Category: Announcements

Categories
Announcements

Advanced Business Broadband is Coming in 2017

UPDATE 2: Officially canceled as of April 10, 2017. See announcement: Advanced Business Broadband – Project Canceled

UPDATE:  As of January 2017 work on this new service has been suspended until further notice. The license holder of the band we needed to lease from may no longer be issuing leases at this time. Rollernet was supposed to obtain spectrum leases in December 2016 to compliment our equipment purchase, but the license holder has not followed through with a lease agreement as of January 17th. Unfortunately without a spectrum lease we can’t operate equipment and we must regretfully suspend work.

We recently finalized plans to start work on a new service we’re calling “Advanced Business Broadband”. This service will fill the middle gap in our business internet options which are currently offered as “basic” or “dedicated internet access”.

Advanced Business Broadband will be available with the following tiers: 20×20, 50×50, 100×100, 150×150, and 200×200. Pricing is expected to be between $400 and $800 per month. Like dedicated internet access this is a licensed service that enjoys the same protections, low latency, high speed, and true symmetric bandwidth with a service level agreement. Advanced business broadband also comes with all the benefits of local content from peers on TahoeIX plus new peers like Hurricane Electric which will continue to enhance our customer’s connectivity to the world beyond what other ISPs in Reno/Sparks that don’t peer at TahoeIX are able to offer.

This will also help companies that want to colocate equipment solve the “last mile” problem: a quality connection is needed to take advantage of the protections that local colocation offers to their business servers, but don’t want to (or can’t) pay the high prices other providers want to charge for a connection back to our facility.

rollernet-advanced-system-coverage-proposed

Our planned coverage area consists of the majority of the commercial and industrial areas in Reno and Sparks along the Truckee River and I-80 corridor and east of US-395. Right now we’re targeting February 2017 for early deployments, which if equipment arrives in January will allow us to do burn in and development testing for 30 days before releasing it to the early adopters. These timeframes are tentative: actual dates will depend on when we start receiving equipment.

As things progress we’ll post updates to our Twitter account @RollernetNV so follow us for the latest news. If you’re interested in being an early adopter send an email to sales@rollernet.us to register your interest. We’re planning on offering some discounts and incentives for early adopters.

Disclaimer: Advanced business broadband is still in the development stages. We may need to tweak plans, pricing, SLAs, or coverage once we actually have equipment in hand. 

Categories
Announcements Changes

Secondary DNS Transition to Paid-Only

The next update to the account control center will remove free Secondary DNS and add the “Basic” paid service level. Existing Secondary DNS zones won’t be disabled at this time, but no changes will be allowed to them unless you have a paid account. Back in March we posted an announcement that we’re going to start discontinuing free services and this is the first step.

You can find that announcement here: http://www.rollernet.us/wordpress/2016/03/changes-are-coming-maildns-prices-free-accounts-and-spam-filtering/

A link to this announcement has also been shown in the account control center for the past 8 months. Although we’re sure to see some complaints no matter how much lead time we give, eventually we have to move forward. That time has come for Secondary DNS.

UPDATE: Effective June 5, 2017, Secondary DNS has become paid-only.

Categories
Announcements Status

Twitter Outages

Twitter is currerntly suffering from outages today (October 21, 2016) and may be unavailable.

As a reminder our third party hosted status page is at: www.rollernetstatus.com

Categories
Announcements Changes

Mail: URI Blocking in Submissions (SMTP AUTH)

We’re now blocking submissions on our outbound mail service (SMTP AUTH) that contain URIs on blacklists we check outgoing content against. Previously we would include them as part of a score, however we started to see unacceptable stuff pass because it didn’t matching anything except the bad URI. Scoring is still in effect, but the score for a URI match alone is now above threshold.

Exceptions are being made for the following recipient addresses:

  • *@spam.spamcop.net
  • abuse@*

Contact support if you have any questions or have a reporting service address like Spamcop you believe should also be whitelisted.

Categories
Announcements Changes

SSL Cert Updates and SHA256

The other day we did some routine updates on expiring SSL certificates. Today we got a few reports from SMTP AUTH customers about devices (like office multifunction copiers, UPS management cards, etc.) failing to communicate with the SMTP AUTH service. The problem turned out to be the updated SHA256 certificate. Those devices simply can’t work with an SHA256 cert.

A while back it was determined that SHA1 is “weak” and could become exploitable, although at the time we’re writing this no successful real-world attacks have been discovered. As such certificate authorities now only issue SHA256 certificates. Unfortunately for older devices and embedded devices like the aforementioned offfice copier (and by copier we are referring to big floor standing ones like a Ricoh or Xerox, not some cheap inkjet printer-scanner-copier) they’re different than installing an OS update on your computer. Things like that usually only get replaced as they come off-lease.

We understand that people aren’t just going to trash their devices for SHA265 support so we’ve decided to add an alternate SHA1 access to the SMTP AUTH server. If your device can’t connect to smtpauth.rollernet.us using SSL/TLS try using smtpauth-sha1.rollernet.us instead. We believe this is a better option than disabling SSL/TLS: irrespective of how “weak” SHA1 could be this point, our opinion is that it’s still better than plaintext at this time.

There are some encryption types that are practically plaintext – like WEP or original DES – but SHA1 isn’t that bad (yet, possibly, maybe someday, maybe never).