Over the past few days we have missed our SLA on a number of support requests in the support queue, order queue and maintenance queues. An upgrade to the support portal on July 10th included a new algorithm for privacy control and support request routing, meant to allow for different types of support requests to be entered into the system but not visible to the entire staff. Accounting would see accounting requests, Support would see support requests, Executives would see executive requests and so on. In process of enabling the SLA against the requests we improperly routed a number of requests to the executive queue which was not monitored from Friday until today. We have addressed and corrected the issue and are moving the tickets and responding to them as fast as possible.

If you experienced an issue that was reported through our support system and was not answered in a timely manner we apologize and promise to have all support requests addressed today. Thank you for your patience.

We have completed the rollout of PHP 5.1.6 scripting language on our clustered web hosting platform. PHP 5.1.6 is our first upgrade from PHP 4.x and opens up a new world of possibilities for our partners and customers to utilize many open source and commercial web applications free of charge on top of their web hosting accounts.

Join Vlad Mazek, Own Web Now Corp CEO for a chat with Karl Palachuk of KP Enterprises at about noon today (Eastern -5:00 GMT) for a discussion about SMB technology and where OWN solutions fit in it as well as the road ahead:

Wednesday, March 26th
9:00 AM Pacific Time Zone, Noon EST
- Dial (319) 279-1000 (U.S. phone number)
- Your participant passcode is 1024518.
- This call is limited to the first 300 attendees.

Generally we reserve network events and alerts for our Network Operations site but the volume of support regarding this single issue has prompted us to post it here. I hope you are not offended by the technical information regarding a third party service that may not affect you.

In the old, dark ages of Internet when ExchangeDefender grew out of the primordial stew, people used connection-based filtering to blindly reject content using nothing but faith in the independent listing service. One of the popular realtime blacklists (RBL) was ORDB and it was a database of mail servers that were open relays. These servers could be used by anyone, without authentication of any sort, to send SPAM content all over the Internet.

In December of 2006, ORDB went offline.

On the morning of March 25, 2008 relays.ordb.org came back online, blacklisting everything. How, why, when and so on are not important, the only relevant task here is to stop using this RBL. If you receive the following context error, the remote server is still using ORDB to detect SPAM and it is dropping all your inbound mail:

The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not report a specific reason. Check the address and try again. If it still fails, contact your system administrator.

< outbound.exchangedefender.com #5.0.0 SMTP; 530 Recipient refused. Open relay found, refer to http://www.ordb.org/lookup/?host=65.99.192.91>”

If you use Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 you can quickly remove ORDB from your RBL query list by opening up Exchange System Manager, navigating to Global Settings, right clicking on Message Delivery and selecting properties. On the Connection Filtering tab you will find the RBLs you currently query. If you are protected by ExchangeDefender, this list should be blank. If you use a mail server other than Exchange consult your vendor.

I hope you have a wonderful day and thank you for letting us manage your SPAM so you don’t have to deal with the above every day Thank you for your business.

Vlad Mazek

The other day someone asked how do we decide what goes on the Network Operations page, which is due for a big overhaul in the month of March based on everything we have learned so far. How do we figure out if something is important enough to put something there you ask? Very simple:

If an issue is affecting more than 10 customers, or more than one server, it gets posted.

If an issue is likely to affect more than 10 customers, or more than one server, it gets posted.

Simple enough. We are a partner company, we are an extension of their business that provides essential Internet services. As that extention, our duty is to communicate to our partners and our clients when things are different than usual. We have found that it is more effective in terms of providing timely support, that it is far easier for the clients to be aware of what may be going on so when they are asked for support they can be fully informed of any service issues.

The site has been very successful, it has contributed to a huge decrease in support requests and consequently savings for everyone involved because we are all that much more efficient. There has been only one negative comment so far, “I want all my information on one page, I don’t want to have to look at three pages to find all my Own Web Now information!” While we can understand the concern, this is a problem that technology has already fixed, people no longer surf the Internet. People subscribe to the data feeds that go on their desktop, portal, SharePoint, you name it. If you are actively seeking out information, instead of letting information come to you in the fastest and most efficient way possible, it’s time to learn about blog aggregators.

