Author Archive for Mads Petersen

Incident Report: IMAP backend server out of memory

Posted on: June 8th, 2021 by

On Monday night, the 7th of June 2021 @ 18:29 UTC, a process on one of our many backend servers was taking a lot of memory; faster than it could release it again, which made the server run out of memory and stop responding. The server were serving IMAP for a limited group of users, who in turn were impacted by the incident

As the server was heavily monitored, alarms were going off with the staff, but was little noticed, as it happened in a low traffic period, and as the systems are build to fix such situations themselves. The systems in this class usually just restore and keep working. This time however, the server did not come up in a timely manner, and the mentioned users saw their mailboxes freeze and their mail become unavailable.

The staff realized that something was not as it should be and went on to manually restore the situation. At 20:27 UTC the server was back up and running, and all mailboxes were available again.

No data was in danger, and mail delivery to the impacted mailboxes continued during the incident.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this incident may have caused.

 

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Announcing Service Window: Update of firmware on Storage

Posted on: June 3rd, 2021 by

This Saturday, 5th of June 2021 at 09:00 UTC, the Kolab Now operations team is performing an update of the firmware on the storage canisters in the datacenter. As Kolab Now is running the operations on high class professional IBM servers under great warranty (see the knowledge base article), the update will be performed under advice from the IBM technical support crew.

As the storage system is 100% redundant, we expect that there will be no interruption or downtime – planned or unplanned – in connection to this change. Users can follow the status of the change via the Kolab Ops Twitter account. They can keep working and collaborating online as usual.

Should you have any issues in this or any other context, then please contact Kolab Now Support 

 

UPDATE 2021-05-05 @ 11:00 UTC: The update has happened, and as expected, there was no downtime. All systems are back up and running as they should be.

 

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Incident Report: Network Interruption

Posted on: May 28th, 2021 by

At 06:00 UTC on Wednesday May 26th Kolab Now fell silent. All connections were dropped. What happened?

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Kolab Meet beta – The story so far..

Posted on: May 4th, 2021 by

Earlier this year we wrote here on this blog about our new added feature: ‘Kolab Meet’ The voice & video conferencing tool. We explained how this tool was still in beta, but that all users of kolab Now (with full groupware subscriptions) could gain access to the tool, and how it was used.

Now it has been a while, and we have made a few updates to the tool. It is still in beta, but we have added features and fixed some defects and corrected some inconveniences. here are a few comments on experiences with the latest iteration of Kolab Meet (listed in no particular order):

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Incident Report: Lock down of firewalls

Posted on: April 28th, 2021 by

At 10:10 UTC this morning, Wednesday April 28th, parts of our environment were getting updated. The updates included Security Enhanced Linux configuration on one layer of our firewalls. Unfortunately this new configuration locked up these firewalls and all traffic was blocked for a group of users.

The problem was confirmed corrected at 10:36 UTC.

No data was in any danger of being compromised during the incident.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

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Welcome to Kolab Meet – Our new Voice & Video conference…

Posted on: January 26th, 2021 by

For some time, users asked us if we could create a Voice & Video Conferencing tool, and apply the same level of privacy and secure communication strategy to it, as we do with everything else that we do. A certain virus, a rise in home office activities and the popularity of online ‘after work’ partys made the request even more compelling; we re-focused our efforts to this task, and here is the result.

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Pricing Restructure, but Is Santa Real?

Posted on: December 24th, 2020 by

’tis the season to be jolly, and at Kolab Now we certainly are. 2020 has been such a smooth year, with only a few minor issues on the international scene, that we decided to do something good for once. Santa is working on his own schedule; we can’t count on him to deliver presents (You can track him here), but here are the presents – from all of us to all of you…

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Menus, cockpits and logins…

Posted on: December 15th, 2020 by

In September we moved to a new and smarter user account administration tool. Just navigate back a few entries in the blog to read about that event.

This new tool was built with new technology and more modern models, and the team was rethinking the architecture from the ground up. The new module, which has taken a more central position in Kolab, makes it easier to make changes and improve the feature sets. It has put us in a position to move forward faster and more effective than ever before. The cockpit (also sometimes referred to as the dashboard) will become the central hub for a variety of new features that we’ll add over time.

This is of course no news. As mentioned above, we have been babbling about that for a while on this blog. The news in this post is that we have made a change. Based on feedback from User Experience specialists and (mostly) You, our customer, we have made a change to the menus in our systems. Let’s take a look at the changes:

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Announcing Service Window: Deploying new User administration

Posted on: September 9th, 2020 by

It’s time!

If you followed our blog over the latest months, surely you have seen that we are working on our new user management module (called HKCCP). This is the module that manage your cockpit; it is where you login when you want to set and change the features supported by your subscription such as Mobile Connectivity, 2FA, Disk space’, etc..

We are now in a position to release and deploy the first production iteration of the module, and we therefore announce a service window for:

Sunday 13th of September 2020, between 07:00 UTC and 11:00 UTC 17:30 UTC. 

During that period the cockpit will be unavailable for a short period, but there will be no impact on other feature or functionality of the service. If you are not working with the cockpit during that time you will not experience any issues at all.

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I lost my phone..

Posted on: September 1st, 2020 by

This happened.

I lost my phone. It happened. In modern days fast paced life on the road you lose your phone.

But this is not about me losing my phone or how sad I was. It is about how my Kolab Now account helped me to recover fast and effective…

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