The DB1 server is back up and running. The new HDD is setup and everything appears to be running smooth again. Again we apologize for the downtime as upgrades were needed.
DB1 Is back up
Scheduled Maintenance
We were waiting to hear back on the best maintenance window to upgrade the hard drive on one of our database servers. But today it crashed due to insufficient space. We have scheduled a hard drive upgrade for 6/23/2014 between 10pm-2am PST. All clients tied to that database have been given a 1 day credit (well more than 1 day’s worth) to their account.
There will also be a slight downtime early in the morning of 6/24/2014 to setup the new hard drive for the database server. Overall total expected downtime is 3 hours max, including the downtime between 10pm-2am tonight.
Various Updates
CLDMV has opened a Development portion to our business. With this clients or anyone for that matter can contact us for web development. We are also partnered with 1stwebstudio for design projects. So all that’s left is to offer is domains, SSLs, SEO. While we do provide domains and SSLs already there is no automation in this process.
Also CLDMV has opened a Twitter and Tumblr account for people who wish to follow updates and posts through those forms of media. The blog site has also had some minor changes in design related to social networking.
Moving forward we excited to be able to provide most web related services to existing and new clients. We are still looking for a reliable and friendly service for SEO.
DKIM Signing and Mail filtering
Spam is always a concern when you have email. We have successfully integrated DKIM signing to our email system. As it can break mail delivery this is not done automatically. DNS records need to be in place for it to work properly. Thus if you’re hosted at CLDMV please contact us in order to help you with the process of setting up DKIM.
Next upgrade we have put in place is our own custom mail filter. Right now there isn’t much to it but injecting a header into emails to show it working. But soon there will be SMTP Relay limits (used to prevent compromised emails from flooding emails outbound), Custom spam filtering though DB rules, and probably some other things which I’m not thinking of currently.
The two main issues we had with putting our own Filter in place was the ability to maintain our Anti-Virus and Spam systems that were already in place while also being able to provide a second content filter. After many hours and tons of caffeine we were able to produce a system which kept our current system intact while adding the secondary system on top of it. As always Security in this manner was a great concern. Especially considering we would be handling external content. Several limitations are at play in current mail systems which caused us to create innovate techniques in order to send emails to our own system securely. We even attempted to hack our own mail server through emails and were unsuccessful.
New feature for JS and CSS
Any website hosted with CLDMV can now automatically serve up concatenated JS and CSS files. For example:
http://cdn.cldmv.net/cldmv/min/cldmv/jquery/?base64.js,decode.js
The above URL is two separate files put together and minified as well. Now lets go over the portions of the URL:
The prefix of the URL (this is required in order to get the script to work.
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1 2 3 |
http://cdn.cldmv.net/cldmv/min/ |
The directory:
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1 2 3 |
cldmv/jquery/ |
Then the marker to indicate the files you want to serve (this is required and never changes):
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1 2 3 |
? |
Then finally the files you want to serve under the above directory:
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1 2 3 |
base64.js,decode.js |
Each file is separated by a comma.
Normally to get both of these scripts to run you would include the follow urls:
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1 2 3 4 |
http://cdn.cldmv.net/cldmv/jquery/base64.js http://cdn.cldmv.net/cldmv/jquery/decode.js |
Instead you can now just include:
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1 2 3 |
http://cdn.cldmv.net/cldmv/min/cldmv/jquery/?base64.js,decode.js |
Update: Since Chrome has an issue with double question marks I’ve reduced the code to only require a single question mark.
Server Updates along with Security Updates
As always security is a main concern in our network. We have updated a couple services already and are in the process of updating a few more services currently.
First we have updated NGINX (our webserver) with a few additional modules which will allow us to do a few more optimizations.
We have also increased the SSL security levels. There are some downsides to this. However we believe the upsides outway the downsides.
Cons:
- Support for IE6 on XP SSL connections have been removed completely.
- Support for Java6 SSL connections have been removed completely.
- Support for YandexBot 3.0 SSL connections have been removed completely.
Note: The above were already not supported as none of them support SNI (Server Name Indication). SNI is how SSL connections are defined by domain names rather than IPs. Since our network serve SSL connections based upon Domain names primarily and IPs secondary. Thus the support for the above methods of viewing a SSL site were spotty at best.
Pros:
- SSL Security score went from 90% to 96.25%, a 6.25% increase.
- Encryption Speed has been increased.
- SSL connections now have a subsidiary encryption which helps even more against MITM attacks.
- Possible BEAST exploit has been removed completely.
- Possible Lucky Thirteen exploit has been removed completely.
- Possible CRIME exploit has been removed completely.
Note: Above exploits above were possible due to Encryption methods which were available in the server to support the above methods of a SSL connection. With these removed the possible exploits are removed as well.
Current Status of Control Panel, security updates, and server updates
First lets start with a screen shot of the dashboard in progress for the control panel.
Unfortunately Data prior to the 28th of May 2014 is a bit skewed. But as you can see we have plenty of navigation so consumers never get lost. We also show are currently showing all site traffic for all sites hosted under a specific user. Though with some crashes here and there we might put these charts on their own separate page per domain but still give the user the ability to view an all domain report as it’s setup right now (at their own risk).
Currently the theming for the charts is still to be completed. But we have the ability to show and hide specific points of data if we want, select a range of the data from the range bar below. And most importantly reset it all to dive into more data.
Updates outside of the control panel:
A lot of reforming to the back-end has happened in preparation of the control panel.
Security is always a concern when dealing with the online world. We have adjusted some security features. The control panel (unlike commercial panels today) will not actually be able to modify anything within the network per-say. What I mean by that is every command done through the control panel will actually hit a sub-system which allows or disallows access at that level. Which then hits the root system which can only run specific commands pre-written into the system. So unlike most control panels today where the code is on the forefront of the system, CLDMV’s back-end is segregated to many systems to prevent hacking. While data can be retrieved from the control panel anything which has to change the system will always be done through our set of sub-systems to insure stability and security.
Also it’s important to note there was a brief downtime of FTP log in and email receiving on 2014/05/31 at approx 5pm PST to 5:30pm PST. This was due to a mass restructuring of the back-end in order to support the new changes to come.
