Posts Tagged ‘All Work and No Play’

Post Mortem on a migration

Posted on: March 28th, 2026 by

The dust is settling..

The migration happened on Tuesday, and was for a large part successful. No data was harmed during the event. All data was migrated. Kolab Now is now running on hardware that has guaranteed warranty for at least the next 5 years, and on a software platform that is making it easier for us to develop and maintain.

We did however run into a very unfortunate situation. A few very urgent matters caused our support mailbox to be quite full, and on top of that, the support ticket form at ‘https://kolabnow.com/support’ was out of order for a few hours. This resulted in response times much longer than we like them to be.

A few issues impacted users:

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Migration postponed for 24 hours..

Posted on: March 23rd, 2026 by

As you can read in the update of the previous post on this blog, we ran into some unforeseen DNS issues during the migration, and were able to stop the actual migration in time. We found what we believe is the cause of the issues, and made changes to the configurations that we need to test.

At  the time of writing, we have postpone the migration until:

Tuesday March 24, 2026 @ 13:00 CET.

As it was the plan today, at 13:00 CET we will switch over the database and the main DNS.

This will cause downtime that can last up to 20 – 30 minutes.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience


Update 2026-03-24 @ 13:00 CET: The DNS issues from yesterday is under control. We are doing it. The migration is in progress.

Update 2026-03-24 @ 14:20 CET: The database has been migrated to the new environment. we are now updating the DNS. When DNS is updated, we can just wait for the global update. depending on where you are on the globe, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to 72 hours (just to mention the extremes). 

Update 2026-03-24 @ 15:30 CET: The migration has finished and all data is live on the new environment. We however hit a few issues; one certificate issue, one webclient defect, and DNS is slow to propagate in some areas (we know from user feedback). These issues should be resolved by now. At this time we are investigating some delays, but mail is flowing and getting delivered. Most of the issues are coming down to “restarting a browser or a Thunderbird”, but we resolve the tickets in Support as they come in. If you have issues that you do not read about here, then please contact Support.

 

The Kolab skins

Posted on: September 11th, 2023 by

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.

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How Kolab Meet and integrated collaborative editing boosted my Christmas preparations

Posted on: November 12th, 2021 by

And.. its around the corner again – Christmas!

Every year it is a very special time for me and my family. The days get shorter, everyone slows down and reflects on the busy year at home with cups of tea and hot chocolate on the couch, covered in a warm blanket.

At the same time it means Christmas preparations. We are a big family with more than 56 members spread over different cities and countries, gathering each year on different locations to enjoy the Christmas days together. Now the cozy moments on the edge of the commencing winter start to get hectic. Dinner plans have to be made, wish lists to be exchanged and discussed, invitations & Christmas cards have to be designed.

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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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Bitpay is being a Bitc^H

Posted on: December 17th, 2019 by

You may have noticed BitPay isn’t a payment option to our service any longer. If that’s what you wanted to be using, please read this article.

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Our October Silence?

Posted on: November 7th, 2018 by

Hi there,

I just wanted to provide you with a quick note that our blog roll’s “October silence” is nothing but just that. Some of us became a father to a son, have needed to deal with some citizen/resident paperwork, some of us choose to entertain the fresh snowfall way up the Alps, others took some vacation time, and such and so forth.

In the all-work-no-play area, I think we’ve figured out webmail decryption/signing, a responsive skin to be made available to mainstream Kolab Now, new exciting service venture definitions even though still under development, and we have now been able to deal with our midterm election anxiety (albeit November 25th could incur some implications domestically).

Incident Report: Thursday, 20:25 – Friday 01:15 UTC

Posted on: September 21st, 2018 by

Last night, a failure in the storage layer caused most of our services to be unavailable. In the week before, we replaced a failed hard drive. In the week before that, a so-called Virtual Fabric Adapter failed, causing a hypervisor to shut itself off. Since the most recent incident was the more serious downtime, that’s what we’ll start our reporting on.

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Adding a Little Byte of Transparency

Posted on: March 28th, 2018 by

I’m considering adding a little bit of transparency to how, and perhaps how well, Kolab Now infrastructure is run, or is running.

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