tnolen

May 21, 2011 – We are going to have to perform some emergency maintenance tonight on a couple of systems.  The maintenance will start at midnight Saturday and may take a few hours into Sunday morning.  The maintenance window is 12:00am – 3:00am on May 22, 2011.   During this time, some backups may not be available for restoration as the web interface for one backup server will be unavailable.  Also, we will be performing updates on a NAS and a virtual server host which will result in some virtual private servers being unavailable during the maintenance.   The emergency maintenance is required to replace failed hard drives in two RAID arrays on different machines which did not rebuild properly when the drives were originally replaced.   Because of the redundant nature of the arrays, no data loss is expected, but the hardware must be reset for the repairs to take place.

Update:  This maintenance is contingent on the rapture not happening tonight at 6:00pm.  If the rapture does occur, we will reevaluate the availability of our technical staff and may reschedule the maintenance window.

Update 2: May 22, 2011 – 12:43am.  The maintenance has been completed without incident and ahead of schedule.  All servers and virtual servers are reporting no errors. We are also happy to report that the end of the world seems to have not come and we look forward to providing you with quality internet services until it does!

April 27, 2011 – Due to a large complex of severe storms, Comcast is apparently having an outage in Tuscaloosa.  The Gadsden area feeds back to Tuscaloosa, so internet for Gadsden customers is down.  The Comcast system in Gadsden is OK, so traffic will pass internally (for instance from a home on Comcast to a business on Comcast), but the internet connection in Tuscaloosa being down keeps customers from getting to the internet.  We are working on finding out an ETR (estimated time to repair) from Comcast.   This outage is also affecting phone service for Comcast customers.

April 27, 2011 – 8:55am – We just got word that the damage is actually in the Cullman area.  There are Comcast crews from Gadsden and Huntsville headed to the damage, but they have not arrived to assess the problems yet, so there is still no ETR.

April 27, 2011 – 12:55pm – The word now is that the damage is actually in Tuscaloosa AND up north toward the Guntersville area.  Some of the main circuits run through Tuscaloosa, and we have heard reports that 2 miles of fiber has been ripped out as a tornado came through.  Crews are onsite working, but more storms are coming, so they are not sure if the crews are going to be able to work straight through.  Right now, they are expecting a resolution some time tomorrow.

April 27, 2011 – 11:00pm – Comcast seems to have resolved their issues or at least enough of them to restore connectivity to Gadsden.  It has been a rough day weather wise, and we applaud the Comcast crews for getting it done!

April 30, 2011 – Comcast had another outage lasting from approximately 3:30pm to 11:30pm today.  This was apparently due to the ongoing efforts in the heavily damaged Tuscaloosa area.  We expect more periodic outages in the coming days, although Comcast has not made any specific announcements.

March 17, 2011 –  We will be making a change to one of our circuits to prepare for the addition of more bandwidth and more redundancy to our network.  This change is scheduled for 12:00am on Saturday, March 19.   We expect there to be a downtime of about 10-15 minutes sometime between 12:00am and 4:00am as the routes propagate.

March 19, 2011 – Maintenance completed.  No downtime experienced.

AT&T Network Engineers will be performing a planned maintenance on
Birmingham-Alabama Gigabit Access Router 1. The work will be performed on
3/30/2011, during the maintenance window of 12:00AM-6:00AM, CDT. AT&T's
goal is to successfully complete the task and restore service within the
stated time frame. 

We apologize for any inconvenience that you may experience.
Please be assured all AT&T authorized maintenance activities are to ensure
optimal performance of our network facilities and equipment.

AT&T Network Engineers will be performing an IOS upgrade and a card
replacement. 

This work should not impact network availability.  Please contact
us at support@internetpro.netif you have any questions.

Update: March 30, 2011

The work has been rescheduled from 3/30/2011 to 4/13/2011 and it will
be performed during the standard maintenance window of 12:00AM-6:00AM
local router time.

March 7, 2011 – We upgraded our alternate webmail interface today.  It is an incremental update that adds a few new features including return receipt and delivery status notification. This new version also lets you check the number of messages in a folder and the size of that folder.  The performance of moving or copying all the messages in a folder, renaming or deleting folders is improved. There is now a link in the “compose” window that lets you pick identities. There are also numerous bug fixes and performance enhancements.  The alternate webmail interface can be found at https://webmail.internetpro.net.

January 20, 2011 10:05am – Our mail servers have been blacklisted by some domains because of an ongoing backscatter attack.  We are working to isolate the issue.

Backscatter is a type of spam attack where spam mail is sent to email servers with forged header information for the Envelope Sender address. If the email server bounces this email back to the sender, a bounced message usually has the Envelope Recipient set to the Envelope Sender of the original message, and the undeliverable message notification will be sent to the email address of the innocent user. There can also be other unsuspecting email servers in the message path and in a large spam campaign the target systems can be flooded with these backscatter spam messages.

January 20 10:30am  – It looks like the mail issue is not actually a backscatter attack, but instead is the result of a misconfigured email list.  The list has thousands of members and was set up in such a way that the members could all post.  Each post resulted in thousands of sent emails.  We are working with the customer who configured the list to resolve the issue.  We are also cleaning up emails coming from the list and are working to get our servers delisted from blacklists now that the source of the issue has been isolated.

January 20 10:45am – Most email is flowing normally now, although there are a few domains still delaying delivery of email from our server.  Notably aol.com and yahoo.com are still deferring our email.  These emails are NOT being rejected and WILL go through, but delivery may take longer than usual for those domains (and possibly some others).

January 20, 11:15am –  Yahoo.com is passing our email now.  AOL is the last holdout that we have found.  We have submitted a request to them for a change in our status, so all we can do now is wait for AOL to get it together.

December 2, 2001 – 9:09am  – Several of our email servers were blacklisted by Comcast for spam.  We believe this was due to the earlier attacks on weak passwords by spammers.  We have implemented a work around and have requested to be delisted by Comcast.  Our customers may have seen issues over the last day or so with delivering email to comcast.net email addresses and possibly some other domains hosted by Comcast.   No email was lost – it was just delayed.   Our workaround has already taken effect and all email destined for Comcast has now been delivered.   We apologize for any inconvenience that may have been caused.

Update 9:45am – We have been removed from Comcast’s blacklist.  All operations have returned to noramal.