The odd-musings of Jared, the Director of Network Security for IAPS Security Services.

IAPS is pleased to announce the addition of Finland and Lithuanian VPN service which will be available starting January 3, 2010. As we continue to build our services, we have come to offer the largest selection of countries of any vpn provider currently on the internet. IAPS wishes to thank all of our clients and resellers as its you that keep us building and expanding and to have the ability to offer the widest selection world-wide. We hope you all enjoy these new countries. Thank you.

Hi Folks,

My apologies for the belated announcement regarding yesterdays maintenance on the Skyhawk server. That maintenance window only lasted about 20 minutes long and she was back up and running again.

I have pulled 2 backup servers and have activated them and put them on standby in the event we need to move any clients to a new server. As the holiday season is now upon us, many of you have a lot more free time and are staying logged in to the various servers more than usual. I’m also seeing a lot of you sitting idle on the servers after you’ve gone to sleep. Please folks, when your done using a server please sign off of it. Your using resources just sitting idle that another user could be using that wants to stream or surf the internet.

Per the announcement I made nearly 2 weeks ago now, if you violate my P2P file sharing policy I am beginning to revoke and suspend your accounts. Since almost none of you want to respect my policies or your fellow user, this is the position I have to take.

Effective immediately, the Skyhawk Server is being taken offline while we look at an over heating issue. When the server begins to over heat, it shuts itself down automatically. Please bear with us while we repair this issue and get it back up for you. Theres no ETA on this fix yet, but should not last more than an hour. Thank you.

The U.S. Net News Server will be down for a maintenance period. This window of time will be used to diagnose an external bandwidth issue thats being caused by a possible faulty network interface card.

Because of wildly popular demand of last weekends mega tv sale, I’ve just re-introduced that sale again. Effective immediately all TV Packages are $60.00 USD at a yearly rate. Come get them while they’re hot!

United States TV Packages
United Kingdom TV Packages
Switzerland TV Packages
Ireland TV Packages
French TV Packages
German TV Packages

With the brand spanking new British Server code named Moon Light, we’re more than prepared for the influx of British TV Package demands. For those of you that haven’t experienced the Irish TV Package, here’s a taste of what your missing:

Home & Away
Eastenders
Dancing With The Stars
Savage Eye
Cracking Crime
The Republic of Telly
One News
News On Two
Nine News
News2Day
The Late Late Show
Nationwide
Kazoo
iWitness
When Under Ether
The View
Beyond The Berlin Wall
The Afternoon Show
Sweded TV
ICE
Ear To The Ground
Natural World
Prime Time
The Panel
The 11th Hour
Doctors
Casualty
About The House
Scannal
Show House
Master Chef
The Restaurant

Let me first say Happy Holidays to all of you. I know I’m in the festive spirit and you’ll never believe it, but just today I finally got a chance to put up our holiday lights outside. I simply could not believe how long it took me to find the time to finally get out there and get them up. Hopefully you guys as well have had a chance to get your lights and decorations up and going.

Ok, pursuant to last weekends sale, I started a thread in our forum area describing the sale that was upcoming this Friday, Saturday, & Sunday. Well folks, the time has finally come. I’ve taken inventory of all our networks and where we have available space, ip addresses, and more than enough bandwidth. I’ve tested our reserve networks as well as our production level networks to ensure that everything was up to par. Later today I will be introducing the new Moon Light British based server. This is a brand new server that sits in the United Kingdom on the IAPS 1-Gigabit Network. Please click the link above so you can read about what has inspired me to create this sale. The forum thread literally tells all. Please don’t mind my last post in that thread as sometimes I go into rants about the injustices of the world. But for those of you that know me, know that I occasionally do this and it wouldn’t be me or the core philosophy of IAPS if I didn’t. We’re all very passionate about the services we provide and we do our absolute best to get the job done better than anyone else. We’re not perfect, but we do everything possible.

One of the things I forgot to mention in the last 2 emails to you folks is the Mac problem. We had planned on integrating Mac users to the newer and safer L2TP protocol. But we experienced severe issues with Mac 10.5 and 10.6 editions. Upon further research, we have seen that the newer technology put into those systems by Cisco, its virtually impossible to get L2TP working correctly on these systems. We have seen that there are no issues with version 10.4 and lower. But whatever Cisco put in the newer versions, it seems a bit buggy at this point and something many people are addressing in the Mac forums. As soon as they have a fix, we will let all you Mac users know. Our aim is to fix this issue but we have to await to hear from Cisco before we can do anything.

Now, as to this mega sale: Pursuant to the above forum link, hopefully you’ve all read it at this point, here are the goodies to point out:

1.) VPN Combo Accounts / Yearly Rates have been reduced by more than 65%.
2.) A 2-Country VPN Combo Account (Annually) is normally $159.95 USD. Now its priced at $54.95 USD for 3 days only!
3.) A 3-Country VPN Combo Account (Annually) is normally $169.95 USD. Now its priced at $59.95 USD for 3 days only!
4.) The VPN Combo accounts go all the way up to 10 countries. You can mix and match countries to your choosing.
5.) When ordering, please use the comments box to specify your countries of choice.

