Eqwebs Ltd - Planned Update to ns.eqwebs.com & ns2.eqwebs.com

Issued at 3.25pm Friday 21st March 2008

In view of frequent server outage problems with our servers at the GX Networks Ltd., Manchester Bank data centre, it has been decided to upgrade to new servers at a different location. The new servers, with a higher specification, will be located within IP House, a data centre owned by Legend Communications plc. The data centre is a purpose built multi-million pound Tier 1 facility, situated on the outskirts of London Docklands, providing the ultimate in redundancy, uptime, and network colocation services. The data centre has been built utilizing N+1 design philosophy. N+1 ensures that every part of the data centre is not only redundant, but has a hot spare on standby in case of an emergency.

This initially affects the following Eqwebs Limited servers

  • ns.eqwebs.com, IP 212.67.194.111
  • ns2.eqwebs.com,  IP 212.67.194.112

During the transfer we hope to have minimal disruption to the websites hosted on these servers but there may be problems lasting for 24 to 48 hours whilst email services are transferred.

All websites will be transferred to one new server which will be named as ns.eqwebs.com with a new IP of 194.93.130.44. For customers using FTP on the new server the default remote directory (for full domain websites) should be changed to ../../../web .

Customers are advised to save anything important in their webmail to their own computer as this data will NOT be migrated. The new server uses squirellmail rather than open webmail.

When you first log in to webmail on the new server (squirellmail) please go immediately to options and then under the personal information setting you should enter (as a minimum) your Full Name and your email address in the appropriate boxes and click on submit.


UPDATES

11.30pm 21/03/2008 Copies taken of all existing websites for migration to new server

1.00am 22/03/2008 Websites copied to new server

9.00am 23/03/2008 Started switching dns to new server - sites switched individually in alphabetic order.

10am 24/03/2008 Problems implementing FrontPage server extensions on newly migrated websites - will require a manual reconfiguration of each individual website that uses FrontPage server extensions - this may take some time (weeks possibly).

3.20pm 25/03/2008 email server started on new server.

9.00am 27/03/2008 all clients that have their incoming mail server set to 212.67.194.111 or 212.67.194.112 should now switch to 194.93.130.44

4pm 27/03/2008 DNS switching is now complete on all websites.

01/04/2008 The manual configuration of FrontPage server extensions is taking longer than anticipated - If you urgently need to update your website and get a FrontPage or Sharepoint services error please contact us to move your website up our list.