Blog

May 2, 2022 – Today at approximately 6:30 PM we were notified by our monitoring systems that our datacenter was offline. After some troubleshooting we were able to determine that the cause of the issue was upstream with AT&T our Fiberoptic Internet Service Provider. We promptly opened a ticket with them reporting the outage.

Update 7:30 PM: Service has been restored and our datacenter is now back online. We are continuing to monitor the health of the circuit and await further details from regarding the source of the incident from AT&T.

April 16, 2022 – We’re doing some needed server maintenance this Easter weekend to minimize business impact.   During the maintenance, some websites may briefly go offline.   If you see anything unusual on your website, please let us know by emailing support@internetpro.net.   These updates do include some PHP version changes, but they should be non-breaking changes.

March 4, 2022 – 10:00am – One of our web servers has suffered a failure that is affecting some of our shared hosting sites.  We are working to address the problem.  Originally, a RAID array lost a drive and it was replaced as normal, but apparently the rebuild process failed and we are seeing degradation in service.  We will be posting updates here as we have them.

Update 1:45pm – The server with the failed RAID array is currently offline as we work to repair the issue. Some sites will be offline until this process is completed. We will update this post with further information as we continue the repairs.

Update 6:45pm – We’ve recovered the filesystem, but unfortunately have some corruption in the database system of the affected server.  We’re working on restoring from backups but are running into some corruption issues.

Update 10:30pm  – We have successfully restored a few sites and have a procedure for restoring the rest.  Sites will be coming up as we restore them.

Update 11:15pm – We believe all sites except for one have been restored to full functionality and we have informed the owners of the affected site.   If you are still experiencing an issue with your website, please email us at support@internetpro.net to let us know and we will investigate it further.  We do apologize for this issue.

March 5, 2022 – 8:30am – We’re going to attempt one last effort to get the one website still having issues recovered.  The effort will affect all other sites briefly.  We’ll update here as to the success or failure and the conclusion of the event.

Update 8:50am – Failure.   The site in question was in the midst of a redesign, so we’re pressing forward with that.  There should be no more service interruptions related to this outage.

February 15, 2022 – We’re seeing a new batch of phishing emails seeking to harvest usernames and passwords from the email system. Please remember that we will never send out emails asking you to verify your passwords.  It is important to stay diligent regarding these types of communications – not just with our email but with things like your bank account, taxes, social media, or any other login you have.  Here is an example of what is being sent today:

If you have any questions or have already interacted with this email, please email us at support@internetpro.net, call 256-547-6817, or use the chat window in the lower right of your screen.

January 17, 2022 – Well, we made it through 2 years of the pandemic before Covid hit our office, but it has come with a vengeance.  For the next few days, we may not be able to respond as quickly as normal for service calls due to a large portion of our staff being sick and/or quarantined.   We will be doing as much as we can using our remote tools such as iFoye to reduce further exposure.   Please bear with us as we work through the process of getting our staff better.

Some staff working remotely are also having a bit of trouble talking on the phone due to coughing, so if possible, we recommend the chat box at the lower right of your browser or email support@internetpro.net if possible.

Normally, the virus icon is reserved for computer viruses, but I thought it was appropriate today…

Thank you for your understanding and patience.

Update January 18, 2022 – We have yet another staff member out today, so our ability to respond continues to be limited.

Update January 21, 2022 – More staff members are out.  We will most likely be closed today for lunch from 1:00 to 2:00pm.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

January 1, 2022  12:00pm – Happy New Year!  The new year brings more of the same old problems.  In this case, a bug in the anti-malware engine of Microsoft Exchange servers has caused email delivery to stop.  Customers who have their own on premise Exchange server will be affected by this.   There is no official patch just yet.   The bug is in the anti-malware service on these servers and the current work around is to stop this service.  You can find an article with more information about this bug here.

Email delivery will be delayed and senders who send to people using these Exchange servers may/will receive a “delayed delivery notification”.   As long as the issue has been addressed within a few days, those emails will eventually be delivered.  If any sender has a short retry time setup on their email, they will receive a second “failure notice” indicating that the email did not go through and will not be tried any longer.   The industry standard is for email delivery to be retried 5 days, but this can be adjusted by individual email operators.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at support@internetpro.net. Please keep in mind that our office is closed for the holiday, so you may not receive an immediate response.   We are working on implementing the workaround for customers with proactive support contracts and those who report the issue to us and wish it fixed at holiday/after hours rates. This will allow the email to be delivered.  For others, we will be rolling out the workaround or fix if it has been rolled out during normal business hours Monday.

Update – Microsoft has released an emergency fix which does require manual application.   We are working to put this fix in place at normal rates for affected customers.

December 8, 2021 – The 3CX company has updated the Chrome extension many of our customers were using.  They actually have replaced the old extension with a new “Click2Call” extension.  The new extension does not have the same functionality as the old one with the small window showing phone controls, presence, etc.   The new extension only allows you to click phone numbers in your browser to initiate a call.   The full web client is still available, but for those who want the smaller popup window, you will need to install the new Windows desktop app.

For customers under maintenance with Network Solutions, Inc., we’ll be glad to provide free assistance and instruction for updating to the new desktop app for Windows users.  Users of Mac or Linux will need to use the web client as the desktop app is not available.  It is possible to load the old extension for Mac and Linux, but it will stop working completely in June 2022 when it is removed from the Chrome app store.

To install the desktop app yourself, simply navigate to the web client (most of our customers have this bookmarked).  It is something along the lines of https://companyname.al.3cx.us:5001/webclient usually.    Once logged in, there will be a Microsoft logo in the upper left.  Click that to pop up an instruction windows.  There are two steps: 1) Install and 2) Provision (activate).

Installing will download a program to run. Once that is run and installed, click the second step and the app will provision itself.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact our office at 256-547-6817 or use the Chat window below.   Please note that this was not a  scheduled update, so we have many unexpected requests for help.  We may need to schedule a return call as a result.

December 7, 2021 –  AWS is the underlying infrastructure for a good portion of the web.  As such, the degradation of their services is affecting MANY sites and services.  These include, but are not limited to Control4’s 4Sight platform, social media websites, cloud software providers including practice management and accounting programs, and much more.  Directly affected are Amazon’s own services including Ring, Alexa, and their shopping/shipping services.  If you are having an issue online, chances are it is related to this ongoing issue.

Here are some links which provide more information, including details about today’s outage:  https://apnews.com/article/amazon-web-services-outage-978394126305

The AWS services dashboard:  https://status.aws.amazon.com/

Downdetector is a good source showing many sites which are reporting related issues:  https://downdetector.com/

Here at Network Solutions, Inc., we don’t rely on any AWS platforms, so our services are unaffected.

September 27, 2021 – 9:30am – We are experiencing an issue with a shared web server which is affecting some customers.   We are currently investigating the issue as it is taking longer to recover than we initially thought.  We’ll be posting updates here as we get them.

Update 10:03am – Services have been restored.  A combination of DOS (denial of service) attack and hardware failure was responsible.  We are working on a hardware fix.

If you have any questions or concerns about this, please email us at support@internetpro.net, text or call 2565476817, or use the chat box in the lower right of your screen.