Data Center Maintenance (Hypervisor)

Start: 2020-09-14 @ 00:00 UTC / September 13, 2020 @ 7:00PM CDT
End: 2020-10-02 @ 00:00 UTC / October 01, 2020 @ 7:00PM CDT

Our Data Center Provider will be rolling out updates across there entire server fleet to improve networking performance and stability on our servers. We do not have a more specific date or time for this maintenance window, we will update this notice when we know more.

This update should have limited to no downtime associated with the maintenance.

Affected Service

  • Managed Web Services
  • Managed Mail Services
    • Webmail
    • Send & Receiving

If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us.

Managed Mail Service Outage - Post-Morten

First off, I would like to apologize for this unexpected outage to our valued clients.

Our recent managed mail service outage that was between 12:17A - 12:35A on September 10, 2020, was a result of a missed announcement of an upcoming maintenance window by our Data Center Provider to resolve an issue with the underlying server that our Managed Mail Service is hosted on. This maintenance window was missed due to multiple maintenance notices for the Month of September.

The maintenance window was scheduled for:

Start: 2020-09-10 @ 04:00 UTC / Sept 9, 2020 @ 11:00PM CDT End: 2020-09-10 @ 12:00 UTC / Sept 10, 2020 @ 7:00AM CDT

Live migration was attempted, however, failed and an offline migration had to be performed. An offline migration requires the Managed Mail Server to be powered off before the migration process. This offline migration caused the outage and extended the downtime.

Timeline of Events:

  • 12:17A - Data Center Provider Attempt Live Migration of Mail Server to the new host, but fails
  • 12:22A - System Monitoring: Notification that Mail Server is unavailable
  • 12:24A - Started investigating
  • 12:28A - Found that Data Center is performing offline migration of Server
  • 12:30A - Migration Completed
  • 12:35A - Server back online

As mentioned above, there are other upcoming maintenance windows scheduled for September 2020, below is the upcoming maintenance windows:

  • September 13, 2020 (CDT) - Hypervisor/Network Upgrades
  • September 17, 2020 (CDT) - General Data Center Maintenance

Again, I would like to apologize again for this outage and I take full responsibility for this error.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us.

Chris Holbrook Mad Scientist Technologies

Data Center Maintenance

Start: August 25, 2020 9:00 PM CDT (August 26, 2020 02:00 UTC)
End: August 26, 2020 11:00 PM CDT (August 26, 2020 04:00 UTC)

Our Data Center Provider will be doing maintenance on the core network equipment, to improve network performance and reliability.

We do not expect any downtime, just may periods of increased packet loss during the above maintenance Windows

Affected Services

  • Managed Web Services
  • Managed Mail Services

If you have questions or concerns about this maintenance window, please feel free to contact us.

— Mad Scientist Technologies’ Team

Data Center Maintenance

Start: June 8, 2020 11:15 PM CDT (June 9, 2020 04:15 UTC)
End: June 9, 2020 7:15 AM CDT (June 9, 2020 12:15 UTC)

Our Data Center Provider will be doing maintenance on the underlaying server that we are using, to resolve a potential issue with the system.

The expected downtime is currently unknown, but may last the full maintenance window. We expect to only see a minor interruption to services - including packet loss - while our system is moved to a new system.

Affected Services

  • Managed Web Services
  • Managed Mail Services
  • All our Online Services

We will update this post with additional information as we get more information.

If you have questions or concerns about this maintenance window, please feel free to contact us.

— Mad Scientist Technologies’ Team

Quick Server Maintenance

Start: May 28, 2020 at 2:20AM CDT
End: May 28, 2020 at 2:30AM CDT

We will be doing some quick server server maintenance, the following services will experience a brief interruption in services

  • Managed Web Services
  • Managed Mail Services

We expect just a few minutes of downtime.

