Positive Fusion

Lately there has been a rash of helpdesk requests stating not much more than simply “it doesn’t work” and of course, without any more details this makes the task of solving whatever problem it may be quite considerably more difficult.

When submitting a helpdesk ticket, please provide as much information as is possible to describe the problem that you are having, otherwise we’ll need to ask you for more information and this process will delay resolution of your problem.

We’re now testing various RBL (Real Time Blacklists) with our email server software. Currently if a sending email server is flagged as being a source of spam (being listed in the RBL) there will be a header line (X-Blacklisted) added to that email indicating the IP address of the sending server and the RBL that IP was found within.

Provided that the testing proves to be successful in blocking spam and not causing too much ‘collatoral damage’ the warning mechanism will be changed to block those senders.

If you do happen to notice legitimate email coming in with X-Blacklisted headers, we can add those to our manual ‘whitelist’ to prevent them from being blocked whenever the switch to blocking from warning would be made.

Additionally, as rampant “sources” of spam, the following domains have been manually blacklisted server-wide:
canada.com
india.com
hongkong.com
china.com

Seems as though we just experienced a bit of a network issue. All connectivity to the data centre seemed to vanish for approximately 10 minutes. Everything appears to be working as it should at this point though.

The issue with Apache being offline has been resolved. An update to CPanel removed two critical Apache modules and thus Apache would not load after that update. Maximum downtime of 10 minutes.

CPanel has been updated, if you notice any “quirks” please let the helpdesk staff know about them.

Apache, the process that serves webpages, has gone offline. We’re currently investigating the cause.

07:29AM