Lounge Network - Latest News

Christmas Message 2011

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 08:21:42 +0

As 2011 draws to a close, we would like to wish all our clients a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We also thank you all for your continued support of our services.

2011 has been a milestone year for us, as we celebrated our 10th year in business. We proud to now be one of New Zealands longest serving web hosting providers, providing some of the best quality and most reliable hosting services in NZ

Proactive Malware Detection Software Installed on Premium Cpanel Plans

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:48:46 +0

We have introduced a new malware detection system for all of our Premium Cpanel servers, named Maldetect. It is an anti-malware project that has proved to be an effective solution against the use of virii/malware on servers. We have initiated full scans on the servers and have detected some malware files on current user accounts. We have incorporated the maldetect software to check apache (web) and ftp uploads. During the uploading of files to the servers, either via ftp or apache (web), maldetect software will scan the file(s) and it will not allow the upload if a file has a signature matching a virus/malware.

Scheduled Maintenance: Mail Storage Migration

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:30:14 +0

Start Time: 21/12/2011 00:00 NZDT
End Time: 21/12/2011 02:00 NZDT

During this maintenance window, customer mailboxes will be migrated to new storage hardware. This will improve the performance of the mail service.

POP and IMAP (mail checking) services will unavailable during this maintenance window - Customers will be prompted to enter their password when attempting to check mail.

All incoming mail will be held for delivery on completion of the scheduled work, no mail messages will be lost.

SMTP (outgoing mail) will continue to function as normal, but saving a sent message to the Sent folder via IMAP will fail.

We thank you for your understanding while this work is completed, and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

New CPanel and Webmail Login URLs

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 07:12:20 +0

This announcement ONLY applies to clients on our Premium Grade CPanel branded web hosting plans.

Due to security and server upgrades mentioned in a previous announcement, clients on our CPanel plans will soon only be able to login to CPanel & Webmail through a secure login page. Therefore the old login URL you used to use will be phased out in the coming weeks.

The new logins will depend on which server your website is installed on. Please check your Account information email that we initially sent you when the account was first setup, which should display the server you are on. If you don't have access to this, you can also try logging into to each server using trial and error, which will tell then you the server you are on.

The login links to both CPanel and Webmail can now be found on our updated login pages. The links to these pages can be found below.

CPANEL LOGIN

WEBMAIL LOGIN

Email authentication issue at Auckland datacentre - Resolved

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:41:01 +0

There was an email authentication issue this morning that appears to have been caused by a hardware failure on our providers primary email storage node. They brought up secondary node and to restore full services, and are investigating why the primary one failed.

No data has been lost and there is no need to reset your email password. We apologize for any inconvenience caused. The issue only affected users ability to connect to the email server.

The email authentication issue is now resolved, with full services restored.

We hope this didn't cause too much inconvenience. Our engineers are currently investigating the cause of the hardware problem on the node and will work to ensure the services are as reliable as possible in future.

PCI Compliance and Server Updates for CPanel Premium Plans

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 06:32:41 +0

Scope of Work: PCI Compliance
Time: From 10:00PM PST (GMT -8:00) Friday December 16, 2011.

-------------------------------------
PCI Compliance is becoming a standard across all sites handling credit card transactions. For PCI compliance, several reputed agencies like Security Metrics conduct scans on servers hosting the particular website requiring PCI compliance. In most scan results, port 3306 comes up as a security vulnerability. Port 3306 is assigned to MySQL database server for inbound and outbound access. However, allowing inbound connections to port 3306 is now considered risky since attackers can gain access to the database.

Fantastico to be replaced by Softaculous

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 07:16:26 +0

Over teh comping months Fantastico will be replaced by Softaculous on our Premium CPanel hosting plans. Our providers believe it is a much better replacement, as Fantastico took a very long time to update their scripts and was often installing old versions of the open source software. Softaculous does a much better job of updating, and not only that, it has about 150 more scripts in it, so if anything, it's a better system all the way around. It may take some time for Softaculous to appear on all servers.

Telecom Xtra / Yahoo webmail problems

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 05:15:08 +0

We have received reports from a few clients that they are having trouble logging into Telecoms Xtra /Yahoo webmail email service. This problem has nothing to do with our own services, or any problem on our network. If you are are having problems with your ISPs webmail system, please contact your ISP directly, eg. Telecom / Xtra, so they can provide support to you.

Alternatively if you are one of our clients, you can use our email service with your domain name, and there are no known problems with our own webmail system.

International Domain Name Scam doing the rounds again

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:31:28 +0

We have been informed that a "pro forma invoices" scam for international domain names is currently doing the rounds again. This happens on a yearly basis, and this sort of scam has been going on for the last 10 years, and we have had many clients who have received these types of letters in the past.

In this case, we are aware of people who have received a letter via snail mail called "Domain Name Expiration Notice" from an American company, who appears to be based out of Australia. They appear to be going through the Whois database and getting domain owners' data to send these letters out.

If you receive these letters, DO NOT PAY IT. If you follow the instructions in the invoice, you risk becomng a victim of the scam. Not only will they bill you more than we charge, you are also giving them authority to transfer your domain name to their management, where you could lose control of it.

Scheduled Maintenance: Router Software Upgrade

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 02:56:23 +0

We are planning on upgrading the software on one of our routers.

Start Time: 29/10/2011 06:00 NZDT
End Time: 29/10/2011 07:00 NZDT

Impact:
The router redundant so we don't expect any outage. Some customers, however, may experience a small amount of packet loss while we transition their accounts to our secondary router.

We thank you for your understanding while this work is completed, and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Scheduled Maintenance: SQL Server Migration

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 02:37:07 +0

Our SQL 2000 Service, mssql.mydns.net.nz will be retired on Friday 18 November 2011. This decision has been made because SQL 2000 is over 10 years old and we can no longer support the software, or the hardware providing the service. All current SQL 2000 databases will be migrated to a replacement server running the latest version of Microsoft SQL, SQL 2008 R2 unless we are advised otherwise.

Email outage at Albany datacentre

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 01:32:42 +0

This announcement only applies to our Corporate and Business plan users

There is currently an email outage with our upstream providers.
Our providers are working to resolve this. There are authentication issues and that means that your mail client will ask to re-enter your password. We request that you do not enter any password and cancel that prompt as the outage is at the datacentre and when the issue is resolved, you won't have that pop up.

UPDATE: ISSUE RESOLVED 1:30pm

The outage started at 1PM and service resumed at 1:30PM. The mail storage locked-up at 100% usage and needed a reboot to recover. At the moment our providers suspect an Operating System error as all hardware is reported as being OK. Our providers will continue to monitor the service.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

PHP 5.3 Cluster Now Available in Shared Hosting Cluster

Sat, 1 Oct 2011 04:36:15 +0

The PHP 5.3 cluster is now fully provisioned in our shared cluster hosting, for clients on our Premium Corporate and Business Class hosting plans. The IP address for this cluster is 119.47.114.163 - you'll see this as a domain template: "Default (Linux PHP5.3) (New)"

This has been running for a few weeks now, and shows great performance and stability. This cluster will soon become the default for new sites. If you use PHP extensively you might like to familiarise yourself with the new service. There are a couple of extra benefits on the 5.3 cluster:

Paymex credit card payments not being processed

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 01:14:03 +0

Our credit card payment provider Paymex has announced that they are no longer processing credit cards due to being closed down by their bank. Therefore we have had to disable the credit card payment option in our domain manager system. We do still accept payment by direct credit, online banking and cheque.
If you have a domain that is due to expire within the next week, and you don't think you will be able to make payment in time, please contact us. We do recommend renewing domains well before the expiry date so there is no risk of them expiring.

Shared Cluster Hosting - Email outage

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 02:34:50 +0

This announcement only applies to our Nolimits cluster hosting plans, our Corporate and Business Class Hosting plans.

