October 20,2007
Every day we are finding compromised mailboxes and a few servers have found their IPs listed on some widely used spam lists (RBLs). For those interested in the issue you read more about it at SpamHaus: What actually is happening is that spammers scan the servers with programs containing easy username/password pairs (such as test/12345 or info/abc123 etc). On a server with hundreds of domains and thousands of mailboxes it is easy to get a hit and once in the spammer can spam from your mail account. This is not a new tactic but since most hosts clamped down on the formmail issue the spammers are having to use other means of which this is now the most popular. We can stop this exploitation dead in its tracks but it's going to require a very small amount of co-operation from you, our clients and your end mail users. Until now you have been able to login to your mail accounts and webmail via the username only. What we need to do is tighten security and make each user login to mail accounts and webmail via the username AND domain name. Example: BEFORE: Login: <user> Pass: <password> AFTER: Login: user@yourdomain.com Pass: <password> So as you can see your login name will change from "user" to "user@yourdomain.com” Some of you are going to say, "But hey, I already use the full username and domain to login!". Yes, you are not wrong. Until now the servers have supported both ways of logging but after this change it will ONLY support the full login name. With this implemented the spammers programs will be rendered useless and our servers will be free from annoying issues such as being listed on RBLs making email bounce for some users. We will make this change next week on Monday night US EST so that should give everyone enough time to make this simple change in mail client settings.
May 31, 2007
Server
65.254.63.210 has been giving problems lately. Currently it is down while our
technicians are trying to fix the problem. No expected timeframe for this is
available at present, but if downtime exceeds 24 hours, we will have to look
at migrating websites over to another server.
April 19, 2007
On Thursday April 19th and Friday April
20th at 2AM USA EST we
will be performing network upgrades on
our edge routers. The
maintenance window for these upgrades is
between 2AM and 4AM and anywhere from
10 to 30 minutes of downtime is
expected. Your servers and services may
experience latency during this time as
well so we ask that you please
refrain from opening any support tickets
during this time regarding any network
speed issues you may be facing. We
thank you for your attention to
this matter and look forward to
successful completion of these upgrades.
March 08, 2007
Server 69.72.158.26
In keeping with our policy of staying up
to date with all new software
releases, we will be upgrading this server's
Plesk to version 8.1. This
version includes several bug fixes,
AWSTATS and MySQL 5 support.
The upgrade will take place at about
08:00 USA Eastern Time today. You
should experience no more than then (10)
minutes of downtime while we
reboot the server after the upgrade.
If you experience any issues after the
upgrade, please submit a ticket
so we can check it out for you. Thank you
in advance for your
cooperation and understanding in this
matter!
February 15, 2007
On Saturday, February 17th 2007 beginning
at 2AM EST and lasting until
7AM EST, the data center will be
performing a scheduled maintenance
window on the network. The upgrades
are to complete the remaining tasks
from the previous network upgrades on Feb
2nd. We do not anticipate
much latency or packetloss during this
upgrade, however we are providing
notice that such occurrences could
occur. This maintenance window will
serve as the final phase completion of our
network upgrades and will
further enhance the network. We
thank you for your time and patience
during these maintenance periods and look
forward to a successful
implementation of the changes.
February 02, 2007
The data center has informed us of scheduled
network maintenance on
Saturday, February 3rd at 3AM EST (8am
GMT). The maintenance window will
be from 3AM until 7AM EST during which
time they will be adding further
redundancy to the network, enabling
additional GIGE links and making
final changes to the CORE / AGG/ GAR
Routers. The initial estimated
downtime will be approximately 30
minutes, followed by individual network
segments of 30 minutes each.
In addition to this, the main power to
the building / facility is being
worked on at 7AM EST on the 3rd as
well. No ETA for completion or
repairs is being provided, however they
will be transferring over to UPS /
Generator power prior to the power being
worked on. In preparing for
this we have also required our UPS and
generator maintenance personnel
to inspect all equipment during this
week, fully testing all
batteries, replacing full batteries on
one of the UPS’s and certifying
all equipment are operating to properly
capacity. Though we expect no
glitches with this maintenance matter,
precautionary measures are being
taken to ensure everything is prepared
before hand as well as requiring
all staff members to be available for any
unexpected matters which
could arise.
