XILO News and Status

We’ll be taking My XILO down from approximately 11:15pm this evening for some essential database maintenance.

During this time, you will not be able to login to your my.xilo.net account. This includes making any changes to your packages, new orders or paying invoices.

Sorry for any inconvenience this short maintenance period may cause.

We are pleased to announce that we are now able to support inbound CentralNic domain transfers from other registrars.

Currently we have only added the most popular suffixes onto our system but if you have a domain in another CentralNic suffix, please raise a ticket at http://my.xilo.net with the domain and the EPP key and we will initiate the transfer on your behalf.

Standard transfers can be completed on our order form at http://www.xilo.net/order/domains/transfer/

Customers that currently pay using their Maestro (Switch) automatically each month will no longer be able to do so from 1 July 2008.

This morning we received notice from our merchant account provider that due to payment card industry rules and to remain compliant with Mastercard’s requirements on accepting their debit brand, Maestro, we will no longer be able to process recurring (automatic) payments when invoices become due without authentication*.

The technical reason for this is that the CVV code must be entered on each transaction. We are not allowed to store this on file as it is illegal to do so.

*You will be able to continue to use your Maestro card for payments by means of manually making a payment for each invoice raised or completing the ‘Authentication’ of your card before the invoice would normally be automatically debited from your account. More information on the ‘Authentication’ method will follow to all customers with current, active Maestro cards on their account.

At this time, Visa, MasterCard, Visa Debit, Delta and Solo cards are unaffected by this change but when adding a new Visa or MasterCard credit card for the first time after 1 July 2008, you may be asked to enter your PIN as part of the Verified by Visa (VbV) or MasterCard Secure Code (MSC) schemes. This will be in a popup window branded in that of your issuing bank. If you do have an alternate, non-Maestro card that you can use for automatic payments of your account, we strongly suggest that you update this as soon as possible.

We’d like to apologise for the short notice given to all customers about this change and have also made an official complaint to our merchant provider for the amount of notice they have also given us.

If you have any questions regarding this, please do raise a ticket for the billing department via http://my.xilo.net.

Further to our announcement in November 2007, we are now planning to cease support for PHP4 effective Monday 14th July 2008.

After this time, any files with a .php* suffix will run under PHP5 only. The majority of customers have already upgraded any scripts to run without any intervention at all and will not notice any service issues with this upgrade.

During the upgrade process, we will also be switching from Apache1 to Apache2. Once again, this will have no effect on any existing service but will show improved page rendering times.

We will start the upgrades on all cPanel servers at 10pm on Monday 14th July 2008 for completion before 6am on Tuesday 15th July 2008.

If you have any questions, please contact support via http://my.xilo.net .

We’re currently reloading all servers with Fantastico. It appears that the cPanel update last night has removed it.

Please bear with us whilst we complete this work and repair the installations.

Once again, LiNX appear to be having network/routing issues.

This will be causing additional latency and route instability. This is out of the control of any one at XILO and will be affecting most of the UK Internet population.

The scale of the problem can be seen at https://www.linx.net/pubtools/trafficstats.html?stats=day

If we have any update from LiNX, we will post accordingly.

As many of you will be aware there are wide spread problems on the LINX foundry LAN.

This will be causing additional latency and route instability. This is out of the control of any at XILO and will be affecting most of the UK Internet population.

The scale of the problem can be seen at https://www.linx.net/pubtools/trafficstats.html?stats=day

Any problems that traceroute over 195.66.224.0/23 are directly connected to this.

We just observed a small outage that affected some of our customers in BlueSquare 2.

Upon contacting the BSQ NOC we have received the following statement.

At approx 12:40pm today we experienced an issue with one of our four UPS systems whilst carrying our routine testing which resulted in this one UPS system powering off.

This caused a short brown out to approx 30% of customers equipment located in BlueSquare 2 & 3 as the unit powered off in an unusual way. The remaining three UPS systems took the load, and continue to provide power to the sites.

Full UPS protection is in place and we are running as normal and our UPS vendors are on-site investigating with senior management.

We aim to provide a further update within the next 3 hours.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Our monitoring shows no servers offline at this time but if you are having problems connecting to your server - please raise a ticket via my.xilo.net.

The Foxtrot server has just suffered an unplanned reboot.

We are already looking into the issue and awaiting a disk check to complete before we can access the box fully.

We will update this post during the disk check process which we hope will take no longer than 15 minutes.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Our monitoring has alerted us of some routing issues which may affect some customers into/out from the network.

We are looking into this with urgency and will update this post as soon as possible.