January 2017 – Roller Network

Virbl was a project of which the idea was born during the RIPE-48 meeting in May 2004. The plan was to get reports of virusscanning mailservers and put the IP-addresses that were reported to send viruses on a blacklist. Since the start, a number of trusted notifiers participated and over the next 10 years Virbl was a great addition to fighting back virus mails on the internet.

However, the internet changed, the techniques used to filter virus mails changed, trusted notifiers stopped reporting about incoming virusses and Virbl became more and more obsolete. This prompted us to decide to ‘pull the plug’ on the project after 12 years of operation.

The Virbl-project site has been replaced by this static message to inform those that find their ways here. The Virbl DNSBL-zone was emptied and will be removed all together at a moment further on in the future. Please remove any DNSBL-lookups against ‘virbl.dnsbl.bit.nl’ from your e-mail configurations. AS-operators will no longer receive the so called ‘Virbl AS-reports’ and it will no longer be possible to look up evidence. Mail sent to the ‘virbl.bit.nl’ domain will be tossed in the endless vacuum called /dev/null.

Please remove any DNSBL-lookups against ‘virbl.dnsbl.bit.nl’ from your e-mail configurations.

Accordingly, we have removed all entries for “virbl.dnsbl.bit.nl” from DNSBL configurations.

Roller Network’s colocation facility is not located in a flood risk area; our activities related to the flood in Sparks are only to assist our customers in affected areas.

UPDATE (13:34): Other than a possible power outage no impact is expected to our POP in Sparks. All of the customers it serves are idle/evacuated at this point. Sparks has now closed roads for 24 hours. Our special office hours today will now end as well; customers should use the hotline if needed.

We will have special office hours this morning, Sunday, January 8th until 1PM local time in order to potentially assist our customers affected by (or potentially affected by) flooding in Sparks, NV. If you are a Roller Network customer and need to temporarily relocate servers or other equipment needed for your business to maintain operations, emergency temporary colocation will be available at our facility.

After 1PM local time the City of Sparks plans to close all road access to the flood risk areas and no traffic will be allowed into the area. As such, we expect any emergency requests from customers will have been satisfied before this time, and we will not be able to go into the closed area for emergency service calls after 1PM.

Roller Network does operate one POP in the closed area which we’ll inspect before the roads are closed, but current maps do not show its location as a flood risk and it’s equipment is mounted several feet above ground level. The biggest risk will be loss of power and UPS discharge since we won’t be able to make it into the area to connect a generator, but since it only serves customers in the closed area the expected impact to operations is minimal to none.