*****Service Impacting Maintenance*****

One of the systems associated with digital.forest's Filemaker Database Hosting, alder.forest.net, will be taken offline for 15-30 minutes between 11:00pm Sunday, July 11th, 2010 and 1:00am Monday, July 12th, 2010.

Functionality will not change as a result of this maintenance.

digital.forest remains committed to providing our customers with the highest level of service, the greatest degree of protection, and the most transparent communications. If you have any questions or concerns about the above maintenance, please contact your account manager. Our account management staff is available Monday through Friday from 08:00 hrs PST until 17:00 hrs PST at 877-720-0483 Option 2.

Our electrician is installing some new wiring in the datacenter today for our new row of racks. This work will require the brief shutdown of the two rows immediately adjacent in Server Room 2. One row is home to our oldest MacOS-based computers ("BandW G3's and older "beige" units.) The other is home to the servers we acquired last summer from FMPHosting.net. At noon PST we will perform an orderly shutdown/reboot of the Mac servers to accommodate the work. We will delay the FMPHosting.net reboot until after 2PM PST (to match 5 PM EST)

NO OTHER servers will be affected.

Thanks for your patience.

We have experienced a significant increase in ICMP traffic, from all corners of the 'Net recently. Today it caused a slowdown and some packet loss on our core switch due to the rapid growth of the forwarding table. We attempted to mitigate this with different switch configurations, but were unable to achieve a proper balance. At 2:30 PM we elected to just block ICMP echo traffic at our boundary router. We realize that this may "break" some monitoring systems, and make some troubleshooting more difficult - but the overall performance of our network is far more critical. We apologize for any inconvenience you may experience.

Should the "worms du jour" that generate this kind of traffic subside, we will enable ICMP echo packets again.

We're applying the most recent series of updates to the core FMPHosting servers tonight. In additioin, the iMail server will also be brought down for a slightly longer period of time in order to install the latest service pack for Windows 2000.

Estimated downtime is about 45 minutes.

There are a handful machines that we didn't get to during yesterday's update process. If you happen to be one of the lucky people who didn't experience the brief downtime yesterday, you might notice it this morning.

The only servers that remain to be updated are part of the FMPHosing network, so this announcement only applies if you're a former FMPHosting client. No digital.forest hosting servers are included in this morning's update process.

We'll also be updating several core FMPHosting servers, including the iMail server, at some point in the future. Those updates will be done during off-hours, and an annoucement will be made prior to any associated downtime.

Again, if you are a co-location customer with equipment running any variant of Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003, please download and apply the appropriate KB824146 Update.

We need to bring the FMPHosting iMail server down briefly this morning to perform an emergency disk upgrade. The process shouldn't take more than half an hour.

This announcement pertains specifically to those clients formerly with FMPHosting.net. Mail service for digital.forest customers will not be affected by this downtime.

08:28 PDT
Data replication is taking a bit longer than I'd hoped, but it should be finished soon.

10:02 PDT
iMail service has been completely restored. Please let us know if you experience any further difficulty with the system this afternoon.