Following Emergency Maintenance performed by f2s this morning our users have been reporting issues with connecting to f2s inbound mail servers throughout the day which was acknowledged by f2s on their status system at 9:31am and subsequently updated at 11:26am saying the problem was fixed at 9:30am.

An update was added this evening at 5:29pm confirming the issue is not resolved and that further information would be posted when it becomes available.

Track this issue on f2s' status system here, or discuss with our users here on our forums.

We will update this notice when we receive more information from f2s.

UPDATE: 17th April 11:24am
f2s have updated their status page informing customers that a new email platform is being put into place to 'resolve this known long term issue'. I am concerned that this will be 'another' new platform of which we've been told of several since the days of the Pipex and now Tiscali takeovers.

New broadband packages have appeared on the Freedom2Surf website, offering up to 16Mb/sec download and up to 1Mb/sec upload speeds by using ADSL2+ on the Tiscali LLU network.

The cheapest package (Lite) offers up to 8Mb/sec download and 448Kb/sec upload with a 10GB/month transfer allowance, similar to the previous range of packages. The other two packages (Pro and Premium) both make use of ADSL2+ to offer up to 16Mb/sec download and up to 1Mb/sec upload, and claim an unlimited transfer allowance. To get the faster speeds on these packages your local exchange needs to be Tiscali LLU enabled, and of course your speed depends on your line length/quality.

There are various extras with the packages similar to what the previous packages offered (free email, phone calls etc.). The Pro and Premium packages both come with a domain name which is registered as soon as the ADSL connection goes live and not at time of ordering the connection. These two packages also come with 200MB of commercial webspace, which is not available on the lite package.

The top (Premium) package comes with a "50Kbps download guarantee", which is about the speed of a fast dialup Internet connection. The website also mentions "Download guarantee for real time traffic", so it's possible traffic on this package gets priority over other users.

You can read the full details on the Freedom2Surf website

Users on our forums are reporting problems sending email. When you attempt to send an email users are getting the error "4.4.5 Too many connections to this host" or similar. Currently the Freedom2Surf system status website doesn't mention this issue.

Update 6:24pm: The outmail server seems to be accepting email again now.

This outage is being discussed in our email forum.

It appears that F2S are currently having DNS issues among other things, this is leading to web access issues for users that are using F2S DNS, but in general they are having issues.

Update 1:10pm: Both DNS servers for Freedom2Surf's domain names became reachable again just after 1pm, so things should be working again now.

This is being discussed in this thread here - http://www.freedom2support.net/forum...ead.php?t=9482

Users are reporting poor email performance from the 'upgraded' email platform.

Issues include:
- Slow email both inbound/outbound
- Password errors when connecting
- Empty webmail
- I/O Errors.

This is being discussed on a thread within our Email Section found here.

At 19:48 hrs Monday 21st January 2008, f2s do not have anything on their status system.

Update 10:11pm: Freedom2Surf have now posted this alert on their system status website about the problems people are having collecting email.

Below is a quote from the f2s status system detailing that the 'old' f2s DNS servers will be removed on the 24th of January and that the Tiscali replacements should be used from now forwards.

Those with dynamically assigned addresses should not worry as the new addresses are already in use, but if you have manually static set addresses, you should endeavour to change these sooner rather than later to avoid potential issues on the 24th.

Failing that, you could try the OpenDNS project DNS servers which also have built in filtering that may be useful to those with children etc. More information is available on their website located at www.opendns.com or by clicking here.

I would hope f2s intend on mailing everyone from their database as not everyone reads these forums nor the f2s status page unless there is a problem, by which time with no DNS they won't be able to get to either!

We are discussing this change on our forums here.

I have just noticed that the Freedom2Surf Website (server0006.freedom2surf.net :: 194.106.56.5), Members Area/Online Ordering (secure.freedom2surf.net :: 194.106.47.1 ) and Webmail (webmail.freedom2surf.net :: 194.106.56.170 ) System seems to be down at present.

Currently the Freedom2Surf system status website lists no problems with the webspace service, but as our Server Status page shows, the 3 servers are offline.

Update 12:29pm: The Freedom2Surf websites are working now, so they must have come back up earlier this morning sometime. The Freedom2Surf system status website currently doesn't mention the website outage.

Users on our forums have reported that FTP access to web hosting has been down since this morning. We think this affects all users on the new hosting platform (Windows & Linux hosting).

Pipex have mentioned the problem on their Pipex System Status website. They posted the incident at 3pm saying they are working on it, however FTP access to webspace is still down at the moment. There is nothing about the outage on the Freedom2Surf System Status website.

Users are discussing this outage here in our webspace forum.

Update 9th Dec 2:50pm: FTP seems to be working again now.