News and Updates

Server Upgrades

December 26, 2018 – We are in the process of continuing the mandatory server updates which we had previously announced via letters to customers, socical media, and on this site (https://www.netsolinc.com/server-upgrades-2/ ). This round of updates will affect our site as well as some customers. We will continue updating here as we proceed.

Update 4:00pm – Most sites should be in good order now unless there are compatibility issues with the new versions of software which have been installed. We urge customers to thoroughly check their sites for functionality issues and let us know if any are found.

Update 6:20pm – We’ve finished checking through sites and we have identified a few issues. We will be reaching out to the customers who we know are impacted tomorrow. However, feel free to contact us if you think there is an issue which we have not contacted you about.

For questions or concerns about these upgrades, please email support@internetpro.net or call 256-547-6817.

tnolen2018-12-27T00:21:04-06:00December 26, 2018|News and Updates|Comments Off

Convincing Email Scam

December 7, 2018 – We’ve received a new email scam which is going out with our company name and at least one staff member mentioned. This scam seems to be linking to a virus-carrying spreadsheet, but there may be other versions. It seems to have been relayed through a compromised email account. The password on the account has been locked down, but users need to be aware that some of these legitimate looking emails did leave the system. Below is an example of one:

–BEGIN

Alert abuse – Spam you host!

Dear Admin domain,

You are receiving this message because you are listed as the contactfor the networks below.This message is intended for the person responsible for computersecurity at your site. If this is not the correct address, pleaseforward this message to the appropriate party.

Our logs show that malicious attempts were made from your networkagainst machines in our domain. This is definitely not an authorizedrequest and we view it as an attempt to probe our network for avulnerability.Either your machine has been compromised and is now being used tolaunch hostile activity, or a legitimate user is engaged in activitythat is probably in violation of your terms of service agreement. Ineither case, please investigate this matter.

At the bottom of this message we have attached parts of our logs inorder to help you track down the perpetrator (All times are GMT-0000).

We would appreciate a reply that this note has been received.

Stop spam – on our servers, our admins fix the attack from your domain details in our report .

Thank you,

Regards,
Trey Nolen
Senior Network Administrator

–END

At the bottom of the message is a link to the “Abuse Report” which is actually a document containing a virus. If you see one of these messages, please delete and ignore it.

Thank you.

tnolen2018-12-07T13:42:20-06:00December 7, 2018|News and Updates|Comments Off

Major WordPress Upgrade

December 7, 2018 – WordPress has released a major new update (version 5.0) and it is rolling out throughout the world. As it turns out, we are finding that some sites may not be compatible with the new update and this is causing some site owners to see the “white screen of death” when accessing their web page. This white page indicates a fatal error on the site and steps will need to be taken to modify the site so that it will again be functional.

Although we do monitor server functionality, we are unable to check each website and each page on the sites to verify they still function when an update like this occurs. This is very similar to the issue we are currently working where the server operating systems themselves must be upgraded – also resulting in some older, unmaintained sites producing issues. Our staff is going through sites today to try to locate any which are not functioning normally, but as a site owner, if you see issues, please contact us at support@internetpro.net to report it. We will do our best to get your site online, although it may be possible that your website developer may need to be enlisted to restore full functionality.

One of the main highlights of this new WordPress release is a new editor which completely changes the page editing experience. A WordPress-produced plugin is available called “Classic Editor” which will restore the old look/feel to your editor. However, this plugin is only going to be maintained until 2021, so it will be necessary to migrate to the new editor eventually.

tnolen2018-12-07T11:50:10-06:00December 7, 2018|News and Updates|Comments Off

Server Upgrades (Updated 11/20)

This post is to announce upcoming work which will have to be performed on several of our web servers. Servers run software in the same way that your home or work computer does, and periodically that software has to be upgraded as it reaches its end-of-life. Remember how Windows XP went away because it no longer received updates? That was because it reached its end-of-life. Here at Network Solutions, Inc. we run our web servers on what is called LTS (Long Term Support) releases, but even those have to be upgraded every 5 years.

Normally, the process of upgrading would be fairly seamless and we just do it “behind the scenes”. However, this time PHP (the scripting language powering most websites) is going to be getting a major release upgrade. The current PHP 5 version running on some of our web servers is also reaching end-of-life in December, so we are having to move to the newer PHP 7.x branch. This is significant because PHP 7.x has broken a lot of backward-compatibility in the interest of increased security.

What this means to you: If you have an older, unmaintained site (meaning that your web designer is not actively keeping your software up-to-date), your site may break or lose some functionality when these upgrades occur. If you are using WordPress, the core product is fine, but your theme or plugins may have trouble if they have not been updated. As part of your hosting, we automatically upgrade your WordPress core, plugins, and themes, but this only happens if updates are available. Plugins and themes are sometimes abandoned and no longer receive updates. This may result in problems on your site if those are incompatible with PHP 7.x.

