Midcoast Internet Solutions

System
News & Notices

November 2002

• November 27, 2002 Late this afternoon we had a problem where some customers could not surf due to a DNS lookup problem. This was corrected at about 5:50pm.
• November 26, 2002 Ragged Mountain's wireless has been fixed and people who use Ragged Mountain are utilizing the new hardware we installed this week rather than the backup link that was used last week after ice damaged things there.
• November 18, 2002 Some wireless customers who use Ragged Mountain are experiencing slower or unreliable connections today. This is due to thick ice coating everything atop the mountain. The ice is expected to be broken off or melted enough today. Nov 19, 2002 12:45 pm. Staff have climbed ragged mountain with ice chippers and camera. The antenna that the affected customers use has about a foot of ice on it and is bent in such a way that we don't understand how it's still working for some people. They are working to remove ice and will replace the antenna mount on a later trip if it can't be brought back to its original shape. UPDATE:Nov 20, 2002 8:00 am. Major icing and strong winds have damaged a structure on top of ragged mountain that hold one of our wireless access point. This is a couple photos of the ice that we had to deal with yesterday. We have set up a temporary access point for the costumers that were affected by the damage. Those people should now be back on line.
• November 17, 2002 12:00pm. Union has lost its connection to Rockland. This affects 785-6622 and Union wireless customers. We are investigating.Update: Nov 18, 2002 11am. The ice atop Barret Hill in Union is too thick. Everything there has an inch of ice all around it. We will have to let the ice melt some, and then things should be working fine there when that happens. Update: Things are working fine by afternoon.
• November 13, 2002 4:50pm. While not enabled systemwide at this time, people may individually choose to have junkmail tagging (PJM) and junkmail optional filtering on the midcoast.com server. To do so, either contact MIS staff, or ssh into midcoast.com and type saon.
• November 13, 2002 11:10am - 11:22am. A networking problem of ours caused some random internet browsing and email checking problems during this time.
• November 12, 2002 12:15am The midcoast.com server will be down for ten minutes at this time for the purpose of changing a hard drive in the redundant drive array. This could probably be done while it's running, but we'd rather be cautious.
• November 6, 2002 11:30am Customers who use our Perry's Nuthouse wireless site in Belfast had trouble this morning accessing the net. This equipment has been reset and is working fine now.
• November 6, 2002 10:30am Customers had trouble with the Washington 845-2002 number this morning. This equipment has been reset and is working fine now.
• November 6, 2002 The midcoast.com server no longer permits people to telnet into it. ssh should now be used instead of telnet. We have a help page on SSH for Windows using putty. Mac OS-X users have ssh built in, and may open a terminal and type ssh username@midcoast.com to establish a ssh connection.
• November 5, 2002 Most details regarding the switch to the new server machine midcoast.com have either gone well or have been taken care of. The primary purpose for the upgrade is reliability. The new server is much more powerful and has much more reliable software on it. The other reason for upgrading is for the option of spam control. Its in there, but it's not active at the moment while we fine tune other software on the server. We will post a message here when it is activated. If you continue to have problems that may be the result of the upgrade, please contact our office by phone (594-8277 or 563-8563) or email (help@midcoast.com). Thanks for your patience while this upgrade took place.
• November 5, 2002 If you receive a message titled: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA it is OK to delete. This message was part of the old server that is no longer in use.
• November 4, 2002 11:30pm - We will move things over to the new server machine for midcoast.com. This will take a couple of hours to complete.
• November 4, 2002 If you check your mail today and don't get a message you were expecting, it's not lost. It's in the process of being moved to the new server. If you need it immediately, you can temporarily change your pop server to testdns.midcoast.com. It may stil be in the process of transferring though. Later in the day, new and old arrived mail will be together on midcoast.com.

  Also: if you have trouble sending mail today, you may change your SMTP server setting in your mail program to kona.midcoast.com.

• November 3, 2002 4:30am The link between Benner Hill and our Rockland datacenter has gone down. This was fixed at 9:30am.
• November 1, 2002 12:15am - dns.midcoast.com will be rebooted. This will take about 4 minutes.
• November 1, 2002 The new server machines for midcoast.com and lincoln.midcoast.com are progressing well. These will be very reliable and have spam tagging software (spam assassin) built into to them just like kona/free.midcoast.com has. We apologize for the delay in implementing, but it is time well spent. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so we are being very careful about preparing them so that the switchover to the new machines will be as seamless as possible. The anticipated install date is Tuesday November 5 at 12:10am. We will post here if we have to change that date.