Internet Services

System Status January 22, 2004 - Long time between notes. That's probably good news. On January 19 we installed a replacement server to relieve the venerable clam.thinkshells.com. There were no serious operational problems with the system but those disks had been spinning along for a couple years and nothing lasts forever. The replacement server is a Sun Enterprise 250 sporting two 400 mhz SPARC cpu's and a gig of ram. It has 6 48g drives. The disks that are operational are mirrored. "While I was in there" as we like to say at the Harley shop, I refreshed all the installed software and operating system. I also installed all the recommended security patches. My major criterion in all of this was to have a seamless rollover to the new system. Synchronization of user directories and software version dependancies were analyzed and efforts made to minimize failures owing to version problems. Overall this was successful. A few minor glitches popped up. Most notably the email authentication quit working. This proved to be a huge mystery but the root cause was isolated to a system library file being overwritten by an incompatible software product. Another objective was to create a system that could be quickly replacated should there be a major failure. With the lessons learned from this renewal activity we are certain to nail this objective. There's just a couple legacy configuration issues to rework and then we'll have substantial redundancy for the entire system. It is our honest hope that we are providing you with quality services and support and that your experience with Internet Northwest Online Services is a good one. If there is any need you have please bring it to our attention and we'll work to provide the desired results. Thanks for using our services. January 25, 2003 - There was a serious Internet melt down as yet another exploit of Microsoft systems was released. This exploit targets Microsoft SQL servers only, and while our sytem felt the load imposed on the Internet, we were not directly affected. We have no Microsoft products and no systems that are capable of running Microsoft products. December 16, 2002 - Major simplification of web site June 2, 2002 - We performed a thorough system security upgrade today. This was necessitated by a second "defacing" event on the main web server. The bad guys keep finding new holes and we keep cleaning them up. This upgrade involved every service running on the system and so there were unavoidable outages during this time frame. As this work was begun in the very early hours last evening it was not practical to notify everyone of what was taking place. We apologize for any inconvenience but felt the urgency of the situation mandated we begin this upgrade as quickly as possible. April 25, 2002 - At 8:20pm the /tmp filesystem filled up. This caused a number of processes to fail somewhat randomly including pop and imap mail. The web server was also down for a short time. The root cause is being investigated. January 10, 2002 - Approx 9:00am until noon we experienced email problems on our network. This issue has been resolved and will be monitored for the next 24hours for any anomalies. November 30, 2001 - Approx 4:00am until 5:30am we experienced authentication problems on the Starnet network. This issue was related to dial-up services only on the Starnet network. There was no loss to any email, shell, or web services during this time. November 10th, 2001 - Our relocation of our servers went smoothly and without any extended outages. We now are located in an Eathquake hardened facility with redundant network connections via seperate Backbone providers. If you are still experiencing problems accessing the shell server, please access it via the IP of:216.57.203.72 DNS sometimes takes a little time to propagate throughout the Internet. Please email support@ThinkShells.com if you are experiencing any unusual problems. October 29th, 2001 - Our Backbone provider that services our web and shell servers lost a router. This caused us about an hour of downtime today between 11am and noon. Our dial-up services were unaffected. Please email support@ThinkShells.com if you have any additional questions.