"Sometimes our customers do not require full implementations of a DNS failover offering. The Simple Failover feature offers customers another way to minimize downtime and improve their website’s continuity whilst being incredibly easy to impliment. We continually update and upgrade our NetMon system, which enables CloudFloor DNS to introduce new and faster DNS failover capabilities to help our customers always remain connected to their online audiences, said Paul Smith, Technical Director of CloudFloor DNS.

Contact us today for more information. New users can sign up for a free trial here. Existing users, please contact us.

• real-time on demand dns failovers and recovery. This is in addition to the normal automated failover and recovery. Clicking the force failover or failback option on monitoring tests now performs a full production failover or failback in real time according to your failover settings.
• Testing nodes have been updated to our latest software.  This now tries to delve deeper into detected issues and report back findings in the responses.  For instance, we are no longer simply reporting the status and that there is a fault.  Where possible we are also reporting back additional data such as http headers and URL's to help assist with problem diagnosis.

We will shortly be launching 2 new exciting failover options.  Please keep an eye out on our news page for more details shortly.

Best regards,

Your CloudfloorDNS team.
http://www.cloudfloordns.com

Included in the improvements is a new multi-threaded testing engine deployed on all NetMon nodes. This new testing engine is significantly faster than the old monitoring scripts. A new multi-threaded approach runs many tests simultaneously and now uses a pool of "master" servers to retrieve XML data, detailing tests to be performed instead of a direct database connection. This translates into faster, more resilient, and more efficient performance.

Read the entire announcement here. 

• Pagination - If your zones are very large, pages can take longer than desired to load.  For zones larger than 250 resource records, the resource record section is now paginated. At the top of the resource record section on affected zones you'll now see a section similar to that below. This enables the page to load quicker and for you to jump to the relevant page right away.
  
  
  
  
• Error checking - We've always checked every single record in your dns zone each time you make changes to your records and every time you visit the editing page.  We post details of errors and other warnings at the bottom of the page.  These sometimes went missed by users, particularly if the zone files were very large.  To help users locate problematic records more easily, we now highlight errors as per the example below. If you see a record outlined in red, check the bottom of the resource record section!
  
  
  
  
• Automatic reverse zone maintenance - For those of you maintaining your own reverse zones, we've made it possible to specify related in-addr.arpa zones files and have the IP's and host names in that zone automatically updated when you make changes in your domains zone file. To associate a domain with a reverse zone, expand the 'zone file options' section and fill in the section with an existing reverse zone file already on our system as per the below image
  
  
  
  
  
• Other minor fixes and improvements - We have made several other minor changes and improvements in order to improve your general dns editing experience.
  

We hope these new features help improve your DNS experience with us. 

Best regards,

Your CloudfloorDNS team.

We are pleased to announce that by popular request, bind style zone file imports are now possible from the dns set-up page. Simply paste your well formed bind style zone file text into the box as per the example below

(click the + to expand the section).

then follow the normal procedure to enable dns for your domains.

As long as the zone passes RFC validation tests, it'll be imported and the records will appear in your CloudfloorDNS zone file.

Merry Christmas,

Your CloudFloorDNS team.

We'll make a comprehensive post with full details soon as there are a couple more parts to the upgrade to roll out over the holidays.

For now, we've

• Increased monitoring capacity by 1000%
• New capability to provide confirmed detection of failures in less than 10 seconds
  
• Added new SSL options (ignore bad SSL, detect invalid ssl, expired cert, etc)
• Improved the test status page and reporting
• Alerts are now delivered in real-time instead of batched to get them to you quicker
• Syslog alerts now supported

Many, many other minor enhancements and improvements, both front and back end with a few more to come.

The upgraded Netmon service is likely to catch even the briefest of issues now if you have your testing interval set very low. Be sure to set the 'alert threshold' in your relevant alert profiles or increase the time between testing if you wish to make the testing less sensitive and ignore brief outages, reboots, etc.

As usual, please forward your comments or feedback to support@cloudfloordns.com

Merry Christmas,

Your CloudFloorDNS team.

• It has always been a bad DNS practice to point your CNAME to a naked domain or root record, so you cannot point mydomain.com to a CNAME
• CNAME’s cannot be mixed with other types of records with the same host name, so where you normally do load balancing with groups of A Records, you cannot add the CNAME to the load balancing group.

With the new Alias Record by CloudFloor DNS, these common problems find an intelligent solution.

With this solution, CNAMES are no longer limited by their current constraints and can be used to point to naked domains and used in load balancing groups much like the more flexible A Records. The Alias Record is a new DNS type available exclusively in our DNS platform that allows you to directly add a CNAME to any record group and have it be seen by the resolving client as just another A Record. Once resolved, the record is served directly to clients as an A Record and stored internally as such for the length of the TTL. This means it can be served as part of a load balancing group with other A Records seamlessly. Additionally, as A Records are completely compatible with root/naked domains, you can point your root directly to the CNAME.

Click to view the screenshots

To learn more about CloudFloor DNS and the exclusive benefits it can offer, visit our website or contact us today.

