11 Jan 2013 11:26 by Alexander John
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As followers to our Twitter feed may have noted, we had a few issues yesterday with mail services on our THAMES server. The backend database server was performing poorly and this in turn affected the performance of our mail server. We soon had a fix in place and normal mail service was resumed within 20 minutes of our initial tweet.
As our mail services operate independently of our web hosting, no customer websites would have been affected by the database server issues. If a customer website used our mail servers to send out messages, they would have still have been processed, albeit slowly.
Hard Disk Shennanigans
Unfortunately, as we were tracking down the database issues we detected a potentially serious problem with one of THAMES' hard disks. To correct this, we took THAMES offline at 22:30 last night (10th) to perform corrective maintenance work. Although this did take several hours, the problem has been resolved. We have verified this again this morning.
Maintenance Work
Over the forthcoming weekend (12th/13th), we will be undertaking routine maintenance work on THAMES. Inevitably, we will have to restart the server at least once or twice as part of the maintenance cycle so there will be some momentary (about 5 minutes) of downtime during the weekend. Wherever possible, we try and do maintenance work outside of what we consider to be the working part of the day (08:00 to 20:00).