Maintenance Window
The next 72 hours will include series of six extensive maintenance tasks spanning three USA-based data centers and two EU-based data centers.
Maintenance Tasks
The first and largest maintenance task involves ExchangeDefender. First we will be adding more servers to the mix. This is a very routine task for us and is expected to produce zero downtime even on the nodes that are active during the transition. After the new nodes are online and older hardware has been swapped out we will proceed to roll out new policy systems which will speed up the daily email SPAM report generation, portal access, MSP control panels and higher-end reseller branding. These processes will continue throughout the weekend and while we will not have any downtime the mail release delays could be delayed up to five minutes. If your message is affected by this delay you will be given a notice when you attempt to release the message.
The second maintenance task involves TheOfficeServer dedicated servers and shared hosted services. We are expanding our portfolio to provide APC MasterSwitch remote reboot to address the complaints regarding Microsoft Windows Server patching problems over the past few months. The APC MasterSwitch software will allow you to remotely power cycle the server through a web interface when the system becomes unresponsive. In order to provide this service we will be gradually powering down and swapping power strips. We expect the downtime related to this task to take roughly 10 minutes. Our engineers will login to your server, trigger a graceful shutdown and move the power cord to the new strip. The downtime exclusively applies to the single switched power supplies, if you have a dual power supply you will not have any downtime associated with this maintenance task.
Own Web Now hosting control panels will be going offline for a period of five minutes during our regularly scheduled maintenance window from 7AM – 8AM GMT on Saturday, December 9th, 2006. This outage will not affect any services (dns, mail, web, databases, etc) but you will not be able to make any configuration changes during this window. If you do have an emergency maintenance issue please contact Own Web Now Corp through the trouble ticket support system.
Warranties
As always, all Own Web Now Corp maintenance tasks are fully scripted, practiced and load tested before being executed on the live production network. We have load tested each ExchangeDefender node at least 500 hours, each power strip has been placed to 80% load (manufacturer recommended maximum load) and held for 24 hours. We have full confidence in the hardware that is being placed into production.
Software Updates
ExchangeDefender has undergone significant changes in underlying infrastructure and reporting services to accommodate the global growth of both our network and our customer base. Although initially you will not see a visual difference in what we have changed you will notice a significant performance boost. This is directly related to the changes in the way we currently collect and build reporting for ExchangeDefender.
Finally,
Thank you for all your support, understanding and patience. Nearly all the changes we are making to ExchangeDefender, Own Web Now Corp and The Office Server systems are directly designed by the feedback submitted by you, our partners and customers. While many of you can appreciate that the recent instabilities have been caused by Microsoft’s diminishing QA of security patches, I personally want to make you aware that we are doing everything we can to both eliminate the problems and continue to work with Microsoft to make sure these issues are minimized in the future.
At no time do we lose sight of the trust you place in us to manage your systems and we’re doing everything we can to deliver on our promise and our message. Thank you for your business!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, CEO, Own Web Now Corp.
Mail Server Upgrades Tonight
We wanted to give all our shared hosting customers a notice that mail servers at Own Web Now Corp will be undergoing and update tonight, Tuesday, November 28, 2006. The maintenance window is scheduled for 07:00 – 08:00 GMT. This translates to 2–3AM EST, 11PM-Midnight PST, 6–7PM Syndey, Australia. This maintenance window is scheduled to occur during the off peak hours where our network experiences the least amount of traffic. Having said all that you should not experience any outages or any downtime.
The upgrades:
- Brand new load balancing infrastructure
- Additional global replication servers for archiving
- Additional webmail options for mobile workers
- Optimization of the mobility components to allow Windows Mobile 5 users to recive similar Push Mail technology via our POP3 servers
- Upgrades to antivirus and antispam infrastructure
Two important notes: This maintenance window does not affect ExchangeDefender customers.You will not experience any downtime. Your users will not see any changes to the interfaces they are currently used to.
Update: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 – 2PM GMT – The upgrades to our hosted mail server network have been completed. No downtime our outages to report. Everything went a according to plan and performance is within expected parameters. We are continuing to monitor the changes and stand by to respond to any unforseen problems. So far there are none to report but if they are they will be announced on this blog.
ExchangeDefender eliminates Image SPAM
Spam wars tend to evolve over time. Initially, SPAM looked just like the offers you still find in your fax machine – direct, informative, actionable. You’re almost pushed to buy something with countless incentives, promotions and reinforcement of just what a great deal you’re getting. We eliminated a bulk of this years ago through use of Bayesian analysis, or text patterns, found in the SPAM messages. Notice how when you get a spam you can tell within seconds that it is garbage just by glancing at its formatting?
