(Daylight Saving Time begins on the second Sunday of March ands on the first Sunday of November. However, from 1986 through 2006 DST began the first Sunday of April and ended the last Sunday of October.)

• Fraud Alert
  Tue Dec 4 20:23:23 MDT 2012

  Be aware of email that appears to come from the IRS at irs.gov. The message body also refers to j2.com, a company that offers fax software. If you open the attachment it will attack your system. This campaign is also associated with telephone calls.

• Outtage
  Mon Nov 26 MDT 2012

  The cause of a short-lived, hardware-related outtage on 25 Nov was difficult to diagnose, and we apologize for the delay in making that diagnosis.

• Phishing
  Wed Jun 8 18:36:21 MDT 2011

  There's increased phishing activity of late, enough that several people have called in to verify.

  We will never ask for your password by email.

  If you do receive a phishing email, please report it.

  If you have been phished, please change your password immediately and do not tell anyone what it is.

• Power outtage (delayed post)
  Sun Oct 3 05:49:00 MST 2010

  We had a power outtage Sunday but recovered nicely. Apologies if you could not get through. If trouble persists something new is amiss. Please be sure to notify support, if this is the case.

• Spam Virus Alert
  Thu Mar 19 00:00:00 MST 2010

  If you see a message with a subject that pertains to the US Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) it is probably spam. US-CERT advises not to follow links within it.

• outages
  Thu Feb 18 10:53:53 MST 2010

  This morning, there was a connectivity issue with our ISP, then later the surge in traffic following restoration of connectivity caused some services to limp along until one tripped and fell over on its nose. The rest of the services pointed and laughed and so got little work done until somebody yelled at them and threatened them with violence.

• sporadic outage
  Wed Nov 18 13:53:47 MST 2009

  A dead fan made the main DB server fail intermittently.

• network outage
  Mon Sep 14 02:27:04 MDT 2009

  An ethernet switch went bad.

• network outage
  Sun Jan 18 14:51:22 MST 2009

  There was a network outage yesterday. One of our fellow colocatees' ethernet cards failed, creating a storm of malformed packets which overwhelmed the switch that's common to his router, our router and the ISP's router.

• imap upgrade
  Mon Jan 5 16:49:54 MST 2009

  Over the holiday, we upgraded the imap server.

• power outage
  Mon Jun 2 16:27:31 MDT 2008

  There was a power outage at the power company's colocation facility, where our ISP puts their primary equipment for Fort Collins. It was from 1:30pm to 2:10pm.

  (The power company is also in charge of the county's fiber loop, thus the co-lo facility for ISPs.)

• tornado
  Thu May 22 12:24:28 MDT 2008

  There's a tornado in the area.

  We've experienced a few brief network outages as a result of power outages in the area.

  Updates:
  Multiple tornados.
  Roofs gone, cars and tractor trailers blown off highway.
  Irony: State Farm's building completely destroyed.
  Power unstable at our datacenter. And office.
  Major damage in the next town over.
  Power lines down at nearest interstate interchange.
  Reports of tennis ball sized hail.
  Road closures, including parts of HWY-34 and I-25.
  Phones out in some areas (both POTS and mobile).
  One death reported.
  Six tornados touched down.
  Major damage to town of Windsor.

• network outage
  Sat May 17 09:29:23 MDT 2008

  We had a network outage from 6am to 9am.

  Several months ago, our network service provider disconnected one point of the fiber ring we're on. They also neglected to turn on a UPS for another point on the ring, and today there was a power outage that took down that UPS-less point on the ring, leaving us and several other customers without service. And you, of course.

• chromalist corruption
  Mon Apr 23 18:49:21 MDT 2007

  The Chromalist database was corrupted. We're restoring from backup, but you should expect some of your more recent chromalist entries to be missing. You should also expect some formerly deleted entries to reappear. Sorry about this.

  We will update this entry when the database is restored. Restore will take most of the night. Meanwhile, chromalist is working, albiet with a very limited database.

  We were able to restore a little data. More than none, but not by much. The backup was basically useless. We'll be fixing that for the (hopefully nonexistent) next time, but I'm sure that's little consolation. Very sorry.

  BTW, for those of you unfamiliar, the Chromalist database keeps track of black- and white-lists for pro users. It also holds data for greylist.

• DoS attack
  Sat Jul 1 08:21:39 MDT 2006

  There was a denial of service attack this morning.

