Scheduled Maintenance - July 17

Completed: After a late start, the maintenance has been completed successfully.

On July 17, 2016 starting at 1:00AM CDT we will be performing regular system maintenance on our Web and Mail Servers. We expect a few minutes of downtime, so that our servers can reboot.

Services Affected

  • Managed Website Services
    • Websites and Web Applications
  • Managed Mail Services
    • IMAP Access
    • SMTP Access
    • Web Mail Access

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

Regular Scheduled and Preventive Maintenance

Closing the Story on our LA Data Center

On June 25, 2016 we have closed our Los Angeles Data Center after six years of service. Now the majority of our web services will be provided from our New York Data Center.

We would like to thank the staff at our Los Angeles Data Center for the help they have provided to us over the years.

Why the change

We decided to change our data center providers for many different reasons, the main reason is to provide our clients the best possible service. Some of the other choices include:

  • Faster and More Powerful Servers
  • Faster Network Connections
  • Newer Software
  • Fast SSD Drives
  • New Features and Services - Faster
  • Free SSL/TLS Certificates on All Sites
  • Access to new locations
    • New York (Primary and Default), San Francisco, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Singapore, India and more

This change will allow us to provide new and exciting opportunities for our clients.

We will be announcing some exciting news in the coming months because of these changes - keep an look out for it.

What is Affected?

This change has required us to migrate all our Managed Services and web properties to the new infrastructure. We have been working on this migration for the last five months.

We’re happy to announce that the migration was 100% successful.

Now all of our clients’ services are running upon our new and better infrastructure - providing faster services to all.

I have questions

With any type of change, there will also be questions and concerns. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us.

– Mad Scientist Technologies’ Internetworking and Infrastructure Team

MadSciTech.com Move

Status: Completed ✓ ✓ ✓

UPDATE June 24, 2016: MadSciTech.com has been successfully moved/migrated to our new and faster web server (NYC Data Center).

We’re still looking for bugs or problems, but everything looks good! If you spot an issue, please feel free to contact us.


UPDATE June 23, 2016: We have over come the blocker. We are in the process of transferring DNS and checking things out before releasing the floodgates to the new server. We’ll update this post when we have completed the move.

Estimated Time: 3 Hours (2:30AM CT).


Starting May 25, 2016 at 7:00AM, we will begin the long process of moving our own web properties to our new server (NYC Data Center). We expect some minor downtime with the following services:

  • MadSciTech.com Website
    • FAQs/Knowledge Base
    • Downloads
    • Contact Forms
    • Posting Comments to Articles (Will be unavailable until Friday, May 27 See Delay Below)
  • DNS Service for MadSciTech.com Properties
    • MadSciTech.com
    • MadSciTech.biz
    • MadSciTech.us
    • MadSciTech.xyz
  • MadSciTech.com Online Portal
  • MadSciTech.com Status Page

We also expected broken links and bad redirections for parts of the MadSciTech.com website. We should have the majority of these problems corrected shortly after the DNS switched to the new server.

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

Mail: Staff |*| MadSciTech |.| com

Transfer Delay* (Update: May 30 at 8AM)

We have ran into a problem during the transferring to the new server, which is currently blocking us from continuing the process. We are currently looking into the problem and will update this post with the latest information, when it comes avaiable.

Because of this blocker the site is still hosted on our old server (LA Data Center) and has data entry disabled. This means that our current public site is unable to provide the following functionality:

  • Commenting - Disabled
  • New Articles - Disabled
  • New FAQs - Disabled
  • New Videos - Disabled

As mentioned, we are attempting to resolve this blocker as fast as possible to finish the move.

Status

  • 7am - 5pm: Old Server Backup ✓
  • 2pm - 5pm: Configuring DNS ✓
  • 5pm - 7pm: Transferring Data ✓
  • 9pm: Database Setup ✓
  • 9pm: Site Configration ✓
  • 10pm: Link Checking ✓
  • June 23, 10PM: Final Checks ✓
  • June 23, 11PM: Switch DNS ✓
  • June 24, 4AM: Live Test ✓

Last Updated: 8:00AM, June 24

Known Problems

  • Short link will no longer work. (Plugin is incompatible with PHP 7)
    • Link: madscitech.com/m/18 will no longer work

MadSciTech.com Outage

On June 21, 2016 between 9:15PM until 9:50PM CDT, our company website (MadSciTech.com) was unavailable. The failure was due to a failure at our LA Data Center provider.