The second evolution of SPAM was when it became convenient to make a purchase. No longer were you sold and promoted to but just asked to click on a link and proceed to buy that latest watch or drug. We eliminated those easily through the use of URIBL, specific blacklists of URL (web site addresses) and additional HTML analysis.
The latest evolution of SPAM has been the most difficult to isolate by far. You’ve seen dozens of these in your inbox nearly every day: Image SPAM. The email is very easy to characterize, it has a big gif or jpeg image followed by paragraphs of garbage text. At first, there was just an image – which contained text that used to be a part of the SPAM you’ve been receiving for years. Except because it was stored in an image it bypassed all SPAM filters. Fine, we easily discarded messages that contained no text. Then spammers started adding text. No problem, we eliminated them by calculating the ratio of the screen being taken up by text vs. image. Think about how often you get an email message that starts with an image that takes up most of your screen? Easy solution. Following the natural evolution of the spam war, image spam became harder and harder to detect.
We have finally come up with a set of solutions that effectively eliminates nearly all known strains of Image SPAM:
- All inline JPG and GIF images are OCR’ed. By using optical character recognition we can convert the image into plain text and determine whether it is SPAM or not.
- Parsing JPG and GIF image info. Each picture has series of image attributes, such as the Camera maker, model, F-Stop, Max aperture and so on. Dynamically generated image spam does not.
- Finally, we have spent the past month developing an image footprint database.
Image footprint database is something exclusive to ExchangeDefender. We strip known SPAM messages from our honeypot (public email addresses that only exist to collect SPAM) and store the known images in spam into a database. We then run analysis on them and compare all new incoming messages against the known samples of SPAM.
OCRing images is very expensive in terms of processor cycles and as expensive as it is for us to analyze each incoming message it is even more expensive for the spammers to create these images for each SPAM they send out. They create a single SPAM message that is then broadcast millions of times – and we’re ready for it!
So thank you for your continuing support of ExchangeDefender and as always, we’ll keep your mailbox clean for you.
Own Web Now’s Ultimate Vista Launch
For well over a year we have been beta testing Microsoft’s next operating system – Microsoft Vista. At first we did not like what was on the table and we lost many computers scratching our head, wondering just what this new OS is going to do for us. Year later, we’re very excited about what is coming out and want to give you the opportunity to try out Vista and Office on your own turf.
Starting December 1, 2006 we start shipping 1000 PC’s with the latest release candidate of Microsoft Vista Ultimate Edition with Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh to our managed sites. Here is what’s coming:
Intel Pentium D 930 (Dual Core) 3.0 GHz LGA 755 Processor
2 GB DDR2 SDRAM Desktop Memory
2x 80 SATA II Western Digital Hard Drive
Storage Fault Tollerance (RAID 1 / Mirror)
NVIDIA GeForce 6200 128MB DDR Video Card
NVIDIA nForce 590 & Marvell Gigabit NIC
7.1 Surround Sound
USB, USB 2.0 & Firewire Connections
These workstations will be fully supported by Own Web Now Corp free of charge to give you an idea of what the new OS can do for your company. You will have them in your office for 6 months to try out your line of business applications, experience the productivity benefits of the new Office and Vista first hand and get the support from a team that has been running it for over a year.
The cost? Free. If you’re on our managed services plan, you’re getting one! Yes, really. There is no catch, no gotcha, no naming your first-born Vlad. As a part of our Vista launch we’re sending all our managed site clients a free PC for six months to experience Vista/Office combo because we know that once you try it, you’ll love it. Six months later the software will expire and we can talk about the best way to implement Vista, Longhorn and Office to work for your business.
Exporting Exchange SMTP Addresses
One of the most common Exchange questions we get is “How do I export all the SMTP addresses on my Exchange server?”
First of all, SMTP addresses are part of the User object in the Microsoft Active Directory. Active Directory is an LDAP-based database and by using LDIF (LDAP Data Interexchange Format) you can run queries against this database. You can use ldifde to accomplish this.
