Blue-Canoe-Support

Cab is in and mostly wired, just a few more switches to add and some network cables to swap. There shouldn’t be any more major downtime now since everything else is ‘permanently’ wired.

Network Upgrades

Over the weekend of 23/24 September, there will be some small disruption as new servers are added and some existing ones retired.

All work should be complete by Monday 25th, any changes will be posted here.

If you require more specific information, please contact me directly.

I'm very happy to announce that the new, high-speed lines will be operational from tomorrow (26/7). Over the coming weeks we will transfer services onto the new IPs. While I'm sure there will be disruption, the process from an end-user perspective will be seamless.

The bulk of the changes will be done outside UK business hours and I will be working to ensure disruption is kept to an absolute minimum.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Email services are currently down. The new mail server will be available later today.

Planned Maintenance 21/10

On Friday 21st I will be upgrading the last of the servers to full SSDs. I will be taking advantage of the downtime to reinstall Proxmox and reconfigure the backup systems, so that each node has a dedicated backup server. There will be minor disruption as key servers like Email, WWW and DNS migrate to a temporary system, then back to their respective nodes.

Server and network status can be checked at any time on our status page (https://status.blue-canoe.net).

status In case you don't want to receive email updates from status any longer submit your email and we will send you an unsubscribe link.

That update didn't quite go to plan, the RAID array in one machine dropped a couple of drives. I do like the Proxmox Backup Server (https://proxmox.com/en/proxmox-backup-server) - fixing was as simple as rolling back the pre-update backups to another server. Including clean-up, the entire process took less than an hour for 6 VPSs.

I’ll be adding a couple of faster network cards to speed up the process for next time. It makes a pleasant change to have a major server outage that didn’t leave me worried about an aneurism.

Service Status & Disruptions

Services are likely to be disrupted between 10:15 - 11:15 for scheduled maintenance.

Details available from

status.blue-cacanoe.net

After futzing about moving machines around after a bunch of upgrades, I tripped over an article about PiKVM (https://pikvm.org/), it's a neat piece of kit with a sophisticated IP KVM, IPMI and an ATX contoller to handle powering a machine off or on.

It all runs on a Raspberry Pi 4B (2GB) and you can buy either a full blown hat or a roll-your-own kit for the rest of the KVM. I went the full blown kit route with a neat steel case and am very impressed.

Worth a look if you're into that kind of thing.

PiKVM - Open and cheap DIY IP-KVM on Raspberry Pi PiKVM an easy and cheap DIY IP-KVM on Raspberry Pi to control remote machines: Full HD, mouse, Mass Storage Drive, VNC, IPMI and much more out of the box. Most modern KVM over IP ever!

Blue-Canoe-Support updated their business hours.

If you happen to run more than just a laptop on your LAN, you likely have a switch. Make sure you need it, if not, turn it off. It will save you money.

Switches are power hungry at the best of times, try plugging one into a fully charged UPS and see how long it stays powered. Not long.

In the saga that is fast becoming the bane of my existence - BT's router that doesn't route - I replaced a 24 port DLink managed switch with a Netgear 8 port. It's reduced the temp in my office by a lot.

Services will be disrupted for up to 2 hours while we have some electrical upgrades done. Services should be available again from 13.00 BST.

The replacement drive for the RAID array on the mail server's primary node will be installed over the Easter long weekend.

There will be up to 90 minutes downtime while mail migrates from its current location on a backup node, back to it's primary node.

Status updates will be posted here.

I'm currently trialling HAProxy with multiple back-end mail servers. It works in my lab setup but I hit yet another snag with BTs business routers.

If there is ever a viable alternative to BT (in this area) I'll bite the IP change nightmares and move.

Mail has now moved to a backup server and is running normally.

Its original home dropped a disk from the raid array - hopefully the disk is still under warranty.

The mailserver is reporting some RAID errors, to avoid any problems I'll be moving it over to another server while the fault is repaired.

Total downtime should be less than an hour with an estimated return to availability of 17:00 GMT

If your situation is urgent, please call.

Blue-Canoe-Support updated their phone number.

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