Community Portal Going Live Shortly

Since our vBulletin license is expiring very, very, very shortly -- our forums will be taken down. Expect the Community Portal to officially open very soon!

DNS Improvements

We have finally received Reverse DNS delegation for all of our subnets (we previously only had delegation for *most* but not all subnets).  If you have a static IP with us, you may request reverse DNS to be configured.  We have also made sure that there is functional forward and reverse DNS by default for all IP addresses.

Network & System Monitoring

We have made MAJOR improvements to our monitoring.  Previously, we were graphing statics on our hosting servers via SNMPv1 and monitoring basic uptime via ping-monitoring through "mon".  We were also performing more inclusive monitoring services on a case-by-case basis. Many of our rules, unfortunately, caused false-positives.

Site-wide, we have migrated to SNMPv3 (much more secure!)  and improved our rules for smartd ensuring that we will be alerted at the first sign of disk failure.

GrokThis.net Hosting Servers

We have elimatinated all false-positives and have added imap, pop3, and http monitoring for all of our hosting servers.  This will provide alerts to our staff in the event of failure.  Each server is  also monitoring their own postfix, imap, pop3, and cyrmaster (cyrus) processes and automatically restarting these services if a failure is detected.  Furthermore, we have configured SNMP traps to be sent to alert us of any failures -- and -- to alert us on certain events (low disk, high system load, failed monitored processes).

VPS Hosting Servers

We have improved our bandwidth monitoring for VPS accounts.  Previously, we were only able to monitor bandwidth per subnet, typically grouping 5 customers together and monitoring the group.  Customers haven't been abusing their bandwidth so this was never a problem, but we have been wanting to fix this.

We are now monitoring VPS customers on an individual basis.  This will, however, require that we reboot each virtual server.  We are working out a schedule to issue these reboots.

OS Updates

1. marley.grokthis.net has been upgraded from Debian Sarge(!!!) to Debian Etch.
   
2. ns1.grokthis.net has been upgraded from Ubuntu Breezy Badger(!!!) to Ubuntu Dapper (LTS).
   
3. galadriel, gimli, and meriadoc have already been at the latest ubuntu/debian stable versions for some time.