The source of the failure has not been announced or provided by our Data Center provider.

This failure only affected our company website. No client services were affected by this incident.

Our site was unavailable for approximately 40 minutes due to this unscheduled outage.

Web Server Fell-over - Oops

On June 12, 2016 at 6:27A our web server ran out of memory and temporarily crashed, causing websites on our Managed Web Presence Service to go offline. We quickly diagnosed and recovered the server and brought the server back up by 6:35A.

We are planning to do a memory upgrade on this particular server in the coming weeks, to prevent this problem from re-occurring. We will post an notice here and on our new status Twitter Account, for that particular upgrade.

We apologize for the outage.

Migration: Classic Managed Mail Hosting

Starting June 13, 2016 we will begin the process of migrating our older Managed Mail Hosting Services (Classic) to a new mail server.

If you do not know if your Managed Mail Service is affected, you can easily check your incoming/outgoing mail servers you use in your email client or webmail web address:

  • Classic Managed Mail Hosting Service (Affected Clients)

    • Incoming Server IMAP or POP3
      • Mail.YourDomain.com
      • xpnv-rqhz.accessdomain.com
    • Outgoing Server SMTP
      • Mail.YourDomain.com
      • xpnv-rqhz.accessdomain.com
    • Webmail URL
      • Mail.YourDomain.com
      • YourDomain.com/.tool/webmail
  • Modern Managed Mail Hosting Service (Not Affected)

    • Incoming (IMAP Only) and Outgoing Server (SMTP)
      • Messaging.MadSciTech.net
    • Webmail URL: mail.services.madscitech.net

If your mail account is configured to use the servers under “Modern Managed Mail Hosting Service,” you have nothing to worry about.

However, if your mail account uses the servers under “Classic Managed Mail Hosting Service,” we will be contacting you soon to schedule an appointment to migrate your mail account to our new and faster mail server.

Your mail account must be migrated before June 25, 2016 or you will lose all messages stored in your account.

End of Support for POP3

Please Note, we will no longer support POP3 accounts on our new mail server. Users that currently use POP3 accounts can keep there offline mail messages, however after they are switched to the new server there account will be IMAP only.

We have deprecated POP3 because it is insecure and out dated in a world where you have multiple devices accessing your email account. So with your mail account, the mail server is the definetive truth of your email.

How Long will it Take?

Mail Migration takes between 15 Minute for small IMAP/POP3 Accounts to 3 Hours for Very Large (5GB+) IMAP Accounts.


Please feel free to contact us to schedule appointment to migrate your mail account at your convenience.

Scheduled Maintenance - Completed

On Sunday, June 12, 2016 at 1:00 AM CDT we will perform a quick system reboot to complete the installation of updates.

We expect less than 5 minutes of downtime with this maintenance window.

Services Affected

  • Managed Web Services
    • Websites and Web Applications
  • Managed Mail Hosting
    • IMAP Access
    • SMTP Access
    • Web Mail Access

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

Regular Scheduled and Preventive Maintenance

Scheduled Maintenance

Completed

On Sunday, May 22, 2016 at 1:00AM we will perform a quick system reboot to complete the installation of updates.

We expect less than 5 minutes of downtime with this maintenance window.

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

Resolved Outlook Mail Client

We have resolved an long standing issue with using Microsoft Outlook Mail Clients with our mail server. As of May 13, 2016 at 8PM, you may use Microsoft Outlook as your email client without issues.

The Problem is due to Outlook failing to provide the computer’s full name when authenticating with the mail server. Our mail service requires that all mail servers and clients to fully identify themselves to the server before accepting mail from them. This is done to prevent spammers from attacking our mail server.

We would like to apologize again, for the long delay in getting this issue fixed.

Resolved: Mailroute Issue

Between 2:30PM - 3:45PM Today (May 13, 2016), mail delivery from MailRoute.net servers were being bounced back when attempting to deliver mail to our mail server.

The Problem has been resolved and we have white-listed MailRoute on our network to prevent this problem from occurring again.

The Cause of the problem was do to a temporary issue between our mail server and MailRoute Server being miss identified as a malicious network.

We would like to apologize for this issue and any inconvenience that it may have caused.