Categories
Announcements

Recent GDPR Stuff

Since everyone has been posting GPDR updates, we should probably say something about it too.

In a nutshell, Roller Network has never collected or used customer’s personal information. We do not require any personal information to set up an account beyond an email address, and we have never monetized any information. We’ve never had any advertising hooks in our systems whatsoever. We do not have any third party affiliates and we do not engage in data sharing. Information required in the account control center to use a specific service is limited to the scope of that service, and anyone can readily add or delete information as they see fit using it. Realistically, we’re a small company and don’t care about “big data” analytics.

On our colocation side of things, because we don’t offer “cloud” hosting services, our systems do not contain customer data. That’s one major benefit of colocation over cloud: your data and your hardware is yours, it’s not subject to the whim of a larger companies’ policies which – and be honest – can’t to be in your favor because they need to track and monetize your usage very closely.

We also don’t have a default contact preference when signing up for an account: an account can’t be created without choosing one of the three contact options. This means we can be 100% sure that everyone’s contact preference was made intentionally. There’s no check or uncheck the box with confusing wording kind of trickery here that other companies engage in so they can share your data with third parties.

Ironically, we do occasionally get complaints about having to pay for services or why our free accounts are slowly going away. This is why: because we don’t have anything except customers paying for services. For anyone who does want their personal data shared and monetized to get “free” services, Roller Network is not the place for that, and we’re not planning on changing that.

What we have done is enabled some cookie warnings since it’s harmless, and annoying at worst. We’re also no longer using Google Analytics on our main website and removed the Facebook integration from the Newspipe. We will continue to use Twitter.

Categories
Announcements Q&A

Mail Mirroring as “Email Insurance”

On a semi-regular basis we receive a call or email for help because something has happened to someone’s email: messages were accidentally deleted, their mail server had a config change and rejected everything or accepted and silently discarded messages. Although we do maintain disaster recovery backups, we charge for staff time hourly to try and find and restore a few files without any guarantees to how far back we can look, and that’s only for IMAP; with POP3 the client can remove messages as they are received which never make it into a backup window. Then there’s the SMTP queue: the queue is constantly changing, but since we’re not secretly storing copies of messages just in case, there’s almost no chance to recover anything. In the end, the messages are gone and there’s no simple way to recover them, if at all.

That’s where the Mail Mirror feature comes in. included with every account. A mail mirror uses hosted mail boxes to store copies of messages that pass through our system. Mail Mirror allows you to define addresses or domains to “mirror” to a hosted mail box by storing a copy for backup or emergency access purposes. It uses the independent storage of a normal hosted mail box, which is not affected by the constantly changing mail queue. Once a message goes into a mirror it remains there until it expires based on how long you configure it to keep messages or is manually deleted by logging into the mirror box. This way, a mirror is self-maintaining and won’t keep growing in size. Mail Mirror is available to all accounts and only counts as hosted mail box storage, but for it to work it needs to be enabled before there’s a problem, not after.

Mail mirroring works with all types of mail configurations. You may never need to access your mail mirror, but just like insurance, it’s there just in case.

We’ve also posted a topic to our forums for any questions or discussion on this feature: Mail Mirror – A Helpful Safety Feature

Categories
TahoeIX

Hurricane Electric POP (2018 Update)

We’ve been talking about the Hurricane Electric POP for a long time now… too long really, but often some of the most difficult things to achieve are the most rewarding.

In summary, a lot of time was spent trying to make Zayo work because at the time, only Zayo could provide an east facing wavelength (cost effectively anyway) to give the HE POP east-west diversity. While the status quo locally has been to backhaul things out of California, doing so increases exposure to the risk of California earthquakes impacting connectivity in an undesirable way. For disaster planning an east facing path is extremely desirable.

The good news is that during all of the time spent working on Zayo, a second option, Verizon, actually improved and is now able to offer an east facing path option to Denver instead of the originally planned Salt Lake City. This is what’s in process now: Zayo is out and Verizon is in. Salt Lake City is out and Denver is in. It’s still going to take a bit more time for Verizon to do the thing they do for long haul, but statistically speaking the number of successful Verizon orders at our facility is significantly higher than successful Zayo orders, so we have a higher confidence level that this is the light at the end of the tunnel.

Hurricane Electric will bring 1Gbps and 10Gbps access ports and PTP transport to their other POPs at prices never seen before in Reno, plus peering at TahoeIX with their famously open peering policy that has made Hurricane Electric one of the top peered networks in the world. Roller Network will be the first neutral colocation facility in Reno a to have a carrier POP* – a real one with peering – not “backhauled bandwidth” or transport to a “city with a router” (for example, all AT&T here goes through a router in Sacramento). We here at Roller Network are excited to be the catalyst for this step away from the status quo.

*Yes, we know there are other bigger fish nearby, but Rollernet is actually in Reno, NV in Washoe County. The others are not, so when we say “Reno” we truly mean within Reno city limits, not somewhere nearby that will never be in Reno. We’re technically correct, the best kind of correct.

Categories
Announcements

Fraud Alert: Telerus Claims to be an Agent

Today we were notified by a customer that they were contacted by a company called Telerus who claimed to be an agent for Roller Network. We have not engaged Telerus for any services, nor does Telerus have any agent or resale agreements with Roller Network.

Telerus is NOT an agent for Roller Network, nor affiliated with Roller Network in any manner. Any claims otherwise are fraudulent.

If you are approached by Telerus claiming to represent Roller Network, we recommend declining to proceed; otherwise you risk falling victim to a scam or other fraud.

Categories
Status

SA 3.4.0 on mail

Updates have been applied to mail.rollernet.us which include bringing SpamAssassin up to version 3.4.0. No issues were observed with mail2.