OUTAGES, NETWORK TROUBLE AND UPGRADES


This page contains information related to scheduled network maintenance and related issues that could affect our customers.

 

OUTAGES: NONE

News and Planned Work:

April 12-07 (9:19 AM CST)

TW Outage -

Service has been fully restored.

April 12-07 (9:00 AM CST)

TW Outage -

Customers may experience a slow down while TW Telecom working on a router / equipment issue at our Milwaukee POP. Sorry for any problems this may cause. ETA is about 20 minutes.

April 11-07 (2:30 PM CST)

Power Outage - (power restored)

All power has been restored. Total outage time was approximately 15 minutes, as several services exceeded our UPS systems run time. Our core routers and TW network fiber remained operational throughout the outage, however we powered down several services as a precautionary measure. Mail and other Web based services may have been unreachable during these times.

April 11-07 (1:00 PM CST)

Power Outage -

Due to weather related winter storms and heavy snow, we are experiencing a power outage. Alliant Energy ETA is 2-3 hours. We are currently on UPS (battery backup).

September 27-04 (9:00 AM CST)

POWER UPGRADES -

We are adding another 800AMP power feed to our data center. As a result we may experience a slight outage during the cutover. We have brought in a 50kw generator to power our data center while Alliant Energy does the cut over. We have secure the generator to insure that we do not lose power to our data center during an extended period of time. We are hoping that everything will go smoothly, and expect to have our power upgrades completed same day.

We will begin work on September 30, 2004 at 7:00AM CST. Please be advised that we will have full staff on site during this time to insure that our network is monitored and available during the upgrades.

May 1-04 (8:00 AM CST)

We have ordered another connection to Savvis Communications in keeping with our commitment to continually add more bandwidth. No ETA has been established for the install.

April 29-04 (10:21 AM CST)

Tree VS. Car causes large spikes at substation. You may have noticed a slight fluctuation in connectivity or UPS usage in our facility today. This was caused when a tree felled by high winds landed on a car several miles away. However it would appear that the line feeds a section of town off of our local electrical substation here in the industrial park. The system is designed to trip/reset when such surges become apparent, which it did, three times. This caused some issues for a few of our UPS systems, affecting a few customers, as well as our DNS. We have replaced the UPS systems affected, and all DNS was restored in minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience.

January 1-04 (12:01 AM CST)

Happy New Year!

October 7-03 (5:00 PM CST)

Our router upgrades have been completed without issue and no noticeable down time. Expect better performance and overall improved stability as a result.

October 6-03 (7:16 PM CST)

ROUTER UPGRADES - and Work

We will be moving some circuits around and working on our core routers Tuesday October 7th, in the morning hours. There may be short outages or slight latency during these periods. Network connectivity as a whole will be maintained via redundant connections and routers. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

October 6-03 (9:39 AM CST)

One of our core routers flapped this morning however network connectivity as a whole was relatively unaffected. We will be moving some circuits around and working on this particular router Tuesday October 7th as part of an emergency planned upgrade to keep this problem from reoccurring in the future.

July 19-03 (12:16 AM CST)

One of our Core Routers had an RSP failure. Typically our RSP's will fall over to another RSP as we have dual RSP's in our routers. However when the first RSP crashed the second one failed. We will be replacing the slave unit immediately in the next week or two. The result of this failure was a partial outage and loss of 4.5Mbit/s of bandwidth, as well as the loss of two remote POP's. All web hosting, colocation and dedicated server customers would have been relatively unaffected. Our other core router remained running and connected to the internet. It should be noted that this failure was NOT the result of the recent IOS vulnerability. We have patched all of our routers as of July 17th, 2003 and have applied filters to block any such attacks on our remaining routers. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

July 17-03 (9:11 AM CST)

Please be advised of the following:

On Tuesday July 15, 2003 Cisco Systems announced that "Cisco routers and switches running Cisco IOS® software and configured to process Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) packets are vulnerable to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack." Although Cisco Systems states that the vulnerability is to "a rare sequence of crafted IPv4 packets with specific protocol fields", Bella Mia Network management has determined that this vulnerability constitutes a sufficient security risk to require immediate action.

Cisco Systems has ascertained that the new version of the Cisco IOS® software will resolve the security issue. Therefore starting tonight and continuing for the next several days, Bella Mia Engineers will be upgrading all Bella Mia IP Network routers to the latest Cisco IOS® software.

It is Bella Mia's goal to provide the highest level of service to our customers. We appreciate your business and look forward to continuing our relationship in the future.

For additional information regarding the Cisco Systems announcement, please visit their website at:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/routers/ps341/products_security_advisory09186a00801a34c2.shtml#impact

July 16-03 (8:01 AM CST)

We have successfully moved two DS1's over to Fiber. Both T1's are connected to two of our remote POP's. There should have been no noticeable down time as these are backup links.

February 3-03 (12:08 AM CST)

We have completed moving our DNS servers over to our new IP space.

