JTAN News and Network Status

Tue, 31 Jan 2012

Mail Relay Change
As a tactical response to Comcast's blocking of JTAN's mail, we've changed the IP address of our main outgoing relay. I really regret doing this. It's not something we can easily repeat. Yet it seemed our only alternative. Comcast was uncooperative.

This forced IP address change should not affect most of our customers. The only exception I'm aware of is if you have a custom crafted SPF record. The suggested SPF record if you use JTAN to send your mail is "v=spf1 redirect=jtan.com". This remains correct. If, on the other hand, you have a customized SPF record that explicitly lists the numeric IP addresses of JTAN's outgoing mail relays, you should consider changing it to "v=spf1 redirect=jtan.com". That way, if we are again forced to change our outgoing mail relay IP, you will not be inconvenienced.

Posted Jan 31, 2012 at 03:32 UTC [/] permanent link

Tue, 24 Jan 2012

Comcast Blocking JTAN
We've heard a few reports about Comcast blocking JTAN mail. I'm not sure what we can do about it other than to wait for their blocklist to clear. It's already been reported to them, FWIW.

On a political note, I hope you are all aware of SOPA, a misguided bit of US legislation that needs to be stopped. Can you imagine the collateral damage should DNS blocklists be implemented? Should anyone doubt the problems that will be caused, they need only look at the problems caused by spamming blocklists.

Blocklists are not good practice. Only inferior ISP's (e.g. Comcast) still use them.

Posted Jan 24, 2012 at 18:51 UTC [/] permanent link

Tue, 10 Jan 2012

Email Non-outage (Solved?)
We are starting to piece it all together. Many people complained about "deactivated" email. Apparantly, a lot of JTAN users received the following phishing SPAM message:

  THIS MESSAGE IS FROM OUR TECHNICAL SUPPORT TEAM 

  This message is sent  automatically by the computer. If you are
  receiving this message it means that your email address has been queued
  for deactivation; this was as a result of a continuous error script
  (code:505) receiving from this email address. 

This spam muddied the water for us considerably. When the deluge of spam caused the POP/IMAP server to throttle, many people thought the spam was real and sent in email queries. These misleading reports sent us down a few blind alleys to say the least.

Anyway, the bottom line is this. Whatever the issue, I always appreciate trouble reports. You should never hesitate to contact JTAN, either by email, or by our web form, or by the members area. We may be confused initially, but reports always help us sort out what's going on. Even if it's the usual spam battle.

Posted Jan 10, 2012 at 16:13 UTC [/] permanent link

Sat, 07 Jan 2012

Free Money
JTAN is giving away free money!

Recently JTAN added support for Bitcoin payment. I really like the idea of bitcoin. I don't know if this new form of payment will catch on, but a viable form of electronic cash is long, long overdue. Online payment systems we have now (Credit Cards, Paypal, etc...) are hobbled by numerous technical, economic, social, and political problems that hamper the online economy. I believe a cash alternative would be a great benefit.

To exchange bitcoins, all you need is the app available here. You don't have to sign up anywhere, or give anybody any personal info. There is no "central bank" or other authority. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer system. I can't guarantee that the app has no vulnerabilities, but the source code is freely available for you to read. You don't need to trust anybody. Decide for yourself if it's safe enough for your taste.

To show our enthusiasm for Bitcoin, JTAN will pay 1 coin (1.00 BTC) to any current JTAN customer that posts a refund address in the members area. You'll find the spot to post your address under the Payment: Bitcoin link. We won't ask for anything in return. The coin is effectively free money.

This is a limited time offer; one BTC per customer. As of this moment, the exchange value of that one bitcoin is about $6.50 US. Bitcoin values fluctuate. and there is no guarantee that a bitcoin will be worth anything in the real world 10 years, or even 10 days, from now.

Of course, some people worry the same may be true about the USD.

