System Status

MAIL PATHFINDER CUSTOMERS PLEASE READ
All customers who have firewalled off their mailservers to Mail Pathfinders' servers need to add the following hostnames/IPs to their allow lists as soon as possible. We will be adding these servers to the Mail Pathfinder pool soon to increase capacity.

wa140-pf1.mx.dnspark.net 67.228.192.140
wa141-pf1.mx.dnspark.net 67.228.192.141

We are currently working to resolve mail delays through Mail Pathfinder.

Our engineers are actively monitoring the mail queues and taking specific action where appropriate to remove bottlenecks.

Additionally, we will be adding capacity to the Mail Pathfinder system to prevent further delays from occurring. We will update you via an Announcement, the Status Page, and an email of the new hostnames/IPs.

Last night we introduced a major upgrade to our back-end systems that will result in quicker updates to our nameservers, more reliable dynamic updates and also set the stage for several new features that will be released in the future.
There were some minor issues to deal with resulting from the upgrade, but they have been resolved now and all systems are functioning as expected.

We're currently experiencing some issues from a network upgrade last night that are randomly affecting some domains on some of our nameservers. Our staff is working to resolve the situation as soon as possible. We will post back here when we have more information.

Yesterday, we identified an issue with one of our Mail Pathfinder servers and removed it from the server pool while our staff investigated and corrected the issue. That issue has been addressed and the server is back in the production pool, bringing Mail Pathfinder back to full capacity.

Service to dnspark.net has been restored. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience.

Our engineers are currently working on an issue with dnspark.net, so accessibility may be intermittent while we get it resolved. We regret this inconvenience and are working to restore functionality as quickly as possible.

All systems are functioning normally. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please open a Support Ticket if you experience any issues specific to your account or domains.

We are continuing to work on resolving some issues related to last night's maintenance window. If you are having problems updating records in your zone, please check back here periodically for updates. We apologize for any inconvenience.

We will be performing some maintenance that will require us to set the system in a read-only mode. You will be able to view your records, but not modify them. The maintenance should take approximately one hour to complete.

UPDATE: Maintenance was completed at 20:00 and changes can be made to your records again.

If you use OpenDNS for your recursive DNS needs, the new DNS-O-Matic has just been released to help you dynamically update your information at one location. By using one of many software solutions (https://www.dnsomatic.com/wiki/software) you simply make one update to the DNS-O-Matic and it will update your dynamic DNS hosts here at DNS Park. In your OpenDNS settings make sure you specify your dynamic DNS username and password and not your normal login information. We hope you find this a useful addition just as the OpenDNS folks do.

ns1.dnspark.net is back online. We are working with the datacenter staff to determine the cause of the network outage and reduce the probability of it occurring again. Thanks for your patience.

At approximately 7:52EDT, ns1.dnspark.net became unavailable. Our monitoring systems detected the event immediately and alarmed. We are working with our datacenter staff to restore connectivity as soon as possible. All testing indicates the server itself is online, but there is a network routing problem preventing the public internet from reaching the server.

Several new changes have gone into the control center. The largest of which is a revamped shopping cart. Many other small changes have been put in as well fixing various bugs or improving application security. Please contact support if you have any trouble.

Additional changes are on the horizon including many new resource record types that have been requested. Stay tuned.

NS3 has been restored and is currently advertising. We will be monitoring the server closely for the next 24-48 hours to ensure it is running optimally.

ns3.dnspark.net is currently unavailable and our Support Staff is working with the datacenter to determine the nature of the issue and to bring the server back online as soon as possible

We will post back when we have more information.

Our Merchant Gateway is back online and credit card orders can be processed without issue.

The Merchant Provider that DNS Park uses for credit card transactions is currently experiencing a network outage.

We are unable to process credit card purchases due to this outage and are working with our provider to restore the service as soon as possible.

Please open a Support Ticket if this outage inhibits you from renewing expiring services. Otherwise, we will update this announcement when the problem is resolved and you can proceed with purchases then.

ns2.dnspark.net is back online with new hardware.

ns2.dnspark.net is down temporarily due to a hardware failure. The system is being rebuilt and should be available shortly.

The scheduled upgrades for ns2.dnspark.net and ns4.dnspark.net are complete. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

As a reminder:
The old ns2.dnspark.net will be taken offline July 20, 2007.
The old ns4.dnspark.net will be taken offline July 27, 2007.

NOTICE:If you have not been receiving this information via email, please ensure your spam filters are allowing messages from @dnspark.com. This is simply a recap of messages previously sent.

ns2.dnspark.net upgrades and ns4.dnspark.net upgrades

ns2.dnspark.net and ns4.dnspark.net are in the process of being upgrade.
As part of the upgrades in network infrastructure and system hardware
we are changing IP addresses for these hosts. Most customers will not be
affected in any way by these changes. The changes will happen seamlessly
without service interruption.

The new servers are online and ready to answer queries. These systems
have an identical configurations to the current systems with the
exception of IP addressing.

