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

As I promised several weeks ago to a number of you, I have made our newest Swiss servers all L2TP compatible. This further increases security for every one as well as brings the Swiss servers over to a 1 gigabit network for the fastest speeds ever. Additionally, I have now discounted all Switzerland VPN Service 6 Month Contracts down to just $40.00 USD for a limited time to introduce the power of these networks. If you have ever wanted the Swiss version of Zattoo which includes not only English language channels, but channels from Spain, Germany, and Italy, now is the time to satisfy that desire.

All new ip ranges are now available for almost every single country we offer and 95% of all countries are now on the L2TP service. Also, there are a vast abundance of Italian VPN Services available also at the discounted price. For you gamers, IAPS can provide you with nearly any European country you need for things live Xbox Live. Don’t miss those game demos or downloads because your restricted by country. All it takes is a little IAPS magic to remove those restrictions placed upon you just because your located in a specific country.

You can check out all our latest offerings on the IAPS Monthly Specials Page or see our Complete VPN Countries List at your convenience.

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.

There will be maintenance performed on the British fleet of servers within the next hour or so as we’ve received the maximum amount of speed the data centers can offer us. As they have upgraded our port speed to the maximum, I have to change out the network cards on each server which will only take me a few minutes. Once these changes are complete, you all should see a drastic change in speed.

Hi Folks,

The maintenance cycle for our U.S. based servers is now complete. From this point on, all vpn connections are dynamically issued which means your public ip address will change each and every time you sign in.

Hi All,

Just a quick announcement that our U.S. based servers are about to go under a maintenance cycle to prepare them for a dynamically issued vpn service. I expect no more than a maximum of 30 – 60 minutes to perform the entire operation.

All servers have been returned to operational status. You will need to send in an email to staff@intl-alliance.com to request the servers new ip address. When sending in your email, you will need to include the first 4 lines of your account information email that we sent to you when you opened your account.

Ok, here’s how its going down:

1.) All British servers will be shut down in the next 30-60 minutes. This shutdown is needed to prepare the servers before the actual transition. Reallocating the network card, the ip tables, and other major parts of maintenance have to be performed.

2.) The servers will be in physical transition starting from 6am GMT time today and should arrive at their new home in 4-5 hours (depending upon traffic conditions) which would be approximately 11am GMT.

3.) It will take approximately 1-2 hours once the servers are put on the new network to make them ready for client usage. I expect full operations to resume between 1-3pm GMT. This scenario is best because it gives Friday late afternoon and all weekend to enjoy your services.

Hi Folks,

I’ve finally gotten the time (barely) to implement L2TP vpn services on a select few servers. By this time tomorrow all servers will have this ability. This type of vpn is more secure than the normal PPTP vpn type and also will help those of you that for one reason or another were previously usable to connect to a PPTP vpn server. For those of you in Italy who were previously blocked by your isp (FastWebNet), this new type of vpn will enable you to finally connect. I’ve never forgotten about you folks in Italy and this solution was made just for you, but will benefit all IAPS clients regardless of geographical location.

If you are in immediate need of L2TP VPN services, please get a hold of me and I’ll get you taken care of. Thank you.

Hello Folks,

We are nearly done resolving the issue with the Silverhawk server. The server became unstable yesterday due to a corrupt driver in the servers primary network interface card (NIC). We originally thought that a card replacement would have sorted the issue but unfortunately it did not. So we had to make some other adjustments to the server to make it operational again. After a few more operational tests, we will be bringing the server back online for client usage.

Once the server comes back online, you will need to contact us with your current user name and the request must come from the email address we have on file for your account. Requests that come from email accounts not on file with us will not be honored. Account security is taken very seriously. When contacting us with the link above, please reference this blog posting and request a new account password. Your old password will no longer work. So you will need to send this request in. I expect the server to return to normal active status within 2 hours from now. Thank you.

Jared T.
IAPS Director of Network Security

_______________________________________________________

***UPDATE***
Silverhawk is now back online and fully operational.
***END UPDATE***

Hello Folks,

We’re making some changes around IAPS over the next few days. Here’s a quick run down of whats happening:

1.) The U.S. based Eagle server will be discontinued. It will be replaced by a server 10 times the power and its code name is NetNewz. The NetNewz server will offer website hosting services through the Plesk control panel and will also provide United States based VPN (Virtual Private Network) services. All current accounts that reside on the Eagle server will be transferred over to the new NetNewz server. SSH services will no longer be offered in this location.

2.) Our Canadian locations are being completely discontinued. Any remaining clients on these servers will be contacted privately and given a choice of a new location and/or service type. The demand for Canada simply isn’t there and we’d rather invest our resources in locations that our clients find useful.

3.) The Goldenhawk server that acts as the gateway server to numerous countries is being rebuilt. I expect this server back online by tomorrow at some point. All current accounts on that server will remain the same. I will input the same account information on that server for clients that are already assigned to it so no need for new account information.