rackAID's sales and case-based support office will close at 5PM ET 30 Dec 2016.   We will re-open at 9AM ET on 2 Jan 2017.

For customers with management plans or management servers, we will have support in accordance with your server agreement.   This includes the standard monitoring, updates, backups and support services.   Sales or low priority inquires received after 30 Dec may not be handled until 2 Jan 2017.

If you have an issue cause a severe or critical impact to your operations, please open an urgent or critical ticket.  We are staffed 24/7/365 and will respond promptly as we always do.

Happy New Year from rackAID.  

rackAID's sales and case-based support office will close at 5PM ET 22 Dec 2016.   We will re-open at 9AM ET on 27 Dec 2016. 

For customers with management plans or management servers, we will have support in accordance with your server agreement.   This includes the standard monitoring, updates, backups and support services.   Sales or low priority inquires received after 23 Dec may not be handled until 27 Dec.    

If you have an issue cause a severe or critical impact to your operations, please open an urgent or critical ticket.  We are staffed 24/7/365 and will respond promptly as we always do.

Happy Holidays from rackAID

Celebrating our 10th year in business. 

Happy Thanksgiving

Our office will be closed Wed. Nov 23 through Sunday Nov 27.    During this period, our sales and billing offices will be closed.  We will not be accepting any case based support work.

For customers with managed hosting or server management, operations will continue as normal. 

We will be staffed 24/7 throughout this period but response times for non-critical/urgent issues may be longer than usual.   Non-service impacting questions may not be answered until Monday, Nov 28.

Dirty Cow (CVE-2016-5195)

If you use rackAID's management services or managed hosting, relax.  We fixed this already.   

Exploit Details

Dirty Cow is a kernel level exploit that can allow a local user possible gain access to the memory mappings of another program.  With this access, the could potentially escalate their access.    Security researchers have found this exploit in the wild via HTTP packet captures.

This is an exploit in the Linux kernel software.   This is the core of the server's OS.   Typically, you have to install a patch and reboot the server.

The Fix 

Fortunately, we use KSplice to manage all of our servers.   This allows slipstream the patch without a reboot.   In fact, the Ksplice guys (part of Oracle) pushed out the fix shortly after it was released.

For more info, I recommend you check out the web site setup by the researchers: 

https://dirtycow.ninja/

Note that any device, phone or computer running Linux is likely impacted.   Be sure to watch out for updates to your phones, internet devices and any system that runs Linux. 

ISSUE:  Dyn DNS Service Provider has DOS Attack

We are seeing widespread DNS issues with some major internet services and sites.  This may be related to a DNS attack at Dyn DNS which handles DNS for many companies.

DNS is critical to both email and web application performance.   If your server cannot find a DNS address, the system may perform poorly while the DNS request reaches the timeout. 

There is nothing you can do about 3rd party DNS issues. 

If your own operations are on Dyn, then your sites and email may be directly impacted.   We recommend you contact Dyn for more information.

We have seen impacts on:

Github

Charter Customers

Twitter

Dyn Customers

Basically any application using Dyn or linking their applications to a site that uses Dyn could see potential impacts. 

Reference: https://www.dynstatus.com/incidents/nlr4yrr162t8

rackAID's sales, case-based support, and billing departments will be closed Monday 5 September for the holiday.

Customers with managed services or managed servers will continue to receive 24/7 support during this period.

Sales, case-based support, and billing departments will reopen Tuesday, 09/06.

If you are a management client and need assistance, just open a ticket in our helpdesk - as always we are staffed 24/7 to handle urgent issues.