One of our largest and newest UPS units decided today would be a good day to stop delivering power to several of our servers, including the one that checks everybody's usernames and passwords. We got power restored and all units functioning on utility power about 5:30 pm today. We regret the interruption. Hopefully the rest of the day will pass gracefully.

Dixie-Net Staff

Online bill payment and account access will be unavaliable this afternoon while an upgrade is being performed.

Dixie-Net Staff

As of Friday August 22, 2003 Dixie-Net has implemented a mail filtering system. This is an effort to slow the propagation of worm and viruses transferred by email and lower spam levels.

For more information see: http://www.dixie-net.com/hd-filtering.shtml

Dixie-Net Staff

Tuesday August 19, 2003

There will be a maintenance window tomorrow morning, August 20 from 12:00 am until 3:00 am.

Dixie-Net Staff

There will be a maintenance window tomorrow morning, August 8 from 1:00 am until 3:00 am.

Dixie-Net Staff

A disk partition filled up on our main email server, causing sporadic errors when users tried to connect to send messages. Problem was identified and corrected in approximately 20 minutes.

Dixie-Net Staff

DS3 back up as of ~11:20 am. Measures have been put into place to re-route traffic in the event of another failure.

Dixie-Net Staff

Wednesday March 26, 2003

10:00 am

The DS3 that feeds all of our DSL customers with internet is bouncing. Our technicians are re-routing that traffic over a Back-up T1 that will provide some connectivity, although it will probably feel slower than usual.

We will keep this page updated with our progress.

Dixie-Net Staff

Wednesday March 19, 2003

Leaving a copy of your email on the server used to require that you check email on port 109 in your email client. That is no longer necessary. Set your POP3 client to check mail on port 110, and indicate where appropriate if you want to leave a copy on the server.

Dixie-Net Staff

Wednesday March 19, 2003

Virus and Spam Filtering System

Dixie-Net is proud to announce that we have added a great new feature that you probably have already started enjoying. Our new email filter system is in place and you should see a noticeable decrease in the amount of junk email you are receiving. Over the next couple of weeks additional options will be added that will allow you to select how much junk email you want filtered.

We realize there may be a few messages that could get filtered which you will desire to keep receiving and that option will be made available to you. For those that are annoyed by junk email messages and don't want to take the time to manage your own email, the option of filtering all junk email will also be available.

As another part of our program to improve your email service, we will also be evaluating server-level virus scanners, which should catch most email-borne viruses and Trojans before they get to your inbox.

Dixie-Net thanks you for your business and we are sure that these new options are a welcome addition for you and your family or company.

Dixie-Net Staff

Tuesday March 4, 2003

As many are aware, our main email server has been struggling lately. This is because of the huge amount of Unsolicited Email (aka SPAM) that has been directed toward our users in recent weeks. We have been attempting to take measures to both improve email performance and apply some SPAM filtering for some time now, and have tried to implement those plans twice in the past 8 weeks. On the first attempt, there was _so much_ incoming SPAM that our filter was taking up almost all of the processing power on our machine. So we threw another server at it. And that helped for about two weeks; but then BOTH servers became so busy processing SPAM that normal email services were getting delayed.

So, we put some limits in place that would hopefully skim some of the most obvious spam off the top, and save some processor time for everyone's needed email. Well, the consquence of that compromise has been fairly frequent suspension of the SMTP service on the main mail server, with the back-up mail server then struggling under this new load which the main server had quit processing.

Symptoms that you all are experiencing: 1) server timing out while trying to send; 2) messages you send to others being delayed; 3) messages sent to you from others being delayed.

Late last week we purchased TWO new, much more powerful servers which should take care of the problem, AS WELL AS enable us to begin filtering SPAM messages. It will take us a couple of nights to get everything set up, but these problems should be going away very shortly.

We realize that email is the number one service everyone needs NOT to have problems. We regret any inconvenience caused you, and we will get the matter rectified as soon as we can do it. We understand that you have choices for your ISP, and we truly appreciate your business.

Dixie-Net Management

Thursday Jan. 16, 2003

There will be a scheduled period of maintenance tonight from 12:00 midnight til 2:00 am. Please be aware of this as it will affect some areas.

Friday Dec. 6, 2002

Dixie-Net's inbound lines for 662 area code were isolated from Bell South for a period of time between 6:30 am and 9:00 am today. Engineers are still researching the cause of the issue.

Wed Dec 4, 2002 8:30 - 9:30 pm

Around 8:30 pm tonight a transformer on the primary power grid at Ripley shorted out, causing a power surge that burned up one of our Back-Up UPS units. That particular unit carries several of our modem racks as well as one of our authentication servers and a couple of our webservers. Power was restored in a few minutes, but the surge also damaged one of the servers causing a back-log of authentication requests. Everything is mostly back to normal at 9:40 pm.

Wednesday November 20, 2002

We will be performing maintenace on some equipment tonight from 11 pm until 3 am.

Dixie-Net Staff

Monday October 28, 2002

We will be performing maintenace on our core switching equipment tonight from 11 pm until 3 am. During this procedure some brief periods of system unavailability may occur.

Dixie-Net Staff

Thursday October 3, 2002

We have added two new links to the Dixie-Net web site, one is the popular search engine "Google" (www.google.com), and the other is to AreaPages.com, a new search service for the state of Mississippi. We hope you enjoy these new services!

