This post will be used to provide regular updates on the issue we are facing with one of our shared Windows servers.

24-Dec-2011 4am IST: All pending issues except the Plesk Control Panel login have been fixed. To resolve this issue, the server has to be put in maintenance mode. To minimize the downtime, we have asked the Plesk Parallels team to proceed with it during the day time today (Saturday early morning in Asia – Saturday midnight in Europe – Friday late night in North America). This is to minimize the inconvenience for users on the server who have not been affected by this issue. During this time, there will be interruptions due to reboot of the server. Please stand by for further updates on this.

23-Dec-2011 1pm IST: The backup of all sites on the server is now completed. We are escalating this ticket now to the Plesk Parallels team so that they can investigate and fix.

23-Dec-2011 5.30am IST: The Data Center team has asked us to decide if to go to Plesk Parallels team to investigate this issue or to restore the server.

We prefer going to Plesk Parallels team as they have almost always been able to fix the issue. Though there is a possibility that the Plesk team might also advise us to do a restore, trying them before restoring gives us a chance to get the server up and running without a restore. So we have decided to use that route. Before doing that, we are starting a backup process to backup the latest data on the server, so that in case of a major issue, we can restore to this latest version of the backup.

23-Dec-2011 3am IST: The DC team has decided to upgrade to the latest version of Plesk to see if this fixes the issue.

23-Dec-2011 1am IST: The DC team is still investigating the issue.

22-Dec-2011 11pm IST: Data Center team is still investigating the issue. They are trying to check if Plesk was moved to use MSSQL server as the database, as it appears it automatically switched to it (we do not change the default installation of Plesk on the server.)

Issue: On 22-Dec-2011 at 6pm IST, we realized that some the key services (such as Plesk Control Panel, Email services) were automatically switched off and we could not start the services even as an administrator on the server. While most of the clients on the server are unaffected, six clients have reported either loss of email access or issue with logging into the control panel. After attempting to fix it manually, we escalated it to the Data Center to investigate at around 9pm IST.

We will continue to update the status of this issue here on this post, until the issue is resolved.