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M6.Net  Weekly  News    December 7 2005


Michael Guilfoyle
Director

   Welcome
 

FIRSTLY. If you use the control panel to add something to your account it will get done much faster and as priority, than if you just sent an email to support@m6.net. Firstly, automation will setup want you want instantly or within minutes. If that does fail at all a support person will set it up manually. After this, support queries are attended to. Many support queries are about things not working which can be because automation has not done it. Once the support team manually does an automation failure they CC Bob and Ananth so they can look into why it failed and fix the underlying problem.

If you have a general support query, submitting it through the control panel will ensure it gets attended to faster. These queries get submitted directly into the support queue and get associated with all the relevant information to make it easy to respond to the support query. Support queries sent by email are picked up by a mailbox scanner every 5 minutes and then inserted into the support queue after looking up the relevant customer details and doing various checks that the control panel does immediately.

The best way to get the fastest response to your setup requests is use the control panel to set it up, failing that send a query using the control panel. We’ve had a solid productive week, much as been achieved in the last week with automation setting the permissions more reliably as well as automation working a lot faster. .Net 2 has been rolled out and will be rolled out on some older servers this week due to the demand from clients on those servers. Also scripts to simplify and speed up the process of moving clients from older to newer servers has been produced and is being perfected so we can gradually move our older clients off older servers to new ones so we can retire some old machines and upgrade our loyal clients to the latest greatest technology. This will take us time to ensure we do it properly but we will work at it as fast as we can. There are no issues; we just believe it is best for all to retire as much old technology as possible. A lot of really cool new technologies are coming out like .Net 2 and SQL Server 2005.


Bob Watson
 Network Operations

Network Administration
 

Another email worm is doing the rounds -- this week a lot of people got hit by Sober.Y, filling up their inboxes with junk. Our virus scanning tools recognised and purged the worm as it arrived, but it left a lot of people with a dozen or more emails sitting in their inbox with no subject, no sender and a message body reading 'This message has been removed'. Rest assured that no legitimate mail has been lost, these messages are necessary as a lot of IMAP mail clients rely on having an accurate mail count and ID, so the messages appear, but they don't indicate any sort of problem with your mailbox, rather, they are evidence of the system working as it should.

What happened though, as the volume of mail generated by the worm was fairly high, mail was delayed in some cases by up to eight hours. There's not a lot we can do to prevent this sort of delay when we're hit by something like this, except to ask that people run a good virus scanner so they don't become relays for the worm in the first place.

As a result of all this, support queries sent via email only entered the support queue up to 8 hours after they were sent. Support queries added from the control panel, as they are entered directly into the database, were not effected.


Kunal Kochlar
Support Coordinator		   Support and Customer Service
 

This week we are getting hold of number of support responses and they should be all cleared by today. Last week end there were some issues with emails with “no subject”, these emails were mainly generated by a new mass mailer worm. This worm automatically generates email messages and the anti virus program deletes these messages with virus. This shows up as “no subject” mail in your inbox.

Tip of the Week: One request to all our clients, most of the features work from our control panel. So, requests like creating users, databases and similar stuff can be done from control panel. Majority of support request that we get can be dealt by control panel now. So please use control panel.


Michael Nordling
Chief Software Engineer		   Development and New Technology
 

Hi everyone, the last week we have been focusing on getting the control panel working smoother and fixing a few issues like the permissions, which we seems like we have finally fixed, windows permission are not fun. Apart from that we are continuing working on it to make it even better, version 3.0 will be released soon.