Connection Issues Resolved -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Monday, July 10 2006
The previous connection issues are now resolved and our primary connection is back up and running. Normal service is resumed.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this third party outage.
Downtime -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Monday, July 10 2006
Our primary network provider appears to be having problems and the HighlandFox domain dropped off the Internet as a result. This appears to have been unplanned as we had no warning about it.
Our secondary connection is now active and our DNS records have been altered so everything should be slowly popping back online as I type this. It may take a while for the DNS to fully propogate. We will of course switch back to our primary connection as soon as it is available again resulting in a few minutes downtime again when that happens.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this third party outage.
Hardware upgrade on hold -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Thursday, January 12 2006
For various reasons the current hardware upgrade has had to be put on hold and has now been put back to a later date.
Our FTP server has now been brought back on line and is available for use again.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this FTP server downtime.
Hardware Upgrades -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Tuesday, January 3 2006
We are in the process of configuring and installing a new primary web server to replace our current one which is slowly dying after years of reliable service in various roles.
Whilst this work is going on, our FTP server will be unavailable and there will be a short outage during the actual hardware swap out.
Whilst we are working as fast as we can on this, potentially this could mean our FTP server will be innaccessible for a few days. Should any users have an urgent need to update their websites then they should contact us directly and we will assist.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused during this hardware upgrade.
Service Outage Update -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Thursday, December 22 2005
Our main line is back up and running much sooner than expected so we have switched back to it. However it is running extremely slowly at times and service is very intermittent as a result with quite severe packet loss occuring.
If you have trouble reaching our servers then please retry in a little while.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this ongoing third party outage.
Service Outage -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Thursday, December 22 2005
Currently our primary connection is dead, our service providor is working on this and is estimating a repair time of around 10.00 - 10.30pm GMT tonight.
We have switched over to our backup broadband line but as usual the DNS will take a while to propogate and service will be intermittent potentially during this entire outage.
As soon as our main line is back up again we will switch it back over which again will result in intermittent service while the DNS settles back down.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this third party outage.
Emergency Maintenance Complete -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Monday, December 12 2005
The emergency maintenance that had to be done at very short notice has now been completed and all our servers are running normally again.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this emergency work.
Emergency Downtime -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Monday, December 12 2005
All the HighlandFox servers will be down at various times this evening for unknown amounts of time for emergency maintenance. Not all servers will be down at the same time for the most part but the network will be "unpredicatable" for the evening.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this short notice for this emergency maintenance.
IMPORTANT: HighlandFox Email Users Alert -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Sunday, November 20 2005
HighlandFox email users are advised that there is currently an email claiming to be from us circulating with a zip file attached to it with an executable file badly disguised as a text file inside it. The email is trying to claim that your account has been used to send spam emails and to persuade you to open the attached file which of course will be some kind of exploit and should not under any circumstances be run.
Users should be advised that this email does NOT come from HighlandFox and that we would NEVER send an email with an attachment without first advising you that it was on the way through another official source. If you have received an email like this, you are advised to delete it immediately and empty your deleted items. In the event anyone has already run this file we advise that you run a fully up to date anti virus scanner and trojan scanner.
An example of the fake email is shown below for reference:
----------------------------------------------
Dear Highlandfox Member,
Your e-mail account was used to send a huge amount of unsolicited spam messages during the recent week. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and confirm the attached document so you will not run into any future problems with the online service.
If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choice but to cancel your membership.
Virtually yours,
The Highlandfox Support Team
+++ Attachment: No Virus found
+++ Highlandfox Antivirus - www.highlandfox.com
----------------------------------------------
The email will also have a zip file attached to it and so far this has been called "important-details.zip"
Again HighlandFox would like to advise its users that these emails do NOT originate from us and should be deleted on sight. We are already blocking the IP number that sent the original ones we have seen but can not guarantee they wont get through to other users. Additionally, we have never and will never sign off emails as coming from "Highlandfox support team" (there are only two of us anyway) or with "Virtually yours" (we're not that corny) and none of our anti virus scanners add a message into emails to say they have been scanned.
Mail Server Security -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Thursday, November 10 2005
To add to the existing security of our mail server we have recently applied new rules to the content filters. Our servers have never allowed attachments to contain .pif, .bat or .scr file types. We have now added .exe file types to that list due to the large number of viruses being propogated using that type of file.
If you have a genuine reason for people to send you .exe files please ask them to zip the file up as zip files will not be blocked, you can then unzip it once you receive it.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience this additional mail server security measure may cause.
Primary DNS Down -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Thursday, October 20 2005
It would appear that our DNS providers primary server site is currently down as their website has gone off line and neither of their primary DNS servers, NS1 or NS2 are responding to any queries.
Their secondary site is still functioning fine and NS3 and NS4 are responding to queries fine. All sites (with one exception) hosted by us have NS3 as an authoritative server as well so are still on line and working but with NS1 and NS2 down there is now no redundancy for those domains should NS3 fail for any reason.
For the one site that isnt registered correctly with NS3 it is currently offline. We have contacted the owner to explain the situation and explained the action needed to fix the issue for them.
