Holiday Hours
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.
ExchangeDefender BugFix Release 3.1.1
On December 16th, 2007 we will be releasing a massive update to the ExchangeDefender policy server, to account for a number of rather unpleasant bugs that have come up as a result of changes from 2.x to 3.0 and 3.1.
Because this is a large scale upgrade with lots of changes under the hood, there may be some temporary downtime while we roll the new system out. This downtime is only going to affect the web site https://admin.exchangedefender.com but mail will continue to flow and no other systems will experience issues. We expect the outages to last a few seconds at most as we reload one system after another.
We chose to announce this on the corporate blog instead of the Network Operations site because some of these bugs have been inconveniencing many of our users and we wanted to let you know that this bulk of updates addresses all the issues that have been brought up in our portal. Specific changelog will be posted at a later date.
This release will not have any new features and the new feature releases will resume on Jan 2, 2008. We have used the past two months to correct all the outstanding issues in the system, from nagging bugs to poor documentation, and I believe you will be very pleased with the results starting next Monday.
Communications Platform Upgraded
Over the weekend we completed our communications overhaul with an upgrade to the core of our network based around Exchange 2007 and Asterisk VoIP. We have upgraded our infrastructure to Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1, Asterisk (Trixbox) to the latest stable edition and we have also added the following components: Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft Responsepoint and Microsoft Livemeeting. We are also still in process of finalizing the SIP/IAX2 connectivity as we have brought another provider into the mix.
The above upgrade to our major communication systems was in order to help us connect better with you. These solutions will allow us to provide more personal and direct support, become more responsive and efficient. I hope you can be patient with us over the next day or two while the new phone numbers are programmed in and we get all our voicemails and voice prompts together.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
OWN Guide for Troubleshooting ExchangeDefender Delivery
We have folks at Own Web Now that do nothing but troubleshoot ExchangeDefender delivery issues all day long and we figured we’d share in the fun. This is the first draft of the document titled Troubleshooting ExchangeDefender Delivery and is meant to help the jr administrators master the art of troubleshooting SMTP.
Covered in the document are steps to troubleshoot inbound and outbound delivery, server configuration, IP restrictions and even how to help remote senders find out where the issue may be. I have been working hard on designing a troubleshooting portal (to send sample messages, check RBLs, etc) but we thought putting the whole best practices process on paper would be very helpful an save a few trouble tickets in the process.
Take a look at it, hope you enjoy it. Feedback is always appreciated.
New ExchangeDefender Service Provider Feature: Alias Domains
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.
OWN Guide for Advanced Mail Server Settings Options For Shared Hosting Clients
Long title, short answer: This is how you get around the port 25 filtering/restrictions ISPs enforce. It’s also the most secure way to configure your mail client to send and receive mail from Own Web Now. In short, this is how you should be configuring your mail clients with Own Web Now virtual mail hosting.
In the guide: Walkthrough of SSL setup for SMTP, POP3 and IMAP for Windows Mail, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Entourage.
Response to recent Hosted SMTP issues
I wanted to take a moment to offer you an update on what we are doing to address the growing uselessness of hosted pop3/smtp as a means to communication over the Internet. The following is merely a status update, it does not offer an explicit date or implementation at which it may become available, only an indication that we are working on it. Support staff will not be able to give you an ETA.
Not a day goes by that we do not address at least a dozen support tickets with one ISP after another causing traffic interruption via port 25. Whether it is individual providers doing network policing and shaping intentionally, or they are being overloaded and experimenting new policies is inconclusive. What does appear to remain as a fact is that the remote SMTP access is rapidly becoming too unreliable for business use. The current recommendation is to rely on the SMTP server issued by your Internet Service Provider to relay mail.
Most providers outright proxy the port 25 connections through their networks. Bell South (AT&T) for example routes all port 25 traffic through their SMTP servers. Some Internet Service Providers are also enforcing SMTP auth on their users, making you authenticate against their SMTP servers. Some are silently dropping traffic on SMTP port 25. The problem becomes more impactful for mobile workers, mobile devices, etc.
We are working on providing alternate means for secure and reliable SMTP relay. All of the soon-to-be-proposed measures will require client reconfiguration. We hope that the additional services will further provide our client base with a reliable SMTP relay and ability to send/receive mail while roaming without depending on port 25. While we do offer SMTP via SSL, SMTP Auth, SMTP via ports 2525 and 25252 the documentation for those processes needs some work and we intend to provide it.
Note: Above only applies to our POP3/SMTP hosting service, not ExchangeDefender.
AhSay now compatible with ShadowProtect
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
Announcing OWN NOC Site
When stuff breaks (or when we intend to break stuff) you’ll hear about it first at our new NOC site:
There are feeds, categories, upcoming graphs and charts and all sorts of helpful stuff that will help you work with us and stay on the same page. We had to publish this site ahead of schedule so there are many features that we will be introducing over the coming months but for the time being, OWN NOC is the best place to find out what’s going on.
Upgrading ExchangeDefender SQL Backends
Please be advised that we’re upgrading ExchangeDefender’s SQL Server backends throughout this week.
No services will be interrupted, however, you may see slight delays at times (from a few minutes to potentially 20–30 minutes if you are on a low bandwidth solution).
We expect this routine maintenance to be completed by Wednesday evening, EST.
Service work completed. We will do one final pass on Satuday evening, October 13, starting at 8 PM and ending at Midnight but all major work has been completed.