Zone Administrator's blog

Thousands of South African Websites Offline Today

A datacentre problem put thousands of South African websites offline this morning from around 07h00 SAST to 11h00 SAST. The problem occurred at Internet Solutions Bryanston datacentre. All sites locally hosted by Afrihost, including all Graphicline sites and our clients' sites hosted on servers in this datacentre. E-mail servers were also down.

The exact number of sites affected is unknown, The best we can do is make an educated guess: Dedicated servers as well as shared hosting servers were all down; so the number of websites offline today will number in the thousands.

Image Hotlink Notification April 4 2012

We have removed a number of images from the site, and are in the process of moving other graphic images to new locations. A spate of hotlinking by an e-mail spammer has initiated this response.Several thousand downloads of certain social icons e.g. Facebook buttons, by recipients of the spam e-mail were seen on a daily basis so a decision was taken to permanently remove all linked images not being used at ths time for our website.

Drupal 7 Core Update Completed

The first part of the current maintenance phase has been completed with an urgently required security update of Drupal System Core files. An essential security fix formed part of the core update. Drupal version 7.12 has been implemented, functionality appears to be 100%.

The site will be thoroughly tested to ensure all functions are still working, and no conflicts were introduced by this critical core file update before continuing with phase 2 maintenance.

Search Form displayed a Recaptcha Challenge

We made a mistake late yesterday evening and unintentionally placed a Recaptcha challenge in the site search box (at the top right of all pages).

The person responsible (The Boss) has been suitably chastised and offers his apologies for any inconvenience caused to site visitors. In his defence he pleads long hours worked over the past four months (sorry Boss, we are all tired) and a need to take a break to catch fish!(Maybe the Boss will take the whole crew!)