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CalHost - Scheduled Maintenance Window
| Posted by AQORN-Adam, 03-16-2005, 01:38 AM | |
The following email was sent to all CalHost Customers:
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Hello Valued CalHost Customer,
Tonight we will be undergoing a substantial firewall upgrade.
Prior to our recent server relocation, we utilized, amongst other things, Cisco firewalls to protect customer machines from external/internal attacks. After the move, we kept it in place but this afternoon we realized there is a Windows security hole being exploited that allows Windows 2003 servers to become infected with a worm and subsequently try to propagate that worm to the rest of the network. After researching we narrowed down the offending ports and traffic behaviour, but our existing firewall solution is not equipped with the capabilities to resolve the issue. All part of our recent growth spurt I suppose. So we are now replacing that unit with a larger more robust device with all the resources needed to do the job.
Normally we would provide more advance notice but the exploit is sending out so much TCP traffic, it is literally saturating the switch CPU resources at our distribution layer (even though the switch CPU only handles the packet header then transfers the rest to the harwdare layer). Because the CPU power is finite, the traffic it DOES see is creating a kind bottleneck because the switch cannot process the traffic fast enough. Because we cannot allow this slowdown to just get worse and worse making everyone's hosting experiences slower and slower, we made the decision to install the new firewall tonight at 12:01am PST.
So, at 12:01am-12:20am PST 3/16/2005 (right after midnight tonight), you will experience some minor connectivity issues. These issues are expected to be both brief and sporadic. If we cannot resolve the issue by or before 12:30am, we will take steps to roll back the changes and try again at a later time. There is the faint possibility that if we get very very close to operational at the 12:30 mark, we may take the upgrade through completion which would add about 10-15 minutes to the process. Again, connectivity will be sporadic during this time.
After the firewall is in place, connectivity will be fully restored and you should immediately notice an increase in network speed since the network will then have far less burden to bear with the release of all the excess TCP traffic consuming the switch resources.
If you have any questions about this upcoming upgrade, please contact us ASAP so so we can address your concerns.
Thanks in advance for allowing us to improve your overall hosting experience.
Sincerely,
CalHost Support Dept.
support@calhost.com
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