MEMO : to all iTMG Hosting Subscribers

Regarding Allstream Ontario data interruption

Certain areas of Ontario are being affected by an outage that MTS Allstream is currently experiencing. MTS Allstream is our primary data provider for all hosting systems. The outage started Saturday evening at 9:24 PM and service was restored to much of Ontario by 6:04 AM.

The outage is apparently due to a major fibre cut that was caused by a propane explosion. It is our understanding that Rogers owns the segment of the fibre (used by Allstream) and is waiting for the fire to burn off before they can finish the repair. We are waiting for further details on the incident. Here is an article about the explosion:

FTP-Only accounts will experience intermittent interruptions today (Sun Nov 15) while we upgrade hardware.

Downtime is expected to be no more than 60 minutes total. This will have no effect on web hosting, mail services or domain service. FTP services that are a part of web hosting will also remain unaffected.

Thank you for your patience as we work to improve service.

iTMG servers have been under attack by malware over the past week. As a result we have been changing server access codes and for a time, had shut off FTP access completely.

At present we are not clear where the malware originated but have isolated a number of attacking IP addresses.

We have completed an extensive purging of files to clear our systems.

For hosting clients that have not otherwise done so, we urge you to check your site files and desktop PCs to ensure their cleanliness.

On Tue Sept 29, 2009 at 16:42EDT, our ISP partner's main data centre had a DNS server failure. This caused an interruption of traffic getting to our servers. The server was brought back online and service restored. Downtime was approximately 2 minutes.

We are looking into the cause of the failure to prevent future issues.

Our upgrade of our cPanel services is now complete. Thank you for your patience while we strive to improve our services for you.

We will be having a system upgrade this coming Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009 from 20:45pm EDT; thus, resulting to network outage. The outage may last as long as 30 mins - 1 hour; but is expected to be considerably shorter.

The outage will affect about 50% of hosting clients primarily with new, or newly upgraded hosting accounts.

During the outage, your website/email/ftp access may be unavailable or unresponsive. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any questions, please contact us at support@itristanmedia.com.

Yesterday afternoon at approximately 15:00 EDT out partner ISP experienced an unscheduled power cut from Hydro to the data centre. This was not announced and we had no forewarning.

As a result, our UPS back up power supplies were enabled but are only able to carry hosting load for a limited time. iTMG hosting services went down for most client sites around 15:39. The Hydro company was contacted to determine the cause and power restoration timeframe.

Hosting service was restored in stages at 16:45 as we brought staff off other duties to help.

We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to ensure we are well informed in advance of power outages from Hydro.

The issue was resolved with our phone provider

iTristan Media Group incoming phone service was hit was power disruption last night and is not receiving incoming calls properly this morning. Some incoming calls may go straight to voicemail instead of being routed to the proper line. We are in touch with our phone provider and they hope to have this problem solved very soon.

The CIRA ( .ca registry) whois servers are currently experiencing difficulties and as such domain look ups are not working properly. Nameserver modifications and all other whois modifications are down at present. We have been in touch with CIRA and they hope to have this problem solved very soon.

Due to an ever-increasing amount of maliciously, or naively-configured mail services and corrupted PCs out there, we, and our service providers are no longer accepting email coming from sources that are not properly configured.

In tech-speak, if incoming mail traffic has no reverse lookup, or a bogus reverse lookup (an attempt to forge authenticity), the mail will be rejected with a soft-fail warning to its sending service.

This is a protection for our clients, as most legitimate mail services and well-maintained servers have been providing appropriate reverse lookup for years. Most illegitimate mail traffic has been coming from

• PCs that have viruses, trojans and should never have been sending mail in the first place
• server that are spam-generators, phishing etc
• old legitimate mail servers that should be upgraded, tended to etc