Read our official announcement of the Alias Record.

If you have any queries, please log a support call and we will be happy to advise you.

Best regards,

Your CloudFloordns team.

Of the top eleven barriers to cloud adoption, Yankee Group identified eight that are directly impacted by the DNS infrastructure. Most DNS providers are ill-prepared to address the issues that cloud migrations raise. According to Yankee Group, to successfully realize the benefits offered through cloud computing efficiencies, a DNS provider must have specific capabilities to successfully address these 8 barriers.Learn more and watch the webinar here.

A quick summary of the Sunrise queues:

• Sunrise AT for Adult Trademark Holders: reserved for members of the Sponsored Community who currently hold a verifiable trademark prior to September 1, 2011.

• Sunrise AD for Adult Domain Holders: reserved for members of the Sponsored Community who own the exact-match domain names in other TLDs prior to February 1, 2010.

• Sunrise B to Block for Trademark Holders: for non-members of the Sponsored Community who hold a verifiable trademark, prior to September 1, 2011, and wish to block their domains in the .XXX TLD.

You can make submissions for the sunrise queue here.

Please contact your sales representative if you have any queries.

continue reading on our blog..

DS records now implemented on all supporting TLDs

DS (Delegation Signer) records are now supported for all registries that provide this functionality.
DS records are used to indicate that the domain dns is digitally signed (DNSSEC).

To update DS records for your domain, enter the domain name in the quick manage box on the left of the screen, or click the domain name in the management panel. From the list of available options, click DS Records.

To use DNSSEC, the following restrictions apply
The registry for the domain name must support DNSSEC for the domains TLD.
The domain name must be using name servers that fully support DNSSEC
The domain must be in an active status and have valid whois data.

All CloudFloorDNS enterprise plans include full DNSSEC management and services.

For more information on DS records, check out knowledge base.
To create DS records, check the utilities page on our web site*

*due end of July 11

MicroTech is now CloudFloor DNS

In December, we informed you of the partnership of MicroTech with CloudFloor and promised that the partnership would bring new features and benefits to you. We have been working hard to enhance our core DNS, domain registration and management services. These enhancements and new features are the continuation of MicroTech’s commitment to providing you a unique and high performing platform. 

Last month, we communicated to you about our recent core DNS platform upgrades and Webzone price increase.   Today we would like to update you on several new brand and packaging changes to our overall platform.

MicroTech products will now be called CloudFloor DNS. Other than the product name change, there will be no other differences from the services and support you receive today.  Your services and support will be provided by MicroTech Limited, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of CloudFloor Corporation. We have re-branded the product name from MicroTech to CloudFloor DNS in order to brand our cloud and DNS management services under one consistent, global platform.

Coinciding with our re-branding to CloudFloor DNS, we are unveiling three managed DNS offerings: SOHO, SMB, and Enterprise. Today, all of our customers are on the SOHO platform.  In addition to our SoHo offering we are pleased to announce a Small and Medium Business (SMB) package as well as an Enterprise offering.  For some customers, upgrading to SMB or Enterprise offerings may make sense depending on your DNS and domain requirements. Below is a brief description of each DNS offering and to learn more, please check out our website:

Our SOHO offering - is our current ala carte DNS offering, purchased through Webzones (this solution allows you to build your own custom solution to match your specific DNS needs and will remain unchanged).

Our SMB offering - is comprised of pre-configured bundles for businesses that require the increased performance and  security of our new Anycast network or greater geographic coverage of our  global Unicast network, broader customer support channels, more advanced load balancing and fail-over features, and/or access to our API and zone transfer capabilities.

Our Enterprise offering - are customized plans to provide peak performance, reliability, and security in addition to access to our unique native cloud discovery capabilities, total customer support and DNS performance/optimization consulting, and even more sophisticated management and report capabilities. 

Each of our DNS packages - SoHo, SMB and Enterprise – are available beginning July 1, 2011.  You can access further details and related product information via our website at CloudFloorDSN.com, via email at support@cloudfloor.com or by calling our Customer Support or Sales numbers at US on +1 781.373.5158 or in the UK on +44 (0)1481 720924. 

Thank you for your continued support of MicroTech and CloudFloor.

Over the next few days Microtech will be migrating some of it's services to new IP addresses. This should be completely non service affecting. As is the case with any system that has run for in excess of 10 years and is used by 10's of thousands of users, some users will inevitably have hard coded some of our IP addresses into their firewalls, software, etc. We of course recommend you only ever point to our host names as set in dns so that IP address changes do not affect you.

If you do experience any issues with any of your mail, software, or other systems over the next few days, please do check to see that you have not hard coded any IP address into your system. Check that the host name you should be connecting to has not changed it's IP since you set itbeforecontacting support.

Some of the services that are being migrated include domain forwarding, email, 1 dns server, 1 netmon probe, secondary dns zone transfer retrieval, and other minor systems. All IP addresses starting in 213 will eventually be removed from service. All new IP's will run in tandem with the old IP's up until this time.