• line down
  Tue Jun 6 13:19:18 MDT 2006

  Our primary bandwidth provider is unreachable because our line to them was cut.

  We're ramping our secondary provider up to handle the additional load. This should take effect within the hour. Our primary provider should be back within a day or so.

  Update: By "cut" I mean Qwest had a hardware failure in the switch through which the OC3 carrying our data gets to our bandwidth provider.

  Update: It's uncut.

• planned outage
  Sat May 13 18:32:42 MDT 2006

  Service will be unavailable for brief periods tonight while we move some equipment.

• web services outage
  Thu Jan 19 17:57:56 MST 2006

  Web services (www and webmail) were down for an hour and a half. Root cause not yet known, but an upgrade of php libraries fixed it.

• downtime
  Tue Oct 11 07:23:38 MDT 2005

  There was a power outage yesterday that lasted about an hour. Plus some more time wrestling a rarely-used CRT into place to diagnose a couple boot problems. Maybe we should buy a small LCD monitor for the machine room for those machines that don't take well to serial consoles.

  Amazing what a little rain will do. (Heavy drizzle for several days straight.) At least it wasn't a lightning strike 7m from the building this time (cf 12 June 2004).

• downtime
  Mon Apr 25 17:18:27 MDT 2005
  Mon Apr 25 20:58:48 MDT 2005 (updated)

  Today the database server crashed. The power supply went bad. The spare power supply was also bad, but in a much subtler way (with no load, 5V was 4.5V and 12V was 11.5V). We spent most of the day assuming the spare was good since it was brand new and mostly worked, and so spent most of the day looking for other causes.

  There are some lingering questions though, so we'll be evaluating that whole system over the coming week.

  Sorry this is took so long. It's embarrassing that a bum power supply would take this long to diagnose.

• downtime wrapup
  Wed Feb 16 09:12:46 MST 2005

  First, we're back up and everything seems to be stable. There's still several hours of email in the process of delivery, so your email for the last couple days will take awhile to get into your mailbox.

  (Update 2005-02-16 15:20: We're all caught up. That was faster than expected.)

  A circuit breaker tripped and batteries in the UPSs failed before we figured out what was going on. The loss of power caused some disks to become marginal; during the array rebuild they were slow (compared to other disks of the same model) and they were prone to error under production load.

  Once we replaced the marginal disks and got the array rebuilt, the machine was still crashing. The power failure (actually several in a short period) caused a few errors on the filesystem. Finding those specific errors and correcting them took a long time.

  The symptoms we saw were null pointer dereferences when data was being written out to disk. We started out thinking memory corruption, various mainboard components, power supply and others. But none of those bore out in isolation. We even eliminated disk corruption, but of a different sort than what really caused the problem.

  Since we resumed answering the phones this morning, we've had several calls from users wishing us good will and good sleep. Thank you! Your understanding and good will means a lot to us.

• downtime
  Tue Feb 15 21:51:12 MST 2005

  A power fluctuation caused hardware to fail. We've been nursing it along for the past many hours.

  The hardware problems caused some other "soft" problems that have been more difficult to track down. Meanwhile they cause us to crash whenever we open general access to the fileserver, which is why access is spotty.

  We think we have a handle on the "soft" problem now and are working to correct it. This will take most of the night. Fortunately, the computer is doing most of the work, leaving us time for catnaps. Going on 34 hours without sleep...

  We are receiving email. It will be available later, after things are back to normal.

  All in all, this is NOT my personal favorite Valentine's Day.

  More coherent news later, after some catnaps.

  Update 2005-02-16 07:40: We are now bringing the system up. Slowly, and load testing on the way. Access will continue being spotty for awhile.
  Update 2005-02-16 08:00: PRO webmail now available for all pro users. There is a lot of email in local queues that has not yet been delivered to user mailboxes, however.
  Update 2005-02-16 09:00: Webmail, POP and SMTP are now available for everyone. It will be several hours before all the email we accumulated over the last couple days is delivered to individual mailboxes.

• attack
  Sun Dec 5 23:20:33 MST 2004

  Major spammer attack this weekend.

  The backscatter of a joe-job made our servers miserable. We made some remarkable improvements in the server while fighting the backscatter, but in the end we had to fall back to a dumber but lighter-weight mail server. To make matters worse, when we deployed the most sophisticated of the heavy-weight server improvements, one of the parts crashed the operating system. Blech!