January 14-03 (12:08 PM CST)

We have finally turned up our 4.5Mbit feed from AT&T. You can view traffic graphs here: ACC-AT&T

January 13-03 (5:20 PM CST)

All Upgrades are complete.

January 13-03 (12:28 PM CST)

We are currently replacing our RSP2's with RSP4's in our Core 7513 router. While we perform this and other upgrades to the IOS we will be powering down this router. This should not have any ill-affects outside of slight latency with the loss of our Savvis connections while we perform this upgrade.

We should also have our AT&T Feeds live today as well adding 4.5Mbits of Bandwidth to our Network!

Finally once our RSP4 is in place an all upgrades completed we will again be taking full routes from all carriers.

January 10-03 (4:46 PM CST)

SBC finished installing 3 more T1's today. These are our AT&T feeds. We hope to bring these live with AT&T today with any luck!

January 7-03 (12:45 AM CST)

We will be provisioning two new T1 Circuits over our Fiber. No outages are expected.

January 6-03 (3:45 PM CST)

As of 3:43PM CST our C&W connections have been restored. We apologize for any inconvenience.

January 6-03 (1:10 PM CST)

We are currently experiencing an outage with our Cable and Wireless Circuits. We have a ticket into C&W and expect a resolution shortly.

January 1-03 (12:01 AM CST)

H A P P Y N E W Y E A R ! ! !

December 4-02 (10:00 AM CST)

We have ordered an additional 4.5Mbit feed from ACC Business, a division of AT&T. ACC currently peers with UUnet, Level3, Abovenet, and several other carriers. We feel that ACC/AT&T's bandwidth,network reach and peering will be a great addition to our network and its strength as we open the new year! We expect to be up and running with ACC as of January 20th, 2003.

November 21-02 (8:00 PM CST)

We have asked ARIN for our own private and portable IP space. We have applied on three separate occasions, each time being turned down. We feel now, and have felt in the past that we met and meet all the requirements that ARIN has set forth. We are multi-homed, run BGP, and have our own ASN. We have set up an RWHOIS server to list exactly what we do with all our IP space currently and in the future and are confident that we will get our own space. Once this happens it will ensure that our customers are not forced to move from carrier to carrier as they either go bankrupt or fail to provider adequate services. In any event once we receive our allocation and have been successfully announcing our blocks for a while we will begin setting up migration teams to help move customers into our own IP space and out of all of our carriers space.

October 23-02 (12:41 PM CST)

We will be doing some routine maintenance to our mail servers today. We have already completed several core upgrades to our backup mail server, and have updated filters, as well as the spam filtering system on the backup server. As the backup server has proven to be quite stable after these upgrades we will be performing upgrades to mail.mia.net as well later this evening. The outage is not expected to last more than 20 minutes. No mail will be lost or bounced, however mail delivery will be slowed and access to mail will be intermittently available.

October 20-02 (1:30 PM CST)

We will be moving our current C&W connections and IP space to New Edge Networks. We are also exploring direct NxT or DS3 connections to either the C&W POP in Chicago, connections to SBC, or a direct connection to the Chicago Ameritech NAP which would give us the ability to buy transit from a number of carriers that peer there. In any even please be assured that our network and connectivity will continue to both excel and expand amid the continuing disasters in the Telcom industry.

October 18-02 (1:30 PM CST)

SBC Ameritech has completed the install of Fiber and DS3 equipment in our facility and server room. We will have support for 4 DS3 connection once the fiber is turned up. We expect Turn up in Mid November.

August 14-02 (11:57 AM CST)

We have updated all MRTG Graphs for our routers and backbone connections on the main infopages.mia.net web site. We have finalized the move of our remaining T1's to our new router, and our connections to Savvis should now be balanced properly. We also corrected a small routing configuration error yesterday afternoon that was affecting about 1/3 of overseas traffic.

August 12-02 (5:18 PM CST)

We have added a new Looking Glass page for our Cisco 7513 so you can run pings and traceroutes directly from our 7513 as well now. We have also added MRTG graphs for our Savvis connections.

August 2-02 (7:41 PM CST)

As planned our new Savvis T1 was installed successfully and is up and running. All customers that had ethernet port connections to our network have been moved to our new Cisco 7513 without issue. Finally our new 208v 30AMP APC 2200 Rack mount UPS systems arrived today and have been installed. We will have them wired in an live some time next week. That's it for upgrades for a while until the digging starts for our Fiber and DS3, as well as additional power. Have a nice weekend!

August 2-02 (12:11 PM CST)

We will be turning up our new Savvis pipe at 3PM CST today. We will also be moving our other Savvis pipe to our new router, as well as moving a few other PTP T1's on our network that link two of our POPs to our NOC. Beyond that we will also be moving customer cross connects and ethernet connection to the new router as well. No down time of our network in general is expected, and all customers being moved should barely even notice the move. Once this is done we are taking a break!