Unless you are contacted by our support team, there should be nothing you need to do as Microtech will completely handle all changes from our side without interruption to service. If you have reference to our 213 IP addresses directly in third party systems outside of our control, you will need to make changes in order to ensure you do not experience issues.

Please contact support via the support centre or email if you have any queries regarding these changes.

Thank you.

Your Microtech Team.

The subject of the e-mail is "Domain Name Information Confirmation". The e-mail contains a confirmation link that must be activated by clicking on it. If the domain name registration information is not confirmed within 15 days of receipt of the notice, the domain name will be processed according to the "relevant provisions of the Registry". This may even imply a possible deletion, so it is important that you confirm your registration as per the email you recieve.

Best regards,

Your MICROTECH team.

http://www.mtgsy.net ]]> http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=792 http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=792 support@mtgsy.net (Microtech) Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:50 GMT http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=782 http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=782 support@mtgsy.net (Microtech) Sat, 22 May 2010 00:00 GMT
Microtech have to date absorbed previous price increases by way of increased volumes and better efficiency in our own systems, but this year you may see some of the increases passed on to certain price bands.

If you wish to make multiyear renewals and registrations before the July 1st price increase, these will be available at the current pricing.  Please be sure to check your pricing after July 1st and update your own pricing accordingly if needed.  Please let us know if you have any queries regarding your account.

Best regards,

Your MICROTECH team. ]]> http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=772 http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=772 sales@mtgsy.net (Microtech) Tue, 18 May 2010 16:32 GMT http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=762 http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=762 sales@mtgsy.net (Microtech) Sat, 8 May 2010 00:00 GMT
Regards,

Your MICROTECH team ]]> http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=752 http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=752 support@mtgsy.net (Microtech) Wed, 7 Apr 2010 00:00 GMT   These costs remain extremely competitive with comparable services.  If using these options, please ensure you have enough webzones to cover your service usage.  Accounts will be updated to show the new usage shortly.

In addition to the above, we have changed the way dns tests are performed with the service.  As a result you may notice that dns response times for your tests appear to have increased.  This is due to the new method of testing which should more accurately reflect the real world experience of your clients.  Test nodes now perform queries and wait for the full result in order to determine the time it takes for a client to receive a typical query back from the server. 

With dns tests, you can now also supply different records and record types to query.

All nodes will be updated with the new software over the next 24 hours.

Best regards,

Kind Regards
Your MICROTECH team ]]> http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=742 http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=742 support@mtgsy.net (Microtech) Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:58 GMT

From May 9^th Nominet will allow us to publish reseller contact details in WHOIS along with the normal whois details.   This will allow your public contact information to be displayed in WHOIS alongside the registrant details allowing the domain owner to easily contact you directly should they have queries regarding their domain name. 

In preparation for this, and should you wish to provide this optional information, please login via the web site and use the Provide your support information on the My Account, Resellers menu.

Where appropriate this data may also be provided to end users enquiring directly with Microtech regarding services on your account.  Appropriate queries would include requests for renewals, technical information, domain changes, etc. This information would also be presented to people requesting login details for domains names that are not on their own account and referring them directly to you.

The intention of this service is to allow clients looking for details about their domain names or other services to locate your public contact information and contact you directly.

If you have any queries regarding this service, please let us know.  If you would like this information  applied to all existing .uk names on your account so your details will be present in WHOIS for all previously registered names, please log a support call via the support centre after updating your contact details and we will arrange this once the UK service goes live.

Kind Regards,
Your MICROTECH team

http://www.mtgsy.net ]]> http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=732 http://www.mtgsy.net/articles.php?item=732 support@mtgsy.net (Microtech) Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:23 GMT

MICROTECH is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new network monitoring and DNS location in Frankfurt, Germany. This adds to our existing 7 global locations in Guernsey, Jersey, London, Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Jersey. This new site provides excellent connectivity to European locations and provides more accurate monitoring and better dns performance for those clients originating queries from Europe.

The new monitoring node has been added to all current Netmon tests. Please remember to add the new IP to your firewall if you restrict access to your services, or disable the node via the Netmon test properties page.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best regards,

MICROTECH Limited
http://www.mtgsy.net

First of all, happy new year to you all.

Santa’s elves have been busy over the Christmas period and upgraded the web site with new domain and domain group permissions features.  These allow any Microtech user account to very easily be given varying levels of permission to domains or groups of domains.

For example, you wish to give access to a domain so that your developer can make dns changes to your domain name for you but you do not wish to give them full access to your account.  Simply get them to create their free account on the Microtech web site, click the domain in your management panel, add the ‘can edit dns’ permission to their account and the domain will appear in their management panel with those permissions.  You can do the same with whole groups of domains from the ‘my account’, ‘group management’ page.  Just add the desired user account to the group and they’ll get access to all the domains that are in that group, even if you add new domains.

We know some of our clients will find this a most useful feature to have.  Should you have any feedback or other feature requests, please let us know via the ‘make a suggestion’ link on the web site, or by emailing us.

