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December 27, 2011 – We thought it important for us to weigh in on the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) issue which also covers the PROTECT-IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act).   These acts are ill conceived and will have far reaching effects on the internet as it is known today. We urge you to read about these acts and contact  your government representatives to let them know you are against them. So you can be more informed, we are posting some links to information about these acts.  The mainstream media is not covering them because the companies that run the media are the ones lobbying for their passage.

What SOPA Means For Education, Technology, and the Future of the Internet
Article from The Foundry
SOPA for Dummies  – A simplified technical explanation of what is going on.
Wikipedia article for PROTECT-IP
Wikipedia article for SOPA

There are many other great articles online.   Please take some time to look around and get better informed about this important issue.

Historically, Network Solutions, Inc. has used GoDaddy as our registrar for registering domain names.  Because of GoDaddy’s support for SOPA, we are in the process of moving all of the domains we are authoritative for away from GoDaddy to Namecheap who is against SOPA.   We will make every effort to boycott any company we deal with who supports these acts.

**Note: Our customers may receive messages about their domains being unlocked and moved.  This is all part of our migration to NameCheap and is nothing to worry about.

November 16, 2011 – Comcast seems to be experiencing a system wide outage in the Gadsden, Alabama area.  The outage started at approximately 12:26 am.  We are working on finding out additional information.  The local system is running fine, but traffice is not able to flow outside of the Tuscaloosa routers where Comcast meets the rest of the internet.

Update: 1:17am – The outage is unplanned and priority critical, but there is no current estimated time to repair (ETR).

Update:  3:15am –  The repairs have been made.  Looks like Comcast got lucky again and had a major outage that occurred during off business hours.  We’re glad to see they are back online.  We have not been able to get an explanation of what happened yet, but if we do, we will post it here.

November 15, 2011 – AT&T Network Engineers will be performing a planned maintenance on Birmingham-Alabama Access Router 1.  The work will be performed on 11/29/2011, during the maintenance window of 12:00AM-6:00AM, local router time. AT&T’s goal is to successfully complete the task and restore service within the stated time frame.

AT&T Network Engineers will be performing an IOS upgrade. 

Because of our dynamic routing, we do not expect any impact on services, although it is possible that persistent
network connections may disconnect and then reconnect.

We wanted to say thanks to the guys at Telsystems for doing a great job on our new phone system.  We needed a system that would let us tie our new annex office to our main office seamlessly and Telesystems really came through to provide it.   Our new system is an ESI with both digital and voip handsets.  When you call our office, our staff may be in either office, and you, the caller, can’t tell the difference.  The system also has door access capabilites which mean that when our staff members leave the annex office, our phones automatically update our voice mail messages to let callers know we are out of the office AND puts a light on the system to let the people in the main office know we are not in the building!

In addition to all this, while our techs are out of the office, you have the option of trying them on their cell phones.  If they can’t answer, you can still leave a message in their voice mail box.  All of this allows us to be more accessible by you, our customer, so we can provide you with the best support possible.

Thanks again to Telesystems for  providing us with a quality system that is exactly what we needed  to support our customers and the  needs of our growing business!

November 11, 2011  In an effort to further curtail spam, we have added two more blacklists to our mail server.  These blacklists are run by Mailspike.  We are now utilizing two of their lists – their reputation data (blocking the IPs with the worst reputation for sending spam) and the zero-hour data which blocks IPs which are actively part of a spam attack.  You can read more about the lists here.  If you would like to check an IP address against these lists, you can do it here.

To check an IP address against other blacklists, you might want to visit this site: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx.

If you are having trouble with legitimate email being blocked, please call us at 256-547-6817 or email support@internetpro.net.  We will be deciding whether or not to keep using these blacklists based on customer feedback.

We have run out of room in our main office located at 226 South 5th Street.   So, in order to accommodate our growth, we have moved some of our staff to our new annex located at 1041 Forrest Avenue.  Most people will not notice the difference, as our new office is to be used as a call center and base of operations for some of our technical staff who are on the road most of the time.  However, for customers requiring a face-to-face meeting with our staff, we will be utilizing the conference room facilities at our new location.   Our expansion to the new location will also allow us to serve you better because we will be using the extra room at the main office to store more inventory and add bench space so we can speed up service work by having more machines running at once and by having to special order less parts.

We want to thank our customers for making our continued growth possible!

October 19, 2011 – We’ve had several reports from our users who have gotten calls from people posing as tech support.  At least one said they were from Microsoft.  These callers are telling people that their computers are infected with spyware and viruses.  For proof, they ask you to go to the event viewer in Windows and point out a bunch of errors in the logs.  These are SCAMMERS!   It is quite normal for Windows to generate errors as it boots up.  The reason for this is that some services depend on other services and sometimes start before the ones they depend on.   These scammers will then direct the victim to their web page to download “utilities” to remove the spyware.  These “utilities” are actually spyware that can log your keystrokes, pages you visit and allow the scammers to control your computer.  If someone calls you to inform you that your computer is infected, please call us before downloading anything!  We will be glad to assist you to verify that your computer is OK.  Our number is 256-547-6817 or 877-886-6868.