Details
Server: pop3.webhost.co.nz / imap.webhost.co.nz

Services Affected: Customers using shared mail servers.
Details: Customers accessing mailboxes on the server above have been experiencing some authentication issues. This appears to have now been fixed, however the system administrators are still investigating this outage.

Payments using Mastercard not able to be processed

Thu, 8 Sep 2011 01:39:52 +0

Currently there appears to be a problem with Paymex and it's ability to process Mastercard payments. Therefore if you are registering or renewing a domain name, you will not currently be able to use your Mastercard. People trying to pay by Mastercard will just get an error. Please either use a Visa or Amex card, or select the direct credit/cheque payment option. Unfortunately this a problem with the payment provider Paymex, so is beyond our control. We hope that they are able to fix it soon, but it could be a problem that lasts a while.

Scheduled Maintenance: ATMAIL Webmail software patches

Tue, 6 Sep 2011 04:31:36 +0

This message only applies to clients only applies to client on our NoLimits Corporate and Business class web hosting plans.

Dear Clients,

We have scheduled the installation of the latest @mail software patches on Thursday night. The patches of the software contain rendering enhancements and general bug fixes.

Start Time: 08/09/2011 23:00 NZST
End Time: 08/09/2011 23:30 NZST

During this maintenance window our current @Mail installation will be unavailable for the duration of the update.

Horde webmail, POP and IMAP services will continue to be available throughout the maintenance window, with no expected disruption.

We thank you for your understanding while this work is completed, and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Warning for .NZ New Zealand Domain Name Registrants

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:37:25 +0

In recent months we have become aware that a small number of our domain names clients have been contacted and supplied with incorrect information by other companies in the web development and hosting field. This incorrect information relates to where the domain name is registered, and that the domain name needs to be transferred to the web developers own management in order to work with their new website. This information is NOT correct. If your domain name is registered through us, it will work with ALL hosting servers/websites/email configurations, no matter what they are. All you or your developer needs to do is change the DNS settings or point the domain records to their servers, which can be done very simply inside your Domain Manager account at www.domains.loungenetwork.co.nz . You DO NOT need to transfer your domain to your website developer, in order for it to work with your website/email.

Emails to Telecom/Xtra email addresses are getting delayed

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 06:00:07 +0

Updated 25-8-2011 - This should now be resolved.

This announcement only applies to our NZ based hosting servers in the Auckland datacentre.

We are aware that Telecom / Xtra / Yahoo are delaying emails which are forwarded or sent directly to @Xtra email addresses, from our providers SMTP servers. This problem is affecting many New Zealand hosting providers, not just us, and is solely an issue at Telecom / Xtra / Yahoo's end, with them blocking legitimate email.

Network Outage at Auckland Peering Exchange (APE)

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 05:29:26 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business class hosting plans.

At 11:20AM our providers started experiencing packet loss across the edge of our network causing connectivity issues.

Upon further inspection, it was determined that the outage was linked to a network failure at Citylink (who operate the Auckland Peering Exchange) – the issue was was causing connections at the peering exchange to reset continuously. This affected multiple ISPs including our own providers.

.NZ domain Management Control Panels - We provide clients with Full Control

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 06:47:08 +0

As you may have seen in the media recently, there have been issues encountered by some .NZ domain registrants in New Zealand who use different domain registrars.

Webmail Upgrade for Auckland Server Cluster Clients

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 05:04:33 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting plans.

We are pleased to announce that we will be upgrading our webmail installation in order to provide a better user experience. This will offer our clients the newer verison of 'ATMAIL' .The new version of the software contains a whole new set of features which we are excited to offer. Very few hosting providers provide this webmail software due to it's cost, so we are pleased to be able to offer it on some of our Premium grade hosting plans.

The scheduled maintenance window for this upgrade is due to occur below.

Start Time: 19/07/2011 07:00 NZST
End Time: 19/07/2011 08:00 NZST

Server and system upgrades

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 04:49:18 +0

If you haven't already noticed, our providers are doing some comprehensive updates to the hosting network, for clients on our Corporate and Business Class hosting plans.

Scheduled Updates on the Windows Shared Servers

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 05:32:08 +0

We have scheduled reboots on some of the servers between 10PM and 4AM between this Thursday Night - Friday Morning, 14 - 15 July 2011.

Scheduled Maintenance: Mailbox Storage

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:18:58 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business hosting plans.

In order to keep up with increasing demands for storage performance and capacity, our providers will be performing maintenance on one of the mail storage nodes.

Start Time: 13/07/2011 00:00 NZDT
End Time: 13/07/2011 06:00 NZDT

During this maintenance window, we will be migrating mailboxes from the servers that they are currently stored on to new hardware. This will improve the performance of mailboxes via POP and IMAP, and reduce delays in mail processing.

Our advantages over other hosting providers...

Mon, 4 Jul 2011 05:09:50 +0

We sometimes get asked "What makes your web hosting different over other hosting providers out there?"

Well one of the many reasons is 'Reliability', 'Uptime', and the comprehensive backup protection that we provide on our premium hosting plans. Our premium web hosting plans are all of a business standard.
Server backups have become a more important issue recently, with a number of high profile providers having their servers hacked, and resulting in them losing many of their clients websites.

For a start, our Unmetered Business and Corporate hosting plans have 14 days of consecutive backups. Yes that is 14 days! They are also hosted in a cluster, so should one service go down such as an email server, other services such as your website will continue to operate whist the email service is being worked on.

Our premium CPanel based plans have 3 layers of backups.

*The first layer is the servers all are in raid arrays, protecting them from disk failures. This also applies to our Corporate and Business plans above.

*The second layer is daily/weekly/monthly backups to local backup storage. This way if a hacker attacks a site, or you delete something by accident or numerous other activities we can restore from a recent backup.

*The third layer is our remote disaster recovery backups. These are incremental backups that occur every 4 hours. This would prevent for any type of disaster at the webserver, such as complete wipeout of a site, and it's backups. This would be useful in case a hacker was ever able to take down all data on a server.

Most providers do not provide this sort of backup protection due to the high costs involved. Many low cost providers offering cheap hosting plans will only do daily backups, if they do backups at all.

Although you are also required to maintain your own backup plan as per our terms, the server backups do provide additional protection especially for hardware failure and hackers. Please note that the backups we provide are mainly for server restoration. A service fee does apply if you want us to manually restore a backup for you.

E-Mail Outage on Albany Server Cluster - Incident Report

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 03:07:42 +0

As you may be aware yesterday we had an extended outage on our e-mail platform on the Albany Server cluster that prevented the downloading of messages from around 11am until 4pm.

We would like to apologise for any disruption this caused to you, and take this opportunity to explain what happened and what our providers are doing to prevent this issue recurring.

Email on the Albany Network - RESOLVED

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 03:59:58 +0

== Update 5PM ==

Mail service was restored just after 4PM. The last of the queue messages are being delivered now and we expect that to complete in the next 5 minutes.

Over the course of the last couple of months our providers have been building and testing a new mail storage platform designed to address the scalability problems with the previous platform. This is largely due to more clients storing a lot more email on the servers than they used to, as well as clients checking a downloading their email more regularly, including through mobile devices. This all puts more load on the email servers. The final transfer to the new platform was being tested in preparation to do the migration next week. Unfortunately, this outage has occurred before our providers had the opportunity to migrate.

The new platform is expected to eliminate the intermittent IMAP connection problem that has been occurring and allow our providers to scale the platform without future performance issues.

Again, we apologise for the impact this outage has had. We look forward to providing you a much stabler mail service in the near future.

=============

Previous announcement:

We apologise for the continued downtime with the email service. Our providers have outlined the issue and what they are doing about it below.