If your mail server ever goes down, ExchangeDefender automatically spools messages for it and delivers them when the server connection is restored. Because the delivery is staggered (we don’t fire a thousand connections to your server the moment it boots up) it can take over an hour to deliver spooled messages that have been stored due to an outage that lasted over an hour.

By default, we keep these messages for an interval of five (5) days, but since we are based in the southern United States and prone to hurricanes, flash floods, tornados and other inclement weather (one DC even got hit by a earthquake this year) we tend to extend the spooling period on ExchangeDefender from June through November of each year to 14 days. Last year, in light of many of our customers in the northwest suffering from ice/snow storms, we extended this period through January.

This is a notice that our mail spooling will revert back to 5 day interval on February 1st, 2008 and we will extend it back to 14 days starting June 1st, 2008. Email spooling is an automatic low-level process, that has since been supplemented by the free ExchangeDefender LiveArchive service. The two are meant to be used in conjunction to provide full business continuity and guard against less-than-reliable Internet connections.

As usual, thank you for your business.

Dear Clients, Partners and Friends,

On behalf of the entire team at Own Web Now Corp, from 18 data centers around the globe, I wish you the happy and prosperous 2008. January is the month in which we announce our new products and services for the calendar year and this time we have a little surprise for you!

Thank you for your business and your continued support.

Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

Our hours will not be changing during the holiday season, we are open 24/7, 365 days a year. All cases will be handled under the usual SLA but do bear in mind that most of our partners and vendors are working limited hours. So while we are here for you, some external research and service requests may take longer to complete than usual.

Have a safe and happy holiday season.

One of the very basic yet missing features from ExchangeDefender has been the ability to add an alias domain to the existing ExchangeDefender account. Truth is, we used to have this feature and had to pull it from the feature set because resellers kept adding new clients domain names to the single domain login. Since domain to IP (or hostname) mappings at ExchangeDefender are 1:1, this eventually breaks and huge privacy and litigation nightmare ensues. Imagine client upon client receiving each others email for example or bouncing it outright.

Fast forward a few years and now we have actual service providers that are experts at managing customer’s messaging environments. We decided to bring the feature back and bring it into the Service Provider feature set. Just select a domain name under the Management screen and select “Add Domain Alias” - type in the new domain name you are adding to this client and you are done.

P.S. As mentioned earlier on this blog, we have had to freeze development in order to deal with some internal affairs. We have resumed development on the 10th of November so you should see the usual improvements to Own Web Now products continue as we head towards new years. If you’ve got an idea or recommendation on how to make our services better we are always listening, either submit it through the product feedback link under the Development tab at support.ownwebnow.com or through anonymous feedback portal.

We got some great news from our partner Kerry Riddle, reporting that ShadowProtect is now compatible with AhSay. As you may have noticed, ShadowProtect overwrites Microsoft Windows Volume Shadow Copy drivers and renders all other backup software on that server inoperable because they all use the default VSS driver. If you attempted to use AhSay on a ShadowProtect system you would receive an error when trying to use VSS backups: “String Index out of Range -1.”

We have updated our documentation to account for this update, hope it helps and you can now reenable Volume Shadow Copy on AhSay clients that have ShadowProtect installed.

Kerry provides the following:

OBM 5.4.2.1 fixes the problem. Tests ran without error.

Kerry

—–Original Message—–

OBM 5.2.2.5 / ShadowProtect Server 3.0.0.3 Compatability

Hi Kerry,

Sorry for the delay. The problems are resolved in the latest patches, which can be downloaded from http://download.ahsay.com/support/post-release-patch/obm.zip (for OBM), and http://download.ahsay.com/support/post-release-patch/acb.zip (for ACB) For upgrade instructions, please visit http://forum.ahsay.com/viewforum.php?f=1