Roller NetworkWe’ve decided to re-enable forum registration and see what happens with regards to spam bots and other junk-type registrations. Forums accounts can now be created online, but we will still manually review and activate them before a new account can post.
We’ve recently added Extended Validation Certificates (EV) to acc.rollernet.us and webmail.rollernet.us. These locations will now show the “green bar” in browsers that support EV (which is pretty much every modern browser).
We need to swap an array controller card in one of our servers due to excessive “verify fail” errors. We’ve already swapped the drive and the problem persists, so we suspect the controller port may be bad. The affected server handles RT and Asterisk for our office. This maintenance will take place after 18:00 UTC-8)
While the affected server is down the following services will be affected:
We are expecting about 15-30 minutes to unrack the server and replace the array controller. No services will be affected. This post will be updated as needed.
UPDATE: Completed array card swap successfully. Total time 18 minutes.
It’s been pretty quiet on here lately, but we’re still here. There’s two major things going on right now:
First off, we’re working on some cosmetic changes for the account control center (nicer looking notify/warning/error message displays) and a mass-update function for Primary DNS that will allow you to change matching records in selected zones. This function would be handy for making changes such as updating an IP address or NS record everywhere it appears. The Primary DNS feature has become more popular than when we originally released it and its current functionality is limiting beyond basic applications. Many customers have requested a template function for Primary DNS – and while this is different – it’s the first step in that direction.
Secondly, we are about to embark on a major redesign to the main website (something we don’t have the in-house talent for). Roller Network is in the unique position of offering the only independent carrier-class colocaiton facility in Northern Nevada. Currently the only way to truly appreciate what we can offer is through an on-site tour. Although we’re boutique-sized compared to the mega facilities you’d find in major cities, we offer all of the critical features of those larger facilities plus features above and beyond what our local competitors offer. Being small does have other advantages, such as simpler systems less likely to malfunction, and our customers enjoy an extensive trouble-free history. Many of the people that have toured our facility comment on how unexpected it was to find something like it locally, so we need to update our online presence.
That’s all for now!
We’ve received a couple questions about zone transfer (AXFR) support for our Primary DNS service. Currently we do not have AXFR enabled on the DNS servers that answer requests for Primary DNS zones.
The AXFR limitation is not intentional; unfortunately it’s supported by the DNS server. Primary DNS is served using PowerDNS authoritative server version 2.9.22. It does not support per-zone AXFR ACLs like BIND9 does.
The only option we have would be to allow AXFR to anyone, but for security reasons we don’t want to do that. We can’t globally allow our Secondary DNS to AXFR because that creates a backdoor where anyone with an account could use it as an intermediate AXFR host. (Security aside, most of our customers don’t want AXFR open to the world or IP addresses they don’t control.)
PowerDNS authoritative 3.0 is currently in RC2 stage. This version does have per-zone AXFR capability and we will support it in the control center as soon as possible. It also has other features we’d like to add like DNSSEC and long TXT records.
We’re working on changes to the control center required to support these features but ultimately it requires the servers themselves to be upgraded to either the release candidate or the 3.0 release to support them.