AT&T is having RBL issues again, we are working with them to resolve the problem. You may receive this problem when emailing the AT&T network for the time being:

<<< 521-65.99.255.236 blocked by sbc:blacklist.mailrelay.att.net.

<<< 521 DNSRBL: Blocked for abuse. See http://att.net/blocks

554 5.0.0 Service unavailable

We have put in place a workaround and are working with AT&T to resolve the issue. You should not continue to see this problem. However, the issue is still open.

Good morning and happy Monday! This posting is part of our effort to keep you more in tune with the network operations group at Own Web Now because you rely on our services and should be a part of the conversation.

Extended maintenance windows over the weekend have been completed successfully and have addressed numerous growing pains and performance issues. Biggest changes were applied to our Exchange 2007 network and all the systems are now performing remarkably well. We would like to thank Microsoft CSS Exchange team for all the assistance they have rendered over the past two weeks in isolating creeping and unusual issues with the product that we have never encountered before.

Issues we are currently working on:

ExchangeDefender Reports Replication – At times the replication between our master maillog servers and slave reporting servers tends to lag. Sometimes the replication lags beyond our tolerance and appears to nearly stall. We have not yet isolated the issue that is casing this problem but are monitoring it very closely and adjusting replication points.

Offsite Backup Scaling – We are preparing our offsite backup network for another product addition to the matrix. You may experience slight availability issues as the management consoles reload while changes are taking place. This process will not interfere with the execution of offsite backups because the backup agent software automatically reloads.

ExchangeDefender SPAM Load – New ExchangeDefender antispam engine went online last week and the detection has been improved dramatically. We still haven’t kicked it up all the way but expect to by Wednesday. We have had several complaints about the level of SPAM and in our investigation have found that almost all of them are related to end user stupidity – whitelisting null senders <> and whitelisting their own domain or email address. When you whitelist any address you suppress ALL SPAM detection mechanisms, so when you whitelist your own address you open yourself up to a ton of SPAM. We have a process that we are preparing that will automatically remove null sender and mirror trusts because those should never be programmed in.

Lastly, an apology to our Canadian clients. Last week we let the cat out of the bag about our Canadian offsite backup product. This site is not intended to serve as an announcement board for new products, we just want to keep you informed about what our group is working on. From time to time what we are working on may not match the business side of Own Web Now so if you have a product or business related question we are not the most authorative source to provide an answer.

Earlier today we completed the rollout of 450 new servers to the ExchangeDefender family all over our American network. The introduction and initial sync of the new nodes did allow some junk through as well as introduce a slight today (maximum reported 1 hour from one system that nearly immediately went into maintenance mode) but as of roughly 11:30 AM EST all is good.

Additional 600 nodes are planned in our global expansion leading up to ExchangeDefender 4.0 launch. We are also looking at additional data centers on both coasts at the moment scheduled to go live this fall.

Update: 2:24 PM EST: We are happy to report that all the nodes have now converged in the scanning network and the SPAM filtering is back at its usual levels (and to be tightened up even further later tonight). You may have seen an increase in SPAM over the past few hours while the nodes were joining the network and accepting new programming but you should be seeing far less SPAM going forward.

We are currently investigating a network event in our Dallas region network centers, since approximately 5 AM EST we have been receiving complaints about network connectivity and availability. There are currently no outages and there have been no outages but certain customers are unable to reach the services on our network.

If you are experiencing an issue, please open a support request and include a traceroute to the service you are trying to reach (ex: 65.99.255.50).

We will update this ticket as soon as we have further information. 

Update (9:05 AM EST, 14:05 GMT): We believe the network issue some of our customers have experienced has been resolved. Particularly affected were some of our UK customers (not BT) and local customers with Level 3 connectivity. Although we see the traffic back up at usual levels, it may take about an hour or so until all the mail catches up and gets delivered.

We have been informed that a number of customers have reported receiving 0’s in their intraday reports even though there was SPAM in the system at the time. We are still investigating what is causing the issue and expect to have the full restore to the intraday reports within 72 hours. In the meantime, we have suspended the intraday report generation as to eliminate the confusion from the user base.

Please remember that the primary way to check for SPAM is through the ExchangeDefender portal at https://admin.exchangedefender.com and for the customers that need a reliable, realtime reminder of the SPAM that is being kept from their mailbox we recommend the SPAM Monitor software designed to sit on the desktop and show alerts. We still consider email reports to be an important part of our offering but due to the their nature (spam digests of spam messages) we urge you to consider the more reliable, realtime alternatives.

Our VoIP provider (IAX-PSTN termination service) is performing routine maintenance on our accounts in order to port some of our numbers from third party services and telcos. We have been advised to expect outages throughout the day as their proxy servers are updated to route new numbers to us, after which we will be programming the proper DID routes in our system.

As a result, our phone systems may not be the most reliable way to reach us today, January 2nd, 2008. If you have an urgent issue, or even an issue that you would like human followup on, please post a support request at https://support.ownwebnow.com.

Later today we will be conducting an upgrade on our VoIP network. Our own network will be down from 5PM EST to Midnight EST but likely far less than that. If you do call 877–546–0316 or any corporate direct dialins during that window your calls may get directed to a voicemail and may even produce errors or “All circuits are busy” rejections. While we will try to return all calls that end up in voicemail we ask that if you have an important matter you either try us later or via email/portal while we migrate to the new communications infrastructure.

If you need immediate assistance please remember that we only provide sales and support via our portal at https://support.ownwebnow.com

If you are an ecommerce client you have already received our notice of the additional burst allocation we have made to our network for the Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday shopping sprees. During this time every server on our network has been “uncapped” meaning that there are no bandwidth restrictions or bandwidth throttling and you could allocate as much traffic as the switch port can handle. For our colocation customers, the caps have been removed as well, giving you full GigE access.

At peak, our network was 81% saturated on Friday, AM which is far above 25-35% it peaks at during the week. The current network utilization is 48%. So far, so good.

This notice is to inform you that the regular network limits will go back in place at Midnight, Pacific (GMT 08:00, Tuesday) and we will go back to our billing as usual. The temporary removal of network capacity locks is a courtesy we offer our e-commerce clients so they can scale on what is the highest traffic day of the year.

We are taking the benefit of lower network utilization this weekend to perform some routine maintenance tasks. The maintenance will be comprehensive and include upgrades to our DNS, storage, web, domain controllers and virtual server networks. In effect, virtually every service we offer depends on these services and may experience a significant impact.

Our maintenance window will be extended from 2 AM – 7 AM EST to 2 AM – 9 AM EST and will also include an afternoon maintenance interval from 4 PM – Midnight, EST on Saturday, November 24, 2007. Everything with the exception of our storage network will be fully operational, with only slight service / performance degredation that might not even be noticeable given the low network volume during Thanksgiving holiday in USA.

Upgrades are routine in nature – swapping hard drives, new memory, new switches, moving servers to optimize power utilization and cooling and other general network maintenance and management operations.