July 31-02 (4:28 PM CST)

Savvis has given the all clear for turn up of our new Savvis T1. The circuit tests out fine from end to end and is ready to be provisioned. We are tentatively scheduled to turn up the T1 tomorrow between 10AM and 5PM. There should be no interruption in services while this circuit is turned live.

July 30-02 (9:31 AM CST)

All planned wiring has been completed by our electricians for our additional 20 and 30AMP 208v service in the server room. There is still some slight work to be done, however this is the last leg of work on the current service. We expect to have another 200AMP service installed in our server room prior to the end of summer. No outages were present during the work.

July 29-02 (7:43 PM CST)

SBC Ameritech installed our additional Savvis T1 today. We awaiting notification from Sprint and Savvis as to the turn up date. We expect to have this circuit operational in the next week or so. We have been testing out new Cisco 7513 router and will be installing the T1 and ethernet modules midweek and hope to have Savvis and Ameritech circuits moved to the new router by the end of the week.

July 23-02 (10:00 AM CST)

SBC Ameritech and hi-cap fiber techs will be in our offices all day today planning our new DS3 installation. All planning for the upcoming digging has been completed and we have prepared a rack for the DS3 equipment which will be installed in the coming weeks. The addition of fiber to our NOC will not only secure greater redunancy and expansion capabilities for our network, but will allow customers to order their own circuits and get cross connects to the various networks we have at our NOC in the future. We currently have multiple redundant connections to Savvis, Cable and Wireless, PSI/Cogent and Ameritech.

July 22-02 (6:23 PM CST)

In our continuing efforts and commitment to expansion of our network we are adding a Cisco 7513 in addition to our Cisco 3640 routers. This will give us added redundancy and better control over our network, BGP, and customer networks. We expect to have our new Cisco installed in the coming weeks. There should be no noticeable down time as we transition to the 7513. The router has dual power plants which will be connected to dual and separate UPS systems for added up time and redundancy. It also sports redundant processors as well.

July 3-02 (3:37 PM CST)

Subject: New Savvis Connections
Date: July 3rd, 2002
That's right, Friday July 5th, 2002 we will be officially turning up a new Savvis T1. We expect turn up at 10AM CST US. While we will be closed for the Holidays (July 4th through 7th), we will be here to turn up the T1 Friday. 30 days from now we expect another T1 to Savvis to be turned up. Also, we have ordered a DS3 from Ameritech which we expect to be installed in about 18 weeks. We do not expect the additional T1 turn up to cause any outages and have taken measures to turn up the circuit on a different and isolated router on our network initially. If nothing else, you should notice an improvement in network performance.

If you have any questions, or concerns, please let us know.

Again, we will be closed July 4th - July 7th in honor of our Nations Birth. Wherever you are, have a safe and happy holiday, and since 95% of our customers are located outside the US, thank you for your support as a customer, and your kind words and support offered after the events of September 11th. Here's to a safe and happy July 4th.

On call tech are available over the holiday using the standard methods of contact.

June 20-02 (3:41 PM CST)

We are currently suffering from a partial outage. We have lost all our connections to Cable and Wireless, along with several T1's. We are working with the our providers and the telco to find the problem. There is no ETA on this problem. While we are still connected to the internet via on last provider, there will be mass latency as all traffic is being funneled out other routes. We apologize for any inconvenience.

May 31-02 (4:41 PM CST)

So far our PSI connections seem to be responding at normal capacities. Again, we will continue to monitor this situation as we are logging all CRC errors at our routers to try to find a pattern to the intermittent problems on this circuit. In any event all systems functioning perfectly at the moment.

May 31-02 (10:01 PM CST)

Ameritech Hi-Cap Techs are in our NOC testing the PSI circuits. So far after 30 minutes of testing the line looks clean. We will continue to test. There will be a slight bit of latency while testing takes place.

May 30-02 (3:05 PM CST)

Our connection to PSI have been flapping all day long. This means a bit of latency as BGP sessions go up and down and as traffic is routed out our other providers. Ameritech is currently working on the circuit which appears to have some sort of problem at the CO. There is no ETA.

May 29-02 (1:00 PM CST)

Bella Mia to add connections to Savvis. This makes Savvis our 4th provider. Expected install is Late June.

March 5-02 (7:05 PM CST)

As of 7:00PM CST our PSI.NET connection are live again. Total downtime was 250 minutes. So far all BGP sessions with PSI are coming back on line. We expect full routes by 7:10PM. Latency should now subside as everything is back to normal.

March 5-02 (5:15 PM CST)

Ameritech has made contact with PSI as of 5:02PM CST. Ameritech says there is a cabling issue in the CO (Central Office) in Milwaukee. There is currently no ETA either from Ameritech or PSI. We are showing a current down time of 150 minutes at this point. Again, all other connections to the net are stable and responding. We will keep you updated as usual throughout the evening.

March 5-02 (4:41 PM CST)

As promised our new 1 hours status notification from PSI.NET returns the same response as previously noted. Ameritech has not returned an ETA to PSI. We have been instructed to call PSI.NET again at 5:05PM for new information on the ETA.

