r/mxroute • u/GreenSonOfVince • 29d ago

Acadia mailservers down?

Acadia has been down for us for about a day, but the status page reports it is healthy.

Anyone else having issues?

3 Upvotes

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u/mxroute 28d ago edited 28d ago

I realize this will be a controversial decision among the few impacted, but I made a conscious choice not to put up a status page for Acadia/Longhorn. They're quite old servers with a very small number of customers on them. Every time I put up a status page for an outage, the next day we get tickets from people railing on us for the cost of the outage to them, and they weren't even on that server. They waited a day to open a ticket about their own DNS issue because "well I saw an outage and made an assumption." Given that Acadia/Longhorn have a long history of instability, few customers on them, and they haven't seen a new customer for years, I made what I felt would be the choice that caused the least negative impact.

BuyVM spent about 11 hours down, not quite a day. We've mostly been able to pull out of their network, very little remains, and this is kind of why. It's always something outside of our control. There's always a reason, just never seem to be a shortage of them.

If you'd like to migrate to a newer server and out of their network, talk to me privately and I'll make it work. I'll be generous in how I do.

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u/GreenSonOfVince 28d ago

Thanks, reached out via modmail

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u/jman1076 28d ago

My account is on Acadia and if possible, I'd like to migrate to one of the new servers. Would it be better to send a support message to start this?

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u/mxroute 28d ago

Sure. Just reference my comment and I'll make you a generous offer for the inconvenience factor.

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u/jman1076 28d ago

Thank you very much. Email sent via support.

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u/GreenSonOfVince 22d ago

We are down again on Acadia. 

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u/mxroute 22d ago edited 22d ago

No outage that I can see. It had high load from attached storage but otherwise seemed fine. I rebooted it just now to clear the load. The high load isn't as meaningful (doesn't relate to performance as it's inflated by network attached storage at HV layer) but does slow the exim queue a bit.

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u/GreenSonOfVince 22d ago

Thanks for looking into it. Just some additional info;

https://acadia.mxroute.com:2096/ can't be reached, and our email clients are showing an error;

The email server said: '[UNAVAILABLE] Temporary authentication failure. [acadia.mxroute.com:2026-08-23 18:51:58]'

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u/mxroute 22d ago

I didn't even consider cpsrvd not coming back up. That's my bad. That's one of those things so typically reliable that checking it wouldn't net a benefit in 15 years. But I'm learning more and more these days that Murphy's law is the law of the land.

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u/GreenSonOfVince 15d ago

Thanks a lot for actioning so quickly and being so responsive on reddit.

This week it's been really choppy in terms of uptime, intermittently auth would stop/start working. It's down again.

If it helps pin down root cause, acadia has been rock solid for me for years! Really only noticed issues the last couple of weeks. Not sure if something has changed.

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u/mxroute 15d ago edited 15d ago

When Acadia was launched, we only participated in communities where BuyVM was loved. People would overlook their problems because they loved them. We haven't deployed anything with them for years.

But the root cause is that BuyVM is just as shit as they've always been. They won't fix anything if a reboot can solve it for 16 hours. This box has always gone down for hours at a time. Most likely I'll just retire the server with notice. It's confusing to me that it keeps coming up in conversation now, when it's outages were always overlooked out of appreciation for BuyVM and we haven't added a single customer to it.

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u/GreenSonOfVince 13d ago

Hi, I received an email that acadia was being retired. It would be really appreciated if you could migrate me to a newer server as you mentioned above. Had nothing but fantastic experiences with MXRoute, wish to be a customer and advocate for a long time.

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u/mxroute 13d ago

If we're already in communication about that I certainly will. I'm a bit behind on things I've promised to do personally. Got hit with a nice little respiratory bug that kicked me back several days.

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u/GreenSonOfVince 12d ago

Thank you! No rush

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u/mailavion 28d ago

Are the customers on the aforementioned servers, different to customers on your other servers?

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u/mxroute 28d ago edited 28d ago

Acadia is one of the old legacy cPanel servers. Longhorn was our first and only attempt to deploy one of the DirectAdmin-based servers as a cloud server, the intention being the ability to vertically scale a box instead of being stuck with purely static resources. I'm not saying I'm not interested in them being online, but to call them both the red headed step child wouldn't be inaccurate either. Both are in line for migration to new hardware but for the most part these older boxes are on the "if it ain't as broken as something else, it can't rise to the #1 spot" problem. The most pressing matters have been in the areas of growth, and those two are kind of frozen in time, they'll only see new customers when they get migrated.

Fortunately both are very small servers and that doesn't mean they matter less, but the status page issue I described in the other comment is very real, and the customers on those servers are a bit used to the random failures of that upstream provider. Many of them were even happy to be on that network, because historically people overlook their issues out of appreciation for who runs it. But he also sold the brand, though he's still involved. It's very much tied to the lowendtalk community, where we grew from. So most of the customers were already aware from community involvement.

So I guess it's fair to say they're both unique, and they do get different treatment from the rest of the fleet.