News and Updates

We’ve had some reports of email being delayed or not getting delivered at all today.   During our first tests, we were not able to reproduce the issue.  However, we have now been able to and the issue is resolved.

The problem had to do with the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which we support.  You can find out more about SPF at Wikipedia.  In a nutshell, SPF helps reduce spam by making it harder for spammers to hijack email domains.

The best practices for setting up SPF is to trust a list produced by The Trusted Forwarder Global Whitelist (www.trusted-forwarder.org) which provides a global whitelist for SPF users. It provides a way of allowing legitimate email that is sent through known, trusted email forwarders from being blocked by SPF checks because the forwarders do not use some sort of envelope-from rewriting system.

Unfortunately, the trusted-forwarder.org domain is failing to resolve today.  We do not know what the issue is, but their DNS servers are reporting SERVFAIL.  This was causing our SPF system to report “Bad SPF Record” and to reject email with a temporary error.  A temporary error means that the email delivery attempts will continue for up to 5 days in the hopes that the problem will be resolved.

We have removed the trusted-forwarder.org lookups from our system, and therefore have eliminated the temporary failures.  Email that has been delayed is beginning to be delivered now.

Note: This issue ONLY affected domains without a valid SPF record.  That is why we were not able to replicate it at first, as all of the domains we tested with had SPF properly setup.

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

Monday, March 18, 2013 – The storms that came through have brought some havoc with them.  In our area, cellular service is very spotty right now.  We believe the cell networks are overloaded because of so many IP phones being down.  Comcast has MANY customers down in the Gadsden area as does Alabama Power.   Our datacenter experienced several power failures, but our UPS and generator systems operated as designed and we experienced no issues to service.

Elsewhere in town, many business networks are down because of power surges and failures.  We at Network Solutions, Inc. will be working diligently to restore operations to our customers as quickly as we can.  We do appreciate your patience as we try to address the needs of the community in a timely manner.

We are also offering access to our annex building for customers who do not have power and are unable to get their systems up and running.  Our annex has a 50Mbit internet connection, wireless, power, etc.   We can move your server and (at least some) workstations to our office to get you up and running to maintain business continuity.  Just give us a call if you need us at 256-547-6817!

AT&T Network Engineers will be performing a planned maintenance on Birmingham-Alabama Gigabit Access Router 1.

The work will be performed on 3/25/2013, 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. 

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

Please refer to the following information:

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

Due to the redundant nature of our network, downtime is not expected, however there may be some increased latency as routes propagate.

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

We are currently having issues with our phone system. We apologize for the inconvenience and we are working on getting the issue resolved. Thank you for your patience.

Update:  Special thanks to Telesystems for coming right out to get us back up and going within 10 minutes of our call to them.  The system was only having trouble for about 45 minutes.  The problem was that internally it worked fine but we could not receive calls, so it took us a bit to notice the problem.

t looks like we’ve gotten on a blacklist for spam.  We are working on stopping the spam going through our servers and getting removed from the blacklist.  In the meantime, you may have issues sending  to some recipients whose ISPs are using SPAMHAUS as a blacklist.   We will be posting updates as things change.

Update: We have delisted our mail server, but have not yet found the source of the bot causing the issue.  We *may* get re-listed as a result.  In the meantime, email should flow normally as soon as the blacklist servers with recipient ISP’s update.

Updaete 2/26/2013:  It looks like we are staying off the blacklist.  Email should flow fine, but if you are having any issues, please contact us at support@internetpro.net or 256-547-6817.

One of our web servers is experiencing some hardware issues.  It has rebooted itself twice today (2/20/2013).   This particular server was scheduled to be replaced in the coming weeks anyway, but these issues have moved up our timetable.  We will be migrating customer sites from the old server to a new one.  Normally, this would be done during scheduled maintenance hours, but due to the hardware failure, we will be migrating the sites as quickly as possible.  Downtime should be minimal or nonexistent as we will be running both servers simultaneously.  However, it is possible that changes posted to a site may disappear if they are posted during the migration. Please keep an eye on your site functionality and let us know if you experience any problems.  Please note that this server only handles a fraction of our customers so most sites/customers will not see any changes at all.

Update 2/28/2013 – We found the issue – a power supply with an intermittent problem.  We’ve migrated many sites, but there are more to go.  But, now that the server is more stable, we will be taking our time to migrate the sites so that there is very little to no interruption in service.

For issues concerning this, please email support@internetpro.net or call 256-547-6817.

We have updated our phone system to answer with an auto attendant during the day.  We did this so that our calls will be answered in a more consistent way.  We do know some people don’t like auto attendant, so a live person can always be reached during business hours by pressing 0 (zero).  However, the auto attendant is designed to route you to the person you need to talk with for your issue, so we recommend listening to the options and choosing the one that best fits your needs.   You can also dial directly to an extension at any time the automated system is talking.  For a list of company extensions, please visit our Contact page or press 6 when the auto attendant answers.

A new version of WordPress has been released which addresses 37 bugs and some security issues in the 3.5 series.  We will be applying the update to all of our managed WordPress sites.  These updates generally only take a few seconds per site to complete, but if you happen to catch us in the act, the site may be in “Maintenance Mode” for a few moments.

If you are interested in more details about what this update changes, you can check out the release announcement from WordPress.org.

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