Please during the network maintenance
window do not open tickets for
packetloss / latency during that time as
we will be undergoing major
upgrades and though we do not anticipate
these issues arising, we will be
fully monitoring all aspects of the
upgrades during that time
specifically to watch for these issues.
Many thanks for your attention to this
matter!
August 18, 2006
Server Gamma 69.72.158.26
In a few
minutes we will be upgrading Plesk on your server to version 8. The upgrade
is pretty painless and if there is any downtime at all it won't exceed 20
minutes. Plesk 8 enables safe_mode by default on all domains so please check
your PHP scripts after the upgrade and if you see safe_mode errors please
contact support to get that fixed. Also if you have scripts set up with email
piping please ensure that is working correctly as often permissions need to
be reset on httpdocs for piping to
work.
June 28, 2006
On Friday night starting at 11pm the
data center will be doing network
acquaintance on their aggregation
routers. We estimate 60 minutes per
router, but are having a window of 2
hours per router, currently there
are 3 aggregation routers. Only one
will be down at any given time.
The reason for this is so they can
upgrade the ram and IOS code on the
routers in order to increase redundancy,
stability, and scalability in
the network.
Many thanks for your co-operation!
June 17, 2006 A network maintenance
window has been scheduled for 6/20/2006 00:00AM to 4AM EST.
On Monday night / Tuesday morning, the
data center will be performing network upgrades comprising of the following:
1. RAM upgrades will be completed on the
aggregation routers to provide enhanced routing features and better bgp
redundancy.
2. New Toplayer boxes will be placed
inline, and testing will begin on its ANTI-DDOS technology, across the
entire network, as opposed to the initial testing which has only been on
about 25% of the network.
Additional upgrades are planned
throughout the next month, and we will update with announcements as they
become available.
With respects to the upgrades, we should
only see downtime in 3 bursts of approximately 5 minutes, but we're carrying
the maintenance window for a longer period to allow for additional time if
needed.
May 10, 2006 We have once again got problems with server
65.254.63.210. Our technicians are working on it right now. If your website
is mission critical, and it is still down by morning of May 11, please email
us with your domain name and a working email address and we will move it to
another server.
April 18, 2006 The server is up and running
again, but we still have issues with webmail, pop3mail and PLESK. Please
stand by.
April 17, 2006 Our technicians are working on a
serious problem with server 65.254.63.210. Please make sure you have a backup
copy of your website(s) on that server.
April 4, 2006 - I have instructed our data center
to increase the RAM on server Gamma 69.72.158.26 from 1Gb to 2Gb. This will
result in some downtime, but will hugely improve the performance of this
server.
IMPORTANT NETWORK
MAINTENANCE
Update Thursday 7am
Most services are running normally,
although we still have some SMTP problems. Our data center is working on this
right oow.
On Sunday, March 5,
2006, between the hours of 12:00AM and 4:00AM,
Fortress ITX will be performing network
maintenance.
During this window, engineers will be
performing software upgrades on
one of our aggregation routers to which
many of our servers are
connected. Customers on servers
connected to this device will experience
interruptions in connectivity during the
above-mentioned time window. We
expect multiple outages during this
windows but experience tells us that
total downtime for such maintenance will
be approximately one hours.
It is impossible to know which servers
are connected to this router
(agg3) as the data center hasn't passed
on such info to us so everyone
should advise their customers that the
maintenance is happening.
We apologize for any inconvenience this
may cause and thank you for
your patience and continued support.
CHANGE OF IP NUMBERS:
If the IP number you used for FTP, control panel, email etc. used to be
216.118.66.246, this has now changed to 69.72.158.26. IP number 194.86.57.4
has changed to 194.150.208.4. IP number 194.86.57.93 has changed to
194.150.208.93, and 195.86.57.5 has changed to 194.150.208.27. If you use
your domain name and not an IP number for FTP, webmail and control panel
purposes, this will not affect you.
DID YOU KNOW?
To find out what the current IP number for your domain is go
to your MSDOS prompt and type:
ping www.yourdomainname.com
e.g. ping www.microsoft.com
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