Tue Mar 12 11:34:14 PST 2002 — Sundry Upgrades: We have been working hard on a series of key upgrades to improve the performance of our network and servers over the past few months. Due to our use of server load balancing, none of these upgrades caused any interruption of services to our customers.
We are in the process of replacing our slower mail servers with dual 1Ghz PIII’s and have already replaced two of the six, and have plans to upgrade two more shortly. The new servers are many times faster than the old ones, and can handle more intensive and intelligent spam and anti-virus filtering as well as providing better responsiveness to our customers while sending and receiving mail.
We have replaced marine.sonic.net, our old out-bound qmail server, with a group of faster load balanced qmail servers. This upgrade increases the speed at which we can deliver mail destined for other networks and gives us redundancy where we used to have a single point of failure.
We are in the process of adding SPOP (or POP3S) support to our POP3 server. This protocol encrypts POP3 traffic with the same type of key used to secure SSL/HTTPS web sites and allows for users to securely connect to our POP3 server from insecure networks. SPOP is supported by most of the common mail clients for Windows, Mac and Unix. Clients which do not support SPOP directly can use a helper application to connect via SPOP.
We also upgraded our three main DNS servers. First we upgraded their hardware so they are now all dual PIII’s with 1GB of RAM and then recently upgraded the name server software – Bind – to version 9.2.0. Our name servers are blazingly fast now and Bind 9.2.0 is proving to be less problematic for us than Bind 9.1.3. -Kelsey and Nathan