Tag Archives: server

S1 Server Upgrade

S1 server will be undergoing an upgrade between 11pm PST 2014-12-09 and 4AM PST 2014-12-10.

The upgrade will help support the growing backup space available.

Server Upgrades complete

Both MX1 and S1 Servers are back up with their new HDDs.

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.

Updates to Web Server

There was a bug affecting a few clients where they could not delete files in the root of their html folders. This has been fixed. I also have a process running every day now to ensure this doesn’t happen again. The following files will server up a default file if they are not found in the html root folder:

  • robots.txt
  • favicon.ico
  • favicon.png

The default robots.txt only had one rule which is to tell all bots to limit their crawl rate to 1 page per second. Any client can place their own custom robots.txt or favicon.ico in their html root and that file will be served up instead. Some additional cleanup and security was done to the FTP service. Namely when you log into the FTP, clients will only see folders which you can actually do stuff in now. Some of which are just backup or log folders which clients can only (most of them) download the files.

Server Upgrade

Server (s1) is scheduled to have another SSD hard drive added to it on:

5.4.2014 (Sun) 01:00 (GMT-0500) – 04:00 (GMT-0500)

Shouldn’t be any downtime as it’s simply a hard drive however there may be some downtime between 10pm PST and 1am PST.