Moonkah Alerts

Brief Outage on July 11

georg — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 08:40:29 +0000

On July 11, 2008 starting at 10pm [Pacific] we will have a brief network outage to restructure our routing tables. We are planning two hours to deal with any quirks that may come up, however our Cisco network engineer estimates the total downtime to be under 30 minutes.

Email server emergency maintenance tonight

georg — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:02:54 +0000

From the data center: “Tonight at approximately 11:30 PM PST we will be doing some maintenance that may affect the performance / [...]. It is only expected to last about 10-15 minutes at most and we apologize for the short notice. This post will be updated as soon as the maintenance has completed.

jordan Tue, 06 May 2008 22:26:05 +0000″

Max 12hrs Downtime, Next Friday

georg — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:26:24 +0000

All our services will be down due to necessary server cluster hardware moving, reconfiguration and optimization. This move will begin Friday, March 21st, at 9PM PDT, and is expected to last up to 12 hours, until Saturday, March 22nd, 9AM PST.

Thank you for your understanding.

One Hour Down

georg — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:32:40 +0000

From the data center:

On Tuesday, February 5th at 10:30PM pacific time, we need to swap two volumes on two filers. These filers have both Randy and Spunky [we're here] mail cluster data on them, and they need to be isolated.

This whole process should take no longer than one hour. During which time your email will queue on remote servers and be delivered when we are finished, but you will have no access to your files or websites.

File server shuffling

georg — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 08:56:54 +0000

From the data center:

On Thursday night, September 20th starting at 10pm Pacific time, we will be shuffling a handful of fileservers for the Randy and Spunky clusters. Each move should take no longer than 15-20 minutes per file server. This is to take inefficiency out of our racks and allow us to deploy even more newer/better/faster file servers! During the time that the file servers are down, your websites and email will be inaccessible, however, no email will be lost. We hope to finish by midnight.

These servers have one or more users on them that will be affected by the move. Please remember, the server itself normally does not crash when a single file server is taken offline for a short period of time.

MySQL Server Moves

georg — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:32:11 +0000

Three MySQL servers need to be ‘re-organized’ in our Alchemy datacenter. This requires shutting them down for a brief moment. This will occur tonight around 22:30 PDT. The three MySQL servers affected are:
tweety, woodstock, and topogigo
This will affect a small number of users in the randy, spunky, and janky clusters. Check this space for updates.

Moonkah is on spunky, so we’re affected!

Webmail Down for 2 hrs tonight

georg — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 16:01:32 +0000

We will be performing some maintenance on our central databases beginning Wednesday, August 15 at 10PM PDT and ending 3 hours later at Thursday, August 16 at 1AM PDT. The expected downtime within this window is 2 hours. This will bring the DreamHost Webpanel, as well DreamHost-provided Squirrelmail offline.

Mail issues, resolved

georg — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 19:35:46 +0000

We’ve had some webmail and successively mail connecting issues yesterday and today. There were couple of problems with a database crash and a mail server. Now things are back to normal. Tested webmail ok on rambomarine.com and millswine.com — everything’s functional.

If you still experience connection failure in your Outlook [or similar] mail client apps, then please close and open it [the app/s] again, it will catch up with the server.
Let us know if any problems persisting.

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience. Apologies,
G. and the Moonkah Team

SSL certificate renewal

georg — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 09:59:25 +0000

Kelly from the data center informs us all, take notice:

Our current “mail.dreamhost.com” certificate used by most of you for SSL email is up for renewal on Friday! We will be replacing it with a newer, better certificate with the name:

*.mail.dreamhost.com

It is also signed by an internal certificate authority, “New Dream Network Certificate Authority”. This means two things! First, most of you will get a popup saying “This certificate is new and untrusted! The world is ending!”. If you press CANCEL the connection will not go through, and you will have a chance to install our NDN CA certificate into your email client. This will allow your computer to trust us!

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/NDN_Certificate <—-<<< link to installation instructions in our Wiki
https://dreamhost.com/ca/ndn.ca.crt <—-<<< link to certificate file data

If you have any problems, please do not hesitate to contact us! This should make your email client not pop up a warning about how the certificate is from an untrusted or unknown certificate authority. This is different from the next (usual) warning about the certificate name not matching the host you are connecting to!

To get rid of the host mis-match error, all you need to do is head on over to https://panel.dreamhost.com/ and log in. In the upper right, click the link that says “Account Status”, then make note of your “email server”. You will want to edit your IMAP, POP, and SMTP servers to be something along the lines of:

a1.balanced.email-server.mail.dreamhost.com
For Example: a1.balanced.spunky.mail.dreamhost.com

Thats it! No more annoying popup windows when using SSL! It is now more secure than previously.

FAQ:
1. Why don’t these instructions work for apple mail?
-It seems there is a bug in apple mail. It does not properly use wildcard certificates. (*.mail.dreamhost.com should match any “word.mail.dreamhost.com”.) We will be contacting them on Monday regarding this issue. Remember, it’s not worse than it was previously!

2. Why not get a REAL certificate signed by VeriSign?
-This is a REAL certificate, and the SSL works just the same.

3. I don’t trust you, I have too many computers to do this on, I can’t expect my clients to install that CA certificate, etc, do I have to install the NDN CA certificate?
-No! Just click to accept the *.mail.dreamhost.com certificate permanently and it shouldn’t bother you until we renew or change the certificate. Installing the CA certificate would allow us to renew the certificate transparently.

4. Why don’t you set the content-type properly on the above link?
-It’s easier to save the file to disk for importing into Thunderbird, etc, if we don’t. Otherwise IE and FireFox both try to process the certificate.

5. What are the vital stats on the new certificate?

Certificate:
Data:
Version: 1 (0×0)
Serial Number:
e8:c8:92:78:d0:05:ce:5f
Signature Algorithm: md5WithRSAEncryption
Issuer: C=US, ST=California, L=Los Angeles, O=New Dream Network, LLC, OU=Security, CN=New Dream Network Certificate Authority/emailAddress=support@dreamhost.com
Validity
Not Before: Apr 12 00:48:57 2007 GMT
Not After : Apr 9 00:48:57 2017 GMT
Subject: C=US, ST=California, L=Brea, O=Dreamhost.com, OU=Security, CN=*.mail.dreamhost.com/emailAddress=support@dreamhost.com
Subject Public Key Info:
Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption
RSA Public Key: (1024 bit)

Modulus=E84958AF3CBFB6AA1060288E83E1B97CF75312B9EEBC194C71EB1A3A477706746134DFC
AD8539ACAA161284CA27C04E70DE479DB825E0EC1D5E0F479C380315F42D46304BE8D064458073
9A33D853A1B70CEF73C6389B09E31AA286B9031EC9CE68BEFBB8A6846E1F40AA6F34A218B5A72F
62C0A52B7B276998B909E344162FB

Unavoidable Power Restructuring

georg — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 06:05:41 +0000

Unfortunately we were informed this week that one of our data centers is requiring to switch 4 circuits from one power feed to another. This will take place on Tuesday night, June 19, at 11pm PDT. The circuit switchover should take approximately 5-15 minutes from start to finish.

We realize this will be inconveniencing quite a few people and you have our apologies, we simply have no choice in the matter.