Comprehensive system update on Tuesday 2011-03-01 20:00 CET

On Tuesday next week we will perform a regular but comprehensive system update on all of our servers in the computing centre Oberhausen. Unfortunately we are not able to avoid downtime of services as the operating system updates will require a reboot of the systems.

Due to that, all services will be affected for periods during the time frame of 8pm CEST until midnight. CEST. We expect the interruptions of each individual service to be short.

We perform updates to sustain a secure, modern, and highly productive environment and to provide you with new features.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the update and will gladly respond to any questions you have. To contact us, send an email to support@gocept.com.

Update 2011-03-02 08:00

The update unfortunately required more fine-tuning than expected from the development and staging environments. We are currently in the process of rebooting the last servers and expect all services to be back to normal until 09:00 CET.

Storage server failure on 2011-02-17

Today we experienced a failure of the iSCSI storage server between 09:36 and 10:00 CET. This caused short service interruptions on some VMs. There was also a short outage of our mail server (mail.gocept.net), but no mails were lost.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Short service interruption, yesterday, 2011-01-27 around 5:15pm CET [1. update]

On 2011-01-27 around 5:15pm we experienced a short outage in the data center where all of our services became unavailable for about 5 minutes.

The data center operator reported that a piece of their equipment rebooted itself thus causing the outage. They are still investigating the cause and will report to us when they are done. We will post an update at this place as soon as we get the report.

We apologize for any inconvenience cause by this outage.

Update 2011-01-28 1pm: We received news from the data center operator. The internet connection was down between 5:12pm and 5:19pm.

The outage was due to a router that presumably encountered a software error and thus stopped working. The data center NOC personnel responded to this immediately and restarted the router. They are currently communicating with the manufacturer of the router for further analysis and potentially applying a bug fix.

Infrastructure maintenance in the computing center, 2010-10-07 05:00 - 07:00 CEST

Our computing center operator announced that he will perform firmware updates on network components on 2010-10-07 05:00 - 07:00 CEST. Due to device restarts there will be short interruptions in network traffic.

If you have problems or questions, please send an email to support@gocept.com. We are also available via telephone: +49 345 12298890.

Maintenance window on Friday 2010-10-01 20:00-22:00 CEST

Several infrastructure servers need to be rebooted on Friday 2010-10-01 between 20:00 and 22:00 CEST. We expect short outages for customer VMs and the mail server. We do not expect emails to get lost.

This maintenance window is necessary to complete kernel updates for improved security and performance.

If you have problems or questions, please send an email to support@gocept.com. We are also available via telephone: +49 345 12298890.

New storage and application server hardware deployed

Yesterday we deployed 4 new application servers, 2 new storage servers and another switch to increase the capacity of our virtual machine cluster in our computing center in Oberhausen. The storage servers now feature 8 SAS 15k  600 GB disks in RAID 5 which should give a good performance boost over the previous SATA-based setup.


Here's pictures of thew newly deployed hardware. Note the neatly arranged cabling!

Infrastructure maintenance in computing center Oberhausen, 2010-08-26 04:00 - 06:00 CEST

Our computing center operator announced that he will perform infrastructure maintenance on 2010-08-26 04:00 - 06:00 to improve the quality, stability, and performance of the switching services.

The work only impacts redundant devices and will only result in very short interruptions.