If you’ve upgraded to Internet Explorer 8 and use webmail.his.com, you’ll find that IE 8 breaks some of webmail’s features, including the ability to list your subfolders by clicking the + on the left panel.
To work around this, go to IE 8’s Tools menu and add webmail.his.com to ‘Compatibility View’. You may have to quit and restart Internet Explorer, but you’ll find that webmail.his.com looks normal once you’ve done this.
Generator repairs at one of our Maryland facilities have taken longer than planned today and batteries in some UPSs have depleted. webmail.his.com has had two brief outages as a result, around 12 noon today (Monday, 6/22/2009).
If http://webmail.his.com is unavailable, use http://mail.his.com instead.
We’ve had a number of reports today of email, supposedly from Microsoft, claiming to contain an update for Microsoft Outlook. The messages are well-formatted and look like they could have come from Microsoft, but they did not - the attachment is a ‘trojan’ and opening it on a Windows machine is likely to infect your computer, causing you to become part of the spambot network and start sending these messages (and more).
A surprising number of these messages made it through both Postini’s filters and ours earlier today - we’re catching them now, but you may have already received one. If you did receive one, delete it (and definitely do NOT open the attachment).
Sample:
8:30 AM 12/10/2008: AT&T made a change in the early-morning hours today that broke inbound calling to our dialup modem numbers, and all of those numbers are returning busy signals. We’re working with AT&T to correct this ASAP.
9:55 AM 12/10/2008: AT&T has corrected the call-routing problem and all dialup access numbers are working again.
4:00 PM 12/3/2008: we’re seeing widespread reports of problems getting to www.yahoo.com - this appears to be a DNS issue, where the site is fine but you can’t get to it. If you’re having trouble reaching www.yahoo.com, there’s nothing wrong with your computer (or your connection).
5:00 PM update: the Yahoo problem has been resolved. It affected mostly East Coast users and was short-lived.
11/28/2008: The HIS Billing Office in Rockville, MD is closed today to give our folks a much-needed break. Voicemail and email queries to billing@his.com will be handled on Monday. You can also open a billing support ticket here.
Tech support is in 24/7 operation as always. You can open a trouble ticket here, or call 301-255-0500 or 1-888-818-0500, option 2.
10:15 AM 11/26/2008: Our business office phone system will be in maintenance mode for several hours today to replace a failing hard drive. During this time our ability to take incoming calls will be limited, so if possible, please use email (support@his.com) or web (http://info.his.com/support/support.his.com.html) to open a support ticket.
3:00 PM 11/26/2008: Phone system work has been completed.
Verizon reports a major fiber cut 16 miles south of Laurel Maryland. We don’t see any evidence of this from any of our locations (DC, MD, VA, NJ, GA, TX, CA) but many circuits are affected, so local users in the Baltimore/DC area may be affected. Repair began at 4:30 PM, no ETA.
11/21/2008 9:55 AM: One of the servers that was restored from yesterday’s hardware failure, psa104, is still having a mysql issue. This impacts sites with mysql databases, webmail logins, and admin control panel logins. We’re working on it and will post updates here. Other Plesk servers are operating normally.
10:15 AM: the mysql database corruption problem on psa104 has been repaired and all logins (webmail and admin control panel) and database (wordpress, etc.) operation appear to be operating normally. We will continue to monitor this server throughout the day.
10:35 AM: the database problem on psa104 isn’t fully corrected after all - we’ll post an update shortly.
11:40 AM: We’ve opened a ticket with the vendor on this problem.
2:35 PM: If your email account is on psa104.his.com and you’re having trouble sending mail, check the settings in your email software and be sure you’ve enabled SMTP authentication, using the username@domain.com username and password that you use to pick up your mail. You may still get a ‘connection refused’ message some of the time - if that happens hit send again and your message should go through.
4:25 PM: We’ve solved the problem on psa104.his.com (no thanks to our software vendor …). As of about 3:45 PM today operations were returned to normal on psa104.his.com. We had to restore one key database from our Wednesday morning backup (the Thursday morning backup was evidently damaged by the server failure), and after testing, it appears that all really is well now. We’ll be sending email this weekend to the registered contact(s) for each site explaining the details of the problem, what we’re doing to prevent this from happening again, and the credit that will be issued to compensate for the downtime.
8:10 AM 11/20/2008: We’re experiencing a problem with a server in Washington, DC that hosts a number of Plesk sites. No ETA for resolution yet.
10:45 AM update: We’re pursuing two parallel methods for restoring the sites hosted by the failed server: a) attempt to get the RAID failure resolved on the server, b) restore sites from backup to a new server. Both of these are underway simultaneously, and the method that succeeds first will win.
1:05 PM update: Attempts to repair the damage to the RAID array have failed, so we’re restoring all affected sites to new hardware. No data should be lost because the failure happened right after the morning backup. Restoration is taking longer than we’d like because of the very large amount of data involved.
2:10 PM update: restore of all data is proceeding.
4:25 PM update: restore is still underway - ETA for completion of restoration and testing: approximately 8 PM. We’ll be in contact with site owners later tonight - credits for this unprecedented downtime will be given, and we’ll send details about the credit and what we’re doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again to site owners.
8:05 PM update: all Plesk sites affected by today’s server failure have been restored, and queued mail is being delivered. Site owners will be contacted Friday morning with information about credits to their accounts.