File system errors were reported on one of our providers mail stores. To prevent potential data loss they chose to do a file system check immediately. All incoming mail is being queued while this happens, but no mail can be downloaded. The amount of mail on the email storage means the file system check is taking an extraordinarily long time. We expect the file system check will be complete before 5PM at which time the queued mail will be delivered and available for download.

Delay in receiving emails/authentication problems on Albany Server cluster

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:10:06 +0

Services impacted: Email incoming services only. Only clients on our Albany hosting cluster are affected.

Our providers are experiencing a mail queue and at the same rate, there is an authentication problem that they are working on. Some of our email that is sent to us, is also being affected so we may not be able to reply to some emails until this is fixed.

None of your emails will be lost, they are in our queue and will be delivered as soon as our upstream providers fix the problem on their end.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Update: Our providers anticipate approximately one and half hour to resolve this problem. They have decided to do a file system check on the file server that looks after the emails in our cluster. We do apologise for this inconvenient time, however, in the light of things, we had to do the file system check to avoid any data loss.

Update: 1:20pm:
Due to the large amount of data on the drives our providers anticipate a further one and a half hours for the file check to finish. We sincerely do apologise for the delay, but it is important this is carried out.

Update: 3pm:
Our providers estimate a further 2 hours to complete the disk check process and system restoration.
We apologise for the old ETA given earlier, as the process is taking our providers a lot longer than they initially estimated, due to the number of files on the servers.

Christchurch Earthquake and minor changes

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:55:59 +0

Christchurch has been hit by another major earthquake aftershock, measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale. None of our services have been affected by this earthquake in anyway.

We did still have a very small number of services still hosted in Christchurch region. Due to the uncertainty of the earthquakes, and how long they will continue, we have now moved all of these remaining services to our Auckland datacentre. The earthquakes do cause potential power and connectivity disruptions, so we want to minimise this risk.

The reliability of domain and hosting services that we provide to our clients is at utmost importance to us, and we want to minimise any potential disruption to our clients.

We wish our Christchurch clients all the best in these difficult times.

iSERVE/ORCON Email outage

Fri, 27 May 2011 12:41:00 +0

- UPDATE - 1:45pm This issue has now been resolved. Email may be delayed as it clears the backlog.

There is currently an email outage on the iSERVE/Orcon network that is causing connection problems for incoming emails. Engineers are currently working on this.

Emails getting delayed on NZ Albany server network

Thu, 26 May 2011 05:12:45 +0

Services affected: Email

Some of our users are currently experiencing an error with receiving emails. Basically, the emails are being received by the mail cluster, yet they are getting delayed due to an internal connection problem. Our providers system administrators are forwarding the stored mail to the corresponding email accounts, and are also resolving the core issue. We appreciate your patience during this matter.

Routing problem on NZ Albany servers

Thu, 26 May 2011 09:20:09 +0

Details
Routing problem affecting web and mail services

Update: 09.50am:
Our providers have a temporary fix in place for this routing problem. We are using one of our other providers for the traffic.

Server: Albany Network Servers

Date: 26/05/2011 - 09.16am
Services affected: Web and Email access
Issue: There seems to be a routing issue that is affecting some of our clients access to their websites and emails. Our providers system administrators are looking into this and trying to isolate the source of the issue. We will provide further information, when we have an update.

SMTP Security issue

Mon, 23 May 2011 05:36:00 +0

Some clients may have received emails from us, regarding changes to the SMTP servers for the server they are on.

Unfortunately, a security issue has been identified with the way our providers SMTP Server handles SMTP authentication. The issue could potentially lead to a server compromise, so they will be disabling certain functionality as a workaround in order to protect it.

To ensure continued SMTP service, please change the SMTP authentication options in your email client (eg Microsoft Outlook) so that it uses plain text passwords over SSL rather than MD5.

Registering domain names under the correct name.

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 06:56:00 +0

If you are a web designer/developer, or are someone who is registering a domain name on behalf of someone else, you must enter the name and details of the person / entity that intends using the domain name, in the 'registrants' field. You mustn't enter your own details as the registrant. We have come across several domains that have been registered under the name of the web developer, instead of the company that was using it. In many cases the web designer has disappeared, creating a major problem for the company who thought the domain was registered under their name.

Registering a domain in your own name instead of the correct person/entity that intends to use the domain, will create problems down the track, as at some stage both you and the correct person/entity will need to complete a domain name change of ownership form, where we do charge an administration fee.

Therefore please always enter the correct registrants details in the registrants section. If you are a web designer and want us to send you future domain renewal notices, you just need to enter your details in the 'Administrative' details for the domain. Domain renewal reminders will go to the administrative email address. Only the final domain renewal reminder will go to the registrants email address, but as long as you renew the domain as soon as you receive the first reminder, they will not receive that email.

Old unread email in Mailboxes

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 06:32:13 +0

Our providers have noticed that there are a significant number of email mailboxes on the servers that are not being looked at, and the email downloaded from them. However these email accounts are continuing to receive emails, probably, mainly spam emails. Some email accounts have more than 1 million emails in them . This is causing performance problems for the servers, especially when backing up the servers..

As the email is not actively being looked at, on Tuesday 22nd March our providers plan to remove all the email stored in those account as per our terms of service. We will also delete the affected email accounts to prevent it accumulating more email and becoming a problem in the future.

If you would like us to hold off deleting the email, please contact us ASAP.

Shared Hosting Performance Issues - Resolved

Thu, 3 Mar 2011 05:16:04 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class hosting plans.
Overnight the Datacentre Engineers resolved the ongoing issues with the shared web hosting platform. We would like to take this opportunity to explain what happened and how they have fixed this problem.

Firstly, it should be mentioned this issue is not related to any other issues over the past couple of months, unfortunately our providers have had a bad run with unrelated systems having major failures causing some disruption to services.

Auckland Datacentre - Shared Hosting Performance Issues

Wed, 2 Mar 2011 02:19:46 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate or Business class hosting plans.

As you may be aware for the past day-and-a-half our providers have had sustained periods where web sites and FTP have been inaccessible or very slow on our Linux cluster. We would firstly like to apologise for this disruption to your websites and would like to assure you our providers are all hands on deck to resolve this situation.
The datacentre engineers have worked through the night (some have not left the office since yesterday morning) in an attempt to reduce the impact on customer web sites, and resolve this issue.
Rest assured this is our number one focus, and once the hosting environment is stabilised a full incident report will be posted on our website.

Keep updated -

All updates are being posted to our news page:

http://www.loungenetwork.co.nz/statussite.php

Major Christchurch Earthquake 22/02/2011

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 03:12:12 +0

It is of great shock and sadness to see that Christchurch has been hit by a second major earthquake, which has resulted in fatalities, injuries and widespread damage to buildings and infrastructure. It appears that it is far worse than the one last year. Our thoughts go out to all the people of Christchurch during this disastrous time, and we hope they can pull together and recover quickly from this.

Shared Linux cluster upgrades next week on NZ Servers

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:23:43 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Web Hosting Plans.

We will be introducing performance upgrades for the shared Linux cluster next week

Server Migration Saturday Night - Mysql 4

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 05:23:21 +0

On Sunday 19 February the mysql 4 server will be migrated into a new cabinet.

Our maintenance window is planned from 9pm until 4am. We will need to shut down the server, remove it from the old cabinet and then install it into the new one.

The server will be down for up to 60 minutes.

Server Migration Sunday Morning of Win 1 and Win2

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 05:22:27 +0

On Sunday 20 February two of the shared windows servers will be migrated into a new cabinet.

Our maintenance window is planned from 1am until 4am. We will need to shut down each server, remove it from the old cabinet and then install it into the new one.

Each server will be down for up to 60 minutes.

Scheduled Maintenance 10/02/11 for Windows servers

Tue, 8 Feb 2011 03:52:11 +0

Scheduled Maintenance

All of our shared Windows servers as well as our SQL servers will have security updates applied to them which require reboots between 10PM and 4AM this Thursday Night - Friday Morning, 10 - 11/02/11. We anticipate up to 60 minutes of downtime during this period and apologise for the inconvenience.

