Orbis Lumen Illuminating Your Interconnections

Servers were down for a good part of the evening after midnight last night until noon this morning as a result of complications encountered with data on the logical volumes of the primary raid arrays during upgrade.

The arrays have been successfully rebuilt without any data loss. I'm sorry for the terribly long downtime.

The IP addresses of tertiary DNS and backup mail routing servers will be changing. These changes must be reflected in customer domain registrations and server definitions to ensure that these backup services remain in effect for customers.

Where Orbis Lumen provides direct IT support, these changes will be made for you without any intervention on your organization's part.

Customers will be contacted with details of the changes needed, specific to their situation.

The GNU project, the origin of the Free Software movement, has turned 25 years old today. For a brief insight into the history and ramifications of this movement, check out http://orbum.net/mark/2008/09/18/freedom-is-free/

We all owe a great deal to these people.

Users may experience brief and intermittent service outages beginning at 01:00 Friday Aug 22 as servers are updated.

The upgrades should not take more than 30 minutes to complete.

All Orb Debian servers will be updated to the latest revision of Debian today. Very brief service outages of one form or another might be noticed during this upgrade process.

Our main servers will be upgraded with security fixes to the kernels this morning. Brief partial outages may be noticed.

Customer systems will be upgraded overnight Wednesday 11 June.

A power outage caused a short interruption in service in the early evening of June 9. We were running on backup generators until power was restored early in the morning 10 June.

Customers running Debian servers or their derivatives are vulnerable to a security flaw in Debian's implementation of the OpenSSL cryptographic subsystem.

We will be providing immediate updates and fixes to customer systems at no charge to address these vulnerabilities.

If Orbis Lumen manages your systems, these updates will occur without your intervention. Otherwise, please contact us to receive your fixes.

Due to the insane amount of spam being generated lately, and the fact that many spammers choose to relay through backup MX servers instead of primary mail servers directly, all Orb backup MX servers are now consulting real-time blackhole lists to deny email relaying from known or suspected spam relays.

Please contact us if you would prefer your backup mail handling bypassing blackhole lists.

Customers using Orbis Lumen servers for tertiary MX or DNS servers should be aware that we have just rebuilt the server.