Mad Scientist Technologies Team

Data Center Maintenance

Start: May 24, 2020 11:15 PM CDT (May 25, 2020 04:15 UTC) End: May 25, 2020 7:15 AM CDT (May 25, 2020 12:15 UTC)

Our Data Center Provider will be doing maintenance on the underlaying server that we are using, to resolve a potential issue with the system.

The expected downtime is currently unknown, but may last the full maintenance window. We expect to only see a minor interruption to services - including packet loss - while our system is moved to a new system.

Affected Services

  • Managed Web Services
  • Managed Mail Services
  • Our Online Services

We will update this post with additional information as we get more information.

If you have questions or concerns about this maintenance window, please feel free to contact us.

— Mad Scientist Technologies’ Team

Server Maintenance

RESCHEDULED

Start: July 28, 2019 at 11:30PM CDT
End: July 29, 2019 at 3:30AM CDT
Expected Downtime: Duration: 2.0 Hours

We will be performing a server upgrade during the above maintenance window.

We expect less than 10 minutes of downtime for the following services:

  • Managed Web Hosting Services
  • Managed Mail Services
    • Webmail Access
    • IMAP/SMTP Mail Access

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us.

– Mad Scientist Technologies Infrastructure Team

CDT: Central Daylight Time

SSL Site Outage

Starting at 11:00PM on July 26, 2019, many of our online services became unavailable due to expired security certificates.

This issue was caused by a silently failing scheduled task that would normally renew the certificates automatically and a notification system failing to send warnings about the expiration of said certificates.

It came to our attention at 1:30AM July 27, 2019 that the services were unavailable, we remedy the issue by 1:40AM. We will be implementing additional safe guards to prevent this issue in the future.

We would like to deeply apologize for this problem.

Phase Two Maintenance

We have rescheduled phase two of server maintenance until the week of May 20 further notice. We will update this post with more details.

  • Mad Scientist Technologies Infrastructure Team

Schedule Maintenance Major Upgrades

Stage One - COMPLETED

Start: May 17, 2019 @ 11:00PM CDT (4:00AM UTC)
End: May 18, 2019 @ 6:00AM CDT (11:00AM UTC)
Estimated Downtime: 7.0 Hours

Maintenance Delayed

Due to last minutes schedule changes, Stage One Maintenance has been delayed 2 ½ hours.

Thus the new Maintenance window for stage one will be:

May 18 1:30AM - 8:00AM

Updates

  • 10:00A: Managed Web Services are fully back online.
  • 9:50A: Managed Mail Services has return to it regular system
  • 5:00A-9:00A: Managed Web Services continue to be worked on to bring system to a stable state. Services are running again.
  • 5:00A: Managed Web Services are mostly back online
  • 2:40A: We have our mail service on a backup system for the time being. Managed Web Services will be going offline shortly.
  • 1:30A: Maintenance beginning
  • 12:30A: Maintenance Delayed

Actual Downtime: 1.0 Hour

Stage Two - PENDING (Delayed?)

Start: May 18, 2019 @ 11:00PM CDT (4:00AM UTC)
End: May 19, 2019 @ 6:00AM CDT (11:00AM UTC)
Estimated Downtime: 7.0 Hours

UPDATE 5/18/19 @ 12PM

Stage Two may be delayed until Sunday, we are looking into the matter to see if it would be better to delay this Maintenance Window. We will update this post with more details later today (May 18 2019).


Affected Services

  • Managed Web Service
  • Managed Mail Service
    • Webmail Access
    • IMAP/SMTP Mail Access

We will be doing some major maintenance this weekend on all of our online services. We have divided this maintenance into two stages, due to the extensive maintenance that is required.

We expect up to 14 hours of possible downtime, however, we estimate the actual downtime will be around 4 hours for each service or a total of 8 hours.

We may not need the Stage Two Maintenance Window, however we wanted a fallback window just in case problems arised.

We will update this post during the maintenance and also on Twitter (@MadSciTechCloud).

If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us.

—Mad Scientist Technologies’ Infrastructure Team