Outages at the Albany Auckland Datacentre on the 7/02/2011

Tue, 8 Feb 2011 01:35:11 +0

Yesterday as you may be aware there was an extended outage that affected email, web sites and a number of other servers that rely on the datacenters load balancers. We would firstly like to apologise for this downtime; we understand that your web site and email are critical to your business.
We would like to take this opportunity to explain what happened and what is being done to prevent this happening in the future.

Email and Web outage on the Albany Auckland Hosting Network

Mon, 7 Feb 2011 04:15:05 +0

Date: 07/02/2011 - 04:15pm

Services Affected: Web and Email outage on the Albany Auckland Hosting Network

Issue: There is a currently a problem with our providers load balancer and the datacentre system admins are working to resolve this problem now. We will put more information about it here once we know more.

UPDATE: Normal services resumed at approximately 5 PM.

We apologise for the outage. The load-balancer that triggered the problem is now out of the configuration and we are running off of one load-balancer. Our providers are gathering information on the outage now and they will fully review what happened and what they are going to do to prevent it happening in the future. We will update this when we learn more.

Upload block on *.php files

Wed, 2 Feb 2011 05:24:12 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class web hosting plans on our New Zealand based server cluster.

Next weekour providers will start blocking *.php files from being uploaded via web pages.

On the morning on the 7th of February they will start blocking *.php file uploads via the Linux web cluster. Please note,they are only blocking *.php files from being uploaded via web based forms; you will still be able to upload *.php files using FTP.

SPAM emails not getting tagged as SPAM by spam filter

Tue, 1 Feb 2011 01:39:33 +0

This announcement only applies ti clients on our Corporate and Business class hosting plans, and NOT clients on our CPanel plans.

Our upstream providers are aware of a spam issue where the spam filter is not able to tag email like "Job offer". The system administrators are working on a way to resolve this problem and we apologise for this inconvenience.

Free Website Building tool for CPanel users

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 12:55:04 +0

We have just updated the free website builder on our premium CPanel plans to version 4. This adds many new and updated features. Many of our clients are not even aware that CPanel includes a free and easy to use website builder, allowing you to setup a website very easily using just your webbrowser, with no programming knowledge needed.

Wellington Aniversary Weekend

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 05:02:55 +0

Just to let clients know that our office will be closed for Wellington Anniversary on Monday the 24th January.

Mail delivery delay on Albany Network due to spam.

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 05:57:00 +0

This announcement only affects our Corporate and Business class hosting clients.

There is currently a delay in mail delivery on the shared cluster due to a large amount of Spam.

Our providers are working on clearing the queue so all mail should be delivered early this evening.

Orcon rolling outages

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:03:17 +0

One of our hosting upstream providers has been having intermittent issues this morning affecting a few of our clients websites and email. Orcon have told us that this has been caused by a compromised website that was affecting all other websites on the servers. Websites are all up and running but we will be continuing to monitor Orcon.

Temporary issue with our email address

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 03:57:58 +0

Due to a denial of service attack on our own email server, we may not have received emails you sent us between 2pm and 3.30pm today ( Wednesday 19th January 2011). These emails may have bounced back to the sender. Please resend us your email if you sent us an email between these times.

Telecom / Xtra ISP users, and sending email issues.

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 06:20:09 +0

We have had several clients (those that use CPanel), who have had trouble recently sending emails through their email client software (eg MS Outlook). All these clients appear to be using our servers SMTP server for sending their emails, instead of their ISPs outgoing mail server. All these clients appear to use Telecom / Xtra as their ISP. It appears telecom have made recent changes on their network, that maybe causing this problem. We do know that they can block port 25, which is the normal outgoing mailserver port, therefore all CPanel clients should be using port 26 or port 8025 in their outgoing mailserver settings.

If you are a telecom user, please send your emails via telecoms / xtras SMTP server, and that will fix the problem.

All Telecom / Xtra cusomters also must authenticate their domain based email address with Telecom Xtra if you haven't already done so. Instructions for doing this can be found at http://tinyurl.com/yahooxtrasmtp
If you have any problems sending email via Telecom Xtras SMTP server please contact Telecom Xtra at 0800 110 050, and they will be able to help you set up the above settings for your domain based email address.

MySQL upgrade for CPanel users

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:30:42 +0

Our providers will be pushing all CPanel servers from MySQL 5.0.X to MySQL 5.1.X. This is scheduled

While these updates take a bit of time to complete, they should not affect any scripts, and expected downtime should be under 5mins. Our providers have tested this and rolled out to 2 servers already and had no issue.

PHP 5.2 upgrade Wednesday morning

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 05:20:01 +0

PHP 5.2 will be upgraded to the latest version this Wednesday for our Corporate and Business plan hosting clients.

Paymex credit card processing outage

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 03:20:45 +0

Our payment processor Paymex currently has an outage with their payment gateway, which is affecting the ability for clients to pay by credit card for their domain registrations/renewals.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 11:43:53 +0

We would like to wish all our clients a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We also thank you all for your continued support of our services.

2011 will be a milestone year for us, as we will celebrate our 10th year in business. In 2011 we are planning many improvements to the services we offer, so please check our website regularly to see the changes, or signup to our twitter page at www.twitter.com/loungenetwork

Shared Hosting Performance Issues on the Albany Auckland linux server cluster

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 03:30:00 +0

As you may be aware the Albany Auckland linux server cluster has had issues with web sites running on our shared hosting cluster over the past couple of days. This has now been resolved, however we would like to take this opportunity to explain the problem and the steps being taken by our providers to ensure it doesn't occur again. Please note that this issue only affected those clients hosted on the Albany Linux Cluster, and not any other server. It also only affected website loading, and not email.

Slow sites issue on Auckland Linux web cluster - RESOLVED

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:09:38 +0

Slow sites issue in Linux web cluster - Emergency Maintenance

Details
All PHP/standard sites are affected

==Update 4:08pm==
This issue has now been resolved
The error has now been identified as a software bug with our providers Sun Storage server. The process that was causing this issue has now been stopped and the software bug will be updated overnight. The servers will continue to be closely monitored.

Please accept our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience caused.

Urgent maintenance on the linux servers on the Auckland based server cluster

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:38:12 +0

Details: Urgent maintenance on our linux servers on the Auckland based server cluster.

Most of our linux servers will be rebooted due to an urgent scheduled maintenance between 12AM and 4AM this Wednesday morning, 17/11/2010. It will only affect those clients hosted in it.

We anticipate up to 30 minutes of downtime during this period and apologize for the short notice. Please note that this does not include our Web Servers.

Another International Domain Name Scam doing the rounds

Wed, 3 Nov 2010 04:27:27 +0

We have been informed that a "pro forma invoices" scam for international domain names is currently doing the rounds again. This sort of scam has been going on for the last 10 years, and we have had several clients who have received these types of letters in the past.

.CO domain registrations now available

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 05:50:58 +0

We are pleased to now offer .CO domain registrations. You can now secure your own .CO domain names for just $59.95+GST /year. To register just visit www.domains.loungenetwork.co.nz

Additional web request filtering

Tue, 5 Oct 2010 03:23:08 +0

This message only applies to users on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting plans.

Details
We now do not allow any web server requests with information_schema in them.

Scheduled Maintenance: Network Enhancements

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:01:44 +0

This announcement only applies to our Corporate and Business Class hosting clients only.

Series of short outages to most services

Start Time: 19/08/2010 01:00 NZDT
End Time: 19/08/2010 05:00 NZDT

During this window, our providers will be performing maintenance on our network to increase capacity and improve recovery time in the event of a failure.

