News
Oct
30
Maintenance Notice - Help Desk Upgrade 1/1/17
Posted by Ivan A. on 30 October 2016 07:14 PM

Touch Support staff will be conducting upgrades on our helpdesk installations.

Systems Affected: https://support.touchsupport.com/ and https://www.generalsupport.net/
Outage Length: Up to four (4) hours
Purpose: Upgrade help desk to latest version in an ongoing effort to maintain stability and security

Start of maintenance window: January 1st, 2017 at 1:00 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST)
End of maintenance window: January 1st, 2017 at 5:00 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST)

​During the scheduled maintenance window all ticket support via Kayako will be offline for the duration of the upgrade. Touch Support engineers will work diligently to assure that data integrity is maintained and downtime is kept to a minimum.

Our website (http://www.touchsupport.com/), will be online and reachable throughout the maintenance window.

For immediate assistance during the outage please contact us via live chat. Alternatively, you can reach us at (888) 45-TOUCH.

This information has been posted here for your convenience.


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Oct
12
Maintenance Notice - MySQL upgrade
Posted by Ivan A. on 12 October 2016 06:24 PM

Touch Support staff will be conducting an upgrade of the MySQL instance being used by our support boards.

Systems Affected: https://support.touchsupport.com and https://www.generalsupport.net
Outage Length: Up to one (1) hour
Purpose: Upgrade the MySQL version in an ongoing effort to maintain system stability and security

Start of maintenance window: October 21st, 2016 at 7:00 PM EDT
End of maintenance window: October 21st, 2016 at 8:00 PM EDT

During the scheduled maintenance window all ticket support via Kayako will be offline for the duration of the upgrade. Touch Support engineers will work diligently to assure that data integrity is maintained and downtime is kept to a minimum.

Our website https://www.touchsupport.com will be online and reachable throughout the maintenance window.

For immediate assistance during the outage please contact us via live chat. Alternatively, you can reach us at (888) 45-TOUCH.

For updates during the outage please visit our out-of-band information center at http://outage.touchsupport.com

This information has been posted here for your convenience. If you have any other questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to reach out to us or reply to this e-mail and we would be happy to help!


Thank you!


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Jul
21
Helpdesk Consolidation
Posted by Eric M. on 21 July 2016 06:05 PM

Hello,

Touch Support is happy to announce that our Ubersmith helpdesk found at billing.touchsupport.com will be streamlined to only be used for billing inquiries and invoice management as of July 23rd, 2016. All future support tickets will be handled here within our primary support helpdesk, support.touchsupport.com.

What is affected?

All technical and general support queues within billing.touchsupport.com will no longer be accepting new ticket requests. E-mails which previously generated tickets in our billing system will now automatically create new tickets in our primary support board, support.touchsupport.com.

What about my historical tickets?

All historical tickets will remain in the old helpdesk installation and will not be migrated to the new solution, however customers can continue to access these historical tickets via billing.touchsupport.com.  Any outstanding issues currently within the legacy billing helpdesk will be resolved appropriately.

Do I need to change how I contact Touch Support?

All e-mail addresses that you previously used to contact us have been rerouted to the appropriate helpdesk. Any incoming inquiries will be handled as normal and no changes will need to be made on your end. If you manually created tickets via billing.touchsupport.com you will still be able to as normal, however we may direct you to the new helpdesk and create a new ticket in the new helpdesk on your behalf.

If you have any other questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to reach out to us or reply to this e-mail and we would be happy to help!

Thank you,
Eric


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Jun
11
Maintenance Notice - Help Desk Upgrade
Posted by Brent S. on 11 June 2015 04:32 PM

Touch Support staff will be conducting upgrades on our helpdesk installation.

Systems Affected: https://support.touchsupport.com/ and https://www.generalsupport.net/
Outage Length: Up to four (4) hours
Purpose: Upgrade help desk to latest version in an ongoing effort to maintain stability and security

Start of maintenance window: June 11th, 2015 at 9:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST)
End of maintenance window: June 11th, 2015 at 1:00 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST)

​During the scheduled maintenance window all ticket support via Kayako will be offline for the duration of the upgrade. Touch Support engineers will work diligently to assure that data integrity is maintained and downtime is kept to a minimum.

Our website (http://www.touchsupport.com/), will be online and reachable throughout the maintenance window.

For immediate assistance during the outage please contact us via live chat. Alternatively, you can reach us at (888) 45-TOUCH.

For updates during the outage please visit our out-of-band information center athttp://outage.touchsupport.com/

This information has been posted here for your convenience. If you have any comments, questions, or concerns regarding this outage please email info@touchsupport.com.  Thank you!


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Apr
22
Celebrate Earth Day & Go Green with Paperless!
Posted by Brent S. on 22 April 2015 12:42 PM
One great way to celebrate Earth Day this year is to choose paperless billing. How big of a difference could that make?
 
According to Buffalo Business First, one tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper, or 8,333 sheets.
 
If just 20 percent of U.S. households adopted electronic billing and payments:
 
    * Nearly 150 million pounds of paper would be saved
    * Approximately 543 million pounds of wood would be preserved
    * Wastewater would be reduced by 1.6 billion gallons
    * 15 million gallons of fuel would not be unnecessarily consumed
 
If the Touch Support community went paperless for all their bills, we could prevent an estimated four trees from being cut down every year. That’s 1,264 lbs of wood left standing!
 
Here's how to change your billing preferences and go paperless in 3 easy steps:
 
1) Log into your account at https://billing.touchsupport.com/
2) Click "Client Profile" >> "View Profile" to display your Invoice Delivery preference.
3) Edit your profile and select "Email Only" as your preferred Invoice Delivery method.
 
If you have any questions you can always reach us at info@touchsupport.com.
 
Happy Earth Day!

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Jan
27
GHOST glibc Library Vulnerability
Posted by Brent S. on 27 January 2015 06:23 PM

Touch Support is aware of a critical vulnerability in the glibc library. This vulnerability is commonly known as GHOST and has been assigned CVE-2015-0235.

What this means:

GHOST is a 'buffer overflow' bug affecting the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() function calls in the glibc library. This vulnerability allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running the application.

The gethostbyname() function calls are used for DNS resolving, which is a very common event. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must trigger a buffer overflow by supplying an invalid hostname argument to an application that then calls gethostbyname().

What to do:

If you're currently subscribed to one of our server administration plans, our staff is already in the process of upgrading all affected servers to a non-vulnerable version of glibc.

Otherwise, if you are the administrator of a Linux server, update your version of ‘glibc’ to a patched version immediately. To eliminate the possibility of an exploit:

  1. Update the glibc and ncsd packages on your system
  2. Restart vulnerable services that use glibc (since so many services use glibc, the safest option is to restart the system).

The Touch Support difference:

We install a unique set of tools onto your server when you subscribe to a server administration plans.

When these types of vulnerabilities arise, our team quickly identifies them and develops a plan to keep your data safe, which typically include software updates that are rolled out to all affected servers. Then, we check to make sure they are no longer vulnerable. But, we don't stop there.

Our proprietary system administration tools are then updated to include a check for the specific vulnerability so that our administrators are instantly notified of future issues.


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