Earlier this afternoon our datacenter was having internal network connectivity issues, preventing access to caligula for several hours. All issues have now been resolved and all services should be working as normal.
caligula
Sender Policy Framework implemented as anti-spam countermeasure
Saturday, December 1, 2007 - 13:17
Tags: Announcement • anubis • caligula • nero
Rhombic Networks’ e-mail servers now check for valid SPF (more information at the OpenSPF website and Sender Policy Framework Wikipedia entry) records before incoming e-mail messages are received. This may reduce the number of messages that end up in your spam folder, making it easy to check your spam folder for false positives. This is a continuation of the many other ways Rhombic Networks’ reduces e-mail spam.
We have been doing this for several years, but implemented differently. Previously, messages that fail the SPF check may have been marked as spam and placed into your “Spam” folder. Now, if a message fails the SPF check, it will be rejected from Rhombic Networks’ servers, and you will not see it.
If you think you’re losing any mail, please contact support with specific details about from whom we may be rejecting mail destined for you.
Errors trying to send e-mail via SMTP earlier this evening
You may have received errors trying to send e-mail through Rhombic Networks’ SMTP servers earlier this evening. This problem has been since rectified and all services are back online.
IMAP and SMTP login failures
For about an hour earlier this evening the authentication system for IMAP and SMTP connections was malfunctioning. You may have received a “Login failed” error during this time when trying to receive or send mail via Rhombic Networks servers. The problem is now fixed.
There should have been no mail loss associated with this event.
Database problems Saturday morning
Sometime this morning the MySQL server on caligula went down. It’s since been restarted and all services appear to be running normally.
High-scoring spam e-mail now not delivered
Monday, December 25, 2006 - 19:30
Tags: Announcement • caligula
In an effort to curb the amount of spam our clients need to deal with, we are now no longer delivering those messages designated as “high-scoring” to their mailbox.
High-scoring spam e-mail are those messages that have been marked by one of our spam filterers, SpamAssassin, as having a score greater than 10. It is very unlikely that messages with a score this high are legitimate e-mail. Spam messages with a score less than 10 will be continue to be delivered to your mailbox into the “Spam” folder, where you can check whether the message was correctly marked as spam.
While these messages are no longer being delivered to our clients’ e-mail accounts, they are not being deleted. If you think a message you did not receive was accidentally marked as a high-scoring spam message (again, this is very unlikely), contact us and we can check for you.
Switch to Mountain Standard time for caligula, apophis
Saturday, December 9, 2006 - 20:10
Tags: Announcement • caligula • nero
Both servers caligula and apophis system clocks’ are now switched over to Mountain Standard Time (MST), over from the Central Standard Time.
The datacenter both these servers are located is within the Central time zone, but since Rhombic Networks and most our clients are in Mountain time, this change is long past due. We do not use
Apache problems on caligula; some modules disabled
There was a botched routine upgrade sometime earlier in the weekend, whose problems did not manifest till the Apache webserver on caligula was automatically restarted Sunday morning. Total downtime should have been only for a few hours Sunday morning; the server itself remained operational without any other problems.
The Apache problems have been temporarily resolved, but we had to disable some modules to get Apache working properly again.
If you encounter any problems, please send us a support ticket immediately.
caligula rebooted Sept 08; MySQL problems
caligula was rebooted Thursday, September 8 in response to a major SSL security bugfix. Rebooting was the only sure way to make sure all services dependent on SSL got restarted properly.
Across these reboots, MySQL had broken and was no longer starting automatically with the system. Downtime was slightly under 5 minutes till we noticed and corrected the problem. During this time any access to a database-powered site would have given an error about the inability to connect to our MySQL server.
All problems should now be resolved.
caligula kernel upgrade to 2.6.17
caligula was down for a few minutes today, for a kernel upgrade to Linux 2.6.17 and upgrade of various software, including phpMyAdmin and some of our Python modules. Total downtime was approx. 5 minutes.