Windows updates

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 06:46:50 +0

Windows updates are scheduled for Thursday night

New Linux web server

Tue, 3 Aug 2010 04:14:04 +0

A new Linux web server will be inserted into the Auckland web cluster tomorrow, for clients on our Albany based hosting plans.

.nz Domain Names with macrons launching on July 26th for Maori language week.

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 03:15:29 +0

Launching 26 July 2010

Registrations of .nz domain names which include macrons over the vowels will begin to be available to everyone on a first-come, first-served basis from 26 July 2010. The launch of this new type of domain name will coincide with Maori Language week 2010, which this year runs from 26 July - 1 August.

Domain Manager payment method changes.

Thu, 8 Jul 2010 10:47:40 +0

Due to our credit card payment provider Paymex closing their business, we will cease providing credit card as a payment option inside the Domain Manager system, for paying for your domain registration/renewals. However all clients will still be able to pay for their domain registration/ renewal using either Direct Credit / online banking or Cheque.

Price Changes and GST Rise

Thu, 8 Jul 2010 06:31:59 +0

As announced in the 2010 NZ budget, New Zealands GST will rise from 12.5% to 15%, from the 1st October 2010. This will mean that we will be adjusting our prices to reflect the change, when that GST rise comes in.

Critical Windows updates

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 04:20:35 +0

Critical Windows updates will be applied on Thursday morning on a couple of the servers

Network Issues for Orcon customers

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 03:38:24 +0

Apparently Orcon subscribers are having trouble reaching our NZ based Auckland network.

This appears to be due to Network issues at Orcon.

See http://twitter.com/orcon for their updates.

NZ Domain Name Scam doing the rounds

Sat, 29 May 2010 01:11:45 +0

We have been informed that a "pro forma invoices" scam for domain names is currently doing the rounds again. This sort of scam has been going on for the last 10 years, and we have had several clients who have received these types of letters in the past.

.nz Domain Names with macrons - Internationalised Domain Names

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 05:37:49 +0

Beginning in Māori Language week 2010 (26 July - 01 August), registrations of .nz domain names which include macrons over the vowels will be available to everyone on a first-come, first-served basis.

.NZ DOMAIN SPECIAL OFFER - LIMITED TIME

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 04:24:32 +0

After the success of our last domain special offer, we have another!

Register a brand new .NZ or .COM domain name for 3 years, and we'll add on another year for FREE !!! This means you get 4 years of domain registration, for the price of 3 years. That is a huge saving of $44.94 inc GST.

To qualify for the free extra year, all you need to do is...

Windows updates will be applied early Friday morning

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 11:46:17 +0

All of our shared windows servers will have critical updates applied to them between 12AM and 6AM this Friday, the 16th April.

EASTER .NZ DOMAIN SPECIAL OFFER - STRICTLY LIMITED TIME ONLY

Thu, 1 Apr 2010 05:10:06 +0

Register a brand new .NZ or .COM domain name for 2 years, and we'll add on another year for FREE !!! This means you get 3 years of domain registration, for the price of 2 years. That is a huge saving of $44.94 inc GST.

To qualify for the free extra year, all you need to do is...

Users of Wordpress take note - WordPress Password Protection Weakness

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:19:23 +0

SECUNIA ADVISORY ID:
SA39040

VERIFY ADVISORY:
http://secunia.com/advisories/39040/

DESCRIPTION:
MustLive has discovered a weakness in WordPress, which can lead to
exposure of potentially sensitive information.

Wordpress Users - A Fantastic how-to book is available

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:14:42 +0

Wordpress is a fantastic CMS system. Compared to other CMS systems, it is easy to setup, install and use. We have recently come across an book called 'Digging Into WordPress', which has been written by a couple of expert Wordpress website designers. It is available as either a hard copy book or a PDF ebook. We believe it is well worth the money if you are serious about using Wordpress on your website, with lots of awesome tips. Click here to visit Digging Into WordPress website.

Please note that prices are in US dollars.

WordPress Vulnerability - Wordpress Clients should update their scripts.

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:08:33 +0

WordPress Trashed Posts Security Bypass Vulnerability

SECUNIA ADVISORY ID:
SA38592

VERIFY ADVISORY:
http://secunia.com/advisories/38592/

DESCRIPTION:
A vulnerability has been discovered in WordPress, which can be
exploited by malicious users to bypass certain security
restrictions.

Linux Updates on shared database server, on NZ based network

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 04:39:54 +0

An important security update will be applied to the MySQL 5 database server early Tuesday morning.

Important Windows Server Updates

Thu, 7 Jan 2010 11:18:23 +0

Important urgent updates will be applied to the shared windows servers.

The maintenance window will be from 23:59 NZDT on the 7th of January and 06:00 am of the 8th of January. A restart will be required, and we expect the outage to be of up to 30 minutes per server.

File server migration planned for the new year

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:51:34 +0

This announcement only applies to users on our NZ Corporate and Business Web Hosting plans.

Our upstream providers plan to migrate from the current Linux file server to a new server the first week of January 2010

As part of the migration they need to upgrade all the machines that will use the new server, this includes the Linux Web and FTP/Cron servers. In preparation for the move, they've set up an additional cluster of web servers that are available for you to test your sites on. They have tried to ensure the servers are configured as closely as possible to the existing servers, but as the Operating System version is changing, certain scripts may be affected.

Seasons Greetings and Happy New Year for 2010 from the Lounge Network Team.

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:49:50 +0

We'd like to wish all our clients a very Merry Christmas, and a safe and enjoyable 2010 holiday season. Thank you for your continued support throughout the year, we really appreciate it. During the year we have released some exciting upgrades to our services, with the big one being a new Domain Auction system, that has been integrated into the Domain Manager. There has also been many other upgrades and enhancements to our hosting services. We look forward to continuing our developments in the coming year as our business continues to grow.

FTP / Cron server migration

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:41:49 +0

This announcement only applies to users on our NZ Corporate and Business Web Hosting plans.

Our upstream providers plan to migrate to a new FTP / Cron server next week. The new server is available for testing. The new server has a more recent version of Linux running on it, and while we believe we've got the configuration as close as possible to the current server, we recommend that you test some of your Cron jobs on the new server.

PRESS RELEASE: 2/12/2008 - New Zealand Domain Auction Service to be launched on 7th December

Wed, 2 Dec 2009 04:21:42 +0

We are pleased to announce that on the on 7th December, we will be launching our New Zealand (.NZ) domain name auction service. This will allow our domain name clients to bid on .NZ domain names that are in the 'Pending Release' period.

Coming Soon - New Zealand Domain Auctions

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:01:13 +0

We are pleased to announced that we will soon be launching New Zealand (.NZ) domain name auctions, which will be integrated into our Domain Manager system.

Linux Updates on MySQL 5 database server

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 05:09:21 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting Plans.

Details An important security update will be applied to the MySQL 5 database server early Wednesday morning.

.mobi domains can now be registered.

Tue, 3 Nov 2009 04:55:47 +0

We are now offering .mobi domains though our Domain Manager at http://www.domains.loungenetwork.co.nz

.mobi (also known informally as dotMobi) is a top-level domain targetted to delivering the Internet to mobile devices via the Mobile Web.

Domain Names can now be paid for by credit card

Tue, 3 Nov 2009 02:28:43 +0

We are pleased to announce that Domain Name registrations and renewals can now be paid for by credit card.

WordPress Users - Update your scripts

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:17:06 +0

TITLE:
WordPress Trackback Denial of Service Vulnerability

SECUNIA ADVISORY ID:
SA37088

VERIFY ADVISORY:
http://secunia.com/advisories/37088/

DESCRIPTION:
A vulnerability has been reported in WordPress, which can be
exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

Scheduled Maintenance: Bandwidth Upgrade

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:19:44 +0

This announcement only applies to our Corporate and Business Class hosting plans.

