EsisNet Happenings

We're under attack!

Well, indirectly under attack. It appears that some spammer has forged one of our domain names into a spam run being distributed via a bot-net.
What's happening now is that hundreds of thousands of (poorly configured) email servers are sending bad reject notices to non-existent users on our domain. These bogus notices are coming in at the rate of about 500/second. While our server is handling the load, it is starting and stopping acceptance of new connections every 10-20 seconds.
If you're having trouble sending email, please keep trying. Right now, it's just luck of the draw for whether you can connect or not. No mail will be lost. This is just an inconvenience at this point. Hopefully, it won't last long.

Back on our feet (or at least our knees)

What a strange trip the last couple of months have been. We had purchased a new server, and were laying out our plans for installing & implementing it when we got blind-sided. One of our other servers crashed... Hard... It was, for all practical purposes totaled.
Fortunately, our new server was big & powerful enough to handle the tasks that were running on the failed system. It just wasn't in our plans for that to have to happen.
Most of you probably didn't notice much more than a blip as we scrambled to get/keep all services running. We're begging the forgiveness of our website customers, as they were the hardest hit.
There was a lag in restoring a few other services as well, and of course this page was one of the last things to be returned to service. We've still got some tweaking to do, but for the most part things are back to something like normal.

Happy New Year from the Staff at Esisnet!

We wanted to share some interesting tidbits from 2007:

In 2007 Esisnet received approximately 8,636,271 emails. Of those 6,492,644 were rejected outright as spam!
That adds up to more than 18,000 messages a day that our customers did not have to deal with.
We also prevented our customers from getting more than 459 viruses from emails.
We will continue to provide the maximum protection to our customers from spam and viruses, and look forward to a year of growth and continued improvements in service.

We wish to thank our customers for their support, and look forward to providing you and your friends with an even better Internet service in 2008!

DSL Outages scheduled for 09 Oct., 2007

We've received word from our DSL co-op that Embarq will be doing some router updates & upgrades between midnight & 6 a.m. on 9 October.
It's quite likely that all of our DSL customers will be impacted, but only briefly.
If you have a problem next Wed. morning, please power cycle your DSL router prior to calling us.

Scheduled outages

We are planning to do an upgrade to our mail server this weekend. The plan right now is for late Saturday night. No changes will be necessary for our users, and no email will be lost but there may be some time when the mail server is not accessible.

DSL customers will likely experience some downtime between midnight Sunday, 30 Sep & Monday morning.
Our co-op upstream provider is moving their equipment to a new data center. Again, no changes will be required but DSL will go down and DSL modems may need to be power cycled to restore connectivity.

Thanks for your patience as we strive to improve our service to you!

Well... This was a not fun morning!

As you may have noticed, all of our services were down from about 7 a.m. until 8:30-ish this morning. What happened was one of those things that is best described as Murphy's Law in action.
The Embarq Central Office in Havelock (where our servers & network gear is housed) apparently lost power at around 6 a.m. The automatic generator didn't automate. Our battery backup equipment lasted for about an hour. Still no power, & the Embarq techs couldn't even get the generator started manually (I'm sure somebody will be in a heap o' trouble over that).
We stayed on-site until the power came back on at about 8:15. Never did find out what happened, but everything appears to be back to normal now.
Some DSL routers may need to be power cycled to return them to service, but otherwise, no harm done.
Since the entire network was down, no email should have been lost. Servers attempting delivery received temporary failure notices & should retry again.

DSL outage tonight

Short notice, but we just received word that Embarq will be doing maintenance between midnight & 6 a.m. tonight (tomorrow).
This maintenance is to attempt alleviate the latency / slow surf issues many of us have been
experiencing in recent weeks.
You may need to power cycle your DSL modem in the morning if the circuits are dropped during the maintenance window.

Planned DSL outage (sort of)

Our DSL upstream partner, NCisp will be relocating some servers tonight (11 May), beginning at 11 p.m. They expect to be finished by 2 a.m.
This shouldn't cause any outages, per se, but if your connection happens to drop during that time it will stay down until the relocation is finished.
We apologize for the short notice & any inconvenience this may cause.

Free spam!

Interesting article, but it (hopefully) doesn't say anything you didn't already know.
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/ConsumerActionGuide/IsFreeStuffOnTheNetReallyFree.aspx

DSL outage tonight

Planned DSL outage.
Date/Time of Event: 03/13/07 12:01 AM EDT
Embarq engineers will perform software upgrades to increase capacity. Customers may experience an interruption of service of up to one (1) hour during this process.
Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.