Best regards,

Microtech Limited
http://www.mtgsy.net

• Improved load times, greatly for some large zones
• Improved error checking
• Improved template management and updates
• New built in SPF record generator on same page
• New longer change history and log viewing
• New simple http 'redirect' record type for http(s) redirects
• various fixes and improvements to page layout etc.

We hope you find this new facility useful.

Best regards,

Microtech Limited
http://www.mtgsy.net

New features that have been added include better SSL support for https URL checks, 2 brand new fail over methods including URL and custom web page, New 'Notify Me' service, more stats storage, and easier to use dns fail over options. Improvements are described in more detail below.

SSL support for https checks
Netmon now better supports SSL when making https URL checks.

2 brand new fail over methods, URL and custom web page
In addition to the previous standard dns fail over (which has also been significantly improved), Netmon now supports 2 new fail over methods. URL fail over diverts your web visitors to the URL of your choice when your site is down. Custom web page enables you to design a HTML page using our WYSIWYG web designer that will be displayed to your visitors if you site is down. This enables you to display a maintenance message or similar rather than your site simply being unreachable. Which would you prefer? No site at all, or a nice page telling your visitor the site is currently undergoing some temporary maintenance? With the addition of our 'Notify Me' service (details below), we can help stop you loosing customers if they visit and your site is down.

'Notify Me' service where your visitors can be requested to be emailed once your site has returned
When using the custom web page service to automatically notify your visitors the site is down, you have the option of allowing your users to request to be notified when the site returns to normal operation. As soon as it does, we immediately send out emails to all the people that registered to be notified when your site is back up. They can then revisit and make their purchase. Studies show us that if your site is down when a visitor comes to make a purchase, they will often simply go elsewhere or become frustrated and having to keep re-visiting your site. With the 'Notify Me' service, they visit once, leave their email address in the knowledge they'll get an email as soon as your site is back up, then hopefully return and purchase. Many visitors will wait and re-visit your site rather than going elsewhere if they know the issue is temporary. You can fully customise the email content in the 'Notify Me' message.

New, easy to use dns fail over options
We've made dns fail over much easier to use. When setting up fail over you are now presented with a list of records suitable for fail over in your dns. Simply tick the host names you want to fail over and enter the IP you want to fail over to. Select as many records as you want.

Extended storage for statistics
For people who want to store their statistics for longer we've added longer storage options (at the cost of 1 or more additional 'webzones'). This will allow more advanced reporting shortly.

We hope you find these new features useful. Please let us know if you have any further suggestions or comments.

Best regards,

Microtech Support
http://www.mtgsy.net

During June 2009 we will be able to offer substantial discounts for the registration of new .IM domains.  You will be able to register .IM domain names at the rate of only 2.50 GBP. This offer applies to new 1-year registrations on non-premium names (three letters and above). The promotion is not valid for transfers and domain renewals. The .IM promotion is valid from June 1 to June 30, 2009.

.IM is the official TLD for the Isle of Man.

Best regards,

Microtech Limited
http://www.mtgsy.net

Some of you may have noticed that Microtech have recently expanded their TLD list.  Microtech now register domains in over 120 name spaces across the globe.  Many of the new additions are in the European name spaces as these have been regularly requested by existing clients.  As part of this upgrade we have also improved the transfer and application process for certain domains that have specific application requirements.  For some domains such as .DE, .FR, etc. that have residency requirements, we now have proxy facilities available for some of these.  For domains this is applicable to you will be offered this facility during the application process.

The addition of the new TLD’s enables Microtech to provide a  more comprehensive service to  clients who register domains on a global scale.

For a full TLD list, please visit the domain name base price list page at http://www.mtgsy.net/domains/domain_pricelist.php

Best regards,

Microtech Limited
http://www.mtgsy.net

The bulk update page for dns services has been updated with some new options.

The list of bulk operations that can now be performed is

• Add dns record
• delete dns record
• search and replace dns record
• search and replace IP
• search and replace TTL (new)
• delete domains / disable dns services (new)

You can carry out the bulk operations above on manually input lists of domains, manually selected domains from your list of domains held here, or by selecting an admin group, and selecting domains from that.

Regards,

Microtech Limited
http://www.mtgsy.net

• Groups
  The groups functions have now been updated to include details of default name servers for that individual group.  You can view / edit exiting domain groups from the 'My Account', 'Group Management' menu.  This allows the enhancements to the management panel (below) to automatically change name servers when you move domains between groups if you want to.
• Domain management panel
  To take advantage of the new group features we have made some changes to the domain management panel.  When moving domains between groups, once you click the confirm button you'll be given the option of having the domains dns servers automatically set to the ones specified in the group.  This enables you to quickly and very easily move domains to different settings, for example if you are parking them or moving them to a particular client.
  

• Secondary DNS page link is available from the main domain utils/quick manage  page (no having to go via the management panel anymore! :))
• Option to convert zone to primary added.  This is useful for when your primary goes down and is not expected back up soon, or if you no longer wish to use your primary. It enables full record management of the zone via our primary dns service, disables secondary dns, and retains all the data previously imported from your primary.
• Email alerts will now be sent if we cannot contact your primary dns server for more than 24 hours.  An email will be sent each 24 hours until the fault clears.  You can view how many times the zone has failed to transfer on the secondary dns page.  Zones that fail to transfer for more than 3 months will now be disabled on our systems unless requested otherwise.

