Categories
Announcements

COVID-19 Update

Roller Network’s daily operations are normally based on automation of primary functions with remote monitoring, supervision, and control. Colocation facilities like ours are always closed to the public with only an essential physical presence. In this sense, operations will continue as normal without any major changes. However, sales tours are suspended until further notice.

Roller Network falls within Nevada’s classification for an essential business and is not subject to the current shutdown orders in place at the State level. Colocation suite access will be limited to a maximum of 10 people per current requirements to remain open as an “essential business”, and we will encourage customers to be flexible with access scheduling so that we can try to prevent overlapping access requests or utilize remote hands to perform tasks that do not absolutely require a visit to the facility. The physical layout of colocation rows and equipment spaces is less than the 6-foot “social distancing” rule. Each row of racks has a spacing of 4-feet in the cold aisle and 3-feet in the hot aisle.

Please do not visit our facility if you are not feeling well or if you have been in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19 or who has been asked to self-quarantine. By close contact we mean spending 15 minutes or more with the person in the last 14 days, or living in the same household.

Instead, we can work with you through remote hands, free of charge, in the interest of safety for other customers or customers that are not comfortable with exposure risk. Ideally we will try to perform all requests with remote hands and no customer visits will be necessary. (Work rates will still be charged for cancellations; free remote hands for customers in contract only.)

All colocation customers will be offered full Gigabit access at no charge to help our customers meet the demand for work from home and remote access for at least the next 30 days. Burstable use charges will also be waived.

New customers looking to move equipment to a high bandwidth environment should contact sales@rollernet.us to take advantage of the same Gigabit access at no additional charge.

On April 8th we installed UV-C germicidal irradiation lamps in our computer room air conditioning systems that predominately recirculate air in customer accessible spaces. UV-C light in circulating air is intended to create an inhospitable environment for microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, molds and other pathogens.

Categories
Changes Status

System Updates 2020 Edition

Over the next several weeks are are going to try to get all of our systems updated to Debian 9 (oldstable) or ideally Debian 10 (stable) wherever possible. Many systems are still running Debian 8 LTS for which security support ends in June.

We will do our best to minimize disruptions. Any work that’s unavoidably disruptive will be performed during our weekly maintenance window every Saturday between 10:00 and 22:00. An example of a system that’s disruptive would be the account control center, webmail, or IMAP/POP3 hosted mail. To completely update a system there are required reboots, and in some cases (most notably IMAP/POP3 hosted mail), forced switches between active/standby pairs to verify functionality. Updates on our in-office system will cause interruptions to our phone and hotline number (which run on Asterisk) while we perform its upgrades. Email us if you don’t hear the voice prompts answer since someone will be watching for emails when we know voice is being worked on. Work to non-interactive systems like ns1/ns2 may be performed at any time since our supported configuration is that customers configure both on their domain, not just one. We may also decide to migrate older hardware based systems to a virtual machine on a case-by-case basis.

If you have any questions please contact support.

Categories
Changes IPv6

IPv6 Public NTP Servers Discontinued

Almost 9 years ago we set up some publicly accessible IPv6 time servers. At the time there were few to no options for NTP over IPv6.

However, it’s time to retire those servers. They’ve run faithfully for almost 10 years and their watch is over. We won’t offer a replacement for this service, but NIST has IPv6 NTP servers in their pool: https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi

Categories
Changes Status

IP Address Change for Mail Forwarding Servers

The IP addresses of our mail forwarding servers will be changing:

mxfwd1.rollernet.us

  • Old IPv4 Address: 208.79.241.114
  • Old IPv6 Address: 2607:fe70:0:16::a
  • NEW IPv4 Address: 208.79.240.12
  • NEW IPv6 Address: 2607:fe70:0:3::f
  • NEW Name: mxfwd-a.rollernet.us

mxfwd2.rollernet.us

  • Old IPv4 Address: 208.79.241.115
  • Old IPv6 Address: 2607:fe70:0:16::b
  • NEW IPv4 Address: 208.79.241.12
  • NEW IPv6 Address: 2607:fe70:0:4::f
  • NEW Name: mxfwd-b.rollernet.us

If you have created whitelists or used these servers in SPF records (we will update include:m._spf.rollernet.us accordingly) please make sure to add the new addresses alongside the old addresses while this transition is in progress. Once completed, the old IP addresses will no longer be used for any mail-related functions.

CNAME records will be added pointing the legacy names to the new names, so it will be safe to continue referencing the old names.

If you are not using the Mail Forwarding functions in the account control center you will not be affected by this change. Log in to your account and see https://acc.rollernet.us/mail/mapping.php to check if you have mail forwarding configured.

The physical servers are being retired and their mail-related functions replaced with virtual machines. We’ll be repurposing the subnet for timing services since the forwarding servers were also used for NTP (ntp.rollernet.us) and installing Rubidium-based timing systems. This will ensure that functions that are more DNS friendly SMTP functions will transition smoothly, and NTP configurations which are normally configured by IP or only resolved in DNS once will continue with no impact.

UPDATE: All changes were completed successfully.

Categories
Status

January 31, 2020: Degraded Service for Wireless Customers

At approximately 14:00 US/Pacific time and lasting for approximately 45 minutes, some wireless customers were affected by a Cisco IOS bug that was causing some prefixes not to be inserted into TCAM on the preferred (shortest path) core router connected to the serving POP, resulting in null routing for affected prefixes.

Once we were aware of the issue the affected core router was removed from service for analysis. Thanks to the fully redundant nature of our core and backhaul design, this allowed all traffic to self-reroute over alternate paths.

The scope of this issue was limited to wireless customers connecting to a specific POP in Sparks, NV. No other services were affected.