Kabissa members hosting a domain name on the Kabissa server will want to take note of a configuration change that may affect you. We have moved the online community website at http://www.kabissa.org to a new server. During the move today, the site was unavailable for a few hours, but that did not affect your own website, mailing list or email hosted on Kabissa.

The new home for www.kabissa.org means that the address we have promoted in the past for accessing the Plesk domain control panel no longer works. Please use the address below instead:

https://kabissa.org:8443

As announced yesterday in a Kabissa Server Alert email, we upgraded our server memory this morning. So far the upgrade appears to have helped and we have not had any server issues today. We will continue to monitor the situation.

The Kabissa server was offline for two hours today. We know how important server reliability is to you and apologize for the inconvenience caused.

We are now investigating the cause of the high server load which caused this downtime and also has been causing short downtimes for the past week.

You may have noticed that today and yesterday we all experienced some unexpected downtime on the Kabissa server. The server went down Wednesday morning for 30 minutes, and again several times on Thursday morning for similar time periods. I would like to apologize for the inconvenience caused.

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.

We took the last step in our server migration today, and as of about 7am GMT all of our domains are now on the new server! Please contact Kabissa Technical Support immediately if you encounter any problems or unexpected behavior with your mailboxes, website or mailing lists.

We have had several small issues come up already in the last few hours:

1) You will receive security warnings now when you log into webmail or the PLESK Domain control panel. We will be installing new certificates to prevent this.

2) Mailman has been upgraded along with this migration. The Kabissa team still needs to reinstall some customizations, including the webmail archives.

3) Plesk was also upgraded. The Kabissa team still needs to reinstall some features, including the backup, antivirus and spamguard tools.

4) This morning right after the new server came into service, email was not flowing correctly. Some members reported outgoing mail not being delivered for several hours. This problem has now been resolved and mail is now being delivered.

We will continue to keep you apprised of our progress and will be sharing in a future message all the benefits of the new server. We appreciate your patience during this process!

We have been hard at work on the migration. As explained in past alerts, all critical data was restored from a backup from last Monday, 19 February. Unfortunately, however, some database tables used by the Plesk domain control panel were corrupted - this was causing the database system to crash several times a day on Friday and Saturday last week. Now our migration consultants have been carefully fixing the corrupted database tables so that they can carry out the migration to hte new server. In the meantime, you should be able to log into Plesk if you need to but you may find some inaccurate information in there (e.g. incorrect disk space limits) or get cryptic error messages when trying to manage e-mail or other services on your domain. All other services are, to the best of our knowledge, operating as usual.

Once they have fixed the Plesk database tables , our consultants will migrate all of our data to the new server. We expect this to take place next weekend and it will take several hours to copy the data. During parts of those days, please be prepared for potential downtime on your domains. This means there may be periods when you cannot access your website, e-mail or other services. If this happens, don't worry about your e-mail: e-mail messages will be queued for delivery after the server comes back up again.

We understand your services on Kabissa, in particular your email, is important to you and we will keep the downtimes to a minimum. We will also do our best to inform you ahead of time of planned downtimes.

As previously announced, the Kabissa server suffered a hard drive failure on Wednesday. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes to Kabissa member organizations, and are taking this situation very seriously and are working very hard to bring the server back to normal as quickly as possible.

The good news is that since Wednesday we were able to recover all essential data and get services running again. You should be able to use your e-mail, websites and mailing lists as usual - if you are having any problems at all please contact us immediately at support.

Unfortunately, there are still some recurring problems with the databases used by our Webmail system and the Plesk Domain Control Panel. We are concerned about the possibility that this type of event could happen again, and that other new problems might crop up resulting from the hard drive crash.

The Server Migration

We were planning on doing a major server migration to a newer, larger and more reliable server soon, but given the circumstances we have decided to go ahead and do this immediately. We have ordered a new server and hired consultants specializing in server migrations. The server is scheduled to come online tomorrow and the consultants have already begun making preparations.

On Monday they will begin migrating our data and we should be moved to the new server by Thursday or Friday of next week.

According to the consultants, there will be little service disruption. If and when any server downtime is planned, we will notify members by e-mail in advance.

Issues we may face before, during, and after the migration

Please keep in mind that server migrations are no small task, especially on a server that has had such a severe hard drive crash. While we do not anticipate extended downtimes, please be aware that the server may be unavailable or be slow at certain times. We will do everything possible to minimize this, and to quickly bring the server back up should it go down. We will keep you apprised of progress via the Kabissa website and e-mail alerts to members.

As members hosting on Kabissa are aware, the Kabissa server hard drive failed on Wednesday. The situation has now stabilized and email, websites and mailing lists all are functioning normally. We are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but are still in the tunnel! Our database system and some files were damaged and have been repaired, and we are now working on an emergency plan to make our server reliable for the longer term. As we move along, we will be posting Server Alerts (see box on the right on Kabissa homepage) and emailing members. If you are having any problems at all or have any questions, please write to kabissa - we are monitoring that address closely and will respond promptly to all questions.

We are terribly sorry to have to report that the Kabissa server hard drive failed completely on Wednesday, February 22, and while we were able to recover nearly all data successfully from a backup from Monday, we learned today that unfortunately irreparable damage has been done to many of our databases. This database damage causes problems in particular with logging into e-mail and makes it impossible to log into the Plesk domain control panel.

We understand how important your email mailboxes, mailing lists and websites are and are taking this situation very seriously. We have been working constantly on this problem since it emerged yesterday morning, and have an emergency plan to get the situation stabilized as quickly as possible.

In the meantime:

• Until the problems are resolved, please use (or send carbon copies to) an alternate e-mail address not hosted on Kabissa, and do not try to update your website hosted on Kabissa.
• If you are having difficulty logging into Kabissa webmail, please try using http://www.saidia.org/mail which relies less on the database
• We will be posting updates at http://www.kabissa.org but please keep in mind that in the course of fixing the problem it may be unavailable from time to time. We will do our best to ensure that everyone is informed of our progress.
• Please direct any questions to kabissa - we will be monitoring this mailbox closely and will answer questions promptly

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this severe disruption of Kabissa hosting services!