Roller NetworkWe had to do an unplanned change of the IP addresses for the rollernetstatus.com site due to chronic packet loss issues that were resulting in excessive false pages from Nagios (typically during the early morning hours). The VPS host says this should fix the problem, so we’ll see.
UPDATE: So far it’s been well behaved without the false pages.
As previously mentioned, we planned to upgrade to PowerDNS 3.0 to support some outstanding requests. We’re pleased to announce that this upgrade has been completed. As always, feel free to contact us with any questions.
We’ve given a surprising number of tours lately for colocation where one of the questions brought up was whether or not we provide UPS power to the racks. The simple answer is yes: Roller Network maintains and provides facility-wide UPS power. There is no requirement for a colocaiton customer to provide their own UPS. It’s actually our site policy that all switchgear, batteries, and UPS systems must be isolated in the electrical room separate from other equipment.
Apparently the motivation behind this question is that many of our local competitors do not provide UPS power for colocation. Well, we do, and we see it as part of our job in providing colocation services. If you have to maintain your own UPS and batteries, why colocate in the first place?
As promised, we’re going to be upgrading our PowerDNS authoritative servers from 2.9 to 3.0 in order to address the previously mentioned long TXT records and AXFR support limitations. We will perform the upgrade on Saturday, August 13 starting at 10:00 UTC-8. We expect the upgrade to be transparent.
At that time long TXT record support will go live (they’re already supported in the ACC, just not publishable) and we’ll start working on the front end to manage AXFR. We appreciate your patience.
It’s just coming up on 04:00 in the morning here at Roller Network on a Saturday (we’re doing some off-hour line card insertions), and even though it’s summer in our part of the world the high desert climate of Reno still lends itself to suitable economizer cooling mode on our primary facility cooling systems every night almost year-round. Right now it’s about 60F (15C) outside and we’re using that air for cooling rather than run the compressors.
That’s pretty good considering we’re not way up in Alaska, and much better than other competing desert locations at night like Las Vegas (78F/25C) or Phoenix (88F/31C) where the night temperatures are much higher than ours in Reno.