News, Announcements, and Status Updates
We are now offering an industrial-grade 8GB SLC solid state disk drive (internal SATA) option for our dedicated servers.
Due to reliability issues with USB flash and the difficulty in obtaining a suitable long-term supply of them, we are discontinuing the “Internal 4GB USB Flash” options. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Roller Network will be observing the Thanksgiving holiday on November 24th and 25th. During an observed holiday technical support response times may vary depending on the service level. Our next regular business day will be on November 28th.
One question we’re frequently asked on tours is if our walls extend (or “cut”) past the false ceiling. The answer is yes; all of our walls extend the full height up to the floor of our mezzanine level, and the remaining overhead spaces are too narrow for someone bypass doors by going through the ceiling. At the same time, we do not permit unescorted site access.
Many times businesses will save money on construction costs by only building up to the bottom of a false ceiling, but since our facility is an integral part of our services we always opt to cut the ceiling. We also dress overhead wiring with d-rings even though it’s hidden.
We’re making a few updates to the Roller Network dedicated server lineup:
The Core i3-540 makes a great alternative to the discontinued Pentium G6950. With the Core i3-540 you get Hyper-Threading, more cache (4MB vs. 3MB), a faster clock speed (3.06 GHz vs. 2.8 GHz), and more memory bandwidth (21 GB/s vs. 17 GB/s) for only $12 more than the old G6950 option. On top of that, the new price for the Core i3-540 option is over $300 per year in savings!
Dedicated servers are still a noteworthy option in today’s cloud-buzzword market by offering exclusive use of known computing resources (CPU, RAM, and disk I/O) at a fixed price. Whole-disk encryption can be leveraged with remote KVM to require an encryption pass phrase at boot time for additional security and peace of mind. Multiple dedicated servers can even be used as the building blocks for your own private cloud!
A question came across the forums last week about address extensions (user+ext@example.com) not working because it wasn’t filing into folders automatically based on the extension part. They do work, but that anticipated behavior is actually a modified one rather than standard, but such a thing can be accomplished with Roller Network hosted mail boxes and a quick Sieve script:
require ["fileinto", "variables"];
if header :matches "Delivered-To" "user+*@example.com" {
fileinto "${1}";
stop;
}
else {
keep;
}
Add this using the managesieve online interface (or managesieve plugin that allows direct entry), replacing “user” and “example.com” with entries appropriate to your hosted mail box. This script will automatically file anything with an extension into a folder of the same name or default to INBOX if there wasn’t an extension.
We have been considering adding this functionality as a per-mailbox account control center option, but a Sieve script will quickly do the job just the same without having to wait for us.
It dawned on us that it’s been a while since we’ve had a power outage or phase imbalance requiring us to switch to generator power (although we do test every two weeks on load), so we did some digging and discovered that indeed the last time there was a utility power outage was back on October 24, 2010.
Over the last year we’ve only observed minor power flickering during weather and at least one lightening strike that caused a citywide (as observed by all of our remote monitoring points simultaneously) hiccup. All of these events where cleaned up by our online UPS system without going to battery.
All power to full racks will now be provisioned with 20 amp 208 volt three phase service with a three phase PDU. The pricing and power offered will remain the same, but the upgrade from included power will now be a “soft” (billing) change rather than requiring the outlet and PDU to be physically replaced. We feel that this will cover the vast majority of full rack power needs. Upgrading to 30A three phase will still be a “hard” upgrade requiring a a 30 amp circuit and PDU to be installed.
Half racks will remain a 20 amp single phase service due to space restrictions: the three phase PDUs are full rack height while the single phase models are half-height. This allows us to pre-populate racks with the most common power and PDU configurations rather than waiting until the time of order to see if a customer wanted single phase or three phase power to their rack. The net benefit to our customers is faster half rack and full rack availability.
Roller Network provides PDUs and power cords with our colocation service since we use circuits and voltages that are not commonly offered as standard features for most colocation providers in the United States. We provide the infrastructure, you provide what goes in the rack. Roller Network makes it that simple.
Roller Network has used Global Crossing as a transit provider for our bandwidth mix over the last year. Earlier this year Global Crossing was purchased by Level 3 and we’ve started to receive notices that as of this month our Global Crossing account will now be a Level 3 account. We don’t expect any changes that will impact us operationally (although we’ll be watching closely), and we will be referring to Level 3 as one of our transit providers from this point forward.
This weekend we’re going to be building a new server for the internal system that runs Asterisk for our office and the Request Tracker ticketing system that handles email for role accounts (like support and billing). Although the current server is still faithfully running with its original Athlon with 786MB of RAM, it’s starting to show its age (RT runs exceptionally slow) and the time has come to give it a forklift upgrade. As such, messages set to support, billing, and sales will be monitored manually (we’re using Mail Mirror on our domain) but they won’t get the usual auto response until after the new server is back online. Our office will also be unavailable by phone during the upgrade, although we rarely receive any calls on the weekends.
The new server we’re building for this upgrade will be an Intel Xeon X3430 with 8GB of DDR3 RAM on a Supermicro X8SIL-F motherboard in a 4U case instead of a 1U since we need to install multiple cards for Asterisk and the drive array controller.
UPDATE: We’ve finished restoring all of the major services and we’re working on the rest of the clean up.
We’ve added a multi-domain tool to Primary DNS that allows updates for simple record types to be easily changed for multiple zones. For example, this feature can be used as a “find and replace” to update an IP addresses or its TTL wherever a match is found (within selected domains). Record types supported are: A, AAAA, MX, NS, TXT, SPF, CNAME, and PTR. To access this feature click on the “Update Multiple Zones” button on the Primary DNS page in the account control center.
Primary DNS multiple zone update examples.