Websites and email should now be back up! It appears to have been effectively a minor, script based, Denial of Service attack.

We are watching the server closely to prevent a repeat of the incident.

Apologies to all affected.

Techs currently working on issue, websites may be up and down for a short period but other services such as mail should be up and running.

Dogfrog4.net is not responding to reboot or networks requests. We’re having technicians at the data center look at the issue now.

Apologies for any inconveniences this has caused you.

Over the last few days, the main shared IP for dogfrog5 has been intermittently listed with the “CBL” mail RBL list. This has resulted in some outgoing email being blocked at the other end.  The symptom is that you send emails and they bounce back.

If you are experiencing this, and haven’t yet spoken to us, please contact us as we can move your website and outgoing email to an alternate IP.

We’ve contacted CBL and are working on getting permanently delisted as well as working out what was the root cause (so far we have been unable to isolate the cause); please accept our apologies for any inconvenience to your email.

It’s worth adding that at this point we are NOT listed, so there should be no outgoing email problem.

To assist in finding the cause, we’ve dropped the outgoing email per hour limit to 50 emails, enough for most people – if you hit this limit please let us know; we should be able to restore it to the normal default of 150 within a day or so.

Email queues on snuppy are large and despite all our best efforts are taking a while to get processed. Emails sent earlier today are likely to be delayed although new messages appear to be getting through immediately.

We expect the service to return to normal in the next hour or so.

Looks like network issues, we’re currently investigating …

Due to a combination of events, we lost our disk array in dogfrog3 at around 11:30pm.

We’re in the process of reinstalling the system, and cPanel, and will then start loading from backup.

It’s quite likely you may lose emails that had been sent but not received, as we will be restoring a 24-hour old backup, but we’ll do our best to recover everything we can.

We’ll update here as we continue to work on the problem.

Brian (0308)

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Most accounts have been restored since 0800 this morning.  Please let us know if you have any issues; there may be some residual things we need to take care of.

We have an email backup from around 8pm so will restore that in the next few hours.  Mail received in the 3.5 hours between between 8pm and 11:30pm is unfortunately likely to have been lost.

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We restored email to some accounts later this morning which may have caused some of you to get spurious “incorrect password” messages.  This problem was corrected around 15:04 today – please do let us know if you have other issues.

Most people’s MySQL databases are from a 24 hour old backup.  We do have access to more recent data;  if that’s helpful a backup made at 8pm could be selectively restored for you.  Please let us know if you need that.

The newer version of PHP (5.3) appeared to be causing trouble for some people, so we’ve reverted back to PHP 5.2.17.

A very few people use the “TTF” font library (sometimes used for CAPTCHA verification on contact pages etc).  This will be added into the system over the next day.

Thanks for your patience and sincere apologies for the outage.

Update 12:11AM: The account transfer is complete, and sites and email are up and running successfully. If you experience any issues, please email us at support@whitedoggreenfrog.com  on Sunday – we will be monitoring this through the day.  If you do have a problem, please let us know on Sunday, don’t wait till Monday!

On Saturday 1st Oct starting at 9pm, we’ll be replacing Bstar / Dogfrog6, one of our Australian servers, with newer, more powerful hardware.

The migration of sites on Dogfrog6 will begin late in the evening of Saturday the 1st of October, around 10pm. While we will do our best to make the transition as fast as possible, we expect it may take up to 6 hours. During the transition, websites and email hosted on this server will be unavailable.

During the move, please check this post for updates, and for any queries.

Email will be queued during this transition; your email will be kept and queued on the sending server and will come through to you during the next few hours after the server is restarted.

As always, we encourage you to make and download a backup of your site before this transition occurs. You can also get a backup CD made and sent to you if you wish; please contact the office before lunchtime on Friday the 30th if you would like to take advantage of this service. Please test your sites as soon as possible after the transfer, so any issues can be uncovered and fixed during a low traffic period. Obviously issues left till Monday may take longer to fix, and are more likely to impact business.

