News and Updates

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.

February 7, 2012 - AT&T Network Engineers will be performing a planned maintenance on Birmingham-Alabama
Access Router 1. The work will be performed on 2/21/2012, during the maintenance window of 12:00AM-6:00AM,
Central Standard Time. AT&T's goal is to successfully complete the task and restore service within the
stated time frame. 

Due to the redundant nature of our network, very limited service interruption is expected although some
increased latency may be experienced as the routes adjust when the AT&T circuit drops.

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

Update: February 13, 2012 - 9:00pm - This maintenance has been canceled.

January 28, 2012 – We have just updated our “Alternate Webmail Interface”, which you can find at https://webmail.internetpro.net.  This new update brings some new features as well as a lot of performance and security improvements.   The  main  things you will notice are:

• Full-featured address book with rich contact information.  You can import, export vcards, and even store photos with your contacts.
• File uploads with progress display.  This will allow you to see how long an upload is going to take and make sure it is actually doing something.
• Address book search
• Spell checker enhancements including per-user exceptions

There are many more improvements, but they are mostly “under the hood”.   Things like better protection for XSS hacking attempts, better memory management for improved speed, etc.

We hope you enjoy the improvements.  If you have any questions or issues with the new update, please email us at support@internetpro.net or call 256-547-6817.

January 11, 2012 – In what seems to be a recurring theme on our site, Comcast is having some issues again.  This is not a complete outage, but Comcast customers are having trouble getting to some websites.  We’ve done some testing and the issue seems to be routing problems on Comcast’s backbone.  We may be wrong, but attempts to contact Comcast have not worked as the tech support line has been dropping calls.   We will continue to post updates as we get more information.

January 11, 2012 – 10:45am – Looks like Comcast has resolved their backbone issues.  We were still not able to get through to their support, but from what we can tell, routing is fixed, so hopefully Comcast customers will are working now.

December 27, 2011 – We thought it important for us to weigh in on the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) issue which also covers the PROTECT-IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act).   These acts are ill conceived and will have far reaching effects on the internet as it is known today. We urge you to read about these acts and contact  your government representatives to let them know you are against them. So you can be more informed, we are posting some links to information about these acts.  The mainstream media is not covering them because the companies that run the media are the ones lobbying for their passage.

What SOPA Means For Education, Technology, and the Future of the Internet
Article from The Foundry
SOPA for Dummies  – A simplified technical explanation of what is going on.
Wikipedia article for PROTECT-IP
Wikipedia article for SOPA

There are many other great articles online.   Please take some time to look around and get better informed about this important issue.

Historically, Network Solutions, Inc. has used GoDaddy as our registrar for registering domain names.  Because of GoDaddy’s support for SOPA, we are in the process of moving all of the domains we are authoritative for away from GoDaddy to Namecheap who is against SOPA.   We will make every effort to boycott any company we deal with who supports these acts.

**Note: Our customers may receive messages about their domains being unlocked and moved.  This is all part of our migration to NameCheap and is nothing to worry about.

November 16, 2011 – Comcast seems to be experiencing a system wide outage in the Gadsden, Alabama area.  The outage started at approximately 12:26 am.  We are working on finding out additional information.  The local system is running fine, but traffice is not able to flow outside of the Tuscaloosa routers where Comcast meets the rest of the internet.

Update: 1:17am – The outage is unplanned and priority critical, but there is no current estimated time to repair (ETR).

Update:  3:15am –  The repairs have been made.  Looks like Comcast got lucky again and had a major outage that occurred during off business hours.  We’re glad to see they are back online.  We have not been able to get an explanation of what happened yet, but if we do, we will post it here.