• new engine
  Sat Nov 20 16:25:18 MST 2004

  We just started using a new engine for the www.softhome.net website. Please tell us if you find that anything works worse now than it did yesterday.

• power supply failed
  Mon Nov 1 06:19:32 MST 2004

  The power supply (or possibly the motherboard -- post-mortem pending) on the main fileserver failed Monday morning at about 1am. We spent several hours very carefully replacing the motherboard.

  Most services will be sluggish for several hours, as we catch up with all the pending mail.

  This same machine had the power supply replaced after the lightning strike. It now has a new motherboard and another new powersupply.

  We won't be answering the phone for much of the day. The caffeine is going to wear off soon...

• DNS SNAFU
  Thu Oct 28 18:42:11 MDT 2004

  Those of you using AT&T DNS servers (including Comcast and many other digital cable users) were not able to lookup SoftHome names (such as www.softhome.net and mail.softhome.net).

  This went from about 10PM (26 Oct 2004) until about 6:30PM (MT) (27 Oct 2004).

  It looked for all the world like a problem with AT&T's DNS servers, but our ISP finally figured out that it was a BGP issue. For some odd reason, AT&T will only route over one of our ISP's upstream providers, but because of the configuration error, only the other upstream was available to route AT&T traffic.

• Maintenance
  Fri Jul 9 19:01:44 MDT 2004

  We will be doing some maintenance this Friday and Saturday nights. POP and webmail will be unavailable for periods as long as half an hour.

  Update: Saturday, not Friday.
  Update: Done.

• Struck by lightning
  Sat Jun 12 15:22:47 MDT 2004

  We were hit by lightning at about 1:30pm. Down time a little over an hour.

  (Yes, literally.)

• ChromaList offline for maintenance
  Sun Apr 18 05:43:45 MDT 2004

  ChromaList (including blacklist, whitelist and greylist functionalities) is offline tonight for maintenance. We're optimizing the database table. It's a very big table.

  During this period, you should expect an increased spam load :(

  When we turned greylist off for the maintenance, our incoming bandwidth usage doubled. That's a lot of spam. Wow. I guess that settles the question of whether greylisting is still effective.

  Update: It's back.

• Beagle Worm
  Sat Mar 20 20:44:27 MST 2004

  We've noticed that the beagle/bagle worm (particularly variant k) has confused many of you. The message is constructed to appear to be from SoftHome staff and purports to be a warning about your SoftHome email account. It instructs you to open an attached file.

  Do not attempt to open the attachment. On microsoft platforms, this will infect your machine and it will use your machine to spread itself and spam to other people.

  If you run a Microsoft Windows operating system, please be a good citizen and use a virus detection program, and keep it up to date. Users of other platforms should also seriously consider using virus detection software.

  Please note: Any message from SoftHome will be plain text and may have an HTML part. Nothing else!

  Viruslist.com, Symantec and others all have descriptions of this and other viruses.

• Routing Problems
  Wed Mar 10 03:23:06 MST 2004

  One of our ISPs ISPs ISPs is having some routing problems. This is affecting many people in the UK, and also some people in the US. And probably some elsewhere.

  We contacted the ISP with the problem (wcg.net) with information that should help them solve the problem. We hope this will be resolved Wednesday (10 March 2004).

  If you want to help, please send a traceroute (in MS Windows it's called tracert) to our support address. Traceroute to mail.softhome.net or pro.softhome.net, depending which you are having trouble with.

  Update (Wed Mar 10 14:36:35 MST 2004): We've had reports that it's fixed. If not, please send a message to support.

• Downtime
  Wed Dec 10 05:41:08 MST 2003

  There was downtime last night. We lost an ethernet switch. It took awhile to notice, then another while to diagnose and fix.

• Power Outage
  Sun Oct 19 22:37:51 MDT 2003

  There was a power outage down the street (a transformer blew up) and part of the power in our building was knocked out. We shut down our equipment proactively to avoid data corruption. We're back up now.

• Maintenance
  Fri Sep 12 22:02:00 MDT 2003

  We were down for a few hours. An ethernet card in our router died in a most peculiar way.

• Maintenance
  Wed Sep 3 14:20:54 MDT 2003

  We will be performing two maintenance activities this weekend. The first will take an hour or so. The second will require about 5 minutes.

  The first is adding more disk space for the database. Greylisting uses a bit more than we expected. The second is upgrading the database software.

  During each activity, very little will work. The activities will be late either Friday night or Saturday night, our lowest use periods.