If your site breaks completely, we will do our best to move you to a legacy server which will not receive security updates. It is imperative that you make arrangements to have the site updated/fixed before April when we will retire the legacy server completely. We will be glad to work with you on this process. If your site requires a small update/fix, we may be able to handle it for you with little to no cost. However, some sites may take a total redesign to become functional again. If you find that your site has lost functionality, please contact us at 256-547-6817 or email support@internetpro.net. Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to test every aspect of every page of every site we host, so we do rely on reports from the site owners to know if there is a problem with their site.

We will be contacting customers whose sites “live” on the servers moving from PHP 5.x to 7.x via postal mail as well. If you receive one of these letters, please do your best to check through your site thoroughly and let us know if there are any issues.

Update 11/20 – Some work will be commencing tonight through an extended maintenance windows starting after normal business hours. Some sites will be unavailable for a time as servers upgrade/reboot. We will do our best to minimize this downtime and will be posting updates here.

Update 6:45pm – The updates have started in earnest.

Update 8:35pm – We’ve had a setback on some of the updates. Some services are experiencing longer downtimes than expected.

Update 9:25pm – We’ve repaired the major issue and almost all issues are resolved. We will be working on an individual basis beyond this point until the next large update.

tnolen2018-11-21T03:25:58-06:00November 7, 2018|Internet, News and Updates|Comments Off

Virtual Machine Issue (Updated)

October 15, 2018 – 6:20am – One of our virtual machine hosts had a hardware problem this morning. It caused some of the virtual machines it was hosting to be slow to unresponsive for a brief time. Our proactive monitoring system alerted us to the issue and we are currently troubleshooting the problem. We will have to perform some emergency maintenance during the day today, but will migrate affected virtual machines to other hosts while this is done. Performance may be slightly degraded during this time but most likely won’t be noticeable. We will be posting updates here.

Update 6:55am – All machines are responding normally at this time.

Update 5:10pm – We are going to be rebooting some virtual machines to bring them up on temporary hardware. Normally, we can migrate them without a shutdown, but we are taking this opportunity to also upgrade the infrastructure, so a reboot is required. Most affected VMs will be down less than 1 minute.

October 16 10:45am – We are still running some VMs on a backup server and there was a hiccup with that server this morning. Some servers were interrupted for approximately 10 minutes. We are waiting on a hardware part to come in for the primary server that is not fully functional.

October 25, 5:10pm – We ran in to some issues with our backup server this morning so we’re going to perform some emergency maintenance this evening to move everything over to the primary server. The part has arrived and the OS has been updated to the latest release. There will be a short interruption on some machines as we perform a quick reboot.

Update 6:25pm – The work is complete and all is well with the world again (well, our little world). This should close out this issue.

If you have any questions about this issue, please contact us at support@internetpro.net.

tnolen2018-10-25T23:25:29-05:00October 15, 2018|News and Updates|Comments Off

Blocked Excel Files

October 4, 2018 3:00pm – We just got word that a bad signature update for our email virus scanner was causing all Excel spreadsheets being sent as attachments to be blocked as viruses. This update was sent out today and we are not sure of the exact time the issues started but it seems to have been around noon. We have applied a fix to the signature and Excel files should go through fine now. We apologize for the inconvenience.

tnolen2018-10-04T19:59:59-05:00October 4, 2018|News and Updates|Comments Off

Email Scam

October 4, 2018 – There is a relatively new scam going around on email which we have been receiving a lot of call/emails about. We thought it prudent to address this type of scam here on our site. The scams are a type of blackmail and they are happening because of the many data breaches of different companies you may have heard about in the news (for example, Target, Equifax, Yahoo!, and others). The other contributing factor is that many people use the same password information across a lot of sites. The scammers will send an email where for “proof” that they have hacked into your system, they give you an example password. This is a password garnered from one of the aforementioned data breaches. They then try to blackmail you into sending money so that they don’t destroy your system or publish embarrassing information about you.

Here is a common example:
–BEGIN

Hello! I’m a member of an international hacker group.

As you could probably have guessed, your account <your email addres> was hacked, because I sent message you from it.

Now I have access to you accounts! For example, your password for <your email address> is <password you may have used>

Within a period from July 7, 2018 to September 23, 2018, you were infected by the virus we’ve created, through an adult website you’ve visited. So far, we have access to your messages, social media accounts, and messengers. Moreover, we’ve gotten full damps of these data

. We are aware of your little and big secrets…yeah, you do have them. We saw and recorded your doings on porn websites. Your tastes are so weird, you know..

But the key thing is that sometimes we recorded you with your webcam, syncing the recordings with what you watched! I think you are not interested show this video to your friends, relatives, and your intimate one…

Transfer $800 to our Bitcoin wallet: 1HWnuWz77oXgb4LVBfB9fQAAgLqJJS7m7T If you don’t know about Bitcoin please input in Google “buy BTC”. It’s really easy.

