This month customers may have seen unfamiliar attachments on their invoices.

One is an HTML attachment which is a form, and generally somewhat useless. You can ignore this.

The other is a signature.pgp, which is the separate PGP signature as per PGP/MIME email formatting. If you have PGP software on your email system this can be used to check the validity of the email.

The reason for this appears to be down to an issue with defaults after email changes recently. We have now changed all accounts not to send HTML or the separate PGP attachment.

If you would now like emails in PGP/MIME format, please do edit the settings on the accounts page to re-enable this. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Please note that in all cases the email included the plain text of the invoice, and this is the formal tax invoice. Being unable to open an attachment does not change this, and the invoice is still to be paid. Sorry if this sounds obvious or condescending, you would be surprised at the comments we sometimes get.

When you log in you will see a Update Contact link which allows you to change some basic preferences with immediate effect. These include whether to send PDF, or XML with documents, and if to use PGP/MIME, and if we send a confirmation link on documents. We may add new options in future.

You can also request a change to contact details (address, email, etc). And if you wish you can paste in a PGP/GPG public key. We email you confirmation (encrypted if you asked for that) and you follow a link to confirm the changes (within 2 days please). If you are encrypting you can click an option to stop doing so, and confirm in the email. If you change email address, we email the old address (using old encryption setting, if any) to advise of the change.

We believe we have all of the emails from accounts covered with this, but if you find any that are not, please do let us know. The only special case is Direct Debit notices. As these are the bank account holder which may not be the same as the A&A account holder, they can be a different email address. As such they only encrypt if you have the same email on the account and have asked for encryption.

If this is all nonsense to you - do not worry, but if you have questions, please let us know.

Customers expecting Direct Debit collection on Wednesday 8th March will actually have the collection made on Thursday 9th March.

We do apologise for any confusion this may cause.

As this is within the permitted 3 working day window in which we can make a collection we will not be sending separate individual notices of this change.

We have had reports from customers that emailed PDF attachments are not opening.

We have been updating the emailing systems recently (as we plan to launch some new features soon), but after a lot of testing all seemed to be working. We are looking in to the matter now and hope to have it sorted today. Most customers will get invoices tomorrow.

You can, at any time, log in to the accounts systems to access invoices, including downloading a PDF. We appreciate some customers would like the "pretty" version of the invoices to file or print. Please feel free to log in and get copies of your invoices. If necessary you can ask accounts to re-email you the invoice.

We'd like to remind all customers that the plain text content of the emailed invoice is the formal invoice with all of the details for the invoice to be paid in accordance with HMRC/VAT rules, and as such the broken PDF is no reason not to pay the invoice, sorry.

We cordially invite customers, friends, peers, associates, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri to come along, at any time between 2pm and 10pm, and to stay for as long as you like, drink, eat (there will be a BBQ) and be merry.

We wanted to just keep an eye on number of attendees, hence the EventBrite. The tickets are free though, of course.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/aaispissup-aka-nerdstock-2017-tickets-32350365815

Fri 23rd Open as Usual
Sat 24th Informal (Some Support staff monitoring IRC and Email)
Sun 25th Closed
Mon 26th Closed
Tue 27th Closed
Wed 28th Open
Thu 29th Open
Fri 30th Open
Sat 31st Informal (Some Support staff monitoring IRC and Email)
Sun 1st Closed
Mon 2nd Closed
Tue 3rd Open...

We are working on our systems to add two factor authentication to web site logins.

At present this has been added to the accounts system only. You will see an option to set up 2FA when you log in. Simply follow the instructions.

In due course we plan to also add this to our control pages.

See http://aa.net.uk/kb-broadband-2fa.html for more information.

We're looking for a new member of staff for our front line technical support team, and another to join our sales/order processing team here in Bracknell

Please do send an email to jobs@aa.net.uk for further information if you are interested.

The card printing system has had a few tweaks to help.

A couple of recently introduced bugs have been fixed.

The fields for VCARD can now have a default, which is useful for making VCARD entries for all the same company for example.

The fixed text field type can now have a multiple line text value - this makes it a lot easier to include standard text on a card template without having to make multiple entries, one for each line.

We'll work on any new improvements we can think of... Feel free to make suggestions.

Our plastic card printing service now allows multiple copies of the same card.

