Category: Downime notice

A constructive maintenance has been scheduled for the OrderBox infrastructure on the 17th August 2014. The exact details of the maintenance are as follows:

Though LB have accounted for a maintenance window of 10-12 hours, they anticipate this activity to complete in around 8 hours. So as such, you may encounter issues with OrderBox and related services for 8 hours or so within the above maintenance window.

You or your customer may have noticed missing email and lack of IMAP services the past 4 days because of a storage related issue with LogicBoxes Austin mail servers (covering both paid / free and enterprise mail services).

This issue unravelled on Thursday morning, and since then LogicBoxes along with the storage manufacturer/disaster recovery company have been working towards bringing historic email back online (to include current email upto and including Thursday 24th April).

A full rundown can be read here : http://forums.myorderbox.com/index.php?/topic/4966-mail-issue-on-austin-servers/ and you can use your NEO user / pass to login to read that forum post.

The last post mentioned that the recovery could take weeks to complete and moreover may or may not be successful in restoring mail.

The latest update is below from the above forum :

How did this happen?
We were bringing a new storage cluster online, and during this process data was inadvertently removed from an existing storage cluster.

What are you doing to get my mail back?
The removal of this data has made it very challenging to restore your messages.  As we’ve mentioned, we are working with our storage industry experts to reconstruct the data, work continues around the clock towards this end, but this is a very time consuming process, and it may take a few weeks to complete the entire process.

Are my messages gone forever?
It is possible that some messages of your messages may be unrecoverable, however at this time we have not completed our work on the restoration.  We will continue working on our recovery efforts, with an eye towards restoring as many messages for as many customers as quickly as possible.

Should I be worried that this is going to happen again?
The error that occurred was highly unusual.  We are carefully analyzing what happened and are implementing additional safeguards to prevent this particular event from reoccurring.

From the above, LB are looking to bring back online IMAP, and, subsequently need you and your customers to backup their IMAP folders if they have them offline, BEFORE connecting to the mail service.  If they used POP3 this does not need carrying out, however, if IMAP was used, THIS CERTAINLY DOES need carrying out.  Some instructions for popular mail applications are listed below.

From LB:

We wish to turn on the IMAP service within the next 48hours. Hence, we would like that all our clients have a local copy of their emails, such that it can be re-synced with the server.

Following are some DIY steps on how we store/backup emails on your local machines.

Instructions for Outlook:
The process to setup the same has been specified in two of our KB articles:
1> https://support.logicboxes.com/helpdesk/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/5/49/how-do-i-move-my-emails-from-one-address-to-another
2> https://support.logicboxes.com/helpdesk/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/59/49/how-do-i-take-a-local-backup-of-my-email-in-outlook-2010

In Outlook 2010:
Follow these steps to export a specific folder:

    Click the File tab.
    In the Outlook Options window, click Advanced.
    Click Export.
    In the Import and Export Wizard, click Export to a file, and then click Next.
    Click Outlook Data File (.pst), and then click Next.
    Select the folder to export, and then click Next.
    Click Browse, and then select the location where you want the new .pst file to be saved.
    In the File Name box, type the name that you want to use for the new .pst file, and then click OK.
    Click Finish.

In an earlier version of Outlook:

    Open Outlook.
    On the File menu, click Import And Export. If the menu item is not available, move your pointer over the chevrons at the bottom of the menu, and then click Import and Export.
    Click Export To File, and then click Next.
    Click Personal Folder File (.pst), and then click Next.
    Click the folder to which you want to export the .pst file, and then click Next.
    Click Browse, and then select the location where you want the new .pst file to be saved.
    In the File Name box, type the name that you want to use for the new .pst file, and then click OK.
    Click Finish.

Instructions for Thunderbird:

Archiving emails to local folder:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/archived-messages

Or

You can install the following Addon in Thunderbird to Import/Export your emails:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/
 

LB will be performing a failback of services to the passive Pooler server in order to perform certain security and developmental upgrades on the current Pooler server.

This activity would require a downtime as per the below schedule:

Maintenance window:

Date : Wednesday, 12th February 2014
Start Time : 05:00:00 hrs UTC / 10:30:00 hrs IST
End Time : 05:10:00 hrs UTC / 10:40:00 hrs IST
Duration: 10 minutes

Affected Services:

During the above maintenance there will be no downtime for OrderBox. However, actions that require registry connections would be affected, example: Domain name Registrations, Renewals, name server modifications, contact modifications. Thus, LB advise you to carry out any actions on domain orders that would require a connection to the registry post this maintenance.

LB are having a server consolidation activity for their Pooler server (responsible for making registry connections) at the datacentre and for that they would require a downtime on 31st July 2013 as per the following schedule:

Maintenance window:

Date : Wednesday, 31st July 2013
Start Time : 02:30:00 hrs UTC / 08:00:00 hrs IST
End Time : 02:45:00 hrs UTC / 08:15:00 hrs IST

During the above maintenance there will be no downtime for orderbox. However, some of the registry calls could be affected. Thus, we advise you to carry out any actions on domain orders that would make a call to the registry post this maintenance.

LB's upstream data center will be upgrading the firmware for certain routers and hence that 
would need a downtime for our domain forwarding service as per the below schedule:

Date: Wednesday, July 10, 2013 (07/10/2013)
Start Time: 05:00 AM UTC/GMT
End Time: 01:00 PM UTC/GMT
Duration: 8 hours.

Services Affected:

Domain forwarding service. Although the above maintenance window states 8 hours from 
10-Jul-2013 05:00 - 13:00 UTC, LB expect that the actual downtime would be just a few 
hours during this window, with the remaining time allotted for verifying that full 
functionality has been restored and correcting any outlying issues after the changes have been applied.