  Update: It took longer than expected (forgot to factor in the looong step :( ).

• Email Delay This Weekend
  Fri Aug 1 01:10:24 MDT 2003

  Email will be delayed for a couple of hours this weekend for Personal accounts. After that period, we expect a significant reduction in spam and email viruses.

  Afterwards, you may notice occasional delays. If you can't bear the occasional delay, or you want all that spam, sign up for a Professional account.

  Professional accounts will not be affected for another week or two, and will have the option whether or not to use this system. Professional users: this system will be on by default, but you will have the option to disable it before we turn it on. We will send professional users further details by email.

  Update: Done Friday night.

• Power Outage
  Wed Jul 30 05:52:53 MDT 2003

  We don't buy that brand of UPS anymore.

  It took a bit less than an hour of driving and fixing. Our router in particular was affected.

• Network Outage
  Mon Jul 21 15:51:09 MDT 2003

  There was a partial network outage starting about 1:30pm, severe around 2-2:30 (MT). It seems to have been a routing problem, root cause so far unknown.

  (It is unlikely to have been the recently announced cisco vulnerability, however.)

• Database maintenance
  Sun Jul 6 17:48:48 MDT 2003

  We gave the database more disk to chew on. This caused an outage for all users of about 10 minutes.

• Network problems
  Thu Jul 3 01:54:41 MDT 2003

  Our service provider had some problems with BGP. Fixing the BGP problem uncovered an old OSPF misconfiguration. Both seem resolved now.

• Continued ... selective outages this weekend
  Sun Jun 22 17:37:51 MDT 2003

  We are coninuing to migrate mailboxes this evening. We have two sixths left to go and will probably finish them tonight. If not, then we'll do the last sixth next weekend.

  See the next entry, "Selective outages this weekend" for more details.

  Update: All sixths done.

• Selective outages this weekend
  Fri Jun 13 17:09:31 MDT 2003

  We have a new fileserver and plan to start migrating mailboxes to it this weekend.

  We will migrate in sixths, as in this will affect one sixth of users at a time. We will move at least two sixths this weekend -- more if there is time. Once all mailboxes are moved we will give the old fileserver a thorough checkup then move one or two sixths back.

  Professional users will see considerably less than an hour of disruption. Personal users will see several hours of disruption. In both cases, you will have access to your accounts and mailboxes during the disruption. New email will be delivered to the new mailbox; any old folders and messages will eventually arrive in your new mailbox just as they were before this migration.

  This whole process will take at least two weekends. You should see no difference in service during weekdays.

• Network outage 7 May
  Wed May 7 09:49:21 MDT 2003

  Our upstream provider had some routing (BGP) problems this morning.

  Our upstream's main provider added a new provider, but partially lost their BGP routes.

• Downtime Monday Morning
  Mon Apr 21 15:47:05 MDT 2003

  We had an outage from about 11am to 3:30pm today. A UPS failed dramatically, taking down a couple of ethernet switches, a couple of servers and our automatic monitoring and alerting system.

  It turns out Monday morning is a bad time to go down...

  To those of you who called, thank you. Unfortunately, we were all out of range of the phone for most of that time.

• Downtime Over Weekend
  Mon Mar 24 15:05:47 MST 2003

  We had a partial outage over the weekend. For some parts of the net, large packets would not go through. Our upstream provider's provider misconfigured one of their routers, and it took awhile to convince them of it.

• New Upgrade Processor
  Thu Jan 30 02:30:04 MST 2003

  The new Upgrade Account is now available. The backend is more elegant, it sports a new credit card processor and most importantly it paves the way for direct professional signups.

  It currently accepts only MasterCard and Visa. PayPal support coming soon.

• Upgrading Website
  Sun Jan 26 01:42:34 MST 2003

  We've upgraded the website. The new upgrade (as in pay for a professional account) part of the site will come online in a couple days.

  The big news for now is that the site requires cookies for login.

  There will be a few awkward parts until the upgrade is complete, but please do report any major bugs.

• NOT Affected by "Slammer" / "Sapphire"
  Sun Jan 26 01:42:34 MST 2003

  Since we don't run any Microsoft software, we weren't directly affected by this weekend's worm. (The worm invades poorly maintained Microsoft SQL servers.)

  You no doubt experienced a slow net though. That's because there's so many poorly maintained MS-SQL servers out there.