For those of you who have your DNS hosted externally, it’s possible (though unlikely) that you may need to make some changes to your DNS zones, as the IP addresses associated with the new server will be different from the current one. If you think this will affect you, please call us on 1300 760 850 or email us at support@whitedoggreenfrog.com for advice.

If you are curious, this server has more disk space, more memory, a more powerful CPU, and a larger backup disk, amongst other things. It is located in Sydney, Australia while the current dogfrog6 is in Canberra.

If you have any queries, please call us on 1300 760 850 before 5pm on Friday the 30th of September, or email us at support@whitedoggreenfrog.com, or leave a comment on this post.

Update 2:36 AM: The account transfer is complete, and sites and email are up and running successfully. If you experience any issues, please email us at support@whitedoggreenfrog.com.

Update 10:08 PM: Accounts have begun to be copied from Tarkyn.

Update 10:00 PM: All services on Tarkyn are now shut down.

Update 9:45 PM: Services on Tarkyn will be shutting down in 15 minutes.

This weekend, we’ll be replacing Tarkyn / Dogfrog7, one of our Australian servers, with newer, more powerful hardware.

The migration of sites on Dogfrog7 will begin late in the evening of Saturday the 10th of September, around 10pm. While we will do our best to make the transition as fast as possible, we expect it may take up to 6 hours. During the transition, websites and emails hosted on this server will be unavailable.

Email will be queued during this transition; your email will be kept and queued on the sending server and will come through to you during the next few hours after the server is restarted.

As always, we encourage you to make and download a backup of your site before this transition occurs. You can also get a backup CD made and sent to you if you wish; please contact the office before Friday lunchtime if you would like to take advantage of this service.

For those of you who have your DNS hosted externally, it’s possible (though unlikely) that you may need to make some changes to your DNS zones, as the IP addresses associated with the new server will be different from the current one. If you think this will affect you, please call us on 1300 760 850 or email us at support@whitedoggreenfrog.com for advice.

If you are curious, this server has more disk space, more memory, a more powerful CPU, and a larger backup disk, amongst other things. It is located in Sydney, Australia while the current Dogfrog7 is in Canberra.

If you have any queries, please call us on 1300 760 850 before 5pm on Friday, email us at support@whitedoggreenfrog.com, or leave a comment on this post.

Update 2:20pm – everything appears to be running smoothly, including email.  If you are having issues, reboot your modem then PC before emailing support.

Update 6:10am - all accounts have been transferred

Update 10:16pm – account transfers from Minka to Snuppy have started

Update 10:14pm – services on Minka have been shut down.

This weekend, we’ll be replacing Minka / Dogfrog5, one of our Australian servers, with newer, more powerful hardware.

The migration of sites on Dogfrog5 will begin late in the evening of Saturday the 20th of August, around 10pm. While we will do our best to make the transition as fast as possible, we expect it may take up to 6 hours. During the transition, websites and emails hosted on this server will be unavailable.

Since our own website is hosted on this server, WDGF email and online support services will also be down for the duration of the transition. Please follow this post for updates, and for any queries.

Email will be queued during this transition; your email will be kept and queued on the sending server and will come through to you during the next few hours after the server is restarted.

As always, we encourage you to make and download a backup of your site before this transition occurs. You can also get a backup CD made and sent to you if you wish; please contact the office before Friday lunchtime if you would like to take advantage of this service.

For those of you who have your DNS hosted externally, it’s possible (though unlikely) that you may need to make some changes to your DNS zones, as the IP addresses associated with the new server will be different from the current one. If you think this will affect you, please call us on 1300 760 850 or email us at support@whitedoggreenfrog.com for advice.

If you are curious, this server has more disk space, more memory, and a larger backup disk, amongst other things; and is located in Sydney, Australia – the old dogfrog5 was in Canberra.

If you have any queries, please call us on 1300 760 850 before 5pm on Friday, or email us at support@whitedoggreenfrog.com which we will monitor throughout Sunday.