• Explicit forwarding
  This is on by default and emulates the current behavior.  This forwards the domain to the URL you specified.  It forwards all variations, so if a user types http://www.domaina.com/test1 or http://www.domaina.com/test2, they still go to the domain you specified, http://www.domainbn.com.  If you disable explicit forwarding the path will be retained and passed to the new forward domain.
• Use 301 rather than 302 for redirect
  The default has always been to use 302 redirects for domain forwards as this is easily changeable.  Some people require a permanent redirect type, 301.  We now support this via the forwarding options, though it should be used with care as it's function is intended to be permanent and is thus not easily changed.  We suggest you research the use of this option before enabling it.
  
• Forwarding of sub domains and hosts
  Microtech www forwarding previously forwarded only the 'www' record of your domain which is what most people use when accessing a website.  It is now posible to add further redirect host names or subdomains and they will be forwarded also.

The major change in this version is access to deleted items from the queues. As well as viewing your quarantine queue you can also view items that have been removed from that queue. This enables users to go back and rescue accidentally deleted emails or review the list of items that have been deleted from their quarantine queues.

To access the deleted items queue, log in to the client as normal. Your current quarantine list, if any, will be shown. If you want to see the items in your deleted queue, click the recycle bin icon. After a short pause the list of deleted items will be shown, if any. You can delete, release, and white list entries from this queue in the same way you can with the quarantine queues. Note the title at the top of the window changes to show you are viewing already deleted items. If you delete items from the deleted queue they are permanently lost. To switch back to normal quarantine view simply click the recycle bin again. The normal list will be shown and the window title will change.

Please provide any feedback you have to support@mtgsy.net

Our network monitoring service now supports escalation alert profiles. These enable you to escalate the notifications to other party's or via different contact methods such as SMS if the problem is not resolved within a certain amount of time after the original alerts were sent.

To update your tests to use an alternative profile for escalation, just edit your test, select the escalation alter profile you'd like to use by ticking the relevant box, choose the amount of failures to occur before the escalation alter profile will be triggered, and click the 'update test' button.

Please let us know if you have any feedback.

Best regards,

Microtech support

A rather large problem has occurred to subscribers of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  This has affected many individual business and web hosting companies.

In order to address the recent vulnerability in recursive caching dns servers, the Red Hat Network issued an update to BIND, the DNS server that powers most RHEL installations.  This seems to have had the unfortunate affect of reverting some of the RHEL installations running bind to caching only!  This means that anyone hosting dns on these servers promptly lost all their dns.  Some hosting companies are yet to fully restore dns to their clients, which has meant websites and email are still not functioning.

If your servers run bind and you are affected by this update, you can restore your original configuration by restoring your named.conf file (if you have a backup).  If you are lucky, the original should still be on your server, renamed at /etc/named.conf.rpmsave.

Microtech was unaffected by this issue.  Perhaps another great reason to consider hosting dns with a specialist organisation, or adding Microtech dns as a secondary to your own dns, rather than relying on a single vendor.

Regards,

Microtech Limited

1. SMS alerts can now be sent to multiple numbers seperated by commas, for the same alert.
2. Platinum account customers can now send SMS messages without having to pre-fund their accounts.  SMS charges will appear on platinum account customers statements at the end of each billing cycle along with registrations, renewals etc.

Do you use Windows Mobile?

If you do then a new product from Microtech may be of interest to you. All too often IT managers and engineers are required to make a quick change to dns, renew a domain, etc. Often this is whilst they are out of the office, on holiday, and so on. Microtech is developing a lightweight application for Windows Mobile devices that enables you to perform some of the basic but most often needed dns and domain tasks.  The application is based on the Microtech API that is available to all resellers of Microtech services. The application is currently fully functional, but in beta, and we are looking for feedback.

If you would like to be able to manage you dns on-line from practically anywhere via your mobile device and would be interested in testing and providing some feedback on the new application, please email support@mtgsy.net with the subject 'MTDMan beta', your username, and your device type and we'll forward a link to the download.

• POP Collection
  Collect your email via POP from our server via any standard POP client if your server is down.  Users are currently using Outlook, Windows Mobile and iPhone PDA's to use this feature for emergency access to emails if their own mail server is down.  It's great to hear of people putting it to good use.
  
• Full featured WebMail - new!
  Use the WebMail client to login to your backup email queue, read and even answer email, delete messages you no longer require, forward messages to other addresses, and more.  Properly reads and displays HTML emails, allows download of attachments etc.

• changes to the group system to allow multiple selection of domains to be moved into existing groups, or to move domains into groups that are created on the fly.
• An 'info' icon next to the domain name that pulls up a list of lots of relevant information regarding the domain when you hover the mouse over it.  The data is retrieved in real time and can report most details about a domain without you having to navigate through various other pages.  A very useful and quick overview.
• The addition of a new 'filter' tab to the management page.  This enables you to filter the domain list shown in the panel by almost any criteria you can think of.  Very useful for those of you with larger domain lists.  Want to see which domains are using Microtech DNS, have mail forwarding, and expire in the next 18 days, no problem!
  
