This latest addition to the XMission domain based services makes it even more convenient to manage your online presence. Need to secure your web transactions or an email server? We can help!

Using SSL Certificates reassures your clients that you are doing everything possible to keep their information secure. Your customers can easily spot sites using SSL because the web address contains “https://” and web browsers shows either a lock symbol, key symbol, or specially highlighted navigation bar display.

Like a drivers license, SSL Certificates are issued by a trusted source, known as the Certificate Authority (CA) and the SSL protocol allows applications to communicate across the net in a way designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and message forgery. All this conveys a level of trust and security to increase your client’s confidence in your online presence.

XMission will handle all your SSL Certificate needs from start to finish. Unlike other companies, we are here to help with real humans that answer the phones and respond to your emails. We will help you every step of the way and with a single bill so you do not have to manage several vendors.

Learn more about SSL Certificates by reading about them on our SSL wiki support page. You can order your SSL online, or simply call someone on our sales team. They will take care of you!

The XMission sales office is open weekdays from 9 AM to 5 PM, MST. You can reach us by calling 801-539-0852, 877-964-7746, or by emailing sales@xmission.com. As always, our support staff is here 24×7 to help you with any technical assistance you require.

Ignite Salt Lake 2 (visit their website)
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
6:00 – 10:00 pm
Admission is Free

Brewvies Cinema Pub
(21+, Must Show ID)
677 South 200 West
Salt Lake City, Utah

In partnership with Utah Free Media, XMission will sponsor a live video broadcast from the event. You can access the broadcast at www.utahfm.org

Grant Sperry from XMission will present on Thursday, so please come and clap loudly for him!

The Library is located at 210 East 400 South in Salt Lake City. This class begins at 2 p.m. and usually lasts until 4 p.m.

Our instructor, Kyle Waters, will provide some info about how the web works and then dive into creation of basic and dynamic pages. You’ll leave with a great foundation for your future web developments (or at least, experiments).

Please visit the Salt Lake Public Library Website for registration information.

We offer other library classes on the second Wednesday afternoon of every month. Generally these classes are beginner-level, but we are always looking for intermediate and advanced instructors if you want to teach.  We hope to see you soon!

With screens and party locations for all festivals in Park City and downtown Salt Lake City, you are sure to find something to do this week.

Festivals:

Sundance Film Festival The grandest of the festivals, Sundance pulls in Hollywood elite for swank parties and some pre-release films.

Slamdance Film Festival This is likely the most true to form of the “Indie” Film Festivals. XMission is a proud sponsor of this festival.

XDance Film Festival All you need in action sport films! I’ve watched many of these films myself.

While you are experiencing the glitter and glam of the cinema elite, be sure to check out the free XMission wireless on Salt Lake’s Main Street and at the Treasure Mountain Inn located at the top of Park City’s Historic Main Street.

If you happen to use Twitter, here are just a folks talking about the events in PC and SLC:  @Slamdance @SlugMag @SlashFilm @Rejects @FirstShowing @ErikDavis @EricDSnider @XDance

Have a great week and thanks for visiting!

Their mission is to become the voice of social media technology — whether it be for business or personal use — in the Salt Lake area. Their goals are to expand media literacy, provide educational opportunities and promote ethical standards.

I believe this will be a great addition to the local scene and plan on attending. XMission is donating some schwag bags with goodies for the raffle.

Tonight is their first meeting: Thursday, January 15, 2009 @   5:00 pm

117 West 400 South (@The Summit Group)  map

This is an organizational meeting/mixer networking event with an open invite. The group encourages you to invite anyone you know in the SLC area to attend. As they like to say, “Everyone is welcome!”

You can learn more about this group on their website: http://www.smcslc.org.

They are also active on Facebook , Twitter, and on LinkedIn.

Check them out and say “Hello” when you see me there tonight.

See you soon!

Tonight is the first-ever Ignite SLC event at the Leonardo. There will be some great talks, a paper airplane Olympics and a whole lot of fun. I hope you’ll join us.

This announcement is very long but we wanted to address questions and concerns that have arisen to restore customer confidence.

Synopsis

While the power only went out for a moment, many systems were adversely affected by the outage and took extensive attention and time to recover. In the case of our primary storage device, we could not bring it back online even after hours of trying so we restored files to the new NetApp we already had on site.  Many systems tie into this device, which exacerbated the problem.

We are happy to report that we will be greatly increasing base quota in the near future for customers at no additional charge from 100 MB to 5 GB now that we have the new NetApp storage appliance online. Our web hosting customers will also see significantly increased quota in the very near future.

As of the opening of business hours this morning, file backups had completed and most everything was in working order. We continue to find and address remaining issues, though. Some customers continue to experience delays with sending and receiving email but the queues are clearing.

Additional Technical Details

We didn’t have all the answers last night so here are further details regarding the outage:

