[LCH Announce] cloud0.lchost.co.uk EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE

[Phillip Baker]

Hi,

Those of you hosted on cloud0.lchost.co.uk will no doubt have noticed 
that it crashed earlier today, causing an outage for all services on 
this server. Since the server came back up I have been attempting to 
troubleshoot

a) the cause of the crash
b) considerably slower than expected mail processing since rebooting

Despite attempts at nailing down b), we are still seeing considerably 
slower than expected mail processing, leading to many MUAs (mail 
clients, such as outlook, outlook express, thunderbird, et al) to 
complain that the server is not responding.

I believe that both the crash and the poor performance are due to issues 
with the current driver and kernel versions in use on the server which 
were built manually with currently available code before Debian (the 
distribution of linux we use) natively supported the RAID controller in 
use on this server.

The latest version of Debian includes built in support for this 
controller as part of a considerably newer kernel. It is with this in 
mind that I am scheduling an emergency rebuild of this server this 
evening in an attempt to nail down these issues entirely. This will 
unfotunately involve the server being taken completely offline so that 
it can be backed up safely prior to being rebuilt.

The rebuild will start at approx 23:40, and is expected to take no more 
than 5 hours.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause; but we cannot permit 
the current situation with potential instability and poor perfomance to 
continue. In the event that initial testing reveals the newer software 
release will not function correctly with the system, we will instead 
look to seperate the mail function out to another backend server over 
the next 24 hours.

-- 
Regards,
Phillip Baker
LCHost Chief Technical Officer
0870 068 HOST ext 50