March 5-02 (3:41 PM CST)

PSI.NET tells us that our connections to their Milwaukee POP went down at 2:49PM CST. They have been unable to resolve the issue and believe it to be a telco problem and have contacted Ameritech HiCap Repair. There is still no ETA, but we should have more news at 4:41PM. Again, our network is up and operational and BGP is functioning. However their may be periods of latency and difficulty reaching some sites. We apologize for any inconvenience.

March 5-02 (3:17 PM CST)

Our connections to PSI.NET are currently down, however BGP is doing its job and our connections to Cable and Wireless as well as Ameritech are currently functioning normally. There may be periods of latency as connections are re-routed automatically, or until service is restored. No ETA is available.

February 12-02 (8:17 PM CST)

Stats.mia.net is back on line. Apparently BSD could find one of the NIC cards in the box, but could not find its IRQ. After doing several tests we finally pulled the NIC card that was having trouble and ran a pencil eraser across the contacts, reinstalled it and it came back up. Go figure. Never a dull moment here!

February 12-02 (5:02 PM CST)

We are still having problems with stats.mia.net. With this in mind all customer graphs will be off line as we seek a solution. Sorry for any inconvenience.

February 12-02 (11:58 AM CST)

stats.mia.net is currently down. BSD seems to have lost its ability to find one of the NIC cards in this box. We have been working on this problem since 11PM yesterday. NO ETA.

January 25-02 (11:36 AM CST)

We are upgrading our EIMS server to version 3.1 today. There will be a momentary outage of the mail servers while we perform this upgrade. We apologize for any inconvenience.

January 15-02 (11:36 AM CST)

We have replaced the battery packs on one of our APC Rack mount UPS's. No down time was experienced as the units are hot swappable. We have purchased spares so that we do not run into this problem again.

January 10-02 (5:29 PM CST)

More wonderful changes/updates to our network. We have been busy today:

1. Moved old "alpha.net"/PSI 206.190.23.x IP range out of the main IP configs on our core router and moved it to a secondary.

2. Moved the rest of our Portmasters out of the old 206.190.23.x block

3. Reconfigured OSPF on our Portmasters and core routers

4. Updated Traffic Graphs for Portmasters

5. Reconfigured RADIUS to recognize all changes

6. Replaced Hard Drive on the new "jer.mia.net" DNS server due to possible problem/failure with the previous one.

7. As we continue to test the new "jer.mia.net", we have installed Debian Linux and QDNS with no problems.

8. Ordered replacement and spare battery packs for our APC Rack Mount units as one unit failed. This is quite common, however we had no spares. The unit is "hot swapable" so we will replace the battery pack once it arrives.

January 8-02 (3:10 PM CST)

We are installing a new DNS server today. Basically we have built new hardware and are moving jer.mia.net (208.146.240.10) to a new box. There should be no noticeable down time during this move.

January 6-02 (11:50 AM CST)

All graphing and statistical information has been restored for all colocated servers and hosting servers.

January 1-02 (12:01 AM CST)

Happy New Year!

December 26-01 (11:00 AM CST)

All graphing for colocated servers is off line temporarily until we can isolate a bug in our software upgrade that occurred late last week. Currently the traffic shaper is functioning, but all graphing is off until we can find the cause of several crashes that have plagued this latest version of the software. I apologize for any inconvenience.

December 21-01 (11:00 AM CST)

All graphing has been reestablished. The traffic shaper has been replaced and is back up and running at full steam with no problems reported at this time. We will be testing to old hardware to find out what the cause of the sparatic and intermittent instability problems were. Again, I apologize for any inconvenience.

December 20-01 (5:30 PM CST)

Thanks to the anal behavior of on of our suppliers there is a delay in getting a hardware key for our traffic shaper replacement.. All graphing for colocated servers will be off line until morning when we receive the key. All traffic will keep flowing without interruption however. Sorry for any inconvenience.

December 20-01 (11:30 AM CST)

We are currently installing our new traffic shaper to replace the old one which has had numerous hardware issues that have caused intermittent outages at various time over the last several months. The new system should be up an running before days end. In the mean time all traffic reporting and graphs will be down.

December 14-01 (11:44 AM CST)

We had a switch and router failure simultaneously.. Not sure which was the true culprit at this point. If all else fails (which it did) we just rebooted everything. Looks like everything is back up and running again. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

December 13-01 (11:44 AM CST)

We will be installing our CSU's for the new T1 Friday December 14th, and subsequently turning up the new circuit.

November 15-01 (11:30 AM CST)

Our new T1 is due to be installed on November 28th, 2001.

October 30-01 (4:00 PM CST)

We have ordered another T1 to link to a new POP. The T1 will create a "round-robin" loop between our other POP's and main NOC. This is being done both to deliver extra bandwidth to the new POP as well as to ad another line of redundancy system wide. There will be no noticeable down time associated with this new circuit.

