Dabuu Networks - Maintenance, Clustering and Improvements! - Knowledgebase

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Dabuu Networks - Maintenance, Clustering and Improvements!

Posted by iexo, 11-14-2013, 06:26 AM
Greetings from Dabuu Networks!

Recently, we've sadly been affected by issues outside of our control.
As some of you will know we've invested heavily in server and network security - which brings obvious benefits, including not only protecting our valued customers, but also making the Dabuu Networks cPanel platform one of the most secure shared providers in our market! The downside of this investment in security is that unfortunately we came across compatibility issues which saw some script modules on our cPanel platform unable to perform correctly - affecting many of our clients, which didn't appear when tested in a development environment.

After lengthy discussions with members of the cPanel team, in addition to investigation by senior cPanel analysts, we were faced with a decision - to reduce security by removing the advanced security systems, or to re-write parts of the operating system and security system to work fully with the rest of our platform - for us the decision was clear, because the risk of online attacks is growing every day and not an hour goes by without our system needing to block attempts to breach the security of both our systems and our clients services.

The main benefits of the advanced security are generally not very noticeable by our clients - silently protecting without even needing a coffee or a holiday, however the simple fact is that any provider without our level of security is, or is placing their customers at considerable risk - and have probably escaped serious security breach (if they have) only through luck. What one of the main features of the system does is set over 25,000 "rules", which aren't generally triggered by the normal usage of our customers and end users, but are instead aimed at preventing attacks, exploits, fraud, spam, malware, phishing, abuse and more. With these "rules", once they're broken action is taken instantly and the system knows how to deal with different circumstances, so for example if you forget your password you're perfectly safe, however if someone tries to guess your password by running through possible common values, they'll find themselves blocked before they even get warmed up! As standard cPanel protects only the secure control panel areas and control services using login failure detection, however our system extends this to most common software applications, includng Wordpress!

Above, are just some of the reasons this system is so valuable, which is why we must take steps to ensure we can keep it in place, due to this our development team will be working non-stop over the next 24 hours to fully integrate this into our system so that everything works in harmony, however we must unfortunately warn that there will without a doubt be very short loss of service across the cPanel platform. This is something we simply can't avoid as under the hood this is a massive operation which is needing hours of planning and testing to ensure it goes right. The nature of this work requires us to effectively move the entire platform between servers, to a custom "flavor" of our chosen operating system, so you can be assured that multiple backups will be taken for the protection of all clients data. Please take note: the final stages (the transfer, followed by integrity checks) will commence at 18:59 PM (EST) / 23:59 PM (UTC) on the 14th November 2013 - after this time we can not guarantee that changes to data will be retained once the transfer is complete. At 21:59 PM (EST) / 02:59 AM (UTC) the final settings changes will commence, this will involve switching the routing of IP addresses from the old platform to the new platform - and is being done in a way which creates a minimum level of service loss - with our intention being that no account will be unreachable for more than 60 seconds.

Note that this method, although may seem very confusing - is the only way we can achieve what we need to without causing loss of service for a significant length of time, so we're happy to put in the extra work if it lowers the disruption and risk. Clients: No action is required regarding this - however if you have active databases which may change during our transfer window, be sure to let us know so we can sync these once works are complete! These changes will have no affect on VPS services, on any node.

At this point I'd also like to give you a "heads up" on some upgrades (the reason for the title of 'Improvements')
While our service is not sold as "Cloud hosting", it's certainly cloud enhanced - and we're about to improve on that with some significant hardware upgrades and additions, which effectively create a "cluster" of services. This greatly improves redundancy across services and completely removes the main single point of failure on the service as a whole, so for example if the server responsible for serving web pages happens to suddenly explode, no interruption will be caused to services such as email - allowing you to remain in contact with your visitors. This is in addition to the backup mail system we already have in place. Another benefit is we're also able to push far beyond the restrictions of SSD capacity - introducing scaleability! The best part being that these fantastic improvements won't change our pricing - we consider it long term investment.

Work on this has already begun, with our remote backup location changing from New York, US to Phoenix, US this week, however the main phase requires some additions to our current hardware, which needs bucket loads of planning and negotiation with partners, so we're unable to provide time-scales as of yet - but of course we'll issue considerable warning before these works take place. We're also commencing upgrades to our global DNS servers this week, which although isn't expected to cause any loss of service, may require some additions to registrar DNS records to be most effective for users individually, although we'll handle this automatically for domains registered through Dabuu Networks. Any relevant service changes regarding this will be detailed individually to clients, so that we can be sure our client population is fully aware!

Remember, we want our operations to be clear and transparent - if you need anything making clear don't hesitate to contact the team at any point (day or night) and we'll be happy to explain how these changes affect you!

Thank you.