Midcoast Internet Solutions

System
News & Notices

October 2002

• October 28, 2002 lincoln.midcoast.com was out of service from 10:00am to 10:30am due to an extended power outage in Damariscotta.
• October 21, 2002 dns.midcoast.com is apt to have problems during the day today. We are working on it and are working on moving it to new software and equipment throught the day.
• October 20, 2002 This evening around 10pm, dns.midcoast.com had trouble which caused people to have trouble logging in. This was fixed by a reboot at 10:15pm. New software is in the plans for this week to improve the reliability of it. Much of the trouble is the result of big surges of spam email. The new software changes we are working on will help our server handle the surges more smoothly.
• October 19, 2002 For a short time this morning, some customers had trouble logging in and authenticating. This was fixed at 9:35am.
• October 18, 2002 For a period during the evening some customers had trouble logging in and authenticating. This was fixed a few minutes after 9:00pm.
• October 15, 2002 Certain local Adelphia customers are having trouble checking midcoast email. This is a problem with Adelphia's IP numbers not resolving, in case a mutual customer is working with them on this problem. When they fix this, things should be fine. In the mean time, the webmail on the midcoast.com webpage still works for you.
• October 13, 2002 2:00pm - Benner Hill is running on generator power due to some sort of power outage in that area of Rockland. Our Datacenter was also running on generator power. Much of Rockland and many surrounding areas were without power. We switched back to utility power at about 6pm. We're not yet sure why the power was out.
• October 11, 2002 12:15am - dns.midcoast.com will be shut down for five to ten minutes for a quick hardware upgrade. This will affect many activities while the work is being done.
• October 8, 2002 8:30am - some people had a problem logging in due to an authentication problem for a few minutes. This has been fixed.
• October 7, 2002 Noon - some people had a problem logging in due to an authentication problem for a few minutes. This has been fixed.
• October 5, 2002 A small percentage of people in outlying areas have had trouble connecting to the new phone numbers. We have made a small change that may or may not improve things. If you still have trouble and you didn't have any trouble before changing the number, keep in touch with help@midcoast.com or call our office. There are a number of different things to check or try that might improve things. Some people connect better than ever and we rarely hear from them. Some people connect with less performance, and if you're one of them, we need to work together. It's not something we did or changed that cause this - we just moved our equipment from one location to another and we have the same type of lines from the phone company. We have quite a bit of experience with modems and are gaining more all the time, so as a customer, you should feel free to contact us regarding such things.
• October 5, 2002 midcoast.com and lincoln.midcoast.com email servers are being temporarily removed from the junkmail spam tagging process. We apologize to those who use this feature to reduce annoying junkmail. The software for tagging spam for those servers is not being well behaved, and we are temporarily disabling it instead of permitting it to cause a potential reliability problem. For us, reliabile email is far more important than popular addon features. The software for kona.midcoast.com/free.midcoast.com (spamassassin) is working fine and reliably and that will stay going. Eventually midcoast.com and lincoln.midcoast.com will receive that software too.
• October 4, 2002 Troubleshooting was completed with busy signal issues on the 500 numbers. 15006997201 should not have a busy signal at any time now. 15006997200 should rarely have a busy signal and we have additional equipment on order for that. MIS, Adtran, and Verizon worked hard on this, and Adtran helped us nail down the problem.
• October 3, 2002 the nntp server news2.midcoast.com is reported to be temporarily down by the people who provide news. News.midcoast.com is fine.
• October 3, 2002 Anyone who uses the proxy server is encouraged to change from 10.0.0.3 (aka quiver.midcoast.com) to 206.26.224.133. This new proxy server IP number goes to a new proxy server that is faster and should be more reliable.
• October 1, 2002 Verizon will again be monitoring phone lines for busies that shouldn't be happening this evening. Their past attempts have not suceeded due to either the wrong person working on it, looking for the wrong things, or most recently - them watching the wrong number for a day due to a typo of theirs.

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