  It sure is a good thing the internet runs a diverse set of operating systems and server software. Even the small percentage of servers that were infected by slammer were able to bring large parts of the net to a crawl.

• Network outage
  Wed Jan 23 15:17:55 MST 2002

  There was an equipment failure on part of our service provider's service provider. It was from 21:30 to 23:10 MST, Jan 22.

• Badtrans worm warning
  Mon Dec 3 07:53:10 MST 2001

  Many of you are infected with the Badtrans worm. If you already have antivirus software, please update it. If not, use Norton's or Symantec's description to manually identify and remove the worm.

  This worm steals passwords and credit card data from your machine.

  This worm only affects users of Microsoft Windows operating systems. Our favorite fix for that problem is to switch to a decent operating system.

  Update: I'd like to emphasize that SoftHome is not infected and never has been. The worm is spread via email and, like most worms, only between computers running MS Windows.

• SMTP AUTH now supported
  Wed Oct 17 06:04:11 MDT 2001

  You can now use SMTP AUTH instead of POP first to send mail.

• Switched IP Provider
  Wed Oct 17 06:04:11 MDT 2001

  On Sunday (the 14th), we finished migrating to our new upstream provider.

• Partial Outage
  Tue Sep 18 10:43:48 MDT 2001

  The new Microsoft worm Nimda has affected (not infected) our old upstream provider. We still use them for outgoing DNS queries, so SMTP is down until we work around the problem.

  We expect to return to full operation later this afternoon.

  The provider is, of course, addressing it at their end.

  We are working to switch the rest of the way to the new provider today, about two weeks ahead of our planned schedule.

  I would like to stress that we are NOT infected by the worm, nor is our provider. This worm has infected some of our provider's other clients, and their infection has caused in effect a denial of service attack for all the provider's clients.

  See slashdot's coverage of this new worm for more information and further links.

  Update: Incoming mail is back up. Outgoing will take awhile longer.

  Update: The worm's name is Nimda. It is not a strain of Code Red. Updated text.

  Update: The service provider fixed their problem before we finished migrating, so we're back in the old configuration for another couple weeks.

• Server Back Up
  Tue Jul 24 05:15:46 MDT 2001

  Everything's back to normal. Mail deliveries caught up some time around 1am.

  Advance warning however, there may be brief service interruptions over the weekend as we futher investigate the incident.

• Server Downtime
  Sun Jul 22 11:38:30 MDT 2001

  Last night we started having problems with the file server. We restarted it a couple times, but it kept hanging after awhile.

  We've taken the server down to give it a more thorough examination. This examination will take several hours. Sorry for the delay, but as the saying goes, better safe than sorry.

  Update: It's going to be awhile, folks. Some more problems have arisen, indicating a possible hardware problem.
  Update: It's probably not hardware. I've resurrected the old array and am copying data over to it. It's brute force and will take awhile. Hopefully, it won't be necessary to copy all of it over. In any case it will take several hours.
  Update: We expect to be up around 6am.
  Update: We're back. Right on time :).

  Sorry about this fiasco, folks.

• Moving Files
  Sat Jun 16 17:22:58 MDT 2001

  You know the drill. See below.

  This is the final sixth.

  Update: done. 2am.

• Moving Files
  Fri Jun 15 14:21:09 MDT 2001

  You know the drill. See below.

  Update: done. 3:45am.

• Downtime
  Fri Jun 15 14:21:09 MDT 2001

  We had a partial outage for an hour or so today, from about noon to 1pm. There was an error on the fileserver that required a hard reboot.

  The moving of files we've been doing will make downtimes much shorter. They're already reduced significantly. When we get these last two sets moved, fileserver downtimes will be on the order of five minutes, when they happen at all.

• Moving Files
  Fri Jun 1 19:09:57 MDT 2001

  You know the drill. See below. Starting at 2am, this time.

  Update: done. 5am.

• Moving Files
  Sat May 19 01:51:32 MDT 2001

  You know the drill. See below. Not starting until 4:30am, though.

  Update: done. 8am.

• Moving Files
  Sat May 12 01:57:14 MDT 2001

  See last Saturday's "Moving Files" entry immediately below.

  Update: done. 5:15am.

• Moving Files
  Sat May 5 00:24:40 MDT 2001

  From 2am (MDT) to 5am (approximately), one sixth of SoftHome users will have only partial access to their email messages. We are moving the files from an old disk array to a newer, larger, faster one.

  Update: done. 6:15am.