September 24-01 (1:00 PM CST)

UPDATE: Network Outage

After 24 hours of lost connectivity to one of our backbone providers we were just informed by Ameritech that they have found the problem. Apparently there is a bad set of transmit pairs in a cross box between our Facility and the Lake Geneva Central office. CSG or the Cable Splicing Group has been sent to fix the problem and replace the pairs. There is still no ETA.

September 23-01 (1:00 PM CST)

Subject: Network Outage

There is a partial network outage that we are tracking starting at around 1:00PM CST. It would appear that one of our connections to the internet is not working. Since we have other providers and other connections to the internet our network continues to run. There will however be slight latency as the other pipes carry to load. Also there is a small block of IP's which are currently unroutable out our other providers. This is causing some problems for some customer servers in this block, and several hosted web sites on our network. We have been migrating all customers in this block into a new block for several months now. We are stepping up the time table for this migration and will be doing so immediately. Some sites may be unreachable to the outside world for several hours while this new information propagates around the world. Thank you for your understanding.

September 18-01 (10:00 AM CST)

Subject: UNKNOWN WIDE SPREAD ATTACK ON THE INTERNET TODAY

Attention colocation customers. If you are using an Microsoft Branded Windows based server please make sure you read this completely.

If your box is affected, we strongly urge you to patch it once a new patch becomes available.

http://www.cert.org/current/current_activity.html

Increase in Port 80 (HTTP) scanning activity

This morning (September 18th) the CERT/CC started receiving reports of a massive increase in scanning directed at port 80 (HTTP). Reports indicate that this scanning activity is attempting to exploit systems previously compromised by Code Red II and/or the sadmind/IIS worm as well as other known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). Please see CERT Vulnerability Note VU#111677 for information on the type of vulnerability being exploited.

The following is a log excerpt of this scanning activity:

GET /scripts/root.exe?/c+dir

GET /MSADC/root.exe?/c+dir

GET /c/winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /d/winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /scripts/..%5c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /_vti_bin/..%5c../..%5c../..%5c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /_mem_bin/..%5c../..%5c../..%5c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /msadc/..%5c../..%5c../..%5c/..\xc1\x1c../..\xc1\x1c../..\xc1\x1c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /scripts/..\xc1\x1c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /scripts/..\xc0/../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /scripts/..\xc0\xaf../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /scripts/..\xc1\x9c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /scripts/..%35c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /scripts/..%35c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /scripts/..%5c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

GET /scripts/..%2f../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir

The CERT/CC has also received reports of a possibly new piece of malicious code named "readme.exe" being sent via email. Preliminary analysis indicates that this file may be related to the increase in port 80 scanning activity.

Sites are encouraged to verify the state of security patches on all IIS servers and email client software. Administrators may also want to add filters to mail servers to block the "readme.exe" attachment. In addition, sites may wish to notify users of the existence of "readme.exe" and its potential threat.

September 12-01 (7:00 AM CST)

Subject: Update on the situation and status of networks in the US

I just wanted to update everyone of our colo customers and web hosting customers on our Network's and subsequent "Network" status. We are currently running at 100%, and have been since this terrible atrocity committed upon our great nation. We are situated in the Midwest, far away from major cities like Chicago and Milwaukee. The networks that we connect to are also 99.9% intact.

There are however many problems as you might guess on the East Coast relevant to damage beyond belief. However we are as of yet relatively unaffected. I just wanted to assure all of you that we are up and running here, as are most networks and businesses. We are at work, we are picking up the pieces and we are moving on. I know that this type of assurance is quite important to several of our customers since 95% of our customer base is located "outside" of the US. We are a tough nation that has had to fight for a long time to gain, and maintain freedom, and will continue to do so. For those of you outside of the US, the mood, while somber is quite positive and focused on doing all we can to help everyone affected.

In any event, everything is running quite smoothly at this hour and has been since this tragedy began. If you have any questions, concerns, or

even need to try to contact relatives in the US, we are here and would be glad to relay messages either via the Internet or phone here in the US.

Also, if you do have trouble getting to corresponding networks that crisis cross their way from other parts of the world to your servers or web sites here at Bella Mia, Inc., rest assured that they are up and running. We have set up extra monitoring to insure that we catch any outage, that you may not be able to.

The best thing we all can do right now is take some time to pray for those who were/are directly affected by this diabolical attack.

God bless everyone involved, and God Bless America!

Regards,
Jeremy Anthony Kinsey
VP Network Operations - Bella Mia, Inc.

September 11-01 (8:58 AM CST)

Subject: Terrorist Attacks

We at Bella Mia, as well as other ISP's across the nation are urging dial up customers to get off the phone lines. There was a major terrorist attack in New York and Washington today that took the lives a thousands of innocent people when 3 separate planes flew into the World Trade Center in NYC, and the Pentagon in Washington. The damage and death toll is devastating.

Several people may have family and friend in New York so again, we are urging all customers that use dialup to connect to the internet to please stay off the lines. Your efforts will help keep the phone lines open for calls in and out of New York. We have experienced trouble calling locally due to the large call volumes from this travesty on our great nation.