Posted Jan 07, 2012 at 17:40 UTC [/] permanent link

Wed, 28 Dec 2011

JTAN opposes SOPA
SOPA is a horrible idea. Copyright holders already have way too much free stuff paid for by the taxpayer. Write your government representatives and tell them in this era of budget cutting, the US taxpayer can't afford to fund yet more unfunded, unconstitutional, unlimited goodies for special interests at the cost of a ruined Internet.

JTAN uses the OpenSRS domain registrar system. OpenSRS has gone on the the record opposing SOPA.

Posted Dec 28, 2011 at 03:08 UTC [/] permanent link

Thu, 29 Sep 2011

Firefox 4/5 Workaround
Since more people are using Firefox 4 and 5 with their personal certificate bug, and less people want to use personal certificates, we've swapped the members area URLs that access the members pages with and without certificates.

To help the majority that use Firefox and may want to upgrade conveniently, the members-nocert URL is now the same as the default members URL. If you still want to use your client cert for members access (and your browser supports client certs), then you can use the new members-cert URL.

Most people can just keep doing what they are doing without any change. Only if you are using client certs for access, will you need to change URLs. If you were using the "nocert" URL for some reason, you can now use the main "members" URL.

Posted Sep 29, 2011 at 01:31 UTC [/] permanent link

Wed, 22 Jun 2011

Thebe Power Supply Fixed
The power supply on the ProWeb host "thebe" has been repaired. Web sites hosted on this machine should now be up. Perhaps the recent problems with thebe have been a result of the failing power supply

All JTAN accounts support hosting on multiple machines as a mechanism for improved reliability.

Posted Jun 22, 2011 at 13:59 UTC [/] permanent link

Tue, 24 May 2011

Bitcoin Accepted at JTAN
In recognition of the fast moving bitcoin market, JTAN will now accept Bitcoin electronic currency on par with the US dollar, or at 10% above the bid price quoted by MtGox, whichever gives you more value for your coin. More information is available at our Payment FAQ.

Posted May 24, 2011 at 01:34 UTC [/] permanent link

Fri, 15 Apr 2011

Firefox 4 Issue
It has come to our attention that Firefox 4 has disabled SSL certificate renegotiation, required for access to the JTAN members page with client certificates. This web page explains the issue and provides a fix.

I believe this issue only affects Firefox 4, and only if you want to use certificates (rather than a password) to access a secure site. Most users are unaffected by this issue.

Posted Apr 15, 2011 at 13:17 UTC [/] permanent link

Sat, 22 Jan 2011

Brief Maintenance Today
We're working on our equipment racks today and will need to briefly power down some of the servers. We expect these shutdowns to be no longer than 15-20 minutes. If you experience an outage longer than 30 minutes, please contact us immediately.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Posted Jan 22, 2011 at 16:03 UTC [/] permanent link

Sat, 08 Jan 2011

Microsoft Imitates JTAN
Some of you know that for many years JTAN housed most of our machines in an unheated barn in Bucks County, PA. It was obvious to us that this made sense. Bucks is known for its historic barns, and what better way to preserve a 19th century structure than give it a new 21st purpose. Sadly, inane zoning restrictions make it nearly impossible to legally use barns for anything other than agriculture and JTAN eventually moved its machines into a concrete and glass "industrial" building.

Now I see that big companies like Google and Microsoft are rediscovering what JTAN knew 10 years ago. Barns make great data centers.

Posted Jan 08, 2011 at 02:51 UTC [/] permanent link

Tue, 12 Oct 2010

The Email Saga Continues
I'm starting to become confident that email is flowing properly again. I can tell this from the hundreds of two-day-old "why is email broken" email messages I am now receiving from everyone. I've tried to reply to all of them with at least a link to this news blog. I'm afraid that it's impossible for me to give everyone a personal reply -- let alone a phone call.