Available countries to choose from: United States, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Poland, Ireland, Spain, France, & Czech Republic. (If your worried about being able to view TV / Media on these accounts, yes you will be able to. We are in the hopes that none of you will have to miss any of the holiday specials on television which is why we are pricing our services to the lowest possible mark we can go. Some of you may wish to give the gift of online tv to a relative or friend. Now is your chance to at the lowest price ever.)

I will be performing a short maintenance cycle on the Firehawk and Secure9 servers today to clean up some of the routing issues and to create a shorter routing table so that data transit can gain those extra nano-seconds. I do not expect downtime to be more than 30 minutes, but I will not quote a more specific time frame at this point as it will take as long as it takes. As it is now nearly 1 a.m. London time and the servers are at their lowest usage point, I feel this is the best time to perform this needed maintenance cycle. Thank you for your patience.

Folks,

This coming Friday, Saturday, & Sunday (December 11-13 2009) all VPN Combo Accounts will be massively marked down. This will be our end-of-year celebration for another successful year of operation and infrastructure improvement.

Throughout 2009 IAPS Security Services has seen its largest expansion ever and more client account renewals than ever before. 2007 and 2008 were great years as well, but 2009 took the cake by a long shot and we’ve built up one of the biggest global networks we’ve ever seen. To celebrate, we’re going to throw the biggest sales party we’ve ever thrown and we’re doing it from 2 country combos all the way up to 10 country combos. This will be the sale of the year and one you won’t soon forget.

On Tuesday December 8, 2009 we’re putting a brand new United Kingdom server online code named Moon Light. For all you British fans, this is another server we’re adding to the British fleet of servers on the IAPS Network. This server will be hooked up to our new British gigabit network so you can get your British business done in style!

Please keep in mind that your continued patronage of the IAPS line of services helps us invest and improve our networks. Our admins and technicians do not pocket your money. Its always used for network infrastructure improvements, new servers, and the research and development of new services. (All of our admins and technicians have a modest salary that keeps the lights burning and gas in the stove.) But we’re always working for you, folks. We’re one of the only, if not only, company that provides live remote support around the clock, 7 days a week, to ensure that your services are working the maximum amount of time. We’re committed to you as our clients.

I know a good majority of you on a first name basis and you guys are great to provide a quality service to. I enjoy the services we provide, although some technical issues do unnerve me at times and do cause frustration, I wouldn’t change the services that myself and IAPS provide, for anything. Its because of all of you that we are successful and all of us at IAPS send our gratitude to each and every one of you. We hope each and every one of you has a prosperous and happy 2010 and we’ll be here right along side many of you ensuring that you have the security and peace of mind that the IAPS Networks can give you. Thank you for your time.

-Jared

Hi Folks,

Due to numerous requests of those not receiving their email from us in time regarding yesterdays 24 hour sales, I’m extending the sale through tomorrow night. I’m also adding all VPN Countries to the yearly rate of $60.00 USD from right now until tomorrow night. Get them while they’re hot because this sale will end tomorrow night and won’t be seen again for several months.

As of last evening, BST/GMT, all of my British networks were upgraded again. This time the upgrade was done on the data center side and what they did was put my fleet of British servers on their own dedicated gigabit network. So instead of sharing the data centers network, we get our own segment of the data center. The speed and capacity throughput has been greatly increased once again. I will stress again, if you are still using the standard PPTP system, please upgrade to the L2TP system. Its free and provides a way better performance level.

In my last email many of you thought that the increase in upload power would work on downloading. Thats not the case. Uploading and downloading are 2 very different things. They have no correlation to each other. Please bear in mind that our servers can only give you the speed as set by your local provider. In some instances, we are able to manipulate the upload speed but not the download speed as that is strictly set by your local provider and there is nothing we can do about that.

Another point that I’d like to address is your operating systems: in the cases of Microsoft Windows users: If your still using Windows XP, its time for an upgrade. Windows Vista and Windows 7 will give you a much better streaming experience. Windows XP is getting on to be nearly 8 years old and its considered ancient technology in the computer world. Don’t get me wrong, its still a good operating system but Windows Vista and Windows 7 stream a whole lot better. Keep in mind that the number of running programs, toolbars, and other bandwidth intensive programs that are running on your computer at the same time you are trying to stream will negatively affect your streaming experience. Try to cut down on the number of things running on your computer when streaming and you will see much better results. For those of you currently running Vista or 7, in your vpn properties box you’ll see a tab marked Options. Click over to it and at the bottom you’ll see a button named PPP Settings. Check all 3 boxes in there, save it, and then connect to the vpn service. You’ll see great results after doing this when combined with the L2TP vpn protocol.