The original design was very much around ID cards where each card would have a different set of name, photo, barcode, other fields, and be printed once.

However, many people have used for things like business cards, wifi password cards, and all sorts where multiple prints of the same card are needed. So we have now allowed a quantity against each card.

There are also a few more standard templates now.

We are making some changes to our Ip transit connectivity over the next few days. This should be pretty seamless as just mean traffic taking new routes. However, there is always a risk of issues.

Today we are doing a bit or preparation which means some minor routing changes for about 5% of our traffic, and which we also expect to have no impact.

We use two data centres in London, Equinix and (Telecity). Equinix have planned engineering works on their power feeds on the morning of 2nd August as follows:

Investigations into the power incident that occurred on Wednesday 20th July 2016 have concluded that the outage was caused by the malfunction of the protection module on the primary circuit breaker for the A power riser in Building 8/9 of Equinix's LD8 (Harbour Exchange) data centre. An identical protection module is installed on the B riser power supply. It is now essential that both circuit breakers are replaced. In order to carry out this work safely it is necessary to power down the affected circuits in accordance with the following schedule in the early hours of 2nd August 2016:

A Power riser:
Power down: 00:00
Reenergise: 01:00 or sooner once work is complete

B Power riser:
Power down: 02:00
Reenergise: 03:00 or sooner once work is complete

A number of customers were emailed that their 1st of month DD was cancelled.

This process was stopped as soon as we realised what was happening so not many people will be affected. You will receive normal DD collection notices in due course for your monthly bills or have collection within 3 working days as per exiting notice (so may be 3rd instead of 1st) as per DD rules.

Our DD management system is coded to be as cautious and customer focused as possible and a minor error meant it was not happy with the DDs for regular collections being in place before the invoice was issued. This has been corrected now.

Sorry for any confusion caused.

I have added some more features to card printing.

https://cards.aa.net.uk

It now included linear barcodes including code 39, code 128, EAN13, UPC, EAN8, EAN5 and ITF

We use IRC all the time here at AAISP, both internally between staff teams and in helping our customers. Many customers have their own IRC client setup on their computer whilst others pop in to the IRC channel by using the web-based version we provide via our website.

To help improve the experience for customers using our web-based irc client we have a new one to try:

https://webirc.aa.net.uk/

We will have Technical Support staff available between 10am and 3pm each Saturday. Customers will be able to contact us in all the usual ways: Phone, email, IRC etc.

Whilst the staff are in the technical support department they will be able to answer general sales and accounts queries too.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all at A&A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agYHiSXple0

Following the recent media attention to the 'cyberattack' and possible data theft from TalkTalk, we asked our account manager how this affects us and our customers. The response was: "The attack was on our consumer website and doesn't impact our partner accounts and customers."

The service we buy from TalkTalk is their wholesale/'partner' account services which is kept separate from TalkTalk's 'consumer' services as much as possible. At the moment in time AAISP are confident that the statement above means that our own data and our customer's data is unaffected by this recent attack.

TalkTalk's own statement can be found here: http://help2.talktalk.co.uk/oct22incident

We have extended our support hours, which are now 8am to 6pm, Mon-Fri, except (English) public holidays.

Previously we worked 9am to 5pm, and sales/accounts still do. However the support staff can usually address simple/urgent queries in those areas if necessary.

Occasionally we do have people ask why we only work office hours, and it is worth trying to explain this. Many ISPs do, indeed, have 24 hour telephone support, for example.

For most of our services, there are faults that come in two flavours. Either there is some big issue (a major outage), in which case we have staff, getting involved in fixing things whatever time it is, or an individual line fault for DSL. It is pretty rare to have individual faults for VoIP, SIMs, etc, but you can, of course, get line faults for DSL.

When it comes to individual DSL faults, there are a load of things people can do at home/office to eliminate equipment and test for themselves, and we offer various on-line tests via our control pages.[1] This can help resolve things. But the issues that don't just go away, and would require support staff to do something, are almost always something that needs a BT engineer to go out.

With very few exceptions, BT engineers are not going to be going our any quicker if we book them next working day at 9am. So having support staff take calls in the middle of the night would not usually be any help. We also have no intention of farming support out to call centres following scripts.

Obviously we're interested in feedback on how the new support hours work for customers.