Thu Aug 18 14:54:03 PDT 2011
RAID failure knocked out some services, currently being restored
Around 1:00 am on the morning of Thursday, August 18th, home directories became unreachable at The WELL, causing all services except email to fail.
At 9:30 the following morning we we were able to place the following unadorned message on the well.com site:
Most functions of The WELL are currently not available due to a hardware failure of the RAID where most of our data is kept. We are working on restoring full service, but do not yet have an estimated completion time. We apologize for this inconvenience.
Please note that email via IMAP, POP, and the Web should be available at this time.
During that time we went through some replacement hardware options, settled on one, and got it installed at our co-location facility. At about 14:45 PDT logins became possible again.
RAIDs are designed to prevent such problems when a disk fails, and we are in the process of moving well.com to the cloud, so this failure was perplexing and hopefully very soon all questions will become moot. Some services are still being repaired and adjusted at this time. Comments are welcome, please email Helpdesk at the address on the footer of this page, or swing by the welltech conference.
We are sorry for the disruption.
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Mon Aug 1 16:42:55 PDT 2011
Mail upgrade complete: If you can't get mail you need to change settings
All systems are up and running. We now have IMAP available for all mail customers. Please be advised that we have shut off all access to two older mail servers as of this afternoon as part of the upgrade to email started in 2009. If you are pointing to those servers in your settings, your mail will no longer work.
If you are not getting or sending email, you probably need to update some settings. You no longer have access to smtp.well.com nor to mh.well.com (mail.well.com). All incoming and outgoing mail operations will now involve the iris.well.com server. To get the appropriate Ports, look up your appropriate settings.
1. You should have access to your new email via a direct web browser login at iris.well.com now and henceforth. This is the easy, quick way for most people to see mail.
2. New mail help for all kinds of programs is now up at http://www.well.com/emailhelp.html with an overview of the system, general settings and a link to a page with more settings for specific mobile devices and computer email programs.
3. You can move your old email into the new environment by use of the utilities page if you wish.
4. There is a way to use Alpine for UNIX access to your mail. See the help page first.
5. We attempted to migrate you with settings matching your former preferences. In some situations we were not able to do that! In particular, if you were forwarding elsewhere and leaving a copy you are probably set up with straight forwarding now, and you will want to adjust that with a web login to iris.well.com.
If you have questions, contact helpdesk or ask fellow users who have solved the problem in the welltech conference. Thank you for your patience.
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Mon Aug 1 09:59:46 PDT 2011
Mail upgrade is in progress.
All remaining mailboxes at The WELL are being transferred to the Zimbra email system at iris.well.com over the next several hours today. Please see the mail help page for instructions on setting up once your mailbox is converted, or use your web browser to go to iris.well.com. (Note that you cannot log in there until the upgrade script converts your mail settings.) Thank you for your patience.
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Wed Jun 22 12:55:09 PDT 2011
All systems are up and running.
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Monday, June 20, 2011 05:36:27 PM PDT
The Zimbra email system on iris.well.com will be unavailable Tuesday evening (Jun 21) between the hours of 10pm and midnight so that we can perform a required software update. The legacy email system will remain up during this period. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Fri May 13 13:50:40 PDT 2011
Members using the Legacy email server are finding their connections time out when they are trying to access mail from mail.well.com. We are working on the situation.