It appears that this "event" began Thursday with a massive slug of spam messages, each containing large attachments. One of these messages apparently hit an unfortunately configured autoresponder run by a customer, multiplying the spam's ill effect. By Friday evening the multi-gigabyte, 10,000 message backlog was so big that mail delivery to JTAN mailboxes was stopped -- for all intents and purposes. Those of you that use POPB4SMTP authentication on outgoing mail, could not send, either. Domain address forwarding and outgoing mail that did not rely on incoming mail authentication still worked fine.

After trying various polite fixes and seeing them fail to deal with the magnitude of the event, I had no choice but to restart all the mail queues. That means that many messages were side-tracked into a sort of limbo where they are only now being queued for delivery. Don't be surprised if you start to see messages you were expecting last Saturday to appear NEXT Saturday.

Posted Oct 12, 2010 at 05:04 UTC [/] permanent link

Mon, 11 Oct 2010

Maybe Mail is Working
After some drastic measures, including the side-tracking of about 5 million email messages, maybe mail is flowing again. It's hard to say for sure. We are still doing forensic analysis. As soon as we are confident the logjam is clear, we'll start injecting the delayed messages (the tiny fraction of non-spam) into the stream. I'm hoping everthing is back to normal by Wednesay.

Full info on 'what happened' to follow forensics.

Posted Oct 11, 2010 at 22:41 UTC [/] permanent link

Sun, 10 Oct 2010

Still No Mail
Yes, mail is still broken.

Posted Oct 10, 2010 at 14:51 UTC [/] permanent link

Mail Seriously Broken
It has come to our attention that the mail system is experiencing a serious problem. We will get the problem resolved as soon as we can. Your patience is appreciated.

Posted Oct 10, 2010 at 00:30 UTC [/] permanent link

Sat, 09 Oct 2010

Weekend Spamming Causing Mail Delays
Spammers are active this weekend, and for some reason many messages in this batch of spam have large attachments. This is causing some delay in mail delivery.

Posted Oct 09, 2010 at 12:55 UTC [/] permanent link

Wed, 29 Sep 2010

Io Migrations Going Well
The first site to migrate to Io went over very smoothly. It was a phpBB based site, and it appears to have come up on the new host without requiring any changes or upgrades. Although it's impossible to tell if there will be any issue with your site, the success of this first migration bodes very well for everyone that wants to take advantage of this new machine.

Posted Sep 29, 2010 at 17:57 UTC [/] permanent link

Tue, 28 Sep 2010

How to Migrate a Site to Io
ProWeb customers with busy, PHP oriented sites that are currently hosted on Thebe should seriously consider moving them to our new host Io. It appears that Thebe has trouble handling the load of your sites. In most situations, assuming an existing domain, there will be no fee for such a move.

If you would like JTAN to move your site for you, we'd be happy to. Simply write tech-support and ask us to do it. However, if your site is complex, it may be better if you did the move yourself. If you feel qualified, here's the procedure.

1. From the members area, add a shell account on Io. You can do this by clicking the blue "plus" icon in the add column next to shell account.
2. Once the shell order is completed, you should be able to add an IP address on Io. Give the IP a name that is similar to your old site, but not the same. For example, call it "www-new.yourdomain.com"
3. Once the IP address order is complete, check that forward DNS is set up properly with the name you selected above. If not, add an "A" record for the name.
4. With the IP in place, you should be able to add a Premium Web Site on Io. Use the www-new name you selected above.
   

   Currently, this option is under "Full Listing" of Services and the members area may claim to cost $32. We will soon fix it so this option is free. If it still says $32, please disregard that price. If the site is in an existing domain that is hosted already on thebe, we will waive the fee for a replacement site on Io. Add the site on Io and accept the fee billed to the account -- you will not be billed.

5. Once you have a shell/IP/site on Io, and your DNS configured, you should be able to bring up the empty template site with any web browser.
6. Now add your files to the site using FTP or SCP.
7. Test. Report any anomalies and we will fix them.
8. Swap the DNS names for the old and new site. Test.
9. Delete the old site.

