This Sunday the 7th September 2008 our local electricity supplier will be upgrading the local power relay to our building. Regrettably this means that some of our data-center services will not be available during the hours of 8am and 2pm.

What impact does this have?

• All mail will be directed to our second data-centre in Telford and queued for delivery (if you use our MailScanner cleaning service). If you have an office server that handles mail from your site your mail will continue to be delivered normally. If your email account is hosted remotely or we operate a Zimbra server on your behalf these services will be available after 2pm.

• VoIP telephone services will operate normally, with the exclusion of hosted VoIP.

• Application hosting will operate normally.

• 80% of website hosting will suffer, premium web stores will still be available.

• Inbound Fax services will not be available.

Engineers will be available on-site following the downtime to re-commission and monitor the services.

If you have any questions regarding this news post please do not hesitate to contact me.

Recently we (sadly) had to say goodbye to 1st line support engineer Dan Wagstaff who joined us last year for his year out support-desk experience. We wish Dan all the luck for the future and his next year, hopefully he will be back when he has passed his University degree.

Dan’s replacement Michael Panjanaden joined us two weeks ago and is just starting to pick up some of the 1st line calls. Mike is (like Dan) a polite helpful young guy who is directly supported by the 2nd line technical guys. Mike is a bright fast thinking guy so it won’t take long for him to grasp your support requirements.

Finally its worth noting in this post that the 1st line guys are completely supported by experienced 2nd line support. The 1st line guys are instructed not to tackle anything that is out of their depth or issues that are particularly complex, complex technical issues are ALWAYS worked on in conjunction with 2nd line support.

Good luck Mike.

We don’t keep it secret and most of our customers know that Intercell Solutions have been using Apple MacOSX computers from our inception - we are proud to be different and after all they-just-work! In the last year we have been checking out the new Apple MacOSX Leopard Server. We have been testing it in heterogeneous networks to test its ability to mix with Windows, UNIX and MacOSX environments. As ever Apple have pulled it out of the bag making everything work perfectly and seamlessly, setup is relatively straight forward for an IT specialist, ongoing administration is simple, the graphical user interface (GUI) is a dream to work with.

Click here to read more about the amazing MacOSX server.

One of the big things our customers look for in a server is for their Windows desktops to access files, folders and printers in a simple way. Leopard Server has full domain control built in, which means hot desking and server controlled login works out of the box.

One of the most exciting features of the server is the new TimeMachine feature. Only once in my life of IT have I got excited about a piece of backup software and that is with TimeMachine - TimeMachine takes backup to the next level. Snapshots of the system happen every 60 minutes automatically in the background whilst the system is still fully functional. With TimeMachine you have complete piece of mind.

When it comes to restoring information from the backup it is a breeze. You click the TimeMachine icon in the dock on your server and you are presented with an outer-space like window, a time-line on the right, and arrows to help you perform your search for files - literally anyone can restore files and folders from a backup!

Click here to read more about TimeMachine.

We are in the process of rolling out Apple Leopard server to our clients at the moment. If you would like to find out more drop us a line and an account manager will be more than happy to demonstrate the power and advantages to your business.

Our VoIP telephone systems are going from strength to strength. Many of our new and existing I.T. clients are now taking advantage of the powerful features and huge savings of KomplettPBX. We have installations in call-centres, worldwide branch offices and simple straight forward replacements for traditional telephony systems - a truly modular system.

NEW! Many of our customers were asking for integration with Outlook and in general their desktop PC’s - the ability to see inbound calls as they arrive, call directly from Outlook, a receptionist overview of all extensions on the telephone network and even instant messaging between users and PC’s. KomplettPBX now delivers Hudlite functionality in version 2.0 of our PBX software. In most cases it is a simple upgrade to the latest version, which delivers hundreds of new additional features.



Click here to read more about Hudlite and the functionality it delivers.

Reduced call-charges - we are currently negotiating a better deal with our carriers to deliver lower call charges to our customers, we will keep you posted on this one, it could make a big difference to the already very low call charges available on our VoIP systems.

Committed to low support charges - we have compared our telephone system support charges with our competitors and in most cases we are 50% cheaper per annum! The reason for this is the reliability and ease of use of the systems we install. Admittedly the bedding in period can be a complicated process (this depends on our clients requirements) but following this we find our clients are more than happy about the feature rich system and decision they have made - after all most of our new installs have come from recommendation.

