Internet

Friday June 22, 2012 – As part of our full service hosting, we will be upgrading WordPress-based sites on our servers to the new 3.4 version which was released a few days ago.  We wanted to wait a few days to make sure there were no critical bugs.   During the upgrade process, the sites will go into “maintenance mode” and the site will be unavailable.  The maintenance mode usually lasts less than 30 seconds as the upgrade is applied.   We will check to make sure the site seems to be working once the upgrade is complete, but we do recommend that users thoroughly check over their sites to make sure the upgrade did not cause any issues.  We will post an update here when we have completed the upgrade on all sites.

Update:  5:45pm  – All WordPress sites have been updated without incident.  If you have any questions or concerns about the updates, please contact us at 256-547-6817 or support@internetpro.net.

Update: Thursday, June 28, 2012 – WordPress has produced a maintenance release for the new version. We will be applying that today. It is version 3.4.1 and contains 18 fixes to the 3.4 version.

Update: Monday, July 2, 2012 – OK, it took aus a little longer than we thought, but all of the sites have been updated now.  If there are any issues, please contact us as usual.

Date – 04/02/2012 – We are about to begin updating our Debian servers to the new distribution.  This is something we must do because the distribution we are currently running has been deprecated and is no longer supported with security updates.  We generally try to wait as long as possible between upgrades as changing distributions will sometimes have an adverse affect on some hosted web pages.  We will endeavour to test all of the pages we can, but we cannot test every function of every site we host, so there may be some breakage we do not find.  If you have a website which ceases to function or starts to display an error, please contact us at support@internetpro.net or call us at 256-547-6817 to let us know.   We should be done with updating all of the distributions by Friday, April 6.

As part of the upgrades, we will also cease support for ColdFusion web sites.  The version of ColdFusion currently installed on our servers will not run with the distributions, and we do not currently host enough ColdFusion sites to justify purchase of the new version.   We will work with those customers who currently have ColdFusion based sites to convert them to PHP or to move them to other hosts.  We do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.   Our last ColdFusion server will be shutdown on or before April 30, 2012 (before the 30th if all sites have been removed).

Again, if there are any concerns or questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@internetpro.net or by phone at 256-547-6817 or toll free at 877-886-6868.

Update – 04/04/2012 – A glitch in one of the upgrades caused a database server to not respond for about 30 minutes.  Our home page was affected as were a few customer sites.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Update – 04/10/2012 – All servers have been updated.  Our staff is doing a check of hosted sites, but we cannot manually check all functionality of all sites, so if you do find an error or problem on a page we host, please call us at 256-547-6817 or email support@internetpro.net.

October, 10, 2011 – Over the last week or so, we’ve been noticing a higher incidence of “false positives” on our spam tagging system.  The system is partially based on a Bayesian probability system which “learns” what spam looks like.  It seems that the Bayesian part of the spam filtering system has decided that just about everything is spam, so each email is getting a higher spam rating than it normally would.   This morning, we made the decision to clear our Bayesian database to eliminate this issue.  A side effect of this is that we may now have more spam getting through until the system re-learns for a bit.  We will also be “teaching” the database with some collected spam that we have.  Hopefully, within the next couple of days, the spam filter should be back to normal.

October 17, 2011 – Our changes seemed to have worked for a bit, but the filter started getting too aggressive again.  We have cleared out the learning database and are attempting to “teach” it with HAM (email that is not SPAM).   Hopefully, we’ll get the filter working correctly shortly.

Update – October, 20, 2011 – We have identified an issue with our filter that is contributing to this issue. It seems that our filter thinks that the Subject and Date are missing on many email and that is contributing to the points acquired by the email.  After 5.0 points, our system considers the email spam.  The lack of subject and date contributes 3.2 points, so that goes a long way toward getting emails classified incorrectly.

If you have any emails that are continuing to get tagged with *****SPAM*****, please forward the sender’s address to support@internetpro.net and we will add the address to our whitelist so it no longer gets tagged.

Sept. 29, 2011 10:52 – We are experiencing a network outage which seems to be upstream.  We are looking into the issue and will provide updates shortly.

Phones were out briefly as well, but we have gotten them back online.

12:00pm  – We have been informed that the issue with AT&T is affecting a large number of trunks.  They are aware of the issue, but have not provided us with an ETR (Estimated Time for Repair) yet.

2:30pm – The issue is a fiber cut outside Birmingham that is the root of the problem.  AT&T repair teams are onsite and the ETR is now 5:00pm.

6:15pm – Even though the initial ETR has passed, the circuit is still down.  We have called to get a new ETR, but they have none, so we are expecting resolution soon.

8:30pm – We checked on the status of the repair, and half an hour ago, technicians reported that they were having trouble splicing the cables together. There is not a new ETR. 🙁

11:45pm – New ETR is 12:30am.   We’ll see…

Sept 30, 2011 2:45am – AT&T is reporting the fiber cut is fixed, but we are still not seeing service. We are working on this now.

3:20 am – We’re up!  The last issue was a routing problem which has been resolved.  All services are functioning normally now.  We appreciate your understanding and are sorry for the inconvenience.

Update 6:00pm –  We just received word that the outage was caused by a construction crew between Birmingham and Childersberg.  The crew is building a new Alabama Power substation.