• Plenty of other minor usability enhancements, such as remembering where you were in your list once you navigate off to other pages and back again.

• Per domain whitelists now managable from the client
  Press the whitelist envelope once to download your whitelist.  It will appear in the msg preview window.  You can use this to monitor addresses or domains you have whitelisted via the 'request whitelist' icon when releasing messages, or you can type addresses directly into the preview window and choose to upload your modified whitelist by clicking the icon again.
• Bug fix where some domains showed emails twice in the client
• Bug fix where some emails would not show in the preview window
  
• All icons should now perform functions on selected emails as well as checked emails
• The delete key can now be used to delete emails (rather than selecting the icon or right click and delete)
• numerous other minor gui enhancements.

• DNS error checking. Every dns entry in your domains dns is now checked for correctness, even if it is a third party reference to a domain name not held on our servers, and it's all done in real-time.  This means that common mistakes and errors, even on domains outside of our control  can be quickly detected and dealt with before more signficant problems occur.  Any records in your domains DNS that are suspect will be highlighted as either a warning or an error, and details are shown at the bottom of the listed records.  We do anticipate that these new features will pratically ellimintate the majority of problems and mistakes we see from day to day, and we'll be working to enhance these checks as we get feedback on them.  Our aim is perfect dns for all, first time!
  
• Zone file locking. Locks the RR records in a zone file against accidential changes.  A padlock icon will be shown on zones that are locked.
  
• Disable RR checks.  This option disables the above error checking, in case you do not want it, though we can't imagine why :)
• Domain health monitoring.  This is another exciting new feature that is designed to inform you if the health of your domain deteriorates.  Many, many tests are carried out on your domain at regular intervals and you will be informed if there are any issues that might affect your name.  To give you an idea of the thouroughness of the testing, for example, should a mail server listed as an MX in your domain stop accepting email for your domain, we'll warn you.  Should one of your mail servers get blacklisted, we'll warn you.  Lots and lots of other tests, such as making sure your records all resolve, third party references still resolve, that any of the other IP addresses in the zone file are not blacklisted etc. are carried out.  This is proactive monitoring at it's best, at minimal cost, and will pay for itself many, many times over the first time you use it.
  
  Domain health monitoring will be rolled out and enabled for all accounts over the next few weeks.  Enable the option in your zone files by checking the appropriate box in the 'zone file options' section.
  

• Realtime alerts now available via MSN / Windows Live Messenger via the Microtech MSNBot as well as the existing Email and SMS alerts.  (Further news will follow regarding the MSNBot as it offers a new way to communicate with several of the services and your account.)
• Ability to acknowledge and comment on faults
• Trace routes and other error information now included in alerts
• User definable test timeouts
• Last response now stored for every test, enabling you to lookup previous failed responses from your servers

• Speed of testing improved
• New style, more informative email alerts
• Store more of 'last response' string
• Other minor improvements to management panel
• DNS Fail over instruction space increased meaning you can now fail over as many records in 1 test as you should ever need (for the technical minded, we've increased the space to 65,535 characters!)
  

At approximately 11am DNS resolution from all 4 of our public servers was affected due to a large scale DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack.  What this means is that an individual or individuals commanded a large Botnet (a group of compromised computers) to attack our dns servers by way of sending torrents of useless data to them.  The target may have been a domain hosted on our servers.  These machines were mostly located in mainland China, almost all in Asia.  All 4 geographically separated servers were targeted simultaneously.

Given the large amount of data that was being sent and the considerable number of  machines data was being sent from, this was also enough to affect the suppliers facilities where some of the servers are hosted.  Some of the bandwidth providers felt there was no alternative but to route the traffic elsewhere away from the dns servers affected.  This resulted in loss of dns resolution from some of the dns servers.  Microtech then acted quickly to restore these servers and 3 of the 4 servers were running again several hours later.  The network was again fully operational by the early hours of the next morning.  Due to dns caching at other networks some clients experienced intermittent access to their web sites after services were restored.

We hope this and the FAQ below explains a little more about what caused the issues, if you experienced them.

What is a distributed denial of service attack?

On the internet, a distributed denial of service attack is one where 100s, maybe 1000s of individual machines at different locations attack a site simultaneously.  This makes it almost impossible to stop in a reasonable time.  The qty of traffic is all aimed at a single point or points on the internet, overloading it and making it inaccessible.

Why did this happen?

We assume it was targeted either at us directly or a client who has dns hosted with us.

Who is responsible for the attack?

At the moment we do not know, however, the matter is under investigation.  In most countries this type of attack is a criminal offence with significant penalties.

Was any data lost as a result of the attack?

No.

Is Microtech the only company affected by these attacks?

No, absolutely not.  Regrettably, this type of cyber terrorism has become rather common place. Many high profile sites have been attacked and suffered in a similar manner.

