.

1st Jul 2009 10:31 Mail Server Problem

We have mail connection issue at the moment. Engineers are working on this and hope to have this fixed very soon.

Update 11:50 There is still a problem which we are working on but most customers are connecting now but mail delivery will unfortunately be slow or delayed a this time.

Update 12.55 We believe this is now resolved and while connections may be a slow for a while, things should slowly return to normal.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Older issues

26th Jun 2009 11:47 Slow mail access

Mail access is slow at present. We are working to resolve this issue.

Update 12:88 We believe things are now getting back to normal but we will continue to monitor the situation.

1st Jun 2009 14:14 Rebooting LCH server47

We are rebooting this machine because of a software failure. It should be back up shortly.

29th May 2009 09:01 Drive failure on server39

Unfortunately we are going to have to take LCH Server39 down for maintenance today to replace a faulty drive. We don't know yet when we will be able to do this, but will update this message when we have a time. We hope that the downtime will be around 30 minutes or less.

Update 11:46 We are taking this server down now and hope to have it back up in around 30 minutes or so.

Update 12:28 This server is now back up.

29th May 2009 01:08 problem with LCH server39

We have a problem on this machine and are currently rebooting it. It should be back up in around 20 minutes.

28th May 2009 12:32 Slow connection to mailservers

Unfortunately customers are finding slow or interrupted connections to the mailservers. There are a number of possible causes for this which we are urgently investigating now. We hope to have this problem resolved quickly and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Update 13:04 Mail services are now available again after a 20 minute outage caused by a failure on an authentication server. Unfortunately during the failure the system didn't switch correctly to another server. We apologise to customer for this.

22nd May 2009 Monday 25th May UK Public Holiday

There will be no telephone sales or support on Monday 25th of May because it is a UK Public Holiday. Email support will be monitored for urgent service affecting issues.

16th May 2009 12:27 Change to MX server policy

Due to the very large amounts of spam mail we are now getting from infected machines on broadband networks (zombies) we will now be blocking all mail that comes directly from IP addresses with no reverse DNS mapping. This should not affect mail from legitimate sources, as any correctly configured mail server will have reverse DNS set up correctly. Most 'end-user' email is normally sent via their ISPs SMTP relay which should be set up correctly. The senders most likely to have problems are those running their own mail servers in small office environments where reverse DNS has not been correctly configured. In these cases they will know that their mail isn't getting through and they should arrange with their provider to get the reverse DNS set up correctly, but if that is a problem we can white-list their IP on request.

Limiting based on reverse DNS is something many ISPs now do because it is a fast way of eliminating mail from most zombie machines, and we are sure it will greatly reduce the amount of spam mail reaching customers.

15th May 2009 08:22 Urgent maintenance to VN server

We have had a critical drive failure on the VirtualNames and control panel server and will need to shut this down to replace the drive. Hopefully it should not be down for more than a few minutes, but it will mean that there will be no control panel access, or access to our main site during the work. We're hoping to do this first thing this morning.

Update 10:26 This work was carried out without incident.

5th May 2009 15:12 Firewall maintenance Thursday 7th March 8AM

We will be performing minor work on our firewall system at 8AM on Thursday. This is not the security patch which caused the previous problems (we hope to do that later in the month), but just bringing our currently offline secondary back online. We don't anticipate any downtime as a result.

With regard to the problems we had with the recent firewall upgrade; a full investigation has been undertaken and flaws in the procedures used by the staff concerned have been determined. There was a problem with the upgrade in that it was not compatible with our current firewall configuration, and Cisco engineers are still investigating the reasons for this. However, that doesn't excuse the long downtime that resulted, as we should have been able to switch back to the old configuration within seconds once the problem was detected.

In conclusion, this work was not carried out to the high standard our customers expect from us; we apologise for that and will take measures to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

Update 08:14 This work was completed without incident.

2nd May 2009 10:43 Monday 4th May UK Public Holiday

There will be no telephone sales or support on Monday 4th of May because it is a UK Public Holiday. Email support will be monitored for urgent service affecting issues.

30th Apr 2009 10:48 Emergency reboot of LCH server39

Unfortunately we need to perform an emergency reboot of this server due to a drive problem, it will be down for a few minutes.

Customers who wish to be moved away from this server, please raise a support ticket in the usual way. Please note though that all new servers only support Mysql 5.0 (server39 runs 4.0) so customers should check that any PHP/CGI applications they run are compatible with this.

Update 11:05 This server is now back up.

24th Apr 2009 11:29 Upgrade of firewall firmware 14:00 today

We will be upgrading our firewall firmware at 2PM today, the work will take around 30 minutes. We don't anticipate any downtime (we have a redundant pair of firewall appliances), but we are just making customers aware of this at risk period.

Update 15:27 As customers may know, this upgrade did not go smoothly and we lost connectivity for around 40 minutes! We apologise to customers for this unacceptably long outage. We are still awaiting a report from the staff who performed the upgrade to find out why this went so badly wrong.

Update 16:05 At around 15:45 it appears that new (non working) configuration was inadvertently reloaded due to human error, this caused a 15 minutes loss of connectivity. We apologise for this and will be fully investigating how this was allowed to occur.

2nd Mar 2009 11:33 Forwarding email to hotmail

Regrettably we are going to have to turn off forwarding postmaster catchall mail to Hotmail as currently this is causing major problems with delivery of all forwarded mail to Hotmail. Catchall recipients that only forward to Hotmail will have the catchall feature turned off so that only messages addressed to postmaster@domain will get through, you will be able to turn this back on again in the control panel, but we may in future have to disable this option also. We highly recommend that users stop using postmaster/catchall recipients and instead use a named recipient at their domain.

26th Feb 2009 08:12 Forwarding email to hotmail

Hotmail have agreed to lift the rate limiting which has caused the problems in forwarding mail to them, however our IPs will still be subject to the same spam checks at hotmail that caused the problems in the first place. To ensure that your email is not delayed please follow these rules:

Don't forward postmaster 'catchall' recipients to hotmail, set up named recipients instead.
Ensure spam filters are turned on for any recipients forwarding to hotmail.
Ideally... don't forward to hotmail at all, use a mailbox on our servers to pick up your mail. If you really *must* have your mail accessible from hotmail, try using their POP3 facility to read from a mailbox on our servers. This will not be subject to the same forwarding delays.