It has been a very busy week here for all of us at M6.Net. We have had to deal with a massive DDOS attack against two mail servers which after today we are winning the battle. Support earlier in the week was well within metrics but has lately been higher due to the DDOS attack. We increased support shifts to handle the extra support and have everything under control.

How does a DDOS happen? It is likely one domain or one user of a domain on the server has upset or offended someone with the capability to carry out such an attack. This can happen by someone upsetting or offending someone in an IRC chat room, mail list, blog, or a forum post. With the shear volume of data it is near impossible to determine.

You can read more about DDOs Attacks and BotNets at the following URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet

What are we doing? We have upgraded the version of SmarterMail on the server, to 3.2, which is better able to cope, but it's not a magic bullet; mail services will be more responsive.. We will continue to monitor the incoming connections, changing abuse settings (blocking IP's), turning off the mail server for periods (to respond nothing to the BotNet and hopefully turn it away). We are also contacting major ISPs to inform them of the erroneous IP traffic coming from their networks, tuning the number of accepted connections allowing as much legit mail traffic to flow as much as possible.

Why can't we just stop it? Unfortunately the Internet was designed on the basis that all the users of the network were legit and ethical. Such things as DDOS attacks and people trying to attack each other over the network were not thought of when TCP/IP and the various protocols (SMTP, POP, HTTP etc) were developed. Generally the only way that such an attack can be survived is to have massive servers and bandwidth that can soak up the attack. Such resources cost several million dollars and would dramatically increase the cost of your hosting. Hosting services can be bought that can withstand these attacks in the majority of cases and cost hundreds of dollars per month for a domain. On some web servers and databases we are in the process of balancing the servers to improve performance.

It"s been a very busy week on my side of things; we have completed the migration of our DNS servers to a new network, continued with the mass-migration away from our old machines and dealt with mail issues on 3 of our mail servers. Regarding the DNS changes. If you control your own domain (i.e. are not registered with domreg-m6.net), and your registrar requires the IP address of your name servers (there aren"t a lot that do, but better safe then sorry), you will need to change them to:
Primary Nameserver: DNS.M6.NET
Primary Nameserver IP: 66.98.182.40
Secondary Nameserver: NIC.M6.NET
Secondary Nameserver IP: 70.86.49.58
Tertiary Nameserver: NS3.M6.NET
Tertiary Nameserver IP: 70.86.49.60
If you have any issues making the change, please contact support for assistance.

This week has been busy for support, early in the week things were looking good with a low amount of queries and no server issues, unfortunately in the last few days we've run into some mail server issues which has seen support levels jump to a high number. We've resolve the issue on all the affected mail servers bar one, which we are still working on. We've brought in some extra shifts to compensate the load though, so support response shouldn't suffer too much from the situation.

This week we are mainly focused in making sure that all our applications and automation tasks are working fine with our new database server.