Posted Sep 28, 2010 at 12:03 UTC [/] permanent link

Mon, 27 Sep 2010

No Luck on RAM for Thebe
We were unsuccessful adding RAM to Thebe. We also tried a processor upgrade and failed at that also. This is bad news. I was hoping we could to an in situ upgrade of the machine, but that appears to be impossible.

Those of you that run busy, PHP oriented web sites on Thebe (you know who you are) should seriously consider migrating to the new machine, Io.

Posted Sep 27, 2010 at 23:53 UTC [/] permanent link

Working on Thebe
We are doing some work on our host thebe. We are trying to add more RAM in the hope that this will make the machine more robust in the face of the traffic spikes it's been experiencing. There may be some brief outages affecting sites hosted on this machine.

Posted Sep 27, 2010 at 22:02 UTC [/] permanent link

Sun, 19 Sep 2010

New Io Available for Web Pages
Users with ProWeb accounts can now add shells, IP addresses, and Premium Web Sites on our new server Io. You'll want to add them in that order. Get a shell first, then an IP, then add the site.

The machine is still quite new, so expect there will be features missing. If you find something lacking, please write to tech-support immediately so that we can install it.

Posted Sep 19, 2010 at 21:34 UTC [/] permanent link

Fri, 17 Sep 2010

Webmail Available Again
We once again have a webmail client available at webmail.jtan.com. Unfortunately, configuration settings from the old client have not been transferred. Nor has the "Config Mail" link. We are working on these fine points; however, we felt it important to get some kind of webmail system up and running ASAP.

Posted Sep 17, 2010 at 03:31 UTC [/] permanent link

Io is Dead; Long Live Io!
Sadly, we were not able to resuscitate the old Io. Instead, we replaced her.

The new Io is without a doubt the best machine we've ever run. It has gobs of RAM, a fast, multi-core x86 64 bit CPU, and the latest Ubuntu Server OS, version 10.04 LTS.

Installed on the new Io is Apache2 with PHP 5.3.2. Many customers have been asking for PHP5. Here it is.

You can add a shell account on Io through the members page right now. Real soon now, the members page will also allow you to add an IP address and web site. If you are anxious to start playing with PHP5, feel free to add a shell immediately. Bear in mind, however, that the new Io is not completely configured. Expect some rough edges.

Because the new Io has PHP, it is a ProWeb only machine. If you have a ProShell account, you cannot add a shell on Io. This is a change from the past where Io was OK for ProShell users. I'm afraid that ProShell folks will need to wait just a little longer. We will soon be bringing yet another new machine online, europa.jtan.com, that will be available to ProWeb customers.

Posted Sep 17, 2010 at 02:04 UTC [/] permanent link

Wed, 15 Sep 2010

DNS Caches Back Up, Webmail Still Down
DNS Caches on 207.106.84.175 and 207.106.6.4 are available again. This should fix various connection delays.

Webmail is still down, but we're working on it.

Posted Sep 15, 2010 at 01:05 UTC [/] permanent link

Tue, 14 Sep 2010

Io Down For The Count -- Webmail and DNS Affected
Io is down, and despite initial indications that we would be able to fix it quickly, this did not turn out to be the case. The disk is unrecoverable.

Io primarily provides webmail. Our best estimate now is that webmail will be unavailable for at least another couple days. If you need web based mail immediately, my recommendation is that you get a free Gmail account and set it to fetch your mail from imap.jtan.com. Alternatively, you can read mail with Thunderbird, Eudora, Outlook, or any other POP/IMAP mailer. JTAN's mail system is fully operational except for webmail.jtan.com

Also hosted on Io are the caching nameservers

  207.106.84.175
  207.106.6.4

  207.106.84.59
  207.106.84.142
  207.106.84.147
  207.106.84.226
  207.106.6.5
  206.135.79.2

Posted Sep 14, 2010 at 21:51 UTC [/] permanent link

Tue, 17 Aug 2010

PaeTEC's Official Statment Regarding Power Failure
Click here to read what PaeTEC has to say about the Friday the Thirteenth power failure.

