Head Guru

IPB all the way.

Sorry for the late update, today has been a busy day. This e-mail was sent to all clients of TCH. -------------------------------- Hello, Late last night the makers of Movable Type announced that a vulnerability existed in all versions of Movable Type. Movable Type is a software that is not supplied by TotalChoice, however it is very popular with our client base. If you are not using Movable Type, please ignore this email. This exploit in all versions of Movable Type allowed a malicious user to exploit the e-mail functions of Movable Type and send unlimited spam e-mail from the targeted site. We noticed certain Movable Type sites several days ago start sending massive amounts of e-mail and caused several of our servers to crash. At that time we were not aware of the exploits. Once we were informed of the exploits and were given access to a plug-in that would stop the attacks we immediately pushed out a file to all of the users Movable Type directories. This e-mail is only a notice that a new plugin exists in your Movable Type installation. We urge you to upgrade your Movable Type Installation to the most current and up to date version. 3.15 Thank you for you continued support. TotalChoice Hosting

We just completed pushing a file to all MT installations. This was done on all servers. This was in direct response to many users MT installs being exploited by hackers. If you feel violated that we pushed a plugin into your MT install I am very sorry. Imagine how we have felt the past three days seeing MT being attacked and there was nothing that could be done. Furthermore, imagine how all the users not running MT on your server would have felt when your install was compromised and the server sent out 100 million emails causing high loads, down time and IP blacklisting. TCH made the right choice. I am sure you want a secure, safe and reliable server. It seems we can never please all of the people all of the time. This is a risk I am willing to take to insure server security and reliability. A e-mail is being dispatched to all our clients, however, we patched our servers before the e-mail went out. This is sometimes done during rushed patch installs. Bill

First of all if you have been here for two years, you know that we don't leave people out to dry. How many workstations do you have in your office using the TCH server to check e-mail? How often are they set to check e-mail. Once per hour, once per 1/2 hour. This is not about the amount of inbound mail to you, it is about the number of connections you or your office is making to our server. In effect it appears you are making more connections to our server than our ruleset allow. Perhaps you should consider bringing in a dedicated transit line and a dedicated exchange server to your office. You could hire a 3rd party to support the server and set up. Would cost you very little. If in fact your loose $30,000 a day when your e-mail stops working you need to get your own dedicated servers. Afterall there are 232 or so workdays per year. Can you stand to place nearly 6MILLION dollars in revenue on a shared hosting service?

Just thought I would chime in with some changes that took place with .com and .net TLD's. It is called RapidDNS. In short instead of waiting days most DNS updates, including new domain registrations of .com and .net TLD's are taking minutes now. More information is found here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=181011

I gave up on Firefox as well. But hey, what's a MCSE to do? Bill

Annie, Do you have logs and Ip's. If so, can you get them to me and we will look at blocking them from all our servers.

Reply sent. YGM! Bill

We have not started using server93 as of yet. So all hosted domains are ns1 and ns2. We will begin provisioning on server93 starting Tuesday January 25, 2005 Bill

Hi, Drop me a e-mail with the domain names and I will respond on what servers and datacenters your accounts are located in. Bill

Ok here it is. http://postmaster.info.aol.com/guidelines/standards.html Per AOL guidelines, and I quote: "AOL's mail servers will not accept connections from systems that use dynamically assigned or residential IP addresses." Hope this helps. Bill

AOL will not accept e-mail from servers running on a Dynamic IP address. This is most likely the issue. Are you on a dynamic IP Address?

If you would like to continue this off board, please drop me a e-mail. I do not check the forums as often as I do help desk and e-mail. The forums are not meant as a means of support to end users from our tech staff. Thread closed.

But we did not change anything so therefore there was no need to send an e-mail to our clients. I understand your sub-domain or parked domain is not working, and for that I am sorry. However, please don't assume because something is not working that we made changes to the servers. That is simply not a correct assumption. In fact it is baseless. DNS issues can be tricky at best. Our bind servers do a very good job for us with DNS. However, on occasion blips or glitches can occur. When they do and we are not aware of them just drop a e-mail or chat us online and we can correct the issue. Bill

Just a update to this thread. Since we have implemented this new policy we have seen a few things occur. The amount of AOL Abuse complaints that are now being received has greatly been reduced. This new policy is working and both servers that were AOL blacklisted are now in the open and on whitelist status. On a side note, we have had many people send us emails in support of our choice and I wanted to say thank you for your continued support. Bill

I doubt anyone played with your server settings. In fact why would we pick your account and just say ok lets play with this account and remove some stuff. That makes no sense at all. These are production servers and we dont "play" with them. The only time we ever make changes to our server farm is for stablity and security. If these are ever done, we give ample notice in our user forums and via email. What I imagine that happened is that cPanel pushed out a update to your server and in the process some configurations were change or lost. BTW server 91 has had 99.997% uptime not 99% Bill

Sorry forgot to add. Please send traceroutes for the following. sql.totalchoicehosting.com server1.totalchoicehosting.com Thanks!

What part of the world are you in? It could be a routing issue between your ISP and our SQL server. Can you send some traceroutes to bill at totalchoicehosting.com and I will investigate this for you. Thanks Bill

I find nothing wrong with our server. I honestly do not think there is anything to fix

I have checked on this again for you. Your ticket was received in the help desk this time. We have responded back and are awaiting details from you. Ticket was Posted on 22 Jan 2005 12:32 pm We responded on Posted on 22 Jan 2005 12:44 pm

If you have access to AOL or Yahoo Instant Messenger please contact one of us directly. Michelle or Myself handle billing issues and would be more than happy to assist. tchgurubill tchgurumichelle Thanks Bill

I thought it was creative and well it's the clients bandwidth after all.

Your website is the most annoying thing I have ever came across. Keep up the good work. Bill

Hi, I just searched thru our help desk and am only to locate two support tickets from you. One was from the 20th of Jan, and Liz answered it 11 minutes after you emailed our support. Do you have the ticket number on the latest ticket, as I simply do not see it. As far as number of tickets, our help desk answered over 75,000 tickets in 2004. Our average response time in 2004 was 9 minutes. So while we do get many tickets into our help desk, we maintain a large enough support team to quickly respond to each one of them.

If this is regarding your cancellation request, they are time stamped when received and processed in the order that order.