Over the next week we will be relocating two of our mail servers.

One of the incoming gateway servers will be relocated from the US to a UK datacentre. This will mean we will then have one incoming mail server in the US and one in the UK.

One of the outgoing mail servers will be relocated to the UK. This will mean we will have two UK based outgoing mail servers and one US based outgoing mail server.

Customers DO NOT have to make any changes to their email settings. This will all be handled by our internal mail routing and DNS changes to the MX records.

We are curently bringing online a third outgoing mail server. This will help reduce the load across the two current outgoing mail servers, add greater stability and reduce message delivery times.

Customers do not need to make any changes to their mail settings. This will all be handled automatically by our mail system.

We will also update relevant SPF records in the netsvr.net domain. If you send mail using the AGUK mail servers and have configured your own SPF records please ensure you use include:netsvr.net as part of your string.

To enable us to continue to provide a stable email platform and prevent problems with the email processing queues we have had to implement a maximum message size limit.

This morning at approximately 09:30GMT a number of domains hosted by us came under a “joe-job” style attack This lasted untilapproximately 12:00GMT. This is where a large number of emails are sent with the sender forged to appear as a domain hosted by us. As a result many mail servers reject the mail and the bounce message is returned to us, even though it was not sent by us.
This lead to a surge in the amount of mail our incoming mail servers had to handle. As a result some mail delivery was delayed during this period as the mail is processed in a queue on a “first come first processed” basis. During this process one of the mail servers froze and needed to be restarted a number of times.

We have recently updated all PHP5 installations to use the new Microsoft FastCGI process. This should significant speed and reliability improvements for sites running PHP5.

For sites runnign PHP4 we highly recommend updating your site to use PHP5 as it is now considered stable and prvovides much greater speed and reliability.

To change a domain hosted by AGUK to use PHP5 you simply need to perform the following:

Log in to Helm

Proceed to Domains > domain.com > Web Site Settings

Scroll to the bottom of the page and then change the drop down from PHP4 to PHP5 and click Save.

We have today enabled the ASP.NET Session State Service on all web servers. This will allow for sessions to be held byt he service rather than the website worker process.

The advantage of this is that sessions will not be destroyed if the worker process is recycled.

To take advantage of this service you need to edit your web.config file. Details at the URL below

http://support.aguk.net/article.aspx?id=10208

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ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX 1.0 has now been installed on all web servers. For more information visit the Microsoft Official ASP.NET AJAX Site

Please note that ASP.NET runs in medium trust on all web servers which may affect the functionality of certain components.

Over the last 3 months the amount of email handled by our mail system has increased by 720%.

More than 98% of this mail is unsolicited commercial email (spam). This is placing added preassure on our systems and causing our spam protection systems to become less effective.

One of the major contributing factors to this problem is the use of catch-all email accounts. This is where one email address will accept mail for anything sent to that domain.

We have updated all web servers to use 1.8.0.1 version of ASPJpeg.

Customers can now take advantage of the additional functionality this provides.

Please note that the previous issues regarding over reporting of diskspace and bandwidth usage have now been resolved. [http://portal.aguk.net/2007/02/bandwidth-usage-reporting/]

The figures now dislayed in Helm are correct as of the 23rd February 2007. These figures will now be used for future billing purposes.