Posted Aug 17, 2010 at 17:18 UTC [/] permanent link

Sat, 14 Aug 2010

Collateral Damage: Ananke
One of our incoming mail servers, Ananke, did not reboot. The power spike must've toasted the motherboard. It has now been replaced.

Since we have redundant incoming servers, having one down did not stop incoming mail from flowing. Unfortunately, ananke is also used as a DNS cache and people are sometimes lazy about listing multiple DNS cache servers in their configuration. If you fit this description and were using ananke as a cache, you may have had a non-functional network. Similarly, if you listed ananke first in your resolv.conf or equivalent, you probably saw some timeouts resulting in long connection delays.

Posted Aug 14, 2010 at 02:04 UTC [/] permanent link

PaeTEC Epic Power Fail
I don't have anything official from PaeTEC yet, but the inside scoop from a witness who shall remain nameless says power to the whole NOC went down for about 15 minutes. Apparently there was some maintenance going on that shouldn't have killed everything, but did. I can just imagine what the poor guy on duty must've thought when it all went black. Yikes!

Anyway, the lights are back on and I believe all the machines are back on. At this stage I can take specific reports for investigation. If your box didn't come back up by now, let me know and I'll get it some personal attention. If some JTAN service still seems broken, please let us know immediately.

Many customers complained that JTAN has no phone number to call. I can understand you might feel helpless with no one to call, but we do have this news page, and a report of the outage was posted here as soon as I knew what was going on. If we did have a phone number, it would have been jammed and we would have been paying somebody to sit there all day and talk to people rather than working on fixing things. Similarly, it's impossible to call each and every one of the thousand or so JTAN users to explain the situation.

Please check the news page for important notices if you have an outage and don't get a quick enough response from tech-support. There is an opt-in email notification system if you want to receive email notice of news posts. Of course, that only works if the email system is working, which it wasn't, initially.

Anyway, this certainly was an interesting Friday the 13th.

Posted Aug 14, 2010 at 00:25 UTC [/] permanent link

Fri, 13 Aug 2010

PaeTEC Power Failure?
Yes, at about 0700 UTC, there was a brief power outage at the PaeTEC NOC facility in Conshohocken, PA where many JTAN Hosts are located. All our machines were affected. Many have not fully recovered from the outage.

We are working as fast as possible to diagnose the problems caused by this outage, and fix them. At this time, I believe incoming mail is working, but outgoing SMTP relay may not be.

PaeTEC runs a state of the art facility with uninterruptable (sic) power. Outages are not supposed to occur, but one did. As I learn more information, particularly about compensation for this outage, I'll pass it on.

Thank you all for your patience and understanding.

Posted Aug 13, 2010 at 12:54 UTC [/] permanent link

Fri, 25 Jun 2010

Certificate Renewed
Rather than making everyone suffer any longer with the expired fancy cert from GeoTrust/Equifax as we struggle against OpenSRS to renew it, I decided to go for one of those cheap, instant certs.

Now you should no longer get a cert error when you visit the site https://www.jtan.com

Posted Jun 25, 2010 at 03:22 UTC [/] permanent link

Expired SSL Cert
Some of you have noticed that the www.jtan.com SSL cert has expired.

The reason this is so is that we've been unable to renew the cert with OpenSRS. I'm not sure why. It's just a formality to reissue the cert (after a payment to them). I can't understand why we've been unable to get them to reissue the cert. We continue to try to pay them.

In any case, rest assured that the old cert is still there. Your browser will tell you it's still signed by Equifax, just like it was a few weeks ago. SSL to www.jtan.com is just as secure as it ever is. The only thing that has changed is that we've been unable to pay OpenSRS.

Thank you for your patience. -- C

Posted Jun 25, 2010 at 02:56 UTC [/] permanent link

Fri, 28 May 2010

Increased Spam Level Reversed
Maybe you've noticed the sudden increase in the volume of spam. We certainly have. The cause of this increase has been traced to a particular exception we coded into our strict reverse-DNS policy. We had received complaints from certain senders with lazy/incompetent/uncooperative ISPs (e.g. Verizon and Comcast) that couldn't send us mail. In an effort to accommodate them, we coded an exception that let in a whole load of spam.

