Lagunanet – Lake Chapala´s ISP

I usually don’t have time to post reviews about different products. I really do love technology and software, upgrades are also fun, but then again, upgrades can create a love hate relationship, or even a pleasure pain scenario, believe me, being in the ISP business for over a decade I have been privileged seeing all of the quirks and improvements in software.

Last year I formated the last machine that had windows on it , with great pleasure yes I do not like windows, never did, probably never will, many of you may have gathered that in conversations. Really never been one to follow the masses, and as far as I am concerned the only good thing about Windows, is that it keeps Microsoft’s cash flow flowing, and better yet,  it keeps the thousands of technicians employed around the world fixing windows problems, viruses etc.

I know most people use windows and with it Internet explorer, but the other day I downloaded Mozilla’s new Firefox 3.6, code named Namoroka, many of you might still run windows, but many Windows users have made the switch from Internet explorer  to Mozilla´s Firefox or Mozilla, if you have never tried it you really should give it a whirl.

As far as looks go, the new Mozilla Firefox has the same look and feel as prior versions, with the exception of being faster and the ability to add custom skins, and of course the usual and robust plugins feature that has brought Firefox to the top of the browser picks. If you have never tried Firefox and are interested in learning more there is a good article here on its new features.

Many of you  Last week had some issues with the mail server, mostly resulting from Spam, it has been repaired and upgraded, what we have noticed…. last week many suffered from bounced mail, original reports where from mail messages with no subject, or very little text info in the body of the message , which for some reason was a total red flag on the spam filter. We still have the Updated spam filter in place and for a reason, last night our mail server processed 11734 email messages between 8:00 pm Friday night to  6:00 am Saturday morning, out of those processed 937 where legit, many complain of the spam causing more harm than good but excess spam is excess bandwidth usage, personally that bandwidth can be better used for surfing the net VOIP etc.

Currently 99.6 % of legit mail is going out and false positives have been reduced, we have tested, Rogers, comcast, yahoo, msn, and mindspring mail servers , just to name a few and e-mail is flowing properly.

We where going to add authentication to our mail server, but because of the long weekend we decided against it and will add authentication at a later time, once we do, we will post what needs to be done . First we would like to confirm everything continues to function properly.

If you do have an e-mail that comes back please send an email to rodc@laguna.com.mx with as much information including the rejected e-mail header to help determine why it was bounced, and if possible ad it to our white list table.

About two weeks ago we started receiveing a couple of complaints of false positives on sent or received e-mail , in the past I was always fast to jump the gun on a couple of complaints, only to find out the issue resided on a clients machine, this time I have taken a cautious stance on the minor e-mail issue, it appears that some changes have occured on our global spam filter.

I really had not realized how much illegitimate e-mail the mail server was actually blocking, until I removed the Spam filter for approximately 10 hours, me personally I received over 500 e-mails that where in fact Spam. At 10:00 am yesterday morning I reinstated the filter because of so many complaints on Spam , there does seem to be an issue with sending e-mail from some older machines, because of the way the mail server handles requests, and requires a legitimate hostname which we are currently trying to address and repair.

If we do not block and try to keep spam to a minimum, lagunanet servers also run the severe risk of being blocked, which has happened in the past, and it is very difficult plus very  time consuming getting  e-mail blocks removed, which is  the main reason for lagunanet to use   Spam filters.

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I will not  go in to detail, but after a 9 month issue with the Telmex billing department, instead of continuing the fight we opted to cancel one of our phone numbers we were having the issue with, the 766-0297 is no longer operational we have carried that number for over 12 years, in any case you may still reach us at 766-2877.

As many of you were probably aware we continued with issues in Riberas it seemed like one thing after another, and in this business it happens, in any case we replaced just about everything there and are running normally as of Friday we have not fully implemented our solar panels yet as we need to add some more battery back up, but we will do so over the next couple of weeks.

For those of you in the Riberas area who stuck with us trough this severe outage we want to thank you, we know that internet is very important to all of you and when it does not work it can be extremely frustrating.

We continue to monitor the Riberas site but all looks good for now.

This week has been a nightmare, we experienced some unexplained interference that was shutting down our wireless, it started Sunday and worked its way trough the week, in any case Wednesday night there was a power failure at the site, something we have always had an issue with in Riberas, It seems like it spits rain and the power goes out. We did ok during the rainy season with almost no down time but for whatever reason this last wek has been a nightmare.

Allthough the house that hosts the tower, has a generator,  but apparently was not functional today, in any case we have added solar panels as of 4:30 pm with some deep charge marine batteries, the same configuration we have in Jocotepec and in El Chante, I  am waiting for the batteries to charge up and will start adding the equipment to the solar section as of Monday.

I understand your frustrations, and we are working to solidify the reliability of the network in that area.

Regards

Rod

The e-mail server was restored at around 11:30 am along with all DNS function, for those who where patient, we appreciate it.  No upgrade is easy, and the less calls we receive, the better and more efficiently we are able to resolve the problem.

If you still continue to have issues please make sure you have the correct DNS settings before calling.

Last night we made the final changes on the DNS numbers right now the primary functional DNS is

Primary      201.116.251.130

Secondary  201.116.251.133

you ma also use the following as a back up, they are public dns servers that should work just fine.

• 4.2.2.1
• 4.2.2.2

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

Using our primary  DNS should work just fine with any of the above public DSN numbers.

Mail Server : we are having an issue with the mail server, mainly outgoing mail which we should have repaired in a couple of hours, please be patient as we are aware of the issue and are working on it, once it has been fixed we will notify you here.

Dear valued customer:

We are making some system and hardware upgrades this Sunday that should improve your service. As a result thereof there could be the occasional period when your email or the internet will not be available. We will try to keep the interruptions to a minimum.

We appreciate your understanding and believe that you will like the improvements.

In the next week or so we will be performing some upgrades on our system. These upgrades  will include installation of new hardware, and there will be some changes to one of our DNS servers, once we receive the new DNS numbers, we will post them here on our blog.