Details: One of our providers is performing maintenance on their network

Start Time: 18/10/2009 04:45 NZDT
End Time: 18/10/2009 06:30 NZDT

Critical Windows Updates

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:22:35 +0

Critical Windows Updates scheduled for tonight

Scheduled Maintenance Window

Thursday 15th October
Start Time: 12 AM
End Time: 06 AM

Expected Downtime: Up to 30 minutes per server

MySQL 5 database migration and upgrade

Mon, 5 Oct 2009 03:24:19 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting Plans.

MySQL 5 migration and software upgrade this Thursday.

The MySQL 5 database server will be moved to a new machine Thursday morning. The MySQL 5.0 will also be upgraded to the latest version, 5.0.86. Both of these upgrades are to improve performance, specifically with certain PHPMyAdmin queries. The scheduled maintenance window is:

Thursday 8th October
12 AM to 6 AM

Windows Server user file storage migration

Mon, 5 Oct 2009 03:22:56 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting Plans.

On Wednesday morning between 12 AM and 6 AM our providers will move user files stored on the MW2 Windows Server to new storage. A hardlink will be setup between the old and new location.

PDFLib will be upgraded to the latest version tomorrow morning.

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:27:38 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting Plans.

Our providers are going to upgrade PHP5's PDFLib to the latest version tomorrow morning between 9 and 10 AM.

Scheduled Maintenance: Mail Platform on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting Plans

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 04:00:30 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting Plans.

Details
Maintenance is being performed on the shared mail platform to add additional mailbox storage capacity.

Start Time: 17/09/2009 00:00 NZST
End Time: 17/09/2009 06:00 NZST

During this maintenance window, our providers will be putting additional storage servers for the shared mail platform into production. This will increase available storage space for mailboxes to allow for future growth.

Intermittent DNS lookup failures for Corporate and Business Class Hosting Plans

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 01:48:37 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting Plans

Since 10 AM this morning there have been intermittent DNS lookup failures on our providers primary caching name servers.

Important security update for our FTP/Cron server

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 06:15:07 +0

This update only applies to our Corporate and Business Class Plan users.

The Linux kernel on our shared FTP/Cron server will be upgraded Friday morning

Scheduled Maintenance for 20/08/2009: Mailbox Storage

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:58:46 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Business and Corporate Linux hosting plans.

Maintenance is to be performed on the storage containing mailboxes

Important security update for our Linux servers

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:56:30 +0

This announcement only applies to clients on our Business and Corporate Linux hosting plans.

The Linux kernels on our shared servers will be updated tomorrow morning.

CPanel security update.

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 10:40:02 +0

All CPanel servers have had a security update applied to them to patch a potentially major security issue. All CPanel servers have now been rebooted.

Microsoft Frontpage Extensions (EOL) End Of Life - Reminder

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:37:03 +0

This announcement is just a follow up to our announcement back in December 2008, regarding the phasing out of Microsoft FrontPage Extensions, which have reached their End of life (EOL).

WordPress Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities - Web Hosting Clients please take note

Sat, 8 Aug 2009 12:49:53 +0

TITLE:
WordPress Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities

SECUNIA ADVISORY ID:
SA36146

VERIFY ADVISORY:
http://secunia.com/advisories/36146/

DESCRIPTION:
Some vulnerabilities have been reported in WordPress, which can
potentially be exploited by malicious users to perform certain
actions with escalated privileges.

RaboPlus New Zealand offering up to $50 for free when you open a new bank account.

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:14:20 +0

New Zealand Internet bank RaboPlus is inviting consumers to open a new bank account with cash stolen from a virtual banker in an online Internet game.

Click Here to play the game and make some free cash.

Please upgrade your RSS Feed to continue get our latest News

Thu, 2 Jul 2009 05:51:47 +0

We are running new RSS Newsfeed software. Please update your Newreader/Web Browser to the following news feed. http://www.news.loungenetwork.co.nz/rss.php?feed=latest-news

Some vulnerabilities and a security issue have been reported in Joomla

Thu, 2 Jul 2009 04:44:49 +0

Some vulnerabilities and a security issue have been reported in
Joomla!, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct
cross-site scripting attacks or to disclose system information.

CPanel Hosting Plans - FREE Upgrades!!!

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:02:19 +0

We are pleased to announce that we have increased the diskspace and bandwidth allocations on ALL of our current CPanel based web hosting plans. Most current CPanel hosting plans have had their diskspace and bandwidth nearly DOUBLED!!! Some plans have also had other features added, such as the ability to host addon websites, onto the single CPanel hosting plan.

Free $75 Adwords credit for new Google Adwords users.

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:04:16 +0

Google Adwords are currently offering New Zealand businesses a free $75 credit when you setup a new Google adwords account. Any NZ business can qualify for this, as long as you are not an existing Google Adwords user.

Scheduled Maintenance for Windows clients on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting Plans: Default ASP.Net Version

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:37:47 +0

The default ASP.Net version for shared Windows hosting is being changed.

The default ASP.NET version is being upgraded to 2.0 (and consequently 3.0 and 3.5) from 1.1 on our Windows Servers.

Start Time: 26/03/2009 00:00 NZDT
End Time: 26/03/2009 02:00 NZDT

Scheduled Maintenance for Corporate and Business Class Hosting Clients: Mailbox Storage Upgrade - Completed

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:35:22 +0

Hardware used for storing mailboxes was upgraded successfully.

This maintenance was completed successfully. POP and IMAP services were unavailable from 25/03/2009 00:10 NZDT until 25/03/2009 03:50 NZDT. All queued mail was delivered to the appropriate mailboxes by 04:00 NZDT.

Corporate and Business Class Plans Hosting Performance Upgrade Coming

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:21:31 +0

We have been listening to client feedback and our upstream providers systems admin team is working on the hosting server cluster to improve performance, especially those of you with Wordpress and other file-intensive web sites.

Scheduled Maintenance for Corporate and Business Class Hosting Clients: Mailbox Storage Upgrade

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 05:00:06 +0

Mailbox Storage Upgrade

Details
Hardware used for storing mailboxes is being upgraded.

Start Time: 24/03/2009 23:00 NZDT (This has been moved an hour earlier)
End Time: 25/03/2009 06:00 NZDT

During this maintenance window, our upstream providers will be migrating mailboxes from the servers that they are currently stored on to new hardware. This will improve the performance of mailboxes via POP and IMAP, and reduce delays in mail processing.

CRON server upgrade for clients on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting plans

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 06:03:20 +0

Dear Corporate and Business Hosting Plan Clients,

Our upstream providers plan to replace the shared FTP / Cron server in approximately 2 weeks time, on the 1st of April. The server will run on a new VMware ESX environment and will run the most recent version of the Debian Operating System.

Important Windows updates this Friday

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:25:41 +0

Important Windows updates will be applied early Friday morning.

Upstream provider outage on our Corporate / Business Class hosting plans

Mon, 9 Mar 2009 03:56:33 +0

There was a 5 minute outage with our upstream provider today.

Our upstream provider had an outage between 14:47 and 14:52 today that caused intermitant connection problems for all services. The problem was resolved and service is now back to normal.

Email receiving issues on our Corporate / Business Class hosting plans

Mon, 2 Mar 2009 11:29:26 +0

Our upstream providers are currently experiencing email issues where users maybe receiving time-outs in connecting to our servers.

MySQL 5 Upgrades on cPanel shared servers have now been completed.

Mon, 2 Mar 2009 11:28:28 +0

The MySQL 5 upgrades that we previously announced via RSS and our network announcements page, have now been completed.

Email Server Upgrades for CPanel users

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 03:35:13 +0

Starting from this week, our providers we will be upgrading all shared hosting cPanel based servers to a different email server. Everything will work identically as it did prior to this changeover, and no settings at the clients end need to change. The only noticeable difference will be much faster connection speeds for IMAP users.