Needless to say, once we realized the mistake, we patched the hole. Spam levels should return to normal. Let this be a reminder to us all that spam is really out there, and is really a problem, and its only the policies of reputable ISPs that keep it in check. -- C

Posted May 28, 2010 at 13:48 UTC [/] permanent link

Sun, 09 May 2010

POP/IMAP Down, Now up.
The power supply failed on the POP/IMAP server. This has now been repaired.

Posted May 09, 2010 at 17:42 UTC [/] permanent link

Tue, 04 May 2010

Jupiter Down
It appears that jupiter is not processing very well. It is in the process of being rebooted. It should be back up within the hour -- unless it doesn't boot.

Posted May 04, 2010 at 01:46 UTC [/] permanent link

Sun, 11 Apr 2010

Thebe Temporarily Down
We are rebooting thebe for maintenance reasons. With luck, it will be back up within the hour.

Posted Apr 11, 2010 at 12:50 UTC [/] permanent link

Sat, 06 Feb 2010

Registration for .mobi and .tel Now Available
The cell phone oriented domains .mobi and .tel are now available for registration through the JTAN system.

The top level domain .mobi is emerging as the de facto standard for mobile internet domains With the growth of the mobile Web comes the need for standardization to allow consumers to easily find mobile content.

The .tel top level domain allows you to put all your communications Under one name. All the ways of reaching you can be under a simple name that's impossible to forget “"YourName.tel".

Write to JTAN tech-support if you have any questions about these domains.

Posted Feb 06, 2010 at 17:42 UTC [/] permanent link

Fri, 22 Jan 2010

VERP Policy
The VERP addressing system implemented with the new Mailman server appears to penetrate AOL's pointless redacting of recipient addresses. In less than a day, I've received the first "Spam" complaint from AOL regarding a legitimate mailing list post mis-reported as spam by one of their lusers. Although AOL redacted numerous headers, their censor failed to snip the recipient username hidden in plain sight as part of the sender address. Thus, we know what luser misreported the post.

And thus it has come to pass that I have the pleasant duty to set new JTAN policy regarding this kind of event.

Should JTAN receive a third party complaint about a list post, we will unsubscribe the complainer from the list and notify the listadmin of the event. We recommend that the list administrator not permit the complainer to rejoin the list until they learn how to operate their computer.

Should a list generate too many of these complaints, we will disable the list.

Posted Jan 22, 2010 at 19:34 UTC [/] permanent link

Seems Like We Did OK
I have the Mailman server down briefly to tidy some problems that we discovered when the flow of mail hit. Don't panic if you can't use it right now (1230 UTC), it should be back in a jiffy.

Reports from the list administrators are that we got the restoration right. I'd like to thank you all for your patience.

Posted Jan 22, 2010 at 12:38 UTC [/] permanent link

Mailman Re-Enabled
The flow of mail to the Mailman server has been re-enabled.

Posted Jan 22, 2010 at 03:07 UTC [/] permanent link

Get Ready Mailman
All the original Mailman lists have been recovered. I have converted the Majordomo lists of those who have requested conversion to Mailman. List memberships have been copied. Admin password and admin address have been copied.

All that remains is to turn the valve to let the mail flow, which I'm about to do. If you don't see your list functionality return by, say, 1200 UTC, and there isn't a post here explaining why it didn't work, please report the outage with a simple email to tech-support.

But I'm optimistic.

Although this outage was an inconvenience, I expect that the Majordomo users will be happy with the upgrade, and everyone should benefit from VERP support -- if it actually works. We also hope that the brand new CPU and disk fix the mailman server instability we've been noticing over the last few months.

Posted Jan 22, 2010 at 02:34 UTC [/] permanent link