Current Status: Maintenance has completed and systems are being tested.
Last updated 17:05 16/11/17
Summary:
Blacknight will disable its online stores, as well as its user administration control panels (cp.blacknight.com), including billing administration services, for 24 hours on Wednesday 15 November 2017 and Thursday 16 November 2017, to facilitate a planned software upgrade. Hosting and other services will continue to operate as normal during this period, but it will not be possible to make certain administrative or account-related changes, or to purchase new services.
Will my Website and Email continue to work?
The operation of customers’ services will not be affected. Web hosting, email, DNS (Domain Name System) resolution, Office 365, BaseKit, will all operate as normal, without interruption, and users may update their websites via FTP and content management systems such as the WordPress Dashboard.
What will be affected?
The File Manager in the user control panel will not be available. Neither will any of the configuration services normally accessed via cp.blacknight.com or the online stores, including DNS changes; registration or renewal of domain names; transfering domain names, locking or unlocking them; adding users or changing user details; changing passwords or performing any self-service action on your accounts.
Essentially, your Blacknight services will work as normal, but the ability to make administrative changes to them will be suspended for 24 hours.
It will not be possible to buy any new services from Blacknight during the maintenance window.
Why?
The purpose of this scheduled lockdown is to allow us to perform a major upgrade of our control panel software. A large number of servers will be upgraded and we have scheduled a 24-hour maintenance window to complete the work. We are hopeful that the work will be completed in a shorter time than this.
When?
Work on the upgrade will commence at 23:00 on Wednesday 15th of November when cp.blacknight.com and the online stores will be taken offline. It is planned to complete the work and bring these services back online within 24 hours.
What are the specific services that will be affected?
cp.blacknight.com will be off-line for the duration of the upgrade. This is to avoid complications caused by new services being added or existing services being changed during the software upgrade.
It will not be possible to purchase anything from Blacknight during the maintenance window.The following online ordering systems will also be offline during this window:
Other services of note that will be affected will be our quick access URLs to phpmyadmin, Webmail, PgsqlAdmin and our File Manager.
However, users will still be able to access the following services directly:
- Office 365 at https://portal.office.com/
- Open Xchange portal at https://ox.blacknight.com/
- Legacy webmail at https://altmail.blacknight.com/
In addition to the above, software will be updated on all web servers, but this is more ‘command and control’ software than services. Your websites, email, domain resolution and other services like Basekit, Office 365 etc., will all continue to operate as normal.
What about Cloud VMs and Dedicated Servers?
Customers who adminster their own internet services (e.g. http, ftp) on dedicated virtual or physical machines will, of course, continue to be able to administer them during the maintenance window.
Users of Cloud VMs can login directly to OnApp at cloud1.blacknight.com and cloud2.blacknight.com (without going through cp.blacknight.com). However, it will not be possible to purchase any additional resources for their VMs until the store reopens.
What does this mean for me?
It means that, for 24 hours, it will NOT be possible to make the following changes on our ordinary shared hosting plans.
- Add new email users
- Add new Websites, FTP or similar internet services
- Reset passwords
For 24 hours, it will NOT be possible to make the following changes to domain name registrations, or our billing system.
- Register new domain names, or renew existing domain names
- Change or add new DNS entries
- Reset passwords
- Pay bills
- Submit orders for new services
- Perform any self-service action on your account(s).
N.B. If a service expires or is suspended prior to the maintenance, it will be very difficult to restore it until the work is completed. Therefore, please verify that any regular payments have been successfully completed before the maintenance window starts.
What are we doing?
Our Control Panel software version is 6.0.9. We are going to upgrade to Version 7.2 which has just been released. It brings a lot of changes to how everything works under the hood but has minimal impact on your customer control panel. Version 7.2 supports some exciting new features which we plan to announce in the near future.
To upgrade the software, we have to upgrade the core operating systems of our platform from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7. This is the single largest task and it involves transferring up to 1TB of data. The migration will be staged; we will have already synchronised data in advance of the update in order to speed it up. We will be working with the software vendors to perform the upgrade. Other companies performing this upgrade have recorded upgrade times in the region of 22-24 hours.
UPDATE: the upgrade and maintenance has been postponed until November 15th (see above)