Dixie-Net Staff

Friday October 4, 2002

BellSouth is updating its Central Office in Pontotoc at 12:00 AM October 5 (Friday night). Service will be intterupted briefly, however service should be completely restored by morning. Thank you for your patience and cooperation.

Dixie-Net Staff

Wednesday October 2, 2002

The primary mailserver had a hardware malfunction this morning. We have mail up and running on a back-up server, and all email related services have been restored. There may be another brief interruption Friday night as we may have to power down to install upgraded hardware, and move primary email services to a brand-new server. We regret any inconvenience caused by this hardware failure.

Dixie-Net Staff

Wednesday October 2, 2002

The mail server is currently down, our technicians are working to correct the problem. We appreciate your patience and cooperation.

Dixie-Net Staff

Monday Septemeber 9, 2002

There will be another maintenance window tonight between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM.

Dixie-Net Staff

Tuesday Septemeber 3, 2002

Maintenance window tonight between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM.

Dixie-Net Staff

Wednesday August 21, 2002

There will be a small upgrade to better serve our customers this evening between 10:00 P.M. and 2:A.M.

Dixie-Net Staff

Thursday August 15, 2002

There was a network outage at ~9:10pm CST unrelated to the scheduled outage later tonight.

Dixie-Net Staff

Thursday August 15, 2002

There will be a maintenance period this evening scheduled from 11:00 pm to 2:00 am to continue upgrading our equipment to better serve our customers. Your cooperation is much appreciated during this time period.

Dixie-Net Staff

Tuesday July 23, 2002

Dixie-Net has a maintenace window tonight beginning at 11:00 pm lasting until 5:00 am. During this time, switch technicians will be performing routine maintenance, as well as some upgrades. Intermittent connectivity issues for dial up customers in some areas may occur during this time frame.

Dixie-Net Staff

Tuesday, July 16, 2002

At 9:30 this morning we received notification from BellSouth that they had resolved the routing problem. It turns out they had inadvertently changed some programming in their Jackson and Tupelo switches that no longer routed calls from those areas to Dixie-Net numbers. Many of called your local telephone carrier only to be told it was a Dixie-Net problem. Obviously, this was their belief, but the opposite has turned out to be the case.

Either way, those of you who were experiencing busy signals due to this programming error should have service restored now. We thank you for your patience, and we'll be monitoring throughout the day to insure that full service has indeed been restored.

Monday, July 15, 2002

In at least 18 exchanges across the state, Dixie-Net users are experiencing "Busy "signals when trying to dial Dixie-Net access or Help Desk numbers. This is a problem with YOUR telephone company. For some reason last Friday, network changes were made at major Telephone Company offices in Tupelo and Jackson causing this problem, which has so far lasted through the weekend. Dixie-Net has plenty of capacity, but user's calls are not being delivered to our system. Dixie-Net has been working to help troubleshoot this problem, but so far, the problem persists. If you are one of the users experiencing this problem, please contact your local telephone company.

We'll continue to assist in the troubleshooting, but currently, this is NOT a Dixie-Net issue.

Thursday June 27, 2002 8:36 am

There are two Major Cable cut in Jackson, MS which are causing disruptions on about half of our network. DSL is affected, as well as many of our Ayrix dial customers. Bell South has given us an ETA of noon to 2pm today for repairs to be complete.

Dixie-Net Staff

Tuesday, June 11, 2002. Noon.

On Wednesday, June 12, there may be short interruptions for customers still utilizing the Ayrix dial-up numbers. These numbers are due to be moved onto our own switching equipment sometime during the day Tuesday, and there will be a short (no more than a few minutes) interruption while BellSouth and Dixie-Net coordinate the changes. This change will allow current us to better control utilization of our modems and the Internet backbone, as well as reduce some costs. If the outage lasts more than a few minutes, please call our tech support center and let them know, as there are about a dozen numbers or so that we'll be moving.

Most people shouldn't notice anything. Calls in progress will not be affected, so you should _not_ be disconnected during this move.

Monday, May 20, 2002, 5:00 p.m.

Well, the weekend was sufficiently unenventful that we can now declare partial success! Friday afternoon, we went home feeling pretty good about the new switching system and its performance, and the quiet weekend pretty much confirmed it. The worst appears to be behind us. Some users are still experiencing periodic busy signals, and we're adding more trunks to take care of that. There are the usual problems that people will run up against, but the new switch seems stable, and our trunks with BellSouth have been up several days.

The reason for even installing the new switch was to be able to handle better not only our current subscribers, but new signups as they occurred. This transition was obviously not smooth, and we'd like to thank the folks out there who encouraged us through the sleepless nights. Our staff can get some well-deserved rest now, and we look for things to not only get back to normal (whatever that is!), but to allow us to get back to our game plan of providing great service to you. As we go forward now, you can rest assured that any possibility of interruption of services will be considered, as we get back to our goal of 99.999% uptime. We pretty much blew that last month, so we'll start the clock over, if that's OK with you.

In the meantime, enjoy the 'net, and as always, we're here if you need us!

mail.dixie-net.com has been up for about 15 mins, everything is back to normal that was a result of the UPS failure.

There was a UPS failure this morning which as affected a number of systems, everything is back up with the expection of mail.dixie-net.com. A manual file system check is being run. The file system check on a file system that large can take anywhere from 30mins to an hour to complete. Once complete there shouldn't be further complications and it will return to service.

We have just completed the addition of a 12 MB internet feed. You should notice substantial download speed increases. Please let us know of any abnormalities.

Dixie-Net Staff

Copyright 2002, ISP Associates, Inc. All rights reserved