If you are using Wireless, or another dedicated connection, there is no need to stay off the internet. If you must use dialup, be brief and use email to communicate with your loved ones.

Thank you for your help during this sad day.

Please keep all these people in our prayers today.

Due to the tragedies in New York and Washington DC, customers may experience problems in these areas. Also, all news sites, such as www.cnn.com, are experiencing high volumes which may prevent user access.

All issues are being tracked in at our NOC.

Again, KEEP THE PHONE LINES CLEAR!!!

Thank you,
The Bella Mia Family

August 28-01 (3:38 PM CST)

Our 2 New T1's finally went up today without a hitch, adding 3Mbits of Bandwidth to our network. There was no noticeable down time or latency during the upgrade. All BGP sessions came back up within a few minutes and our peering session is now active with Cable and Wireless. The additional bandwidth will allow for future growth as well as allow our current customers the speed and performance they have come to appreciate. We will be doing some testing later this evening by pulling down circuits one at a time and turning them back up to insure that our load balancing and fall over works as intended.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know.

August 28-01 (12:58 PM CST)

***URGENT***

Subject: Network Outages and Latency Today

We will be installing 2 T1's today adding 3Mbits of Bandwidth to our network. While this will not be a complete outage, there will be a slight amount of latency as our routers fall over to our other upscale providers while we move/add our new circuits.

Also, during reconfiguration of our BGP and load balancing our Core Router may be rebooted causing momentary down time.

If all goes well the upgrade should be no more than 1 hour. Downtime should be limited to a matter of minutes only. This upgrade is a long time in coming and should provide increased speed and better routes in and out of our network.

What does all this mean to you? During the upgrade things will slow down a bit, and there may be some spot outages. Delays in mail, or access outside of our network. Again, the downtime will be quite limited.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know.

August 24-01 (11:58 PM CST)

As of 8:00PM CST we have fixed our DNS servers and all DNS traffic and queries should not be active again to our network. It looks like the DNS DOS was caused by the "orbz" list people's DNS servers.

Hers is the jist of the problem:

- Our DNS server starts trying to resolve something in the inputs.orbz.org zone.

- It creates an internal list of servers to query, and starts its way through the list.

- Later, it modifies this list without checking the data integrity.

- It continues to try to use the list as if the list had not been modified.

- Crash.

We're not fully able to quantify what's wrong with the inputs.orbz.org servers - Sigfus (the engineer who worked on our system on Friday) says, "the setup over there is weird." All they can tell you us, the answer we get from a.ns.inputs.orbz.org contains a refusal to answer; b.ns.inputs.orbz.org doesn't answer at all at the moment.

August 24-01 (4:58 AM CST)

We are experiencing some kind of DOS (Denial of Service) attack on our DNS servers. This problem is causing our DNS servers to crash. The only way we can mainatin stability at the moment is to block all incoming UDP packets from the outside world to our network. This will cause DNS services for any of the domains that we (Mia.Net) hosts to be unreachable to the outside world. We are currently working with our software vendor to find a resolution.

July 11-01 (4:32 PM CST)

We have finally received the license keys for upgrades to our traffic shaper and graphing machines which should be installed Thursday. The upgrade should eliminate the crashing problem on this box. Once this fix is applied the graphs should not die in the future. Again, sorry for any inconvenience this has caused. Also, we have moved all of our switches to an internal/fake IP addressing scheme. This should insure that no one outside our network can attempt access to any of our switches.

July 1-01 (4:32 PM CST)

All customer graphs are finally running again, and stats.mia.net is fixed. We have also set up spanning tree support on all of our switches. If for some reason stats.mia.net or our traffic shapers go down, network connectivity will be maintained. We have tested the fall-over capabilities of this system, and found the change to be instantaneous.

We also upgraded our core router to IOS 12.1 only to find that Cisco's new IOS killed one of our serial ports taking down a PTP T1 link. We reverted back to the old flash and have notified Cisco's routing group. It's been a hellish, crazy upgrade day.

June 30-01 (8:16 AM CST)

All customer graphs will be down indefinitely until we can find out what is causing problems with stats.mia.net. Again, graphing is disabled for all colocation servers due to an upgrade on stats.mia.net and stats2.mia.net, however stats2.mia.net is unaffected by this. We apologize for any inconvenience.

June 27-01 (10:24 AM CST)

All customer graphs should be restored. Again, graphing was off for all colocation servers due to an upgrade on stats.mia.net and stats2.mia.net. We apologize for any inconvenience.

June 26-01 (9:10 AM CST)

We are recompiling the BSD kernels on stats.mia.net and stats2.mia.net. Both of these boxes run our traffic management, backup routing, and a few other tasks. stats.mia.net is currently down, so you may not be able to see your traffic graphs, or they may look a bit strange.

