Category: Planned Maintainance

We are continuing maintenance work on our Xen VPS nodes this evening. The following servers will be restarted from 9.00PM (GMT+1)

* xn6.pcsmarthosting.co.uk = Completed
* xn7.pcsmarthosting.co.uk = Completed
* xn8.pcsmarthosting.co.uk = Completed

Please Note: Since these machines had over a year of uptime, a number of VPS are doing a FSCK causing high IOWAIT on the host machines and delaying the startup process. If your VPS is not online it will come online by itself, please be patient and do not try to reboot it from SolusVM. Thanks

We are continuing maintenance work on our Xen VPS nodes this evening. The following servers will be restarted from 9.00PM (GMT+1)

* xn1.pcsmarthosting.co.uk = Completed
* xn3.pcsmarthosting.co.uk = Completed
* xn5.pcsmarthosting.co.uk = Completed

Please Note: Since these machines had over a year of uptime, a number of VPS are doing a FSCK causing high IOWAIT on the host machines and delaying the startup process. If your VPS is not online it will come online by itself, please be patient and do not try to reboot it from SolusVM. Thanks

Tonight between 22:00 and 00:00 (GMT+1) we will be rebooting the below servers in order to boot into new kernels which address a recent Xen security issue. Downtime will vary from machine to machine as each VPS shuts down and boots up individually.

Any issues will be posted here. Apologies for any inconvenience.

We are going to be rebooting the following servers at approx 11PM GMT in order to boot into newer kernels, with numerous security fixes and support for newer OS’:

vz1.pcsmarthosting.co.uk
vz2.pcsmarthosting.co.uk

We don’t expect any issues, but downtime will vary as OpenVZ starts up and shuts down VPS one by one.

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vz1 = Reboot completed, VPS are starting up.
vz2 = Reboot completed, VPS are up

Our monitoring picked up a failed drive in the RAID10 array on xn2 earlier this evening.

The missbehaving drive has been hot-swapped out and the array is rebuilding. There was no interruption to service, but note I/O will be a little slow while the array restores full redundancy.

Thanks

Following a previous crash due to high load, we are doing a bit of maintenance on this server to ensure everything is running optimally.

During this time there may be some brief load spikes as we apply updates. Appologies for any inconvenience

Update: This has been completed and we are seeing improved disk performance and lower load.

Below is an email sent to all users on vz2 approx 2PM 12/11/11:

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You are recieving this email because you have one or more VPS on the OpenVZ Node, vz2.pcsmarthosting.co.uk

A drive has failed in the RAID10 array on this machine and requires replacement. Due to previous issues we have had on this node following hot-swap disk replacements, we are going to shut down the machine cleanly, replace the drive and power it back up again.

We are sorry for any incovenience this may cause, especially as we only replaced two other drives a couple of months ago. This machine is running a 4x disk RAID10 array and it’s not uncommon for drives to fail around the same time as they are all from the same batch.

Outage Details:

Task: Replace failed drive in the RAID array.

Scheduled Time: 11.00PM UK Time (GMT) on Sunday 13/11/2011

Expected Downtime: Approx 20 Minutes, though as VPS are started individually it may vary.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to open a ticket.

Update: The server halted much faster than expected and is now down. We are waiting for remote hands to swap the drive out for us and power on.

Update 2: The drive has been replaced but is not being picked up. Looks like a blackplane/RAID controller issue. We will arrange another maintenance in due course to resolve this.

Below is a copy of an email sent to customers on 20/11/2011:

This email is to inform you about some upcoming planned maintenance, affecting a small number of customers on the machine xn15.pcsmarthosting.co.uk. To check if you have a VPS on this machine, log into SolusVM and check the Location at https://solusvm.dns4vps.com:5656 Or just open a ticket with your IP Address and we will check for you.

If your VPS is not hosted on XN15, please discard this email as it does not affect you.

If your VPS is hosted on XN15, our datacenter will be moving this node onto the new network setup with increased resilience, as we have done with our other servers a few months back.

This will be taking place between 1AM and 3AM (UK Time, GMT+1) on 10/11/2011 and the server will be down for approximately 30 minutes while it is moved to another rack and powered up.

If you have any questions please let us know.

Regards,

The PCSmart Team

From 8PM on 02/09/11 I am going to be onsite doing some work on a few machines.

VZ2 will be down while we troubleshoot a RAID controller issue and replace two faulty disks.
XN2 will be rebooted as the RAID controller has not detected a new disk correctly which was hot-swapped in.

If your VPS is currently down we appologise for the inconvenience, but its important we return your host machine to its fully working state with an Optimal RAID10 disk array.

Thanks

As per an email sent out to all customers last week, we are carrying out some network upgrades on Saturday 27th August at 10.00PM (GMT+1). This is to reconfigure our network with a Cisco HSRP setup for improved redundancy incase of any router issues.

There will be a short outage between 10-20 minutes affecting all of our UK servers, except XN15 and XN16 which are in different racks.

Updates will be posted here throughout.

21.50: We are now preparing for the upgrade
22.03: Upgrade has started. Network is now down
22.11: Conectivity is restored. All finished!