• Downtime
  Mon Apr 30 16:17:43 MDT 2001

  The problem with webmail and signup was that the new server was TOO FAST. Don't you love race conditions?

  You might say there was a bug in our earlier configuration, but it didn't show up because the machine wasn't as fast.

  The beta webmail will be back later this evening.

  Update: beta webmail is back.

  Update: signup is only half working. You can sign up, but the account isn't initialized. That will be fixed tonight.

  Update: signup is fixed.

• Downtime
  Mon Apr 30 03:44:20 MDT 2001

  The server we were having problems with late last week crashed on Sunday afternoon, before we were ready to replace it.

  The new server is now online, but since we didn't get to test our new configuration completely before deploying it, not all services are immediately available.

  POP and SMTP are available, but webmail and signup are not.

  We expect webmail and signup to return this afternoon.

  The crashes did not affect email data. Your email is safe.

  The good news is that the new file server is biggerbetterfaster...

• Downtime
  Fri Apr 27 06:52:53 MDT 2001

  Motherboard problem. Down many hours. We worked around the particular problem, but it will be touch-n-go for a day or two. We don't expect more downtime, but things will be sluggish at times.

  Anyway, we've got this other file server we were planning on installing this weekend. I guess it will be the only file server for awhile instead of the second file server. Sigh.

  This has been our longest downtime ever, BTW.

• Downtime
  Wed Mar 14 02:52:00 MST 2001

  Our services were up and down for several hours yesterday.

  Around 3 PM, the telco (Qwest/ICG) broke the interface card for one of our T1s. (They fried a bunch of other T1 cards at the same time.) That didn't affect SoftHome much except for webmail and signup.

  The broken T1 card was discovered and fixed around 7pm.

  Not long after that, our routing went to heck. We don't know why yet, but we're pretty sure it was set off by the downed T1.

  The good news is that our new service provider has arrived. We will be phasing them in over the next week or so. The old service will stay around for load balancing and backup.

• Webmail Problems
  Mon Feb 12 17:43:53 MST 2001

  Our upstream provider broke one of our connections. Webmail was served from that connection. We have worked around it for now.

  Presumably, this is related to their big move tonight. See more about that below, under "Expected Downtime".

• Downtime
  Fri Feb 9 16:08:38 MST 2001

  Our upstream service provider had some difficulties that broke our connection for an hour or so. Again. Grr.

  See "Infrastructure Announcements" below for not exactly related news.

• Infrastructure Announcements
  Fri Feb 9 15:41:23 MST 2001
  • Redundant connection: In mid-February, we will add a connection to a second service provider. The new connection is a fiber link. We will maintain service on both, but the old connection will act primarily as a backup link.
  • Expected downtime early Feb 13. See "Expected Downtime" below for details.
• Expected Downtime
  Fri Feb 9 03:37:22 MST 2001

  We expect approximately 2.5 hours downtime during the midnight to 6am (MST) period of Feb 13 2001.

  Our upstream provider is moving equipment to a new facility.

  This is just a couple days before our new net connection is supposed to arrive. Bad timing, huh? :(

• Server Crash
  Fri Feb 2 04:11:38 MST 2001

  We were down for most of the night repairing a recalcitrant filesystem. Your data is safe.

  Did you use the time constructively? One user was very kind and said she appreciated the imposed family time.

  It will take a couple of hours to catch up with local email deliveries.

• Database Switchover
  Sat Dec 9 20:03:21 MST 2000

  That worked much better.

• Database Switchover
  Sun Dec 3 03:09:20 MST 2000

  That didn't work so well. Bad hardware. We think. We'll find it and try again next weekend.

  Update: it was a kernel bug. bleeding edge and all that... rescheduled for the 9th.

• New Webmail
  Sun Oct 15 01:11:52 MDT 2000

  Minor changes to make our sponsors happy.

• New Webmail
  Mon Jun 5 12:49:01 MDT 2000

  The new webmail moved from beta to production last night.

• Downtime planned
  Thu May 25 00:40:33 MDT 2000

  We are going to move our servers on Friday, 26 May 2000 at 8PM MT (GMT-6).

  The move is expected to take four hours.

  This move is to facilities with capacity for more bandwidth, so we can grow further and serve you better.

  Update: changed time from 10PM to 8PM.

  Update: done. It went well.

• Missing Onelist?
  Tue Apr 11 03:02:15 MDT 2000

  Are you missing your onelist.com subscription?