Telecom / Xtra Email Problems

Thu, 5 Feb 2009 12:07:57 +0

We have recieved reports, that Telecom / Xtra clients who connect to the internet via Telecom / Xtra are likely to be unable to send email at this time. There appears to be more problems with Xtra's outgoing smtp.xtra.co.nz mail server. Please don't change any setting trying to correct this. They will likely fix the problem as soon as possible. If you have any questions or need help with this, please contact Telecom directly. This issue has also been reportedin the media here,

MySQL Upgrades on cPanel shared servers.

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 03:07:19 +0

Starting Feb 21st our providers will begin upgrading the cPanel hosting servers from MySQL 4.1.X to MySQL 5.1.X. This includes the Libra and Concorde servers. This is a very low risk upgrade, which has had no problems in their testings. They are doing this in response to more and more scripts using functionality only available in the 5.X tree of MySQL. This is also part of our continued updating and upgrading processes.

Scheduled Maintenance: Network Infrastructure Upgrade for Corporate and Business Class hosting clients

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 02:24:15 +0

Details: Four access switches are being replaced.

Start Time: 14/1/2009 23:00 NZDT
End Time: 15/1/2009 06:00 NZDT

During this maintenance window, we will be replacing the hardware for 4 access layer switches. This will improve the available bandwidth between the access layer and the core.

Happy New Year - cPanel Upgrades

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 02:21:56 +0

We would like to wish all our clients a Happy New Year.

Clients who are hosting on our cPanel hosting plans may have noticed that their control panel now has the words 'cPanel Accelerated' in the header of the control panel.

Seasons Greetings and Happy New Year from the Lounge Network Team.

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:27:06 +0

We'd like to wish all our clients a Merry Christmas and a safe and enjoyable holiday season. Thank you for your continued support throughout the year, we really appreciate it. During the year we have released some exciting upgrades to our services, including a newly upgraded Domain Management system, a new Email management system, and lots of other enhancements to our hosting services, including a new backup system. We look forward to continuing our developments in the coming year as our business continues to flourish.

New Email Control Panel for our Corporate and Business Plan users

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:19:50 +0

We are please to announce our new Email Control Panel for our Corporate and Business Plan users. This is avaliable from the dropdown list on the Webmail Login at http://www.controlpanel.co.nz

The email control panel allows users to manage their existing email accounts, without having to enter the main Hosting control panel.

Microsoft Frontpage Extensions have reach their End Of Life (EOL)

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:42:56 +0

During mid 2006 Microsoft announced that they discontinued the development of Microsoft FrontPage and server extensions, and will cease supporting it, due to it having reached the end of it's economical life.

Scheduled Maintenance: Network Infrastructure Upgrade at the Albany Auckland Datacentre

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 02:51:17 +0

New routers are being installed, and some switch software is being upgraded.

Event Date: 18/12/2008
Start Time: 00:00 NZDT
End Time: 06:00 NZDT

Libra cPanel Server - Apache Upgrade - Scheduled Maintenance

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:44:48 +0

On Dec 14th 2008, from approximately 8pm, the Libra cPanel server's apache web server will be upgraded from 1.3.X to 2.2.X.

Scheduled Maintenance - Server Migration for Corporate and Business Class Clients

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:56:52 +0

A number of our servers hosting our Corporate and Business Class Clients, will be migrated early Thursday morning.

Mail server outage this morning for Corporate and Business Class Hosting clients

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:31:10 +0

Half hour email server outage in the morning. All services now restored.

Telecom / Xtra broadband outage

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 06:25:01 +0

As reported in the media, Telecom / Xtra has had major issues with their broadband network that started on Friday evening, and hasn't yet been 100% resolved. This outage doesn't affect our web/email hosting services in anyway. This outage affected Telecom customers from being able to access the internet and send receive email, and even caused Telecoms own website to be knocked offline.

Concorde Server PHP Upgrade - Stage 2

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 03:49:36 +0

Saturday Nov 15th 2008. From 5am , the Concorde server will be changed to make the DEFAULT php handler to v5.

Urgent upgrade to the Albany Server networks border routers tonight

Thu, 6 Nov 2008 06:49:22 +0

An urgent upgrade will be made to the Albany Server networks border routers tonight.

Security updates will be applied to the shared FTP server between midnight and 1 a.m, Monday, November 3rd. Services may be unavailable for up to 10 minutes while the server is restarted for the update to take effect. We apologise for any inconvenie

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 09:47:19 +0

Security updates will be applied to the shared FTP server between midnight and 1 a.m, Monday, November 3rd.

Important information for international domain name registrants

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:27:49 +0

Further to the email sent by our provider SRSPlus / Network Solutions.

Windows Servers Upgrade

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:22:44 +0

We have some really exciting changes coming to some of our windows hosting platforms over the next few weeks, and this announcement is to let you know whats changing and when. This applies to all windows hosting plans, apart from our Corporate and Business Class windows hosting plans at the Albany datacentre.

New Backup System In Place for CPanel Hosting plans on Concorde and Libra servers

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 04:23:49 +0

Since May 2008, our providers have been testing and running a new backup system for the CPanel Hosting plans on the Concorde and Libra servers. This new backup system is state of the art, and is only used by premium hosting providers. After the successful initial testing, it has now been implemented for CPanel Hosting plans on Concorde and Libra servers.

NZ Albany Network Users - FTP Shared Hosting Security Update

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:33:59 +0

Security updates will be applied to the shared FTP server tonight between midnight and 1 a.m.

NZ Albany Network Windows server Users - An urgent ASP.NET security reconfiguration

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:33:39 +0

Our providers have been made aware of recently released exploit code that the Windows Servers may be vulnerable to. Our providers have therefore made an urgent security configuration change to prevent the service from being compromised. This has changed the ASP.NET Trust Level, so it is ow using the custom settings between Medium and High.

UPDATE - Concorde servers PHP4 installation has now been successfully switched from mod_php to suphp

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:02:40 +0

Concorde servers PHP4 installation has now been successfully switched from mod_php to suphp.

After this upgrade only a very few clients have contacted us with issues with old PHP4 scripts on their website. This is mainly due to most of our clients having already changed from PHP4 to PHP5 prior to the upgrade, as requested on our announcements page first posted back in Febrary 08, and via our RSS feed. We believe only a few clients are still using the old PHP 4. Our providers are keeping a very close eye on the server, in case any server issues caused by the upgrade occur.

UPDATE - Concorde servers PHP4 installation will be switched from mod_php to suphp

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:39:37 +0

As per our earlier announcement at http://loungenetwork.co.nz/status-rss.php?id=25, the Concorde cPanel server will have it's PHP 4 installation switched from mod_php to suphp.

This should take place this weekend (between 11th-12th October 2008).
The total update should take a few hours, and involve no server downtime. We will update this message when it has beeen done. *** UPDATE This update has now been completed***

DOS Attack on NZ Albany Network

Thu, 9 Oct 2008 01:18:26 +0

There was a DOS attack this morning that caused poor performance.

Mail, Virtual Server and network infrastructure updates for NZ Albany based Server Network

Wed, 8 Oct 2008 04:35:09 +0

Details: Software updates are being performed on our providers mail platform, Virtual Server platform and various components of our providers networking infrastructure.

NZ Upstream Provider Downtime for 10 minutes

Wed, 1 Oct 2008 04:56:39 +0

Our upstream provider for our New Zealand based network experienced a 10 minutes network outage this afternoon.

cPanel Clients - New Webmail Program (Roundcube) Installed

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:16:29 +0

Some clients on our cPanel based plans have asked about additional webmail programs that are more functional and prettier than squirrelmail and horde, and our providers have listened.

Mondays mailserver outage for clients on our Corporate and Business - Detailed report Hosting plans.