Customers with secondary nameservers that perform zone transfers from
ns2.dnspark.net should note the new IP address. The new IP address of
ns2.dnspark.net is 83.170.90.100. Please update your configuration to
reflect the new IP address.

Customers with secondary nameservers that perform zone transfers from
ns4.dnspark.net should note the new IP address. The new IP address of
ns4.dnspark.net is 209.160.66.110. Please update your configuration to
reflect the new IP address.

DNS Rescue customers will need to update configuration if you have
IP based access controls setup for zone transfers, or have firewall rules
setup to restrict zone transfers from a limited number of addresses. Zone
zone transfers will take place from 83.170.89.43 and 209.160.65.32. Please
add these addresses to your ACLs and firewall rules where appropriate.
If you rely on TSIG security to restrict zone transfers you should not need
to make any changes.

Customers with branded DNS hosting services that are paid and up to date,
please contact us for new IP address assignments. You will be required to
update your host records for the branded nameserver IP and update your
domain registrars information. Please contact us soon.

All customers should have any configurations updated no later than July 6, 2007.

The official cut-over time for ns2.dnspark.net is
July 6, 2007 11:00pm-02:00am CDT (GMT-5).
The current ns2.dnspark.net will be taken offline July 20, 2007.

The official cut-over time for ns4.dnspark.net is
July 13, 2007 11:00pm-02:00am CDT (GMT-5).
The current ns4.dnspark.net will be taken offline July 27, 2007.

All Mail Pathfinder services have returned to normal.

One of our Mail Pathfinder servers was causing delays in mail delivery, but we have identified the problem and removed that server from production until it is resolved.

Power has been restored to the system and it is fully operational again.

At approximately 15:00, ns1.dnspark.net became unavailable. Our monitoring systems detected the event immediately and alarmed. We have been working with the Datacenter staff to determine the source of the problem. The server itself is functioning, but we've been told there was a massive hail storm that took out a portion of the power to the Datacenter, and apparently the back-up power systems have failed as well. They are working to restore power and connectivity. We don't believe Datacenters should have power problems, so rest assured, when the problem is resolved we will be escalating this issue as far as we need to in order to ensure this does not happen again.

As of approximately 04:30 CDT (09:30 GMT) services were restored for ns4.dnspark.net. All services are fully operational at this time. Thank you for your patience as we work to further improve our response capabilities to these types of attacks.

We have been working internally and with our upstream providers to mitigate the DDoS attack we've been experiencing. Throughout the day, we've taken various steps and at this time connectivity has been restored to NS1, NS2, NS3, & NS5. We are working with the datacenter that NS4 is located in to bring that back as soon as possible.

Additionally, we've already begun reviews internally to determine actions we need to take to minimize the probability of an event like this occurring in the future. Our discussions have ranged from increased reliability from our providers, to internal policies, to more effective communications with you, our customer, during events like this.

Please continue to check this page for current status updates.

Earlier this morning, our remaining servers came under attack as well, in addition to new IPs we began routing through yesterday. Our staff is continuing work with our own systems and our upstream providers to get all systems back online as soon as absolutely possible. NS5 is currently responding to queries and we expect to have NS3 & NS1 online soon. Rest assured, we are doing everything we can to keep your zones available.

The Good: ns3.dnspark.net is fully operational.

The Bad: ns2.dnspark.net and ns5.dnspark.net are still degraded by the ongoing attack.

The Ugly: A new DDoS attack has begun on the web guiding service. Our systems saw some slight delays initially, but are fully operational now that we've engaged all of our anti-ddos hardware against the attack. When it rains, it pours.

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is still in progress. We have rerouted traffic for each of the nameservers to backup locations to resume service while the attack continues. There may be some continued delays for the next few hours, but services should be operational.

At this time we are the victim of a distributed denial of service attack. ns2.dnspark.net, ns3.dnspark.net, and ns5.dnspark.net are being targeted. If you are experiencing problems and your domain is on one or more of these nameservers, please open a ticket and we will work with you to get your domain back online as quickly as we can. To help use serve you most efficiently, please include the specific domain(s) the ticket pertains to.

www.dnspark.net was unavailable for a period early this morning due disk problems on the shared storage device. The problems were cleared up and everything is back online.

One of our Web Guiding servers has become a target of a DoS attack. We are in the process of rerouting all Web Guiding customers to another of our Web Guiding servers.

In response to customer feedback and after going through an internal audit for security weaknesses, we have taken multiple steps to better secure our system from outside attacks.

As a result, we will no longer allow your login user to control dynamic DNS updates. All users wanting to dynamically update hosts must create one or more new dynamic DNS user(s). Dynamic updates will fail until you have created at least one dynamic DNS user in your account. You can create new DDNS users from directly in your account at https://www.dnspark.net/dynamicusers.php

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but we strongly believe this will further strengthen the security of your account to prevent unauthorized access and provide you with additional flexibility to use multiple usernames and passwords for dynamic DNS update clients.

We already utilize multiple anti-ddos hardware technologies upstream at several facilities to help us mitigate these types of attacks and we were not able to stop the most recent attacks effectively. Our upstream providers could only provide limited filtering due to the distributed nature of the attacks. All of the facilities we co-locate equipment in and/or lease equipment from are fully gigabit connected and bandwidth is generally not the bottleneck but rather the rate at which our servers can process the information.