Could this attack have been prevented

No, not unless you knew the people responsible and their intentions.

What can Microtech do to prevent this in the future

We can do little to prevent someone attacking us or our clients.  We can try to make any such attack have significantly less impact whilst it is located and stopped.  Microtech are investigating several avenues for the future.

CentralNic domains offer some advantages over traditional TLD's. Most CentralNic name spaces are not as heavily populated as .com, .net, .org, etc. This generally means you have a much better chance of getting the name you want.

The new agreement with CentralNic also means we are able to finally accept and process transfers for their name spaces. This was previously not possible.

The CentralNic name spaces currently available are .GB.COM, .GB.NET, .HU.COM, .JPN.COM, .KR.COM, .NO.COM, .QC.COM, .RU.COM, .SA.COM, .SE.COM, .SE.NET, .UK.COM, .UK.NET, .US.COM, .UY.COM, .ZA.COM

CentralNic domains need no specific browser support and work within the normal domain name system. They are also very rapid to activate and just like the Nominet system for UK domains are normally live within just 15 minutes.

Please let us know if you have any questions regarding CentralNic names by emailing your account manager or sales@mtgsy.net

This means our systems are unable to validate whether some domains are available or not.

We will notify you when these systems are functional again.

Please note this only affects Nominet .uk names, and not any other names.

Please do not plan for any name server changes etc that Sunday as these may not be possible.

Regards,

Microtech Support

Once logged in, please go to the preferences page to activate the feature if it is suitable for you. Activating the feature will limit your logins to your country of residence. The protection feature is disabled by default on all existing accounts, but enabled by default on all new accounts. When you sign up, you specify your address and country of residence. When you try to login to our web site, we attempt to determine what country you are actually logging in from. If this does not match, we reject your login attempt and will notify the user that a possibly fraudulent login attempt has been made. All users _should_ have correct address data, but you can update yours via the 'My Account', 'Contact Details' page if required.

You can check whether this feature will work for you on the preferences page. This will show you where you have listed you are resident, and where we detect you actually are. If you do not login from multiple countries, please enable this feature to help protect your account from being used, even if your details do fall into the wrong hands.

If you have any comments on this new feature, or any suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact support@mtgsy.net.

Best regards,

The Microtech support team.

The mail reads

"According to our terms of services, you will have to confirm your e-mail by the following link, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons."

Do not follow the link.  Do not enter your login details.

Microtech logins are ALWAYS done via https.  If you do not see the page is secure, do not login.

Please note, that this sender DOES NOT have a list of our users, but we have a substantial user base, and some are bound to receive the email as we have already seen.

If in any doubt, please email support@mtgsy.net.

Thank you.
The real Microtech Support team!

A 'Set bad condition (test alert / fail over)' option has been added to netmon test status pages.

This allows users to test the processes that happen when a test is detected as bad. When this link is selected the test is temporarily set to a bad condition, any alerts and fail over actions will then be performed. The next scheduled check of the test will set the test good again (if it is up) and any alerts or fail backs for the good test will then be done as well. This test uses all the real alert components and is not a simulation so should perform exactly as expected when the test fails for real.

Regards,

Microtech Support

Specifically, netmon email and SMS alerts now include details of dns fail overs and the last reported status of the device if applicable. This has been abbreviated to try and keep it within the character limit of most SMS services for a single message.

Netmon dns fail overs are also now logged in the user audit log and details of each record that fails over, and back, will be recorded and displayed in the zone log for each domain on the dns editing page.

We hope you find these changes useful. Please send any feedback or suggestions to support@mtgsy.net.

Thank you.

Microtech Support.

For users who have not yet used the client, logon details are set via the mailscan management panel on our website. Each domain has it's own independent login and password that can be set on the 'option' page for each service. If you do not have access to this yourself, please ask your reseller to setup your initial login for you.

Existing versions of the client will self upgrade when launched. The new client may also be downloaded from the Mailscan management panel here.

This is the fifth generation of the mailscan client. Please report any comments, suggestions etc to support@mtgsy.net.

.EU domains are now competitively priced compared to the common .com's and .net's so why not see if your .eu domain is available today?

Please feel free to contact us if you have any queries.

To access the mail forwarding page for your domain, if you have mail forwards already configured, click the icon in the domain management panel.

Regards,

Microtech Support.

DNS templates are a powerful tool to managing multiple similar domains, especially in hosting situations.

Many domains are often pointed to the same servers and share common dns information. This is often the case if domains are for the same client, or are all being hosted on the same server.

Microtech already has time saving features that enable you to set default zone files and create new zones based on zones that already exist, but templates go much further than that.

Imagine the following scenario. You have 250 domains hosted on your current web server. You decide to host elsewhere and the IP of the WWW record changes. What do you do? With template based DNS you simply update the master template and all the zones based on that template also update in real time. Adding, deleting, and changing records in the master zone affects all the domains based on the template.

You can build as many templates as you wish. This enables you to create templates for groups of domains, say those belonging to a particular client that have common settings. Next time the client asks for the 'www' record to be updated on all their records, or an MX record added to those 200 domains, it'll be a 30 second job to update them.