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:48:10 +0

On Monday morning (22/09/2008), a power supply at the datacentre, that was in a server in the same cabinet as the primary mail file server failed. When it failed, it short circuited one of our providers power distribution units (PDU) - essentially a multiboard on a much larger scale with a few neat tools for keeping track of power load and controlling power to each outlet. When a short circuit occurs, the circuit breaker between the PDU and our providers power feed is automatically switched off to protect the wiring in the building and prevent a fire from starting. This resulted in around 15 servers at the datacentre and a network switch losing power.

PHP5 migration completed on Libra cPanel Server

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:22:30 +0

The php migration has been complete and default php version is now 5.2.6.

Domain Name payments made via Paymex.

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 09:59:10 +0

This is an important message is for those clients who have attempted to make a domain name renewal through our Domain Manager system at www.domains.loungenetwork.co.nz, between the dates of 25/09/2008 to the 12/09/2008, and attempted to pay by CREDIT CARD via Paymex's credit card payment system. This message only applies to those clients who have attempted to pay by Credit Card, and not by Direct Credit or Cheque.

Due to a problem with the credit card processing company Paymex, clients who attempted to renew/register a domain name and pay for it by credit card, the transaction has not gone through, which would have been indicated by a blank screen after your entered in your credit card details, rather than a confirmation page that payment had been processed.

Joomla CMS Security Vulnerability

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:22:40 +0

A vulnerability in Joomla versions 1.5.x has been discovered allowing any administrative password to be changed without proper authorisation.

NEW - Updated New Zealand Domain Manager Released - Version 2.0

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 03:54:42 +0

We are pleased to announce the release of our new updated New Zealand Domain Manager system. This has been two years in development, and can be accessed at http://www.domains.loungenetwork.co.nz/

PHP5 PDF Lib Upgraded on Corporate and Business Hosting Plans

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 03:35:45 +0

PHP5 PDF Lib has been Upgraded to the latest version, for hosting clients using our Corporate and Business Web hosting plans.

19/07/2008 - PHP 4 End-Of-Life Plans for all Linux Users - FURTHER UPDATE

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:08:42 +0

We have now received notification from our cPanel Hosting provider that PHP4 will be disabled on the Concorde and Libra servers on approximately the 15th August 08, and replaced with PHP 5. Therefore please make sure your scripts that use PHP 4 will work with PHP 5 before this switch over date. PHP 5 on the server will also be upgraded to version 5.2.6. Information about the PHP 4 End of Life can be found in our previous update about this below, and how to switch your website to PHP 5 now.

10/07/2008 - Updated Control Panel released for Corporate / Business Plan users

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:01:57 +0

An updated version of the Control Panel released for Corporate / Business Plan users.

8/07/2008 - Scheduled Maintenance of Zion Network, at the TelstraClear Datacentre in Wellington New Zealand.

Tue, 8 Jul 2008 04:31:30 +0

Saturday 12th July - 08:00 to 10:00 AM

A planned upgrade and restructure of network resources in the TelstraClear datacentre is being undertaken in the time period above.

27/06/2008 - New Datacenter for our cPanel Web Hosting Clients:

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:21:01 +0

This announcement only applies to cPanel web hosting clients, and not to Corporate/Business Hosting Plan users.

Over the course of the past year, our providers have been diligently working behind the scenes, building and setting up a new facility for our clients. The facility started out being one that our providers would expand into. The more our providers thought and looked at the future, they decided to move everyone to this new facility.

25/06/2008 - Windows Server - ASP and ASP.NET services stopped responding

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:49:59 +0

Windows Server ASP and ASP.NET stopped responding - Issue resolved

5/06/2008 - PHP 4 End-Of-Life Plans for all Linux Users - UPDATED

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:29:32 +0

Important Information for ALL PHP 4 Users on ALL Linux Users.

As you may be aware, PHP developer support for PHP 4 was discontinued on the 31/12/2007. While our hosting providers will continue to support PHP 4 sites during early to mid 2008, PHP 4 itself will only receive select security updates until 08/08/2008 and from then on it will no longer have security updates released. All new Linux websites setup from the 5/06/2008 will now be setup by default as PHP 5.

UPDATE: PHP 4 will be phased out on the on the cPanel Servers (Concorde and Libra servers) on the 15th August 08, so please make sure your scripts that use PHP 4 will work with PHP 5 before the switch over date.

12/3/2008 - IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR XTRA/YAHOO/TELECOM ISP USERS WHEN SENDING EMAILS VIA YOUR DOMAIN BASED EMAIL ADDRESS

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:25:18 +0

If you are currently a Xtra/Yahoo/Telecom ISP user this message applies to you. We have received a information that Xtra/Yahoo/Telecom are apparently implementing more changes to their email systems, in particular with sending email via a domain name based email address. We don't believe that Xtra/Yahoo/Telecom have yet informed their own customers about this very important change.

29/01/2008 - FOLDER PERMISSIONS

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:24:30 +0

Over the past couple of days we seen reports in the news, that a number of websites in NZ have fallen victim to hackers due to wide open permissions (777) on directories and files or out of date CMS installations. We would like to remind all clients that 3rd party software on your site is your responsability and to make sure files are not world writable.

23/01/2008 - IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR USERS OF THE ALBANY SERVER NETWORK:

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:23:49 +0

This notice only applies to clients who use either our Corporate or Business Class Hosting Plans.

17/01/08 Telstra / Clear / Paradise Users:

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:02:33 +0

We have had reports from a couple of customers who use Telstra/Clear/Paradise as their ISP, that they have been having difficulty accessing their websites on both the Concorde and Libra Servers. This is due to an issue with Telstra/Clear/Paradises network, and not with the servers or network that the websites are hosted on. People having difficulty browsing their website will be able to test their website and bypass their ISP by using the following Proxy website http://www.proxybrowsing.com/. If you are experiencing issues, please contact your ISP to fix the issue.

3/12/07 Domain Name Scammers at it again.

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:00:33 +0

We are aware that some domain registrants of international domain names (eg..com,.net etc) may have received an unsolicited letter in the mail, from what appears to be an American domain registration company. The letter asks you to renew and transfer your domain to their registrar. For anyone who receives this letter, please ignore it as this is a scam, and following the instructions in the letter could leave you out of pocket and without your domain name.

29/11/07 IMPORTANT NOTICE for people who forward their domain based email account to a Yahoo Xtra Bubble email account

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:59:45 +0

As reported in the media, Yahoo Xtra bubbles email service is again experiencing issues. This time it is affecting email that is 'forwarded' from a domain based email address, to a Yahoo Xtra email account. Yahoo Xtras systems are reported to be deleting this email, or putting it into a bulkmail bin.

7/11/07 IMPORTANT NOTICE for any Lounge Network Clients who use Yahoo Xtra / Telecom email accounts for their Email:

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:55:27 +0

There is currently major problem with Yahoo Xtras Bubbles Spam filtering system. This problem causes many legitimate emails sent from NZ Businesses, that are sent to ...@xtra.co.nz email addresses, to being classified as spam. This causes these incorrectly classified emails to go into your Yahoo \\\'bulk mail bin\\\' instead of into your Xtra Yahoo inbox. This means that if you use email software such as Outlook to download your email, you will not receive some important emails. You will be able to view incorrectly classified emails, in the \\\'Bulk Mail\\\' folder by logging into your Yahoo Xtra Bubble webmail system at http://xtra.yahoo.com/mail . To \\\'Whitelist\\\' an incorrectly classified email, as a legitimate email, please follow Xtra Yahoos instructions athttp://xtra.co.nz/help/0,,4155-7824012,00.html . If you need help with this, please contact Xtra on 0800 CALL XTRA

Welcome to Lounge Networks RSS Newsfeed

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 06:56:23 +0

Starting from June 2008, we will be moving from our current web based announcements system, to using an RSS Newsfeed so you can pull in announcements via your web browser. All notifications of scheduled maintenance, unscheduled downtime etc. will now be delivered through this RSS feed.