Since the servers are located on the east coast, we are potentially affected by Hurricane Sandy.  But, the backup power systems were tested this morning, generators have their fuel tanks topped up, and we are not expecting any problems with the service.  Stay safe at home checking your email...  :)

For those customers who use domainsmadeeasy as their DNS provider, you are likely seeing sporadic outages.  A hacker has claimed responsibility, but hasn't said why.  DomainsMadeEasy's phone is busy/down, so I haven't been able to talk to them to get an estimated uptime.

I suppose there is one reason to use the company I use for DNS (who have recently changed their policy to not allow me to tell you who that is?? Though you can simply look up who I have for nameservers...) instead - the domainsmadeeasy DNS is free with a domain registration, and I have to pay for the other provider, but they have handled pretty large attacks successfully in the past.

It's been a while since I've had anything interesting to report, and that's usually considered a good thing...

We're having some trouble with one of the servers and replacement parts are on order and will be installed tomorrow.  In the meantime, if you are on "tangerine", your web page will be inaccessible.  Email will still be delivered relatively normally in most cases, and will be saved for later delivery in all other cases.

Sorry for the inconvenience.  Please call if you have any questions.

UPDATE: 08/23: 12:30PM.  The power supply is going bad and has been temporarily replaced.  Most customers (e.g. all but one) are now up and running.

UPDATE: 08/23: 4:00PM.  A permanent power supply has been installed and everything is back to normal.

Level3 (an upstream provider for Lime Daley) appears to be having some issues today, and that is causing some flakiness in our network.  Staff is onsite monitoring the issue, and may end up moving traffic off of Level3 until they fix their issue.

[Update: it turned out to be a Sprint issue, and it took them a while to figure it out.  It only affected the connections between some people and some websites.]

Not much to say, but I figured there hasn't been anything posted in a while, so thought I should at least post something.

Lime Daley has expanded our existing servers a bit - one customer now has 16GB of RAM exclusively for their site, and another customer needed more disk space, and so we installed a RAID6 array with 8TB of usable space.

Another successful year has passed for Lime Daley, and since I like statistics, when I happened to notice a large amount of spam being silently thrown away today, I took the opportunity to check up on the stats for the last year.

EMAIL

We received 5 million emails in the last 12 months.

We bounced 74% of that email back to the original sender because it was being sent from computers known to be spammers.

We silently threw away another 12% due to the content of the message was known to be spam.

Then we tagged 6% as possible spam for delivery to your spam folder and then the final 8% was delivered to your inbox.

We occasionally get a new customer who will say that his email isn't working once they switch to our service.  In every case, the problem has been that he was so used to getting email every time he hits the "send/receive" button that he figures there is something wrong, but then I'll look up his account, and say that I can deliver the 85 spams that he received that day if he wants, but I assume he would rather not get them.

We can't claim to be spam free (and no one can, unless they can afford to hire a secretary to read their email, and even then, I'll bet there are occasionally mistakes, either in deleting too much or not enough), but I'd say that deleting 86% of your inbox without accidentally deleting real email, and also keeping your spam folder relatively small so you can more easily review it for any real emails means that we are doing a pretty good job of managing your email.

FTP/WEB HOSTING

124 domains

2,718 email addresses (excluding those customers that use wildcards for theoretically infinite addresses)

24 outgoing terabytes; 3 incoming terabytes

670GB of disk space used (excluding backups)

SERVERS

4 Servers, with 14 cores total; 86% idle (counting 24 hour days, but busier during the day time)

REFERRALS

We paid out $700 in referral fees -- Thank YOU for continuing to grow Lime Daley!

We'll be upgrading some networking equipment on December 22 between 2:00 and 6:00 AM EST.  You might see some delays and brief outages during that maintenance window.

UPDATE: 2010/12/22: 6:30AM: Most equipment has been upgraded without any downtime.  The job ended up getting split into two pieces, so there will be another maintenance window on 12/24 as well.

UPDATE: 2010/12/24: 7:00AM: All devices have been upgraded.  We had a couple minutes of downtime around 4:00AM.  For those of you who were awake at that time to notice, our sympathies...  :)

We are now using dnswl.org's mail server whitelist to bypass greylisting, which means that for known legitimate mail servers (all 101,686 of them at the moment), greylisting will be bypassed, which means that your e-mail will arrive a little bit sooner.

Our upstream provider is currently seeing intermittent network connectivity at this point.  We are looking into it further.

UPDATE: 11:05EDT: The cause was a misconfigured machine on our network causing a denial of service to other connections.  The machine has been removed from the network, and as of 10:25EDT, everything looks good, but we'll continue monitoring.

2010/08/07, 10:55AM: The company we use for DNS services is having some issues this morning and some queries are not being answered, and some are being redirected to our European servers, and causing various delays. If you host DNS with Lime Daley, you might see some flakiness in accessing services on your domain.

Incoming mail should not be lost, as the senders' servers will retry automatically.  And we've opened a support ticket with our upstream providers to make sure they know about the issue.

We'll keep you updated as we find out more.

2010/08/07, 3PM:  Fortunately, all it took was for us to post about it to fix it, as it has been stable since 10:46AM.  I should have posted sooner.  The company who runs our DNS servers, had a distributed denial of service attack on their servers, all based out of China, and the traffic reached 50Gbps, which is a pretty impressive number.  They are working on a solution to try to avoid this in the future.