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CableOne Issues

August 3, 2016 – Last night CableOne covering the Calhoun County area did an update.  This update changed the routing of their IP addresses.  It seems that every customer with a static IP address has lost service and will have to obtain a new IP from CableOne and program their router with the new information.  Unfortunately, CableOne send out no updates about this happening.  Of course, we are also experiencing an unrelated phone issue which is making it difficult for our customers to reach us regarding this problem.  We are trying to reach out to customers who we know have static IPs.

 

2016-08-03T15:25:22-05:00August 3, 2016|News and Updates|Comments Off on CableOne Issues

Phone System Issue

August 3, 2016 – 9:30am  – For some reason, the time reset on our phone system making it think that it was after hours.  We have manually reset the time now, so everything is working.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update: 9:50am – Apparently, we are still not able to take incoming calls. We are checking into it.  In the mean time, please email support@internetpro.net for help.

Update: 10:15am – We just found out that the issue is with Verizon who has our main number.  The number is no longer routing properly, so even our failover system won’t work.  Our DID numbers and our toll free number is working.  If you need assistance, please call 256-467-6314 or our toll free number at 877-886-6868.

Update: 12:55pm – Phones are back online!!!   Woohoo!

 

 

2016-08-03T17:57:27-05:00August 3, 2016|News and Updates|Comments Off on Phone System Issue

Tool for Stopping Windows 10 Upgrade

We have been receiving NUMEROUS reports of computers automatically upgrading to Windows 10 without input from the owner.   Although Windows 10 is fine for many users, there may be reasons that you do not want to upgrade.  For instance, older versions of Quickbooks are not compatible with it.  There are also other software programs, like EagleSoft which may not run using Windows 10.  Or, you may just be comfortable with your current version and just don’t want to upgrade.

Lately, Microsoft has been aggressively pushing the upgrade.  The prompt for the upgrade will pop up and if the user does not decline or delay the upgrade, it will happen.  What we’ve been seeing is that people who leave their computers on overnight are frequently returning to find the machine upgraded.  This is because the computer is unattended for hours and no one is present to decline the upgrade.

If you are on a business network using a “domain”, this will not happen and you don’t have to worry about it.  However, if you are on a “workgroup” or using an individual computer (at work or home), this upgrade may present a problem.

For those of you who do NOT want to upgrade to Windows 10 unexpectedly, we have found a tool called GWX Control Panel which will allow you to turn off the “Get Windows 10” notifications and disable the “Upgrade to Windows 10” behavior on Windows 7 and 8.  You can click HERE to get that tool.  The user guide can be found here.   The tool can do many things, but to disable the notifications and the automatic upgrade, you just run the app.  A window like the one below will appear:

GWX-cp

The computer we took this screenshot on had Windows 10 already installed, so the upper left button is grayed out.  You will see a button that says “Click to Disable ‘Get Windows 10’ App” instead of the grayed on which says “Click to Enable ‘Get Windows 10’ App (restore icon)”.   Click that one and the button which says “Click to Prevent Windows 10 Upgrades”.

After clicking those two buttons, it is safe to just delete the file you downloaded for the GWX Control Panel app.   If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at support@internetpro.net or call 256-547-6817.

2016-05-25T15:22:14-05:00May 25, 2016|News and Updates|Comments Off on Tool for Stopping Windows 10 Upgrade

Email Forgery FAQ

This article aims to answer some questions we frequently receive regarding spam emails which seem to come from yourself or a user you know.

Q: How does someone make it look like he/she sent an email to themselves or make it so that it looks like it comes from someone I know?
A: The email system was designed in the beginning to behave exactly like the postal mail system.  Postal mail was very familiar and reliable, so it seemed reasonable from a programmer’s point of view to create a system which behaved in the same way.  As such, there is no “sender verification”.  This means that there are no controls in place to verify the sender is who he says he is.   With postal mail, you can send a letter with a fake return address and name on the envelope and you can do exactly the same thing in email.  All you have to do is go into your email program and change the Name and Email Address fields in your settings before you send the email.  Spammers and scammers frequently use this to help trick someone to opening an attachment and/or reading the email because people are more likely to read an email from someone they know.

Q: How would I know which email address it really came from?
A: You don’t.  The email system does not require sender authentication, so there is no way to tell who an email really comes from.  Sometimes the headers (envelope) of the email can be used to track a sender based on the IP address it came from, but this process usually requires a court order and it still may not track the email to an individual user.  For instance, if an email is sent from a restaurant which offers free wireless internet, the court order may determine that the email came from the restaurant itself, but would not be able to determine the individual patron.

Q: How do we know what to blacklist so we do not get more email from this offender in the future?
A: You don’t.  Because changing the sender is so trivial, the scammer/spammer can easily change the From address on subsequent messages to get around your blacklist.  Spam is a very difficult issue and this is one of the reasons why.   You cannot rely on filtering systems to make your email 100% safe – you must be diligent in your inspection of emails.  Do not open an attachment that you are not sure is legitimate.  For example, if someone you “know” sends you an attachment you aren’t expecting, contact them and make sure they actually sent it before opening it.