We are looking at other technologies to further globally distribute our systems to limit any failures to geographic locales while allowing other areas to remain fully operational. Additionally we are reviewing our existing hardware capacity to determine if we can handle loads many times our normal operating loads.

In the short term we have updated all those affected to utilize all 5 of our nameservers. The attacks were centered around only 3 of the 5 this time around. Our customers using the two unaffected nameservers saw a slight degredation in performance but not a complete outage. By adding the additional nameservers to all of our customers we should be able to provide a better footprint of servers for everyone while we add additional technologies on the backend in preparation for future attacks.

If you are an existing customer and wish to have your domain listed on all of our nameservers, please contact support and we can get the remaining nameservers added.

Please let us know if you have any questions and we'll be glad to answer them for you.

ns1.dnspark.net is back online though still under attack. We have noticed some delays in response but we expect to have that cleared up shortly.

ns3.dnspark.net is back online and fully operational. We are still working on ns1.dnspark.net to resolve the final issues.

As an update, we have been continually working with our providers to contain the distributed denial of service attack. The ongoing attack is extremely large and from thousands of sources. ns1.dnspark.net and ns3.dnspark.net are still affected by the attack. If you are experiencing any delays, please feel free to contact us and we will be glad to help. Please include the specific domain(s) the problem pertains to so we can efficiently help each of you.

As of 15:42 CDT the attack has ceased against ns5.dnspark.net. We are still working to restore service to ns1.dnspark.net and ns3.dnspark.net.

At this time we are the victim of a distributed denial of service attack. ns1.dnspark.net, ns3.dnspark.net, and ns5.dnspark.net are being targeted. If you are experiencing problems and your domain is on one or more of these nameservers, please open a ticket and we will work with you to get your domain back online as quickly as we can. To help use serve you most efficiently, please include the specific domain(s) the ticket pertains to.

We are currently experiencing delivery delays for Mail Pathfinder and Mail Guiding. We are aware of the problem and actively working to resolve it.

All DNS services are fully operational at this time.

We have mitigated the initial attack and services have been restored at this point. We are still working with one facility to restore ns2 to full capacity.

We are currently experiencing a severe degredation of services due to a denial of service attack. We are working to restore services as quickly as possible.

We are currently experiencing problems with our credit card processor. We are working to resolve the problem and hope to have everything back online shortly.

The failed hardware is being replaced and services should be coming back
online by 11:30 CST (GMT -5). The Web Guiding and Web Camping services
will be the first services brought up and tested, followed by the DNS
Park websites.

We thank you for your patience. We are already working to reschedule
hardware and infrastructure upgrades planned later for this year to
ensure this doesn't happen again in the future.

If you have any questions you can contact us at parkrangers@dnspark.com.
We will get to each request as quickly as possible. Additional
notifications will be sent out as services are brought back online.

February 7, 2006 03:30 CST

An unexpected hardware failure in one of our firewalls has caused all
web services to become unavailable. We are actively working on restoring
services and should have a solution in place within the next few hours.
During this time Web Guiding, Web Camping, Dynamic DNS Updates, and the
DNS Park websites will be unavailable.

Earlier there were delays in mail delivery initially caused by the
firewall failures, but those delays have been remedied and mail services
are passing mail at normal rates.

Since our online support ticket system is unavailable, please contact us
at parkrangers@dnspark.com if you have questions. We will get to each
request as quickly as possible. Notifications will be sent out as
services are restored.

Over the next several weeks we will be upgrading multiple areas of the web-based control center to resolve several bugs and enhance the ease of management. The control center may be unavailable at times during our maintenance windows to in order to perform the upgrades. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us via the support system. Thank you for your patience as we make these improvements.

At this time our credit card merchant is having problems and causing purchases to fail with an 'unknown database error'. If you are having trouble purchasing services you may use PayPal or you may contact us at billing@dnspark.com and we can issue and invoice for the services that can be paid later.

We hope everyone had a blessed Christmas and New Year with their families. We look forward to another great year.

The DNS Park Team

Our credit card merchant is currently having problems with their system and credit card purchases are not working at this time. We are working to see the problem resolved as quickly as we can.

We are being forced to change the IP address of ns1.dnspark.net and ns1.dnspark.com since our service provider is reallocating addresses. Effective October 31st ns1 will only answer to the new IP address. The new addresses are as follows:



ns1.dnspark.net - 64.34.197.141

ns1.dnspark.com - 64.34.209.236



All DNS Rescue customers should ensure that we can continue to perform zone transfers from their master if they are using IP based restrictions.

DNS Park is in the process of moving some of our support staff out of our Houston, Texas area. We do not expect any delays in getting to support requests, but there may be some delays since part of our staff are in transit to other areas and others ready themselves for the approaching hurricane Rita. Thank you for your support. We will keep your critical services running throughout the storms in our area. We do not expect any service interruptions in any of our data centers.