itsDargens / kerjodando p2p Server Down

The its Dargens website and kerjodando p2p server are down due to an issue at our host company Netrino ltd.

We received the following messages from them:

25th Jan 2007

Dear Customer

As you are no doubt aware, last year both Redbus Interhouse, the company from which we purchase most of our data centre space, and Telecity were both acquired by the investment group 3i to form TelecityRedbus, the single largest data centre operator in Europe. Since the date of the sale, wholesale prices have increased rapidly, partly due to the monopoly on space now held by the company, but also the scarcity of available space in the centres themselves with demand for space now far exceeding supply.

When we renewed our contracts last year, we were subjected to a significant price increase which saw our costs double overnight. We were determined not to compromise the excellent value of our dedicated servers and colocation space, and kept our retail pricing static despite the huge cost increase. We were able to achieve this partly because of the volume discounts we had negotiated on IP transit, but also by making savings numerous savings within the company. One of the savings was with our freelance staff which, we will be the first to admit, has had a serious affect on the quality of the support we have been able to give in the last year. Despite our best efforts to improve the situation, many customers have commented that the support we are currently able to offer is not as effective as a year ago, and this is something we are determined to change.

Once again, we come to renewal time for the first of our three data centre contracts and have found prices to increase by a further 60%. We have negotiated hard over the last month since we received the renewal price, but have been unable to achieve any reduction in this rate. We do not wish to be forced into making further savings to compromise our operation any further, and are also concerned about raising retail pricing in line with the costs as it would seriously upset the the excellent value our range of services offers.

After much contemplating, we have this week signed a deal with a new data centre provider, Blue Square Data, to relocate a large proportion of our operation to their flagship facility, Blue Square House in Maidenhead. The site is one of the strongest of the new data centres, with technical facilities of the same standard as the Docklands operations but at a price which offers far better value and will allow us to restart our investment in client support without having to make increases in our retail pricing. As contracts with Redbus expire over the coming year, we will be relocating the majority of servers currently housed in Redbus facilities to the new facility. Once a significant number of machines have moved, we will be relocating our London office to the Blue Square facility itself, giving us an on-site presence during office hours and ensuring any problem which requires attention to a physical server can be actioned far quicker than at the present time.

We will keep our two points of presence in Docklands ensuring we are able to take advantage of the IP transit deals we have negotiated, and have commissioned 2 x Gigabit circuits between the POP's and Blue Square to give a fully resilient backhaul to Docklands.

Your server is currently located in the area covered by our first contract, which expires at the end of the month. We therefore intend to relocate it to the new facility on the evening of Friday 26th January. The server will be shut down some time after 10pm and moved to the new facility where it will be reinstated on our new network node. We expect all work to be complete by 4am, although we aim to have no server offline for no longer than 2 hours. No IP address or other configuration changes are needed - the server will continue to operate as normal once active in the new building.

If you have any queries about this move, please drop us a line either by replying to this email, or calling on 0207 670 1670.




28th Jan 2007
It looks suspiciously like the disk in this machine is about to die. I might be able to rescue it for long enough to copy the files off, but to do so I need your root password as I can't even get as far as single user mode. Please let me know what it is if you would like me to attempt a rescue, if not, I think a reload with a new disk is the best solution.


30th Jan 2007

I've been over to the data centre this evening myself to try and get this working. It appears that /boot is corrupted, most probably due to the disk in your server failing. I'm going to have Luke take a look in the morning to see if he can work out a way of getting it to boot so you can recover data, but it is most likely that the disk will have to be replaced and a fresh OS installed.

I will update you once I have spoken to Luke. In the mean time, it would be sensible to ensure your backups are close at hand so that you can restore sites as necessary should a rebuild be needed.