 

2018-03-07T22:58:46-06:00May 18, 2016|FAQ|Comments Off on Email Forgery FAQ

Widespread Comcast Outage

We are currently experiencing an outage with  Comcast who is our upstream internet provider for our office. Due to this calls into our phone system are not stable and may be dropped. If our phone system is down when you call you will be prompted to leave a voicemail that will be delivered to our technicians to call you back. Currently we know that the outage is affecting companies as far north as Huntsville.

This outage is not affecting web hosting and email services. We have a dedicated fiber optic link that is providing internet for those services.

We will post any updates as we receive them and apologize for any inconvenience.

 

2016-05-12T16:47:34-05:00April 25, 2016|News and Updates|Comments Off on Widespread Comcast Outage

Hosted Exchange Update

April 8, 2016 – We applied an update to our Hosted Exchange services to improve compatibility with the new Outlook 2016 version.  As a result, users may get a message similar to the one below.  Please place a check mark next to “Don’t ask me about this website again” and hit “Allow” if you see this popup message.   It will not affect your security in any way and once you accept the message, you will not be bothered again by it.

If you have any questions or concerns about this update, please email support@internetpro.net or call our office at 256-547-6817.

exchangemessage

2016-04-09T00:08:34-05:00April 9, 2016|News and Updates|Comments Off on Hosted Exchange Update

Site Maintenance

April 6, 2016 – We are experiencing some performance problems with our website (https://www.netsolinc.com) and we are trying to isolate the cause.  While we do some troubleshooting, you may notice the site not behaving properly.  This is temporary and we are aware of the issue.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

 

Update – April 11, 2016 – Well it took us a few days to track it down, but the issue ended up being the “Latest Virus Alerts” feed at the bottom of the site.  We pull that data from Sophos and apparently they moved the feed.  Our site was slowing down because the feed was timing out and the site was not rendering until that happened.  We’ve updated the footer with a new feed from the same company.

Additional – While working on the site, we took the opportunity to make some adjustments so that the netsolinc.com site is completely served by SSL, meaning that all of the information on the site is served to customers through encrypted traffic.  Google and other companies are making a push to move all traffic to SSL in the future.

 

2016-04-12T12:43:01-05:00April 6, 2016|News and Updates|Comments Off on Site Maintenance

Phone Line Trouble

March 28, 2106 – 10:00am:  We are experiencing issues with our phone lines resulting in callers getting a busy signal when trying to reach us.  We are also having trouble calling out.  A very few calls are able to come through, but not all. If you are having trouble, please try reaching us at support@internetpro.net and we will do our best to contact you.  We have contacted our phone provider and are working to resolve the problem.  Updates will be posted here as soon as we have them.

 

11:30am – Our phone services have been restored.  Apparently, the SIP password for our upstream connection was cracked and our lines were being used by third-parties to make unauthorized calls.  This used all of the call paths we are authorized for and caused our lines to be busy.

2016-03-28T16:30:06-05:00March 28, 2016|News and Updates|Comments Off on Phone Line Trouble

Emergency Maintenance

February 19, 2016 – A critical vulnerability has been identified in the Linux operating system.  This issue affects many of the services running on Linux servers and can result in the server being completely taken over.   Most of our infrastructure is based on Linux and as such, we are having to patch this vulnerability as soon as possible.  You can read more about the issue in this article if interested.   For most updates on Linux, a reboot of the server is not necessary.  However, this particular vulnerability affects many services, some of which cannot be restarted without a reboot.   For that reason, we will be doing emergency maintenance which will require updates/reboots of many of our servers.  We are scheduling this to happen between 11:00pm Saturday the 20th and 2:00am Sunday the 21st.   During this time, some services will be temporarily unavailable including email, web hosting, and offsite backup services.   Not all services will be unavailable at the same time, but there will be disruptions periodically during the maintenance window.  We will post more updates here as the issue is addressed.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at support@internetpro.net or call 256-547-6817.

Update 4:28am February 21, 2016 – Our maintenance went a little longer than planned but all servers should be safe from the vulnerability found in the Linux OS.  We also were able to implement some upgrades on our virtual server hosts while we were working on the issue.  These upgrades result in faster virtual machines and more features.  If you have any issues with your web page which we missed, please email us at support@internetpro.net or call 256-547-6817.

Thank you and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Update 10:15pm February 22 – One of our virtual server hosts did not properly upgrade and we are having to work on that server.  It is affecting some VPS machines and websites.

Update 11:00pm February 22 – The server update problem has been corrected and all hosts should again be online and functioning properly.

 

2016-02-22T04:59:14-06:00February 19, 2016|News and Updates|Comments Off on Emergency Maintenance

Fax Trouble

February 19, 2016 – We have found that our fax line (256-547-6818) is temporarily out of service.   We are working with AT&T to get the service restored.  In the mean time, if you need to send us a document, please scan it and send it to support@internetpro.net.   We will post an update here when the service is restored.

 

Update- The issue with AT&T has been resolved and we are again able to receive faxes!

 

 

2016-02-19T15:22:43-06:00February 19, 2016|News and Updates|Comments Off on Fax Trouble
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