123 reg are having some DNS issues with their name servers at the moment

NS.123-reg.co.uk and NS2.123-reg.co.uk

They have released the following status update : http://www.123-reg.co.uk/support//systemstatus.aspx

UPDATE

Looks to have been caused by a Chinese DOS Attack!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/23/123reg_ddos_attack/

Here’s some feedback some of our customers have emailed through this week out of the blue!

“Thank you for your help.  I want to tell you guys how comforting it is to have great support even for the simple questions so I can concentrate on my job vs software.”

“Pleasure to work with as all your guys are and it has been a breeze to get this up and running compared with other companies who have quoted ridiculous sums of money and are hard to work with, so thanks again”

We really appreciate the kind words, and of course will keep up the great service!

Looks like some of our customers on the Be There network are experiencing slow downs due to a routing issue from their network. Some of the websites they have had speed issues with are rightmove.co.uk , natwest.com and other banking websites.

After speaking their technical support department they are aware of the issue and working on a resolution.

**UPDATE 16/02/2012**

Be There are still having Routing Issues and Packet loss leading on from the start of the issues on  Monday this week

So 2012 has been a great start to the year, with a selection of new customers, and getting our existing customers over to Office 365. Office 365 definitely has some major pluses over BPOS such as

• No single Sign on Utility needed, it work with Outlook’s Auto discovery even Out of Office!
• Microsoft can now be your DNS host making life easier for DNS Management and the setting up of records for Auto discovery and Lynced
• IMAP import tool , 365 will import all your old emails and folder structure via IMAP ( if you old provider supports it ) which means the only manual copying that needs to be done is Contacts and Calendars
• Faster Webmail and a full web based outlook
• Upgradeable to higher tear plans
• Minimum Seat Count = 1 ( BPOS was 5! )

A few of our existing BPOS clients have already been migrated by Microsoft and the transition smooth. It was as simple as configuring the correct autodiscover DNS records, getting everyone to change their password to sync with 365 and Outlook does the rest! So far all our transitions have been performed over the weekend, so a email goes out to the Friday before transition with the  365 webmail link : http://mail.office365.com

As Microsoft Partners we can help you with the transition , so contact us today!

Webroot notified us today as a Partner, that it is exiting the email security, email archiving and small business web security service’s to focus on ‘web and mobile security solutions that will most effectively protect individuals and businesses in today’s threat landscape’. I think this will be a common ground with most email filtering provider’s now, who do not provide hosted email to compete with the such of Microsoft’s 365 and Google Apps/ Postfix. The costs of full hosted exchange email solutions now to the end user is only double the cost of  email filtering so it makes sense to move your small business mailflow all together and migrate into the cloud! If you are a Webroot customer looking for a migration path for your webfiltering, email archiving and filtering and new provider contact us !gdfgdf

Routing

It looks like some of our customers using BT internet as an ISP are having issues routing to American Sites. UK Sites and Servers seem uneffected, however domains that have their nameservers in the US will also have issues remotely connecting to the office. This can be temporaly fixed by using the direct server IP. This looks to be a local BT issue as other customers on Zen connecting through a BT line are uneffected.

Recently one of our clients upgraded to Virgins new 50mb Service for there existing ADSL2+ Service. The day of change over we moved IP’s and the server started to accept new email from the new IP, accept SMTP transmissions were timing out. We adding a middleman SMTP server inbetween the Spam Filter and the Exchange box with a low MTU connection size 1440 and this fixed the issue temporarily.  After a week plus with Virgin Technical Support, Virgin have found there is a problem with their new 50Mb service. There’s a workaround which is to reduce the MTU to 1460 on the receiving server

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\[ID of interface]\MTU

The virgin router partners Netgear are working on a firmware update for their new superhubs to fix it properly.

Following on from Facebook and Privacy issues, it looks as it LinkedIn has done us the “favour” of having a default setting whereby our names and photos can be used for third-party advertising. 

Completely down to you whether this is of any relevance, but if like me you don’t want to participate, here are the quick steps to rectify LinkedIn’s devious ploys!

[CLICK DIAGRAM TO RESIZE]

1. Sign into LinkedIn, and click on your name, then choose “Settings“.

2. Now click on “Account” (bottom left).

3. In the box to the right click on “Manage Social Advertising” .

4. This opens a new window – now remove the tick from the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising” .

All done.

Nearly got us LinkedIn – close escape!

Additionally: If you you may want to have a look at the settings within “Email Preferences” very reminiscent of Facebook! Eg: Check out Turn On/Off Partner InMail (junk mail coming your way!). 

We have had a few customers contact us with issues trying to email our Microsoft frontbridge systems from Orange or Wanadoo email accounts. We have spoken to Orange Technical Support and they have confirmed this is general fault with their system which they are working to fix!

Recently we helped a new customer combine their existing webmail accounts from Yahoo and Gmail into one Free Google Apps Standard account that could send from their domain name. The merger involved transfering 4 Gigabytes of Email and 1700 Contacts from Yahoo and as well another 600mb of Email from their gmail account.

We used the migration tools from https://www.yippiemove.com which copied over the 4 Gigabytes of email via the “cloud” in under 2 hours. We used the export CSV Tool for the contacts and the Gmail Backup and Restore tool to migrate the Gmail Emails. The custuomer has now consolidated all their accounts into a free Google Apps Standard account which is valid for up to 10 users.

Let us know if we can help you out with any cloud migration problems or questions!