News and Updates

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.

January 10, 2011 – Due to the winter storm, our store front will be closed today (Monday).  However, our staff will still be available via phone.  Our office number is 256-547-6817 or 877-886-6868 and option 8 will connect you with a technician.  Billing, scheduling and other issues can be addressed by dialing extension 126 at the voice prompt.  As always, we can also be reached by email at support@internetpro.net.

January 10, 2011 – Due to a lack of support calls, we are going to let our staff enjoy a snow day.  We will still be offering technical support via the phone, but it will be on a call back basis for the remainder of the day.

January 10, 2011 – 9:00pm – Looks like we are going to run the same routine on Tuesday.  Technical support will be available by hitting 8.  Billing, scheduling, etc. will be available by dialing extension 126.  We expect some additional calls on Tuesday as south Alabama warms up and drys out, however many of our staff would be put in danger if they were required to get to our office.

January 11, 2011 – 2:00pm – We have opened the office for normal business. The roads look like they will be bad tomorrow, so if you want to pick up your computer, pay a bill or whatever, you may want to come by this afternoon.  Just be careful!

January 12, 2011 – Our office is open for business as  usual today.  Normal office hours apply.

December 30, 2010 9:15am – A bad security update on one of our shared web hosts has caused some MySQL enabled websites to be disabled.  We are working on the issue.   The fix may involve migration of affected sites to another server or restoration from backup.  We do not have an ETR (estimated time to repair) as yet.

10:30 am –  We have initiated repairs using both options — restore AND migration.  Some affected sites are beginning to come online as they are being moved to other servers.  The restoration is still in progress.

11:25 am – Our restoration of backups has completed and all sites seem to be back online.  We also managed to migrate many sites to a new server (this was planned for the future, but got done now) and those sites are also online.  We believe that all sites are now operating normally. If you have a site that is still having trouble, please contact support by emailing us at support@internetpro.net or calling 877-886-6868.

December 6, 2010 –  We will be performing some emergency maintenance on our primary network attached storage (NAS) system tonight starting at approximately 2:00am.  The maintenance will impact some virtual servers.  At the same time, we will be applying OS updates to all virtual servers that need them. We expect the maintenance to take less than one hour.  The NAS maintenance will resolve an issue caused by two failed drives.  Normally, because of the redundant nature of the NAS, this type of work would not impact any virtual servers, but the failures that have occurred are going to force the NAS offline for a brief period.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

December 7, 2010 – 3:00am – The emergency maintenance has been performed successfully, and all services have been returned to normal.

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.

At 4:07 pm on Nov. 14, 2010, one of our web servers started presenting an FTP error.  At that time, users were not able to connect via FTP to update websites.  Or technicians responded to the problem within 5 minutes, but have not yet been able to isolate the issue.   At 4:45, the server was rebooted in an attempt to bring the FTP service back online.   At that time, all services were unavailable on that server.   The server came back online at 4:49 pm, however the FTP issue remains.   We are currently investigating the cause of the FTP problem, and hope to restore full service shortly.

Nov. 14  2010 5:18pm  – At 5:02, the outage escalated due to a misconfiguration of our main firewall.  Technicians were attempting to block the FTP DOS attack, and inadvertently blocked all traffic.   We are continuing to work on the problem.

Nov 14, 2010  5:30pm – Redundant firewalls have all been restored.  Looks like everything is up and running.  Our technicians are continuing to check.

Nove 14, 2010 5:38pm – The original FTP denial of service attack has now been resolved.  We are sorry for the inconvenience caused by this issue.  If you see any problems that you believe may be related to this issue, please give us a call at 256-547-6817 or 877-886-6868 to let our technicians know about it.

AT&T Network Engineers will be performing a planned maintenance on Birmingham-Alabama
Access Router 1. The work will be performed on 11/18/2010, during the maintenance
window of 12:00AM-6:00AM, local 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.
We expect service to be impacted somewhat during the maintenance window.

AT&T Engineers will be performing an IOS upgrade.

AT&T Network Engineers will be performing a planned maintenance on
Birmingham-Alabama Access Router 1. The work will be performed on 10/5/2010,
during the maintenance window of 12:00AM-6:00AM, local 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.
We expect service to be impacted somewhat during the maintenance window.

AT&T Network Engineers will be performing a router reload.