News and Updates

May 16, 2012 – A major power outage hit downtown Gadsden at approximately 10:35 PM and lasted until 11:17PM.    Our generators took over so we didn’t have any major issues.  However, one our our virtual server network attached server (NAS) devices lost power due to a misconfigured UPS.   As a result some virtual machines went down until the NAS power was restored.   All machines are online and running now.  There were some filesystem errors, which may affect some customer servers/sites.  If there are any questions, please contact us at support@internetpro.net or call 256547-6817.

Update – May 17, 2012  – It seems that some databases were corrupted because of the power failure.  This caused a few websites to go offline as well as the alternative webmail interface.  We restored the affected databases from backup and all is working now.

May 11, 2012 – We have heard of several reports of people in the area being called by “technicians” working for several companies.  These “technicians” have generally been foreign with very heavy accents.  The scammers are telling people that their computers are infected with viruses.  They ask if your computer is running slow as “proof” that what they are saying is true.  Since almost all computers run slow at times, people generally agree that something bad is happening.  The scammers then direct the target to a web site which allows the technician to take over the computer.  They “find” infections and try to sell $250 or so worth of software and services to clean it up.   We are not sure if these scammers are also placing other software such as keyloggers on the computers or stealing data, but we are recommending anyone who has worked with one of these scams to format and reload their computers as a precaution.

The best course of action if you suspect your computer may be infected is to take it to someone you trust like the folks at Network Solutions, Inc. 🙂

We are happy to announce that we have released a new version of iFoye.  The new version is 4.6 and brings many new fixes and several new features.  Many of the new features and fixes are only apparent to the technicians working on your system.  However, one of the major new features is that the system is now much faster, which will allow our technicians to complete the job more quickly.  The new version also brings an enhanced chat client and the ability for our technicians to disable your keyboard and mouse if needed to prevent errant keystrokes or button clicks.

We are proud of this new tool and look forward to being able to better assist our customers.

March 14, 2012 – Verizon seems to be experiencing a rather large data outage that is affecting Alabama, Georgia, and several other states.  We’ve received word that is may be as late as 11:00pm before the issue is resolved.  Another story online about the outage can be found at http://wirelessandmobilenews.com/2012/03/iphone-verizon-3g-northeast-mid-atlantic-data-outage-fix.html.  Some people are reporting it only affecting iPhone users, but our staff can definitely confirm that Android is also having an issue.

Update: Apparently, the issue affecting other states (like Philadelphia)  was actually separate from the problems in Alabama and Georgia.   It looks like everything had been restored by about 8:00pm.  We have heard that the issue was a switch in Birmingham, but that is unconfirmed.

February 21, 2012 – We have received reports of a phishing scam being sent to our customers.  Please be aware that we will not contact you in this manner and will not ask for your personal passwords on a web page.  Below is an example of the scam that is being sent in email to our customers:

—BEGIN—
—– Original Message —–
From: “Network Solutions, Inc.” <helpdesk@internetpro.net>
Sent: Sunday, February 19, 2012 4:57 PM
Subject: Emergency Verification!!
> Dear Network Solutions, Inc. Webmail subscriber,
>
> We hereby announce to you that your email account has exceeded its storage
> limit. You will be unable to send and receive mails and your email account
> will be deleted from our server. To avoid this problem, you are advised to
> verify your email account by clicking on the link below.
>
> http://crcntr.001webs.com/
>
> Thank you.
>
> The Network Solutions, Inc. Webmail Management Team.
>

—END

If you have responded to this message or one like it, please contact us immediately at support@internetpro.net or call 256-547-6817.

February 17, 2012 – We will be performing some emergency maintenance on our primary network attached storage (NAS) system tonight starting at approximately 12:00am.  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 causing some functions of the NAS to be unresponsive.  The failures that have occurred are going to force the NAS offline for a brief period.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

February 18, 2012 – 1:22am – The maintenance is taking a little longer than expected, but we are making progress.  All services should be restored within 30 minutes.

February 18, 2012 – 2:32am  – We ran into a few difficulties, but all services have now been restored and all machines have all OS updates.  We do not expect any further issues related to this maintenance, but if you have an issue, please email us at support@internetpro.net or call 256-547-6817.

February 14, 2012 – We have had a couple of virtual servers hang, thus causing a service outage on some customer sites.  Our monitoring system failed to escalate the issue, and we are looking into that failure.  In the mean time, our technicians are reactivating the affected servers to bring all services back online.  We expect the outage to be short lived.

 Update: 2:05 pm – All machines are back online and regular service has been restored.   It seems that one of our virtual server hosts had an issue that caused many (if not all) of the machines it hosted to hang and become unresponsive.   We have rebooted the host causing the issues and all of the guest virtual machines that it housed have been reactivated.  Our technicians will continue to look into the cause of the hang and the failure of some of our notifications.   We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.