Fails

SureMail� Service Interruption - August 25, 2011

Lisa Lockhart — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 12:07:18 -0400

As part of our continued efforts to provide a secure SureMail environment we updated the configuration of a firewall on the Exchange Server today at approximately 4:20 AM EDT. This update went smoothly and our monitoring indicated no issues with the new configuration.

However, some SureMail clients did begin to experience connectivity issues at that time; this was due to a load-balancing problem caused by our updates. This issue was resolved at 8:20 AM EDT; no mail was lost only connectivity to local clients was affected.

We are currently updating our monitoring to detect this type of load-balancing issue in the future to prevent further connection issues of this kind.

Should you have any questions about the above, please let us know at solutions@suretech.com

- Your SureTech.com Solutions Team

Outlook Failing to Connect Help

Josh Little — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:06:50 -0400

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Troubleshooting Problems with Microsoft Outlook Add-Ins

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Third-party add-ins (such as desktop antivirus scanners) cause a disproportionately high number of connection-related issues in Outlook.

The easiest way to test this is to start Outlook in safe mode, which disables all add-ins.� To do this, shut Outlook down completely, by choosing File Exit, and then hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete to enter the Task Manger.� From there, click the Processes tab, and terminate any processes called OUTLOOK.EXE.� Next, go to Start Run, and type in outlook.exe /safe. (Note that there MUST be a space character between outlook.exe and /safe.)

If running in Safe Mode fixes whatever connection issue you were having, the next step is to restart Outlook normally and start disabling or removing Add-Ins.� There are two areas youll need to check COM+ Addins, and Exchange Client Extensions.� These are accessed differently on Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003.

For Outlook 2010:� Go to File Options Add-ins.� Click the Go button thats located towards the bottom of the window.

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For Outlook 2007:� From within Outlook, navigate Tools Trust Center Add-ins.� Towards the bottom, choose COM Add-ins and click Go.

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For Outlook 2003:� Within Outlook, choose Tools Options, and then click the Other tab, and then the Advanced Options button.� Towards the bottom of the screen youll see a button labeled COM Add-Ins.� Click that.

Youll get to a window with a number of Add-ins listed:

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Web Server Failure Friday, June 17

Dana Molina — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 08:25:48 -0400

Friday afternoon, June 17th, our server administrators noticed that the hard disk on one of our web servers was showing signs of potential failure.

Your MS Exchange is fully recovered after Tuesday's service outage. All data has been fully recovered to your mailbox with no loss of data.

The issue we experienced was precipitated by a problem with an HP Storage Area Network that caused an enclosure with 12-drives to fail. Our work to recover from this was followed by an additional drive failure during the rebuild of the degraded array that hosted your mailbox, causing a catastrophic failure in the array.

Please note we regularly deal with upgrades, maintenance and occasional hardware failures transparently and without affecting your service. In this case, however, all data and data redundancy in the production environment was lost causing us to ...

Outage Details for SureMail� MS Exchange December 28, 2009

Alberto Molina — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:13:44 -0400

We strive to ensure that all our products are reliable and consistent. Whenever services are interrupted we work hard to get to the bottom of the cause and solutions so that such an event does not happen again.

On Monday, December 28 we experienced an outage for selected clients from 8:58 a.m. to 9:57 a.m. EST.

The underlying cause:
An error in the Storage Area Network (SAN) supporting mailboxes hosted on the MAIL34 server removed client access to the mailboxes. We troubleshooted the issue and were able to bring the SAN and server back online within an hour.

Steps taken to prevent reoccurence:

We have implemented additional monitoring of the SAN in order to be informed quickly of this specific condition, so that if this issue ever occurs again, the downtime associated will be much shorter.

We are researching this issue further in an effort to eliminiate the possibility of it occuring again.

Network Stability:

Overall, the entire SureMail™ environment has enjoyed a 99.902% availabilty rate over the past 365 days, along with very few scheduled maintentance periods. The ...

Outage Details for SureMail� MS Exchange July 22, 2009

Alberto Molina — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 21:27:38 -0400

On Tuesday, July 22 we experienced an outage for selected clients from approximately 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. EST.

The underlying cause:
An error in the behavior of clustering services led to the offlining of a number of mailbox stores which prevented access to those mailboxes. The same event also introduced inconsistencies into the log files that are generated for these mailbox stores which made bringing them back online a lengthy process with some element of risk. Once we had taken steps to ensure that incoming mail would continue to be accepted by our incoming mail servers we made copies of all affected mailbox stores to ensure that existing data was secure before beginning the process of rebuilding the mailbox stores. The rebuild process is resource intensive and to minimise the downtime for our customers we allocated additional hardware resources to the recovery process. Recovery ...

