We’ve made some changes to the login system for the Account Manager that are now live on our production Account Manager.  I’d like to outline what those changes are and the reasons we made them.

What the changes are

• The next time you log in to the Account Manager (or go to the Account Manager if you had your account set to “Remember Me”), you will be prompted to migrate your password.
• During this migration you will be prompted to enter your current password, followed by a new password two times.
• You will also be prompted to enter a Security Question and a Security Question Answer.  The question is a freeform text field that you can put whatever question or other information you like.  This “question” will be given to you as a prompt during the “Forgot Password” procedure.  The answer is the data you will be prompted to enter as the answer to your question.

Why we are making these changes

There are a number of reasons why these changes are being put into place.  First of all, we are using a new method of storing user passwords that provides additional security and utilizes a different hashing mechanism than we used before.  Some additional reasons for this change are:

• We are consolidating user records in our system.  When this process is complete, customer admin accounts and end user accounts will be consolidated into one system to allow for consistency across our systems.
• We will be adding in functionality to allow customers to designate additional administrators.  These additional administrator accounts can be set up as full-fledged account administrators or can be given access to various areas of the Account Manager, including fine grain control down to the server and/or domain level.
• We will be consolidating the quarantine system into the Account Manager, making one place where users log in to see their quarantine and manage their account.  Since we released custom branding options for our customers, the need for a separate quarantine site that is under a different brand has diminished.

At this time, the only changes that have been made have been to migrate existing customer admin accounts to the new user system and add the additional security measures surrounding logins to the site.  As we release additional changes we will post about them here on the blog.

Please comment here or contact support@purity.net if you have any questions or issues with the new system.

First, my apologies for the issues that we’re having and the confusion surrounding it.  We’ve isolated the issue and have taken steps to resolve it.  In this blog post I’m going to explain what happened and what we did to fix the issue.

What Happened

A few weeks ago we decided to bring our DNS services in house after having them hosted by a third party for the last year.  We configured our zones in our new DNS servers and did testing against them.  Everything was working properly, so we switched our DNS servers with our domain registrar.  Our old DNS hosting was still up and running at this point.  Unfortunately, when our account period with our old DNS host expired they changed the IP addresses on our record to one of their internal IP addresses.  I believe it’s their way of disabling an account.  Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, as we had changed our DNS servers well before that to point to our own DNS servers.

Unfortunately, we had an issue with our DNS servers that we didn’t notice during the changeover.  The serial number on the records on our DNS server was lower than the ones on our old DNS hosts records.  This caused some DNS servers to continue to look to our old DNS provider for records, thinking that our new servers had out of date information.  When our old DNS provider changed the IP addresses to disable the account, some mail senders picked up that change.

What We Did To Fix It

We have updated the serial numbers on all of our domains to be newer than the serial number on our old provider’s DNS servers.  This will allow DNS servers to pick up the proper, current records from our DNS servers and see them as valid.  I’m not sure exactly how long this will take for DNS servers that have cached incorrect information, so if you are still seeing issues with senders having trouble getting the correct DNS information for our gateways you’ll need to have them force a DNS cache update to get the newest information.  Feel free to point people to this blog post for an explanation of what happened.

We will be issuing all customers a 10% credit to their account based on the services they have with us.  For example, if you have a DomainProtect account at $6.95 per month, you’ll receive a 70 cent credit.  If you have a ServerProtect account at $39.95 per month, you’ll receive a $4.00 credit.  You should see the credit on your account in the next couple of days.

Once again, I’d like to apologize for this oversight on our part and assure you that we’ve learned from this situation should we need to transition DNS services again.

We moved our DNS servers several weeks ago, but apparently one of the OpenDNS servers had the wrong information cached. This was rectified a couple of days ago, which is why we are seeing these problems today.  Now, there are several senders that still have bad DNS information cached.  If you are not receiving messages from some senders, be sure to notify them that they need to update their DNS cache.

Here is how the sender can find out if their cache is bad:

The sender’s system administrator needs to do a lookup on their mail server to see what IP address they’re getting for our gateway. Additionally, it would be helpful if they could get us the nameserver records they’re seeing for ijnet.net as well.

Examples:

On windows:

nslookup -type=a g1.ijnet.net
nslookup -type=ns ijnet.net

On linux:

dig g1.ijnet.net a
dig ijnet.net ns

Our correct IP’s are:

MF1 – 216.246.89.41

MF2 – 216.246.89.42

G1 – 216.246.89.40

G2 – 216.246.89.37

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us at support@purity.net.

Thank you for choosing Purity Networks.

Our G1 gateway has completed database maintenance, and normal mail flow has resumed.

Our G1 gateway began experiencing issues sometime around 8:00 am CST today.  We did not become aware of the issue until 10:30 this morning, and once we knew there was a problem we began taking the necessary steps to fix it.   Apparently there was a database error in the gateway that began causing all mail to be put into an unscanned queue and not processed.  The gateway is currently undergoing database maintenance, and should be back up and running within the hour.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused, and we thank you for choosing Purity Networks.

Just a quick note to remind everyone that today is the last day for the extended Early Bird discount for HostingCon 2009.  To get the Early Bird discount as well as additional discounts from our special code, see this post for information on how to register.  We hope to see you there!