The following ldifde syntax will export the proxyaddress list for each user object in the directory on the server SERVERNAME.DOMAIN.TLD:
ldifde -f C:\DATA.ldf -s SERVERNAME -d “dc=DOMAIN,dc=TLD” -p subtree -r “(objectClass=user)” -l “cn,proxyaddresses”
The data is then dumped in C:\DATA.ldf. But suppose your server name was SBSBOX.MYDOMAIN.LOCAL. The syntax changes to:
ldifde -f C:\DATA.ldf -s sbsbox -d “dc=mydomain,dc=local” -p subtree -r “(objectClass=user)” -l “cn,proxyaddresses”
If you open it up with notepad you’ll see a number of entries in this file:
dn: CN=Administrator,CN=Users,DC=MYDOMAIN,DC=LOCAL
changetype: add
cn: Administrator
proxyAddresses: smtp:Administrator@MYDOMAIN.LOCAL
proxyAddresses: SMTP:Administrator@mydomain.com
proxyAddresses: smtp:postmaster@mydomain.com
proxyAddresses: X400:c=US;a= ;p=MYDOMAIN;o=Exchange;s=Administrator;
proxyAddresses: smtp:postmaster@MYDOMAIN.LOCAL
Nothing very private in here, just the display name and a few containers along with the proxyAddresses. Now another interesting bit – notice how there are both SMTP and smtp addresses here? What is the difference you may wonder? SMTP is the default SMTP address and smtp are the additional addresses and aliases.
The process is quick and convenient but unfortunately it does not export proxyAddress attributes from other objects such as distribution lists and public folders. For that you can use a third party script, such as this one that our friend emailed over. Simple vbScript that will create a list of users and addresses in C:\EmailAddresses.txt.
Pick your way but as you can tell, exporting SMTP addresses in Exchange is a piece of cake.
ExchangeDefender Starts Deployment of 3.0
We will begin deploying ExchangeDefender 3.0 over the next two months. Because ExchangeDefender is a large cloud-based network all updates are all-or-none so we will be deploying features one by one. We will be announcing them here on our blog so please stay tuned.
The first significant change to come is the end to open relaying:
Starting November 1st, 2006 we will no longer blindly relay domains through ExchangeDefender for our customers. The following email address requirements will be established for the new accounts:
- All users and valid email addresses must be provided at the time of account activation. By default ExchangeDefender will block traffic to addresses it is not aware of.
- All users will be programmed into the Valid Recipients database, either by the customer, reseller or ExchangeDefender staff (through the LDF file)
- All users that activate their accounts will automatically be allowed through the ExchangeDefender cloud, there is no need for double entry on the administrative side.
All current customers will have until December 1st, 2006 to provide a list of valid recipients or establish a protocol for address verification. We will of course be available to assist you with any administrative tasks that may be required to get the data exported correctly.
Reasons for Address Restrictions
ExchangeDefender has always applied address restrictions but until now it was an optional feature. Unfortunately over the past year address book attacks and mail probes have made open addressing impossible to facilitate. Many major ISP’s (Own Web Now Corp included) have stopped allowing “catch-all” addresses. Furthermore, many sites have even stopped issuing NDR’s (Non-Delivery Receipt) alltogether.
In the modern world of email threats, NDR’s can and are often used to flood the third party mailbox with SPAM. All servers are configured by default to send an NDR if there is a problem with delivery. Spammers can identify mail servers that openly issue NDR’s and can forge the From: address that the message is being sent from. When the target SMTP server rejects the message by issuing an NDR the message is sent back to the forged From: email address.
The result? Flooded mailbox. Quota Warnings. Diminished effectiveness of spam filtering. Increased overall load on the mail server. To protect our customers from all of these we’ll begin enforcing address validations through ExchangeDefender.
Any questions? Let us know – support@ownwebnow.com
OWN Blog: First Post
Welcome to the very first post of the Own Web Now Blog. My name is Vlad Mazek and I am the CEO of Own Web Now Corp. If you are our customer you have met or at least spoken to me.
Over the past two years I have been sharing insights into how OWN does business, what we do, what our culture is like, how we work on problems. Some of these posts were quite personal and were meant to give outsiders an idea on what it’s like to run a global company. Lately, we have seen and heard a need for a central place for us to communicate with you – our customer and partner – on what we’re doing.
So again, welcome to the OWN Blog. This is the area where my staff and I will be posting frequent updates about what we’re working on. Sometimes we will have announcements, sometimes we will have alerts, promotions, specials. On a more technical and business side we will talk about our core – technology behind advanced network infrastructure, SMB networks, hosting, virtualization, ExchangeDefender, spam defense, security issues, Shockey Monkey and more.
So welcome to the Own Web Now Blog. Please click on the link below to add us to your RSS reader and keep up with us. We look forward to working with you and as always, we thank you for your business:
http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog/feed/rss2
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE, Exchange MVP
CEO, Own Web Now Corp