Outage Report for SureMail� MS Exchange June 30, 2009

Alberto Molina — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:24:43 -0400

At 1:49 AM EDT on 6/30/09, a brief power interruption in our Data Center appears to have severely damaged one of the four UPS's in one of our racks. (This UPS had not exhibited any symptoms of issues going into the power interruption.) The damaged UPS resulted in half of the rack's AC power supply being removed.The infrastructure in that rack was designed to continue to function in this type of partial power outage, but several limitations in this design were exposed yesterday, resulting in the queuing of all inbound email ...

Outage Details for SureDesk� Service

Alberto Molina — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:21:59 -0400

On June 22, 2009 we experienced a serious outage on our SureDesk™ systems. While attempting a minor stability upgrade, our systems admins encountered an unfortunate irreversible bug that crashed the connection service to our SureDesk™ Gold environment

As it happens we also had a parallel upgrade standing by for release this weekend that we were able to move up to be in effect today and include when we restored service.

Service was down from 7:30am to 3:07pm and we sincerely regret the inconvenience to all affected SureDesk™ Gold users. Going forward we have adjusted our upgrade policy for bugs to take less risks while system upgrades are also being rolled out. Please note SureDesk™ Platinum users were not affected. Our Gold services don’t have a fully redundant failover standby which contributes to the difficulties in restoring service we saw today.

Also please note in addition to policy changes, we are streamlining work arounds if this were to happen again (which we do NOT expect) including old-school “Terminal Services” access and streamlined local synchronization of SureFiles™. Feel free to contact us for more information.

On the ...

Avoiding Great Service but Bad Value

Alberto Molina — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:56:22 -0400

13 Hours and $1,400.00 To upgrade my Hard Drive?!?

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Weve always said that Managed Services for IT is usually a flawed business model.� Pretty much the better job you do the less you make.� Kinda like lawyers, I guess, except at least we talk about it!

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13 hours to reformat and upgrade a client laptop is the perfect example of providing GREAT service at a TERRIBLE value.� I worked over a long day and night replacing the hard drive of this particular laptop.� Theres no question the client got a lot of benefit.�� 3.5x more storage space, 3x improvement in speed.� And almost no worries he handed me the laptop in the morning and came back for it the next day fully upgraded.� I couldnt save him from a couple headaches, though he had to hunt down passwords that needed to be reached in his browser .... and he had to see my 13 hour bill!� Which points to the value problem the work took 13 hours, but no one wants to pay labor of 13 hours for 3.5x space and� 3x speed.� Think of it this way the 320GB drive cost less than $100 and the 3x speed was just getting the computer back to the speed it was the day he bought it.� Who wants to pay almost the cost of the computer to simply set (or in this case reset) it up?

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Ill tell you: nobody.� But whats the alternative?� It takes hours and hours to set these things up so we as a ...

Apple Scores on Service

Alberto Molina — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 01:22:28 -0400

American based, for american customers - and email.

That's pretty much the price of excellent service these days. If you outsource your service to a place that doesn't care about your customers ... - view comments

Xobni for Outlook is awesome except it doesn't work.

Alberto Molina — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:25:23 -0400

Xobni which is inbox spelled backwards is an absolutely terrific plug in for Microsoft Outlook except for the small fact that it doesn't work... - view comments

SurePhones Service Outage - 4:05 pm Sept 23, 2008

Alberto Molina — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:54:50 -0400

4:05 pm

The Virtual PBX we use, RingCentral.com completely went down nation wide and all Phone service was completely interrupted.

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4:15 pm

The delicious annectdote in all this is we had just five minutes before the outage fixed a number of configuration and programming issues on the local phones for one of our clients.

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Virtual PBX used to not work at all and per our experiments over the summer it seems to have come of age. �Getting the correct firmware and configurations for the phone with the RingCentral service, however was a 3 day troubleshooting project, which we were proud to have finished and to report to the client with our success, at 4pm - and then the whole system went kaput! �Sweet irony, right?

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Calls to Ring Central engineering don't work correctly - we can hear them but they can't hear us. �Some of the same problems we experienced in setting up configurations on our local network.

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Eventually we get through and ---- they tell us service is down. �Estimate is One Hour Minimum for repair, so I advise our clients it's out for the rest of the day.

We expend so much effort finding the right solutions and working to integrate them into Solutions for clients, the worst thing to then have to tell a client the system just doesn't work and there's nothing we can do.

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