  Onelist has stopped accepting bounces from us. Why? We have no idea. They won't take our calls.

  If they'll talk to you, please ask them to call us at the number at the bottom of the page.

  Their actions cause a denial of service situation for us. It fills up our disks and causes our servers to waste a lot of time trying to bounce the messages. Until this is resolved, we can't accept email from them.

  Update: Resolved.

• Downtime Scheduled.
  Fri Jan 7 15:06:51 MST 2000

  There will be a brief downtime tonight, from 10:00 to 10:30.

  POP, webmail and signup services will be affected. Email delivery to user accounts will not be affected.

  Update: The upgrade went well. We now have a new kernel and a new disk array. Thanks for your patience.

• Web-based email available.
  Tue Dec 7 14:05:54 MST 1999

  Web-based email is available.

• Use username, not account number, for pop.
  Mon Dec 6 13:35:08 MST 1999

  This only applies to users who have been with us a long time. Thanks for your loyalty, and sorry about the inconvenience.

  When checking your email, use your username, not your account number. Account numbers no longer work for checking email.

  For example, test@softhome.net's username is test. Test's account number is a000005m. If you're using something that looks like a000005m, it won't work. Send email to support@softhome.net or call if you need further assistance.

• Web-based email available.

  It's in beta.

  See http://mail.SoftHome.net/beta.html

• Downtime Thursday, 30 Oct 1999.

  An ethernet card failed.

  Pop was down from 11pm to 1am.

• We're back up.

  We are currently still working on fixing the last of the bugs arising from this upgrade, so do expect some minor glitches within the next week.

• Downtime planned for Wednesday, 29 Sep 1999.

  We're upgrading!

  Starting at 5pm MT (GMT-6) on Wednesday, 29 Sep 1999, POP and new account signup services will be down for two hours.

  This will complete the upgrade we started on the 17th.

  Outgoing and incoming email (SMTP) service will remain active for most of the downtime period. However, email downloading (POP) will be down for this period. Because you have to check your mail through POP before sending email with SMTP, many users will not be able to send email during this period.

  Users should also expect minor service disruptions over the following week as we iron out the kinks in the new system.

  N.B. If you check your email every few minutes , you should not do so frequently during this period; you will simply get the same error message every time and possibly fill up your disk. If you are checking your email often enough for this to adversely affect you, please stop. If this is is the case, you're adversely affecting our services as well.

• Special note for AOL customers

  America Online has now taken to blocking the SMTP port, port 25, coming out of their network.

  This effectively makes it impossible for AOL users to send email through SoftHome.net.

  The only current known solution is to redirect your mail client to a higher port; SoftHome runs an alternate mail service on port 25000 for outgoing mail; this can be changed in Eudora and Microsoft Outlook. Unfortunately, Netscape doesn't allow users to change the mail server port, so they will most likely have to switch mail readers if they'd like to continue to use SoftHome.net.

  Sorry for this inconvenience.

• Downtime done for real this time...
  We hope.

  We reverted back to the old system. The new one was so close. Just that one little bug.

  We did keep incoming email going the whole time, though. So it should be more or less current right off the bat.

• Downtime finished Saturday, 6:30am.

  It took a bit longer than we hoped, but overall it went well.

  There were a few glitches. Stubborn hardware. The attacks while were testing the new setup were very helpful. Thanks for helping us test. Better now than later, but in the future please ask before you try to crash our machines!

  However, do expect some glitches throughout the weekend. We're bound to have missed something. Hopefully just minor stuff though.

• Downtime planned for Friday, 17 Sep 1999.

  We're upgrading!

  Starting at 9pm MT on Friday, 17 Sep 1999, pop and signup services will be down for several hours.

  SMTP service will remain active for most of the downtime period. You'll still have to pop first. You'll get the same message every time you pop though, so for your own sanity please don't pop too often during this period.

  You should also expect some minor service disruptions over the rest of the weekend as we iron out the kinks in the new system.

  We're upgrading the system software on our main server. The new system will make maintenance a lot easier in the future and will let us do a few things we've been itching to do for some time.

  For those who are curious, we have been running a manually maintained and upgraded early Linux Slackware (1.3 Elf beta, I think it was). We're switching to Debian GNU/Linux.

  Our other servers will be upgraded at a later date, after we get the kinks knocked out of this first system. When we upgrade the other systems, there will be much less disruption. One thing we're improving with this new system is service redundancy.