Hi,

We’ve been informed that there is a submarine fiber cut affecting some Internet backbone networks (including the one we use) in Hong Kong. The issue is being worked, but there is no estimate on repairs yet. The Hong Kong gateway is still available, but it might be a good idea to use LA, San Francisco, or Seattle if you experience performance issues.

If our experience in Hong Kong is any indicator, the west coast gateways might be better even after it’s repaired. We’re working on it!

Bill

Due to a power failure in Virginia data center, we lost east coast DNS, website, and VPN servers in Virginia for a little over an hour. We have redundant ISPs there but, with no power, both were down. We’ll be inquiring with our data center provider why the backup diesel generators were not immediately brought online to restore power. They should have immediately kicked in!

All other VPN gateways globally were 100% available so hopefully this wasn’t even noticed by most customers, but PPTP-only customers, or those that only have east coast DNS servers entered (west coast DNS was unaffected), were likely down during the power failure.

Looks like everything but two SSL servers and PPTP servers are back online, but other SSL servers are taking load fine and we’re working on restoring PPTP service.

Update as of 7PM ET: we dispatched technicians to data center to manually reboot PPTP servers and switch and all came back up fine.

We’re working on it. Such is a beta service. LA and HONG Kong VPN servers are all functioning great though. This is referring to the proxy service only.

Hi,

Our new proxy service is now available for beta testing. It’s definitely not a replacement for our VPN service, but it may come in most handy in certain situations and it’s FAST. Best of all, it’s free for all active customers so only the most bitter of you will find something to complain about. : )

Read more about it and how to set it up here.

All fixed. Again, we encourage you to choose a specific gateway to connect through. SSL customers may switch as often as they like and have access to all VPN servers globally, but closer usually means faster.

With our rapid expansion (yet unannounced, formally, as we tweak things) to Hong Kong, Dallas, Seattle, etc. we hit a “theoretical” limit (which ain’t so theoretical it would seem). It’s intermittent, but some customers, that use our main domain and do not specify a particular gateway, will be unable to connect to the VPN and see “Host Not Found” errors in their log.

We should have an overall fix in place today, but you should also be able to resolve this by editing your config and choosing a specific gateway…which is often a good idea anyway for best performance. Click here for the WiTopia Wiki article on how to do that.

Appears our hoster is having a serious network issue. Even their website is down hard. Until they resolve, please use another gateway.

Click on this link to go to the configuration generator tool. It looks like this:

You will need to enter your original order number (ORD#) and the email address you ordered the service with. Next, you choose if you want the configuration to be for Mac OS X or for Windows, then what server you want to connect to.

Finally, you can choose if you want to connect to a server running the “Normal” (or default) connection – this is fine and recommended for most situations, one of our alternate port TCP 443 servers – needed when running through a proxy or behind a restrictive firewall, or if you want to use one of our AES 256 bit encryption servers – the highest level of encryption.

Click “Submit”, the configuration will be created and presented for download.  Thats it!

After you download it to your desktop (or wherever you download files)….

Just drag it into your WiTopia.Net config folder located here: C:\Program Files\WiTopia.Net\config (Windows users) or Mac openVPN users should just move it into your openvpn folder located in your Home folder’s Library.

Quit and restart personalVPN and the new configuration should show up as a connection option.

Enjoy!

Seems to be very effective at overcoming some of the peering congestion and slowness customers using Deutsche Telekom have reported. It has been added to new configuration generator as well as general article on manually Changing Gateways on main Support Wiki.

This gives us NYC, DC (Dulles, VA), San Francisco, and Manchester, UK for openVPN SSL customers. PPTP customers currently use Dulles, VA only, but we’re investigating some possibilities. We’re also scouting for another Pacific gateway. We’ll keep you posted.