• Our primary storage device (a NetApp F801 we were in the process of replacing this week with a new NetApp FAS2020) suffered the loss of 2 drives on one of the volumes, causing us to lose the data on the device entirely.
  • We were waiting to get our snapmirror license from NetApp to copy data over but at least we had the new hardware on site and ready.
  • Since many systems NFS mount to this gear, which handles /home, other servers required attention to get up and running properly.
  • Web hosting was down into the night until customer files were restored to the new hardware. This was completed by morning.
  • Our new NetApp 2020 has additional recovery options not available on the older 810.
  • We have plans to purchase another NetApp 2020 in the near future to host offsite. While we already have off site backups, the 2020 is an upgrade to that system.
• While email services were down about 5 hours for most customers yesterday, no mail should have been lost although some customers continue to see delays sending and receiving email.
• DSL and UTOPIA customers were offline for up to an hour because our radius server did not recover on its own. Some customers also needed to powercycle their modem before they could reconnect. As a rule of thumb we highly recommend customers powercycle their gear when troubleshooting.
• Although it was a holiday, our systems administrators were on site within minutes and many worked through the night, some up to 18 hours without a break.
• We are sorry about problems with our phone systems. They initially were offline due to the outage, then we maxed out connections to it, and we couldn’t answer the calls because we only had a skeleton staff of phone technicians due to the holiday. We are making some changes to the existing phone system but are also in the process of replacing it by the end of this year. Some expressed concerns that our status messages were not very helpful.  Unfortunately, we often did not know when systems would come back up and we also needed to keep the message short due to heavy call volume.
• To clarify, the outage was due to human error while doing maintenance on one of our 3 UPS’s and not any of our equipment. A breaker was mislabeled, which brought about the mistake.
• DNS (Domain Name Service) was sporadic for up to an hour. This was mostly due to a Cisco 6509 that continued to have issues in the beginning but we have since moved our two onsite authoritative nameservers (ns.xmission.com and ns1.xmission.com), as well as most other servers, to a new redundant connection.  We should note that we do have a tertiary name server in California (ns2.xmission.com).  If you list ns2.xmission.com as a tertiary nameserver for your domain, then your domain will continue to have working nameservice in the event that the two onsite nameservers are offline.
• QMOE customers suffered a prolonged outage due to the same Cisco 6509 that caused problems with our name servers. They have since been moved to a different router with greater redundancy. We will send our QMOE customers a separate email with further details by tomorrow.
• About 25% of our colocation customers suffered a brief power outage since we have customers spread across 3 separate UPS’s. Otherwise, aside from networking being briefly down after the initial outage, colocation services were not widely affected. In case some colocation customers are not aware, they can purchase powerstrips from different UPS’s to have redundant power. If you suffered equipment loss from the power outage or would like details about redundant power, please contact your sales rep for details.

Resolutions and Moving Ahead

We are very sorry for all of the problems that this outage has caused our customers and greatly appreciate all of the kind words and support you have given us. More than anything, we want to assure you that we are taking this matter seriously and proceeding with steps to lessen the chances that something like this can happen again, which include:

• We will more dutifully use our already existing NetStatus page to keep customers informed about our systems: http://stats.xmission.com/netstatus
• As well, we will be announcing all upcoming maintenance on the NetStatus page in the future and emailing those who opt into a list, which will soon be created for this purpose. To be added to the list, please email: support@xmission.com.
• We recognize that we need to handle communication much better in the future. We did setup an outage page with updates but realize that most did not know such a page existed: http://stats.xmission.com/outage/
• We also have our Nagios systems status page, which provides a very good look into our systems: http://stats.xmission.com/nagios/
• We plan to run redundant power from a second UPS up to our server room to feed essential hardware with dual power supplies. That alone would have dramatically minimized the effects of yesterday’s outage.
• While we already perform most maintenance outside of business hours, we have decided to enforce a policy that all systems critical maintenance (i.e., involving power, routers, core systems) must happen outside of business hours. Some additional training is also planned in regards to our electrical infrastructure.

XMission extends a heartfelt apology to our customers for any inconvenience caused by yesterday’s outage. We are truly sorry, and appreciate your patience.

This is a courtesy post for anyone that is not already on the XMission Announcement email list.

XMission Outage

XMission experienced a serious outage while we were performing some standard UPS maintenance today. The outage affected all services and started at approximately 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, November 11th. Network services for many were partially restored by about 2:30 p.m. but some other services required a lot of attention and took much longer.

Details

About 40% of our data center, including our server room, suffered a power outage when a technician flipped a mislabeled breaker during some standard maintenance on one of our 3 UPS units. Although the power outage was momentary, servers and routers often respond very poorly to losing power and sometimes take extensive work to come back up. Unfortunately, such was the case today with many systems.

Seriously Affected Systems

• An important router, which some connections and servers rely on, required extensive attention from our network administrators.
• DNS (Domain Name Service) was sporadic for some customers for over an hour.
• Email services were down for over 5 hours.
• Web hosting suffered the longest outage because our NetApp storage appliance which houses all customer files and web sites lost multiple hard drives. As a result, we are currently restoring files to our new NetApp 2020 from our November 9th backup, which will take many hours yet to complete. We recently purchased this new NetApp and were merely days away from getting it online.

Conclusion

Today’s outage was exacerbated by multiple systems responding poorly to losing power. In spite of the holiday, our systems administrators were on site within minutes and continue to work tirelessly to restore all services. In the end, we should have performed this maintenance on a day when our systems administrators were on site because problems can arise no matter how carefully you proceed.

Here is how it works: businesses purchase two inexpensive DSL lines and combine their speeds into a single connection using a low-cost appliance developed by PipeDream Networks. This rack-mountable, noiseless appliance allows administrators to easily provision or remove lines from the appliance via a web-interface.

Each pair of bonded connections includes 500 GB of monthly transfer. Eventually, XMission will offer the option to bond up to four DSL lines. Consider this cost comparison:

Please note: unlike T1 and Optical Ethernet, Bonded DSL uses consumer-grade bandwidth and does not include a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

If you would like to participate in this new service, please contact Mandy by email or phone: 801.303.0838 (toll-free 1.877.964.7746).

Customers interested in signing up for service or making payments can now walk directly to our reception area without having to search out our different departments upstairs. XMission also has a new kiosk if you ever need to stop in to check your email.

We hope to see you soon!