Changing ISP from Synetrix

[Ultra_Charge]

Thanks for all the reply’s on this, however although email is a large issue, it is not the only issue and therefore the reason why we are now looking to move.
we've also experienced issues with our web hosting and our internet feed provided by Synetrix.
we have actually gone through all the points stated above with opening and closing port 25 etc.
With port 25 open, we actually became blocked to AOL, MSN and Google, which was far worse as synetrix refuse to set up their server DNS correctly resulting in our external IP not resolving with certain vendors. a very large headache as you can imagine, everything set up correctly with FQDN on our 2007 Exchange, but blocked emails all over the place.
we also experience web page down time without prior notice, this is incredibly annoying, plus internet down time without prior notice. as a result we were not impressed.

we need someone more reliable and more professional to support our needs, especially in an emergency.

[nicholab]

Easynet?

[gonzodad]

Hi ultra_charge

First up, i do work for Synetrix !
I ‘ve lurked around edugeek for a long time, but never felt the need to post, however i can see you’re obviously really with our service and wanted to try and help out, not by suggesting another ISP as per the thread title, but with the more immediate problems of the mail blacklisting.

Agree with Tom @ smoothwall that blacklists are not the most effective way, unfortunately a lot of mail providers typically used by parents (those that are free......) do still use blacklists and it’s a constant job to try and stay off them. There are many advantages to having a grid wide mail filtering setup; however one of the flipsides is that it only takes an issue at one school to trigger the blacklists. Typically this can be genuine and innocent reasons – we’ve been blacklisted before from a valid DL used within a school (also footers and signatures). Correct reasons do occur such as open relays etc, but the invalid reasons far out strip the valid ones nowadays.

I’m sorry if it’s taken a while to explain things and the messages you’ve got from us haven’t been clear – I’ve checked and we are currently being blacklisted by a couple of rbl , we know what’s triggered it in this instance and hope to get ‘whitelisted’ soon (although we are at the hands of organisations who don’t offer service levels or guarantees on turnaround to be ‘whitelisted’). There are more targeted things we can do, but I would need to know who you are – I think looking at your location and our call logs etc I know, but if you want to pm me I can see if we can get you sorted asap.

cheers

[jheynder]

Having real issues with Synetrix today. Gonzodad, I hope you can reply to my pm to you...

Thanks!

[gonzodad]

Jim - responded to your pm. Ill see what i can do.

[jheynder]

Jim - responded to your pm. Ill see what i can do.

Perhaps due to your efforts, we're looking in the clear now. All services appear to be up, and I'll send an all fac/staff text message in 30 minutes if all holds.

Thanks for your help-- I will definitely buy you pints at the Holly Bush if you are ever near Hampstead.

Jim H

(feeling much relieved...)

[Edu-IT]

Perhaps due to your efforts, we're looking in the clear now. All services appear to be up, and I'll send an all fac/staff text message in 30 minutes if all holds.

Thanks for your help-- I will definitely buy you pints at the Holly Bush if you are ever near Hampstead.

Jim H

(feeling much relieved...)

That must be costly for you? Curious as to why you have to send an SMS to all staff to tell them the internet is back.

[gonzodad]

np Jim, happy to help - you should of had a call to confirm everything ok? TBH the engineers were already working on it, the planned works got a little complicated due to a BT outage, hence the over-run of the maintenance window.

[jheynder]

That must be costly for you? Curious as to why you have to send an SMS to all staff to tell them the internet is back.

Not costly-- we have a rarely used Groupcall account with an annual quota of use them or lose them text messages, and it was a good excuse to test the system and and use up some of the annual quota. (We didn't have any snow days this year, for example.)

Since I had texted the fac/staff earlier in the day, and promised to text again when the issue was resolved, I bought in to doing two texts (including the all clear). We had a lot of faculty trying to access our services yesterday, and the first text message was to hold off and focus on something else. The second was to "come on back.."

Overall, it was an example of why we have Groupcall. We have text messaging as part of our on campus student information system, but it doesn't work when we're cut off from the Internet and our mail relays.

[jheynder]

np Jim, happy to help - you should of had a call to confirm everything ok? TBH the engineers were already working on it, the planned works got a little complicated due to a BT outage, hence the over-run of the maintenance window.

Thanks again-- I did receive a call last night to see if all was fine. We were back in the clear about six p.m., and it did sound like the work at Camden became more complicated than expected.

[Ultra_Charge]

Update - Meeting with a rep from Synetrix regarding issues this month, maybe we can get some issues straightend out.

[Ultra_Charge]

Another Synetrix update, our entire school website was up and down all weekend and today is now completely down.

Support were unable to give reason and are getting back to me.

[gonzodad]

hey ultra_charge – we did have a busy weekend...there was a disk controller problem on one of the vm's for the webhosting service - that had knock on to php based sites first and others later. I believe this was fully resolved around the time of your post 10:30-10:45 today. Sorry for the unexpected downtime. I will find out who’s going to visit you and maybe get myself an invite! as it’s always good to put names to faces.

Cheers
gonz