We are pleased to report that the "Great Migration" was completed successfully yesterday, on March 13th. In a heroic effort, our migration consultants successfully moved more than 500 Internet domain names hosted on Kabissa to a brand spanking new server. This process took quite a long time for them, since they were moving large amounts of data which then had to be verified on the new server, and also since they were required to upgrade several services at the same time which was tricky. So far we are very pleased with the performance of the new server, which is the state of the art in server hosting technology. It runs on new hardware in a new datacenter and the operating system, control panel and all services have been upgraded to the very latest versions. This is a server upgrade we have been intending to do for some time, and the hard drive failure of February 22nd forced our hand.

There were some small glitches initially, as you may have noticed if you were logging in on Monday. Mail was not being delivered right away and there were some customizations missing from our beloved webmail and Plesk domain control panel. Perhaps more seriously, our Mailman mailing list server was completely upgraded. In the process, you may have noticed intermittent problems with accessing web archives and sending mail to some lists. We apologize for the inconvenience caused and have been corresponding with individual members about these issues.

We are counting on you to report any problems! Please contact the Kabissa Technical Support team right away if you have any questions or concerns regarding the server migration, or if you are experiencing any unusual issues with the Kabissa hosting services you utilize. Please describe any problems in as much detail as you can.

Great Migration Highlights

• Completely new hardware in a new datacenter: our previous server was two years old, had slower and less reliable IDE hard drives, ran on an older version of the Redhat linux operating system, and was in an older datacenter at Rackspace. The new server is state of the art technology in a new datacenter which means that it will be more reliable and also the Rackspace technicians will be better trained to support it.
• Very solid backup systems: we now have three hard drives configured in a so-called redundant RAID-5 configuration, which means that if one of the drives fails, the server will continue operating as usual and none of our data will be lost. We will be able to replace the failed drive without any significant down time. In addition, we have a separate Managed Backup device, which retains regular daily backups of our most critical data outside of our machine so if ever there are problems with our machine we will be able to restore from backup.
• New IP Address: the IP (internet protocol) address used to identify the Kabissa server on the Internet has been changed. Since we use domain names to reach our domains on the server this will not be noticeable to us, however we have heard reports of other mail servers that previously were not able to receive emails from our other IP address because of antispam measures now being able to receive our mail.
• Mailman mailing list server upgrade: We are now operating at version 2.1.5 of Mailman, upgraded from version 2.1.2. There are many improvements in reliability in the background, however the most appreciated new feature for Mailing list operators is that you can now delete all pending messages in your admin queue - all at once! Mailman is also more closely integrated with Plesk.