FWIW – I don’t believe I’ve received any alerts since Friday, although there were a number that came in around the end of last week.

BTW, I discovered an unrelated bug in the web page. Log in and go to “Configure Alerts” page. Where it says “Configure Alerts, Server Down” uncheck the box for “pager or mobile phone” and then click “Save Preferences.” Now visit another page and then go back to the Configure Alerts page – “mobile phone” is checked again! It’s seems impossible to turn this off – the only way I could get MXToolbox to stop SMSing my phone was to clear my mobile phone email address instead.

Bob

I tried to look up your account by name but could not find you in the system…would you mind emailing me your company name, IP or domain so we can access your account?

Thank you,
Wendy

What is the current status of this problem? I’m still getting several “Server Down” alerts per day for a server that, as far as I can tell, is runing normally. I never used to have this problem with this server.

More- I can go to the “Performance monitor” on my MXToolBox account and view the transaction times for the last couple of weeks – there’s no value shown that’s greater than 1.5s. If the monitor is really timing out on a connection attempt to my server, why don’t I see some huge transaction times here?

And- I’m getting “Server Down” messages several times a day, but I rarely see a “Server Up” message. I thought it only emailed me on a state change – how can I get several “Server Down” notifications in a row without an intervening “Server up”?

Thanks,
Bob Armstrong

Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. I will be cracking open the code to see why this is happening, but I also wanted to make sure that you are aware that you have some defensive software which might be causing at least part of this problem.

Below is the monitor history for your server around the 3:29 down alert. The 220 code is a good normal banner. The 421 code shows that some piece of hardware or software is actively blocking our mail. I fear that the “Not allowed in this state” could possibly be a complete denial of a connection which would be a more aggressive defense against our IP address than the 421.

As I said I will be looking at the code to make sure that we don’t have a bug which is causing the connection to fail from our side, but if you could possibly add our IP address range (64.20.227.128/28) to an approved list, it would help things greatly.

I will keep you posted on my progress and if you would like to have me check the monitor after you add us to any whitelist you can, I can let you know if it has made a difference from our side.

2009-05-21 15:42:48.000 421 4.0.0 Intrusion prevention active for [64.XXX.XXX.XXX]
2009-05-21 15:29:56.000 Not allowed in this state. Connect first.
2009-05-21 15:22:08.000 Not allowed in this state. Connect first.
2009-05-21 15:09:33.000 220 ns1.XXXX.com ESMTP; Thu, 21 May 2009 16:09:30 -0400

Thank you again for your feedback.

Peter LeBlond
MXToolBox
Product Development Engineer
peter@mxtoolbox.com