June 21-01 (10:36 AM CST)

According to one our techs... From what we can tell, the-isp-formerly-known-as alpha.net dropped it's link to above.net yesterday (June 20th, 2001). We do not think alpha has any other connections left, so now everything is going out their PSI pipe.

As a result our network traffic was pretty out of balance because of this. We are prepending Cable and Wireless's AS number onto all routes we get from them. That should balance things better. Once we get the our additional C&W T1s, we will drop all the stuff for prepending and weighing things differently and the our core cisco can do things with an un-modified routing table.

We apologize for any inconvenience or slow downs this may have caused.

June 15-01 (2:26 PM CST)

We powered down home.mia.net today to install more RAM. There would have been a slight outage of not more than 2 minutes for customers hosted on this box. We apologize for any inconvenience.

June 13-01 (6:56 PM CST)

We still do not have a definitive install date for our new Cable and Wireless T1's. They are about two weeks over due. We are hopeful they will be installed by the end of next week.

June 12-01 (12:01 PM CST)

We powered down our core router to install new WIC cards for our new Cable and Wireless T1's due in any day now. There would have been a 1-2 minute loss of connectivity during this upgrade.

June 7-01 (5:01 PM CST)

Well back hoe harry and our moronic neighbors in the industrial park decided today would be a good day to dig through a cable run in front of our building. While this (luckily did not affect any of our T1's since they take a different path) it did affect our voice and fax lines. Our phone lines in the office are still pretty dead as we speak. HiCap is on site doing an emergency splice. They are however only splicing services for Sprint and Telecorp who have back haul T1's going through these lines. Things are a mess right now, but again, it has not affected our "data" network. All servers are live and going strong. Someone is going to pay through the roof for this!!! We have instructed our attorneys to stop construction/digging until further notice. We have also contacted the City Building Inspector and the City Engineer who signed off on this stupid project.

June 7-01 (8:21 AM CST)

Ameritech installed 2 T1's today for our new Cable and Wireless backbones. We expect them live next week some time.

June 1-01

For some strange reason www.mia.net died today. Webstar just quit. We spent several hours trying to diagnose the problem and could not find a reason for the crash. This is quite odd since this server never crashes. As of 12:01PM www.mia.net is back up, and running normally. We will keep a close eye on this server to insure that stability is maintained. We apologize for any inconvenience.

May 23-01

I am happy to announce that our Server Room Expansion is near completion. The walls have been removed, new paint, and a new floor have been installed. Additional power has also been installed. We are currently installing racks to add additional capacity for approximately 200 servers. We still do not have an install date on our Liebert system. We are hopeful it will be installed in June. Also, in the first weeks of June we will be installing our 2 new Cable and Wireless T1's. Stay tuned.

May 22-01

All of our Mac based Web Hosting servers have been upgraded to Rumpus 1.3.4. Version 1.3.4 corrects a couple of problems, the most important of which is a possible system hang that can be caused by specific illegal input from an FTP client. Because the crash could potentially be used in a denial of service attack, Maxum will not discuss the specific method required to reproduce the problem. However, both Maxum and Bella Mia, Inc. urge all Rumpus 1.3 users to perform this free upgrade. If you have a Mac Server colocated here please download the update from www.maxum.com/rumpus

May 10-01

One of our BSD boxes that controls the traffic graphs had a problem. The trouble has since been corrected. Customers would have noticed a lack of traffic on their graphs during a 24 hour period while we fixed the problem. No network connectivity was lost. This was merely a cosmetic issue.

May 2-01

Looking Glass on our Cisco 2501 should be functional again: http://stats2.mia.net/lg.html

May 1-01

Our New T1's from Cable and Wireless have been pushed up to June 1, 2001 for tentative install.

April 26-01

Well it looks like one of our upscale providers that carries transport to the NAP in Chicago went bankrupt the other day. They did not in fact have a fiber cut, or switch problem as they had indicated previously. Their provider shut them off. Luckily we had another set of PTP T1's at our remote POP where this outage occurred. These T1's have been running for several months, but have yet to pass traffic. It took a bit of reworking, but we moved everything at this remote POP on to our network, and all is functioning at 100% again. NS2.MIA.NET is back up, however on a new IP now, which has been changed in the DNS, and with our Host Registrar. The same can be said of one of our backup mail servers which also resides at this remote POP. In any event this outage did not affect any traffic to customer servers, or hosted web sites. Anyway, NS2 and MX Mail services at this POP are back up.

April 25-01 (2:55PM CST)

We now have a tentative install date of July 1, 2001 for two NxT T1's (3Mbits) from Cable and Wireless.

April 25-01 (2:25PM CST)

OUTAGE: Some moron with a third grade education and a back hoe decided it would be a good idea to forgo calling Diggers Hot line and cut four OC48's that feed one of our POPs. What does this mean for colo/web hosting customers and our network? Not much. Only ns2.mia.net is down at this time along with a backup PTP feed. Pays to run BGP and have multiple connections to the net, as well as multiple DNS servers. Anyway, there is no ETA on the damage caused by back hoe Harry. I do understand that this problem affects Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin however.

