As most of our users probably know, Bifrost was our support system of choice for many years. It was a great system that served us well all those years, however it also had it’s weaknesses and it is time for a change.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Announcing Service Window on Wednesday 4th of October 2023: Larry skin & Spellcheck
The Kolab Now Staff is going to deploy the “old” larry skin and enable the English spellcheck option (again). Therefore we declare a service window on:
Wednesday 2023-10-04 at 07:00 UTC until 08:00 UTC.
Incident report: Service not restarting automatically on failure
In the very late hours (UTC) of 2023-09-18 Some users experienced that they could not receive mails, or do administrative activities – like making payments or creating new users. When they tried they were given an error message: ‘Internal Server error’. This lasted until the morning (UTC) of 2023-09-19.
The issue was caused by the in-memory data store (Redis) going out of memory.
The Kolab skins
Some users probably remember when we first released the new Responsive skin back in 2018. Since then, the responsive skin has been developed further, some improvements were made, and the skin was promoted to be the default skin for new Kolab Now users.
We in the Kolab Now team love the Responsive skin, and we were not going to miss the old static skin when it was not deployed during the update to the latest version of the webclient. We had only received positive feedback about the responsive skin so far, but it turned out that some users still were very fond of the old look and feel.
Incident report: “Stability!”
Welcome back!
We were finally able to bring our blog back. During the past 2 weeks we had a long lasting incident. We did what we could to make sure that users could use their primary services during our work on the systems, but we know that there was unplanned downtime. As the blog was a victim of the situation, we couldn’t inform users as well as we wanted (we really do not like X (‘formerly known as Twitter’)), so here is finally the incident report from the beginning to the end.
Service window postponed – Due diligence..
Last week we announced a service window that was supposed to start and be in session about now. However, following due diligence we went through the list of activities last night and found that we had overseen an important step in the plan. The operations that are going to happen are on the backend servers, are quite sensitive, and we would like to avoid any problems. We therefore suspend the current service window and hereby declare it for the coming Friday:
Friday 2023-06-30 at 08:00 UTC until 13:00 UTC.
Announcing Service Window Friday 23rd of June: The everlasting race to get rid of old infrastructure..
The Kolab Now Staff is going to update parts of the platform to get rid of even more old infrastructure, and to ensure the best possible solution for users. Therefore we declare a service window on:
Friday 2023-06-23 at 08:00 UTC until 13:00 UTC.
Announcing Service Window Friday 9th of June: Getting rid of even more old infrastructure..
The Kolab Now Staff is going to update parts of the platform to get rid of even more old infrastructure, and to ensure the best possible solution for users. Therefore we declare a service window on:
Friday 2023-06-09 at 08:00 UTC until 12:00 UTC.
Announcing Service Window: Caching infrastructure..
Lately we have had reports from users of the Kolab webclient who saw a variety of issues such as: login issues, some data entries being hidden and showing up again and folder creations failing. As this was seriously affecting the reliability of the webclient, we put the deployment of new features on hold to investigate the root cause of those issues.
How to prevent deleted e-mails from disappearing permanently
Last week our support team reported interestingly some similar questions from unrelated users circling around the topic: “I accidentally deleted some e-mails. Can I get them back?”
As often in complex support situations, the answer to this question is: It depends.. 🙂
Users were pointed to this knowledge base note. This answered the questions, though with some confusion. In this post we will lay out the options.