All being well NS3 will stay up fine and all sites will remain online perfectly fine and the rest of pghost.com will appear back on line again soon giving back the redundancy, but users should be advised that there is now the possibility of site failures should NS3 fail too.
All four of the HighlandFox domains (.com, .net, .org and .co.uk) have seven DNS servers hosted with two different companies and at six different locations answering authoritatively for them as we pay for the extra cover, so this site should remain online fine. Please watch this space for any updates.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this 3rd party outage.
Unexpected Downtime (Resolved) -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Tuesday, October 18 2005
Our main line finally popped back online again and our servers have been switched back over to it and reconfigured again. Apologies for any inconvenience this 3rd party outage may have caused.
All our services should be back to normal again now, however there may be a few residual "glitches" for the next few hours as everything settles back in.
Unexpected Downtime -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Tuesday, October 18 2005
Apologies to all users of HighlandFox.com services, our Service provider has been working on a fault most of the day and is yet to resolve the issue.
We have now re-configured our back up broadband connection and all our services are slowly popping back on line although please bear in mind that these may be intermittent for the next few hours due to DNS changes and may also be slower to react than normal due to the extra routing we've had to put in place to make them available again.
Users should be advised that once our mainline becomes available again we will be offline again for a short while whilst the systems are changed back over to it and everything is re-configured.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this 3rd party outage.
Mail & FTP Servers Back Up -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Wednesday, June 29 2005
The previous problems caused by the power outage have now been resolved and our primary mail and FTP servers are now back up and running again.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused and thanks you for your patience.
Mail & FTP Servers Down -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Wednesday, June 29 2005
We had a major power failure caused by huge storms tonight. Unfortunately after this power failure our primary mail and FTP servers didnt come back up correctly. These have been unavailable for the last hour and a half. We are working on it currently and hope to have the servers back up and fully running again shortly.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this outage.
Spammers Using Our Email Address -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Sunday, January 23 2005
It would appear that we are not exempt from spammers faking our email address.
We have so far received several "bouncebacks" for emails we obviously didnt send out trying to sell people viagra and we are in the process of trying everything we can to get it stopped at once.
Unfortunately because of this it is quite likely that the HighlandFox domain may end up on various black lists through people reporting the spam that "appears" to be coming from us. The headers of these "fake" emails are shown below and originate from an IP number 203.81.204.10
Return-Path:
Received: (qmail 7644 invoked by uid 7392); 23 Jan 2005 00:51:39 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO cvsmail.com) (210.205.146.205)
by whoisprivacy1.prod.netsol.com with SMTP; 23 Jan 2005 00:51:36 -0000
Received: from 203.81.204.10
(SquirrelMail authenticated user admin@highlandfox.com);
by cvsmail.com with HTTP;
Sun, 23 Jan 2005 00:12:54 +0000
Message-Id:
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 00:12:54 +0000
Subject: This stuff is not really expensive as before...
From: "Dionne"
To: kh9n46ek2r5@networksolutionsprivateregistration.com
User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.3a
X-Mailer: SquirrelMail/1.4.3a
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Importance: Normal
It is important to note these emails DID NOT originate from HighlandFox or any of our servers/systems.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience this ARSEHOLE may cause our users.
Downtime for server software upgrades -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Sunday, January 2 2005
Due to recent security flaws that have come to light in the press about the versions of software HighlandFox was using on our web servers, it was necessary for us to take them offline in order to perform updates to all the affected software. This only affected our web servers and all other HighlandFox services where unaffected by this downtime.
Our web servers are now back on line and working normally and are now running fully up to date versions of Apache webserver, PHP, MySQL and GD and all associated software.
It should be noted that despite the flaw in the software, no intrusions happened and no sites hosted by us have been affected by this.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this necessary important upgrade.
Downtime -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Tuesday, November 23 2004
HighlandFox was temporarily off the air last night unexpectedly, this is due to our connection provider doing unannounced work on their network which resulted in us being completely cut off for several hours.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused by this third party work.
Hardware Update -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Wednesday, August 11 2004
The new server is in place and the basics appear to be working, websites are back on line and through traffic to the mail servers appear to be getting through.
Some aspects will not be working until later on today, the FTP server remains down until we get time to reset all the relevant permissions on the new server to allow it to connect to it.
Hopefully this higher spec machine will help performance slightly also and be as reliable as the old one was until recently.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience caused.
Hardware Failure -- Posted by Ian_Highlander on Tuesday, August 10 2004
Due to a failure in the hardware on our primary firewall and webserver it is failing intermittently at the moment and is currently locking up completely a couple of times a day. A quick reset of the machine is bringing everything back on line each time at the moment however this is obviously not ideal.
We are in the process of building a replacement machine, once this is complete we will be de-commissioning the old server and replacing it with the new one. This should hopefully happen some time tonight (GMT) although there are no guarantees and in the mean time we will attempt to keep as normal a service as possible running although please dont be surprised if you suddenly cant access any of our servers for a short period of time.
HighlandFox apologises for any inconvenience this hardware failure may cause and is endeavouring to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.
