The Road Ahead

For many years we've use Uptime Kuma to power our service service status website, status.calzadamedia.net. It has worked quietly, efficiently and reliably and was amongst the easier third party open source tools we have used in our infrastructure. As tools develop and mature, their direction sometimes diverges from our requirements and it may need to be replaced.

We've reached that point with Uptime Kuma, and we have replaced it with an equivalent tool, Statping-ng. Statping-ng provides the same customer facing service status, albeit with a slightly different interface. The website address, status.calzadamedia.net, has not changed nor has it's isolation - it runs on it's own dedicated server independent of all our servers and systems.

Uptime Kuma is still a fine self-hosted monitoring tool, and we would gladly recommend it to anyone looking for one in the home lab or similar. For our needs, Statping-ng is currently a better fit.

Calzada Media services are unaffected by the ongoing worldwide IT problems. If you are affected, we recommend you check any available status or service information page for your provider.

We send our deepest condolences to the Royal Family following the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. On the day of the state funeral, 19th September 2022, Calzada Media will be closed as a mark of respect.

We appreciate that that may not be possible for some of our customers. As with any other bank holiday, we still provide emergency support cover should it be necessary. If any of our customers have an issue or question they may be raised using a support ticket. Emergencies will be addressed as soon as possible with any other business deferred until 20th September 2022.

As is traditional at the time of year, in between mince pies and other festivities we will be installing some upgrades and undertaking routine maintenance on our systems. Wherever possible, we schedule this work to take place at time of low activity and interruption. Typically, the period between Christmas and New Year is such a time.

We don't anticipate any substantial downtime or upgrade work. If there will be any downtime periods in excess of five minutes, we will announce them in advance through our regular channels.

Further updates on the installed upgrades and any new or enhanced features or services will be released in the near future.

A recent and dangerous vulnerability has been found in the Apache Log4j logging software library. This is a widely used software library found in applications ranging from Apache through Minecraft through to complex web services.

We do not use Log4j in any of our products, services or websites. Nor do we use Apache in any of our hosting services. As per Microsoft's official response, we do not currently believe our servers and systems are exposed.

We are investigating whether any third-party service, product or application we may use is potentially at risk. If any are, we will mitigate the risk where possible and update when fixes are released.