Finally we would like to thank you for your continued support and if you would like further information about Hudlite the desktop telephony integration software or indeed the feature rich KomplettPBX phone system your account manager will be pleased to advise you accordingly.

A news post just left our system that should have gone out on the 16th June 2008, please ignore this message as it was related to some downtime last month.

Today at 12:46pm our data centre was affected by the UK wide failing leased line circuits at BT exchanges. BT were alerted to the issue by Easynet and BT had restored connections by 3:45pm. We are waiting for confirmation from BT that everything has been restored successfully and that this issue is now fully resolved. 

We apologise for any inconvenience caused. 

The DNS records for the mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk cluster have been checked periodically throughout the night with several different service providers with positive results.

Both mail scanning cluster queues and services have also been monitored throughout the night and all mail has been delivered successfully.

Part of our continued commitment to upgrading our core service network we will be splitting the scanning clusters between our existing BVIC data-centre and our new Telford data-centre. The upgrades will be complete by next Tuesday and will add further redundancy to our mail scanning service, which will help prevent incidents like we have suffered this week.

The Telford data-centre sits on a 10Gb link into tele-house in London, has full power fail-over generation and will be primarily running our Apple MacOSX Server Xgrid clusters for web applications and email services. More information will be posted on this subject when the upgrades are complete.

Once again please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

DNS is now resolving fully, there will be the odd service provider that is not yet up to date. You may notice a flurry of messages that should have been delivered over the last few days, please check the dates and times that messages should have been delivered rather than the actual delivery time.

Any messages that are not received in the next few hours will have been bounced back to the sender.

We are continuing to monitor the situation.

We have received a few messages following our earlier post so this update attempts to address them.

Question: Certain people emailing me are still seeing bounced messages.

Answer 1: Some service providers will have old cached DNS records suggesting that mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk is unavailable. The time-to-live on theitguys.co.uk is 2 hours, which means some service providers will not re-check the records until later today.

Answer 2: People emailing you may have sent a message on Monday and only just received a bounce. Mail servers by default are configured to retry for up to five days and then bounce a message back to the sender. They don’t always give an immediate bounce to a message.

Serious DNS issues can occur with service providers that cache DNS names and ignore the time-to-live records for the domain. Service providers that are known to do this include AOL, BT and Virgin.

We will keep you posted on the progress of this situation.

For the more technical amoungst us the correct DNS for mailscanner2 is:

$ dig mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk mx @ns1.easynet.co.uk

; < <>> DiG 9.4.1-P1 < <>> mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk mx @ns1.easynet.co.uk
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 20069
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 3

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk.	IN	MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk. 10760 IN	MX	5 mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk. 2794 IN	NS	ns2.theitguys.co.uk.
mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk. 2794 IN	NS	ns1.theitguys.co.uk.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk. 2794 IN	A	78.33.33.164
ns2.theitguys.co.uk.	2794	IN	A	82.109.198.9
ns1.theitguys.co.uk.	13331	IN	A	78.33.33.162

;; Query time: 20 msec

;; SERVER: 195.40.0.250#53(195.40.0.250)
;; WHEN: Thu May 22 12:58:05 2008
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 146

$ dig mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk a @ns1.easynet.co.uk

; < <>> DiG 9.4.1-P1 < <>> mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk a @ns1.easynet.co.uk
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 47152
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk.	IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk. 2634 IN	A	78.33.33.164

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk. 2634 IN	NS	ns2.theitguys.co.uk.
mailscanner2.theitguys.co.uk. 2634 IN	NS	ns1.theitguys.co.uk.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns2.theitguys.co.uk.	2634	IN	A	82.109.198.9
ns1.theitguys.co.uk.	13171	IN	A	78.33.33.162

;; Query time: 24 msec
;; SERVER: 195.40.0.250#53(195.40.0.250)
;; WHEN: Thu May 22 13:00:45 2008
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 130

This week we have had several reported issues regarding the resolution of DNS and email being bounced. The issues have finally been isolated to one of our primary DNS servers and the records it holds. The server has had it records reloaded from a backup as corruption had occurred, which was difficult to trace due to the randomness of the reported problems and obtaining decent bounce messages.

For information this affected emails being delivered to our secondary mailscanner2 cluster service from some service providers. The exhaustive tests we have performed in the last 20 minutes are showing positive results. We will continue to monitor the situation and inform you of any further situations.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.