HIS WordPress users should upgrade to the latest version of WordPress as soon as you can – the current version is 2.8.3. This is a security update, and you want it. If you’re using any third-party themes or plugins, make sure you’ve got the latest versions of those as well.
We’ve had several customers get hit by spammers who have used WordPress vulnerabilities to add spam to posts and RSS feeds.
A cable cut has affected internet access to/from west Africa:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2009/07/2009730775992910.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8176014.stm
Estimated time to repair: 2 weeks.
We have scheduled a software upgrade on Zimbra email servers dc.his.com and zimbra.his.com for the midnight to 2 AM maintenance period Saturday morning. This is a maintenance upgrade to optimize performance with Outlook 2007 and to add security patches. Mail will be unavailable on each server for about 10 minutes while the upgrade is being applied.
Update: the upgrade to version 5.0.18 is complete and dc.his.com and zimbra.his.com are operating normally.
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.