We are investigating issues with hosted exchange 2007 servers in Dallas at this moment. The service is currently being restored and should be back to normal momentarily.

A number of users have reported inability to receive email. Sending email works fine but receiving does not. In multiple tests against multiple sites, both protected by ExchangeDefender and not, we have seen nearly 60% connection drops.

At this point we believe this is related to the latest Microsoft patches - and a simple reboot appears to clear out the issue of no port 25 connectivity. Don’t worry, ExchangeDefender is holding your email. It does not appear to be fixed by removing the patches and reapplying them.

As our friend Susan Bradley just told me via IM: “Full moon passing”

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp

Good morning - we are currently investigating two blacklists from large ISPs targeting one IP address on the ExchangeDefender network. Two services are identified as Verizon and FrontBridge and we have opened requests to be removed from both along with any data that might help us find out why the lists were put in place to begin with given our 0 tolerance for SPAM. The rejections are marked by:

< mail157-dub-R.bigfish.com #5.0.0 X-Postfix; host    winse-6216mail6.customer.frontbridge.com[131.107.115.215] said: 550 5.7.1    External client with IP address 65.99.255.232 does not have permissions to  submit to this server. Visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928123 for more information. (in reply to end of DATA command)>

 

<outbound2.exchangedefender.com #5.5.0 SMTP; 571 Email from 65.99.255.232 is currently blocked by Verizon Online’s anti-spam system. The email sender or Email Service Provider may visit http://www.verizon.net/whitelist and request removal of the block.>

In the meantime, you can change your outbound smarthost to outbound1.exchangedefender.com if you experience the problems above.

On the funny side: We find it hilarious that Microsoft is linking to their own KB articles in the rejection note for a problem that is caused on their own servers - how about something more helpful like postmaster or delisting contact address or URL! Even more surprising is that Microsoft FrontBridge is running on an open source Postfix mail platform, not a Microsoft one.

We will update you on the delisting process as we get more information. The problem should not impact many senders as 65.99.255.232 is just one of the nodes in our outbound network.

In about 10 minutes (11 CST, -6 GMT) we will be shutting down the Offsite Backup infrastructure for the memory and networking upgrades to accommodate the new global replication platforms and proxies. The maintenance interval is expected to last less than an hour and we do not expect anything out of the ordinary.

For approximately one hour between 2PM and 3PM EST our phone service was knocked out. Due to growth we ordered a block of additional DIDs (direct dial in numbers) and our VoIP IAX provider inadvertently reset all our DIDs to a different proxy server. Unfortunately, we were registering our PBX to the wrong VoIP proxy server and as a result of it, majority of our direct dialin numbers failed to connect. Among major numbers affected were our primary toll free number (877) 546-0316 and our primary local number for international calls (407) 465-6800.

We were able to quickly identify and resolve the problem but suffered approximately an hour of outage without a record of phone calls missed. We are sorry about any inconvenience this may have caused, if you missed us please keep in mind that you can reach most of us via the support portal, email, instant messaging and of course, direct sip dial if you are on VoIP as well we do accept connections at sip.ownwebnow.com  

We are experiencing significant issues with the virtual hosting of Microsoft Windows 2003 servers. We are still collecting data and trying to isolate the issue but some virtual servers simply stop responding to the network requests - either before or after the latest Microsoft security updates. To further complicate issues, virtual machines are crashing upon reboot requiring two reboot cycles.

We are still working on a solution, it appears that after the second reboot the system remains stable and accepts network connections without an issue. Please stand by for update, as of 2:00 PM CMT the entire network appears to be completely operational.

Earlier today we identified an issue with one of the nodes in the ExchangeDefender admin cluster that was set with the wrong clock (wrong timezone configuration) and although the times were in sync across all servers, due to many scripts relying on unix timezone settings to calculate offsets and localized time, some users have experienced timestamps that were off by one hour (-1)

This issue was resolved at roughly 8:30 AM and while it did not pose a huge issue we felt it was important to note for any of you that may have noticed weird times in the admin logs.

We have officially frozen all external development tasks until November 10th, 2007. All timelines will be adjusted two weeks from today to accommodate internal development and work on projects related exclusively to Own Web Now Corp. You should not see any new features nor the changes to the default system behavior of any of our products until November 10th, 2007.

Thank you.