I guarantee that after that, we’ll erase all your “data” 🙂

A timer will start once you read this message. You have 48 hours to pay the above-mentioned amount.

Your data will be erased once the money are transferred.
If they are not, all your messages and videos recorded will be automatically sent to all your contacts found on your devices at the moment of infection.

You should always think about your security.
We hope this case will teach you to keep secrets.
Take care of yourself.

–END

Understand that these are scams. The data from the data breaches has been published and is available on the web. This is a relatively easy way for scammers to extract money from you without have to have any real technical knowledge. It is just a trick, but it DOES highlight the importance of not reusing passwords.

We hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns regarding a scam like this. Contact us at 256-547-6817 or support@internetpro.net.

tnolen2018-10-18T14:30:40-05:00October 4, 2018|FAQ, News and Updates|Comments Off

Scheduled Maintenance (Updated)

October 2, 2018 – We’re going to be performing some scheduled maintenance from 12:00am to 3:00am on Thursday, October 4. During this time, there will be some email interruption as we upgrade our services and perform some filesystem maintenance. We expect the actual service interruption to be less than 30 minutes. The upgrades include updates to the Country Authentication Restriction, webmail and portal interfaces, unified spam list and uncaught spam reporting.

Block people from other countries from accessing your email – even if they have the correct username/password.
You can now force your connection to our mail server to be encrypted (TLS) – just like the pages where you enter credit cards for buying merchandise. This protects your passwords and your data.
Filters are now available in all web interfaces. If you aren’t using these, you should look at them because it allows you to automagically sort or delete incoming email.
If you think you get too much spam, you can sign up to be a “Spam Feedback Volunteer” where you will put all of your uncaught spam into a special folder so that it can be analyzed. Rules for blocking that type of spam will then be created for future emails — not just for your benefit, but for others as well!
Webmail interface improvements
Updated calendar in Tuxedo to support invitations, notifications, etc!
Better foreign character support and better attachment management

If you have any questions about how to utilize these features, please contact us at 256-547-6817 or email support@internetpro.net.

Update October 4, 2018 12:22am – The maintenance has been completed and all services seem to be running normally. Please let us know if you have any issues.

tnolen2018-10-04T05:23:37-05:00October 2, 2018|Internet, News and Updates|Comments Off

Phone System Change (Updated)

On Tuesday, September 4, 2018 at 10:30am, our phone lines are scheduled to port over to a new service. Along with this change we will be updating to a new phone system as well. As a result, our phone service may be unavailable Tuesday morning for a short period of time. If you are attempting to reach us during that time and are unable to, please email support@internetpro.net.

This system changeover will allow our technicians to be more reachable in the field to allow us to provide better service to our customers. We are moving over to one of our two new telephony platforms which we are now selling and supporting. Please check out our unified communications page (or see the Telephone menu above) for more information about the systems we are using. We can save you money on your phone bill, provide more features, and remotely support your system to handle issues more quickly than you may be used to on your current system.

Update September 4 10:35am – Our phone lines are currently down for the changeover. We expect the new system to be up shortly.

Update 10:45am – Our lines are now ringing into the new phone system. We apologize for any inconvenience, but we are up and running now.

Update September 5, 2018 – 9:00am – Apparently, our toll free number (877-886-6868) and an old published number (256-547-6868) did not port over and are returning a fast busy signal. We are working on that issue. In the mean time, please use our main number of 256-547-6817.

Update September 7, 2018 – The toll free number is now working.

Update September 11, 2019 – Our old legacy number of 256-547-6868 is also working.

tnolen2018-09-12T14:01:13-05:00August 30, 2018|News and Updates, VOIP|Comments Off

Comcast Issues (updated)

June 29, 2018 – At approximately 11:30am CDT, Comcast started experiencing a nationwide issue. From what we can tell, it is mostly a routing problem and does not affect all customers or all internet sites. However, locally, customers of ClearVoice VOIP phone service are experiencing issues when their ISP is Comcast. There are also numerous reports of websites which are unavailable including Alarm.com. This issue is unrelated to the bad weather experienced by our area yesterday. Comcast tech support is unavailable at this time due to high call volume, but we will post updates as soon as we find out more.

Update: 1:54pm – News outlets are starting to pick up this story. Apparently, the issue is not internal to Comcast’s network, but is actually a fiber cut to one of their large peers. Here are some related articles:
CNBC
CNET
Newsweek

As of right now, there is still no estimated time to repair.

Update 5:00pm – As of now, there is no real news from Comcast. Right now, it is just a “wait and see” situation.

Update 7:30am 6/30/18 – The outage has been resolved. It actually got resolved around the time of the last update, but Comcast did not make an announcement. It has been announced that the fiber cuts causing the problems were in the CenturyLink network and the Zayo network.

tnolen2018-07-02T13:39:32-05:00June 29, 2018|News and Updates|Comments Off