April 11-01

Work has been stepped up on our server room expansion project. We should have the room complete in about 2-3 weeks. New power will be added next week, including power for the new Liebert system. We have installed a Window on one of the outside walls of the server room so that visitors can peer in. It should be pretty cool once the room is complete, and filled of course. Our new Cable and Wireless T1 is also on order.

April 3-01

Our new server room expansion project is now underway. We will be adding about 500 sq ft of space to the current room and are having Liebert technicians assess the space for a new cooling plant and environmental control system. We will have space for an additional 200 CPU's by Summer 2001.

April 1-01 (1:07 A.M. CST)

All MRTG graphs for customer servers and or hosted web sites are now back on line. No polling data was lost during the outage. Thank you for your patience.

March 31-01 (3:28 P.M. CST)

All MRTG graphs for customer servers and or hosted web sites are currently off line. We are repairing the system that maintains the graphs as a result of this mornings router failure. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to have graphing restored shortly.

March 31-01 (12:18 A.M. CST)

OUTAGE: At approximately 12:18AM(CST) one of our border routers failed. This particular router controls a great deal of customer routes, including some internal and external parts of our network. While our entire network did not go down, we did loose a great deal of routes for various parts of our network, including all customer aggregation points, ie., colocation servers. After manually bypassing the router and restoring network stability we have examined the problem router and can find nothing wrong. We have rebooted the router and checked all configs and have since brought the device back on line. Some customers may have noticed that reachability to our network as a whole was patchy, and in some places completely unreachable. We will monitor this router closely throughout the weekend to insure that this does not occur again. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

March 29-01

Thanks to the help from Chris Buxton from Men and Mice we have successfully changed all "legacy" domains/zones that contained homer.alpha.net and helen.alpha.net to the new PSI.NET secondary name servers. We have also reconfigured ns2.mia.net to reflect these changes and have subsequently rebooted both ns.mia.net and ns1.mia.net to reflect these updates as well.

March 27-01

We reset our BGP sessions yesterday afternoon in an attempt to better balance our traffic. This would have caused a slight delay in connectivity lasting not more than a minute. We will keep you updated as we continue to add and manage more connectivity.

March 21-01

STATUS UPDATE: Our router upgrade was successful. Total down time was limited to about 5 minutes, (the time it took for our BGP sessions to come back up.) We will be configuring our new T1 later today. No noticeable down time should result from these configurations.

March 20-01

PLANNED OUTAGE: Welcome to Spring!!! We will be powering down our core router at 12:00AM CST to install a new T1. This will be a system wide outage of our network and should not last longer than 5 minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience.

March 14-01(2:31PM CST)

core-bmia-burl-wisp-s0-0-1cw.mia.net was sucessfully installed today. Turn up date for the T1 on this router is March 22nd.

March 13-01(2:52PM CST)

We are adding another T1 to create a PTP link to a POP of ours. The link will help facilitate redundancy at this POP where we have various backup servers, such as DNS, Mail, etc., located at. The install date is set for March 22nd. At that time an additional Core router (core-bmia-burl-wisp-s0-0-1cw.mia.net) will be turned up. This install will not affect connectivity, nor will there be any down time during installation and configuration.

February 21-01(11:20AM CST)

We have been doing some security checks do to a recent hacker intrusion on one of our customer colocated servers. We recently checked the ftpds running on a couple ips near the customer server that was hacked. All colocation customers might want to check to find out if your ftp server up to date with the recent security patches and bug fixes, and if no, fix it and check for any intrusions.

February 6-01(11:20AM CST)

A system wide upgrade of the following Bella Mia Domain Name Servers (DNS) was performed today:

jer.mia.net
ns.mia.net
ns1.mia.net
ns2.mia.net

January 29-01(11:50AM CST)

MRTG Graphs for customer bandwidth utilization are back up.

January 29-01(10:50AM CST)

MRTG Graphs for customer bandwidth utilization are down currently. We are doing a bit of maintenance due to lasts nights unexpected problem with our customer aggregation router. All graphs should be back to normal by days end.

January 28-01(6:50PM CST)

One of our core routers took a dump for some reason, which is yet undetermined. This would have caused a loss of reachability for some customer servers, and routing on our network. We have since rebooted the the troubled router and stability has been restored.

January 24-01(1:50PM CST)

ns.mia.net (208.146.240.194) is back up and fully operational.

January 24-01(11:00AM CST)

ns.mia.net (208.146.240.194) will be off line for a hard drive replacement and system upgrade.

January 21-01(3:00PM CST)

Our new core router to Nap.Net/BBN Planet is now operational.

(core-bmia-burl-wisp-dc0-1cw.mia.net)

January 1-01

Welcome to the New Century! January 2001. Last months news has been archived to the following link.


The comments and news items contained in Mia.Net's "News" section are not necessarily the opinion or commentary of Mia.Net or Bella Mia, Inc. Though they should be.

Archived News -


Last updated 5/5/04

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