To setup templates visit the management panel and click the 'DNS Templates' tab on the domain listing. Any existing templates will be listed, and from there you can enter the domain name you want to base the new template on (they must be based on an existing zone) and a description for that template. When you enable the dns facilities on a domain or create a new zone file you'll be given the opportunity to create those zones based on any existing templates. The newly created zones will stay associated with that template and any changes made to the master zone will be replicated to all zones based on the master unless you 'dissociate' the zone from the template via the link on the dns editing for that domain.

Note that if you make changes to a zone file based on a template, and not to the master template, the changes will not be replicated elsewhere. This is intentional and allows you to still have domains based on template but retain the ability to add single extra unique records where required.

If you do not have templates in place but are looking to bulk insert, delete, or update dns records in multiple zones, please look at the 'Bulk update' feature on the 'DNS' menu.

Knowledge base articles have been added with the above content.

We hope that you find this enhancement useful. We love client feedback. Please send any comments or suggestions to support@mtgsy.net.

Regards,

Microtech Support.

With IE7 and Office 2007, built in support for RSS is easily available to everyone and it is a very convenient way to stay informed of developments. The news pages and support knowledge base also have RSS feeds at

http://www.mtgsy.net/mtgsynews.xml for the new page

http://www.mtgsy.net/support/support.xml for the support knowledge base

If you use our services, please take a minute to subscribe to the feeds if you are able.

Therefore, if you are sending test emails via our systems please ensure you use a reasonable subject line and put proper content in the body of the message.

e.g.

Bad example

Subject : test
Body : dsfjhhjb sdflkjhsfkjh sdlkjhfdsk

Good example

Subject : test email from hotmail sent 09:15
Body : This is a test email.

This will mean that your test messages should arrive without delay.

Thank you.

This affects inbound emails only. Outbound emails are not affected.

EPP transfer authorisation key codes are generated by the current registrar. 

The initial procedure for transferring domains remains the same:

·  Transfer verification must be made to the gaining registrar by the domain’s registrant and/or administrative contact(s).
·  The domain must be at least 60 days old
·  Domain must be in “ACTIVE or OK” status, i.e. unlocked
·  If a domain is transferred between registrars, ICANN's Transfer Policy states no re-transfer of the domain is permitted for 60 days from the date the transfer was complete, except in the case of dispute or legal proceedings.

Then, starting this Saturday, October 28, all registrar transfers will additionally require the "transfer authorisation key" or "EPP key" for each domain name being transferred.

EPP keys can be obtained for domains registered at microtech by clicking on the domain name in the management panel and choosing the option to 'Request EPP key'. This function will be available from Saturday.

Get additional help, updates and support at http://www.mtgsy.net/support

Anyone who has been through the transfers process a few times will probably realise the benefits of this new feature.

Suspended transfers are a convenient way to reduce your workload when transferring global top level domain names. The process for transferring a 'gTLD' name often involves getting the WHOIS data set correctly to you or your clients email address so that transfer confirmations can be answered, getting the domain unlocked by the current registrar, and then monitoring when these tasks are done so that you can finally request the transfer without it being rejected.

The new option on the transfers page enables you to enter your transfer now, request the other changes you need such as getting the contact changed and unlocked, and we'll only submit the transfer for you once this is done. This means you are much less likely to get transfers refused and there is less work for you to do.

You can request the immediate submission of the suspended transfer at any time from the domain management panel.

Should you have any queries,comments, or suggestions, please log a call via the support centre.

This facility allows you to make bulk additions, deletions, and changes to your domains dns records. You can select as few or as many domains as you have on your account with us then specify the dns records to add, delete, or change. All changes are made in real time.

This is especially useful if you wish to add a single record to a large amount of your domains, change an IP address for a web server, add an MX record etc.

If you don't see the menu option on the 'dns' menu, please 'refresh' the page.

We hope you find this extra facility useful in helping to manage your dns. Should you have any comments, queries, or suggestions, please contact support@mtgsy.net.

Transactions are now logged in much more detail by all areas of the website, including the API. Users should now be able to see a lot more detail in the transaction history listings for all new transactions and deposits from today.

We hope this popular feature request meets your requirements, but should you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to contact us.

Nominet will suspend and delete a domain name if they find that the contact information is not accurate. This includes accurate postcodes for UK addresses.

We have recently been receiving an increased number of potential suspension notices from Nominet and are contacting users as we receive them, however, it's better that it does not get to this stage!

Please ensure that your domain WHOIS data is correct at all times, especially for .uk names. Failure to ensure this can lead to the suspension and deletion of your domain name without a great deal of notice. Also, please ensure your contact data with us is accurate at all times. Not only is this part of our AUP, but failure to keep current contact data with us means that we may be unable to inform you of any potential service affecting issues.

To update domain details, visit the domain management panel, click on the domain name and choose the option to update your contact information.

To update your account contact details, choose the 'Your Account' - 'Contact Details' option from the web site menus.

If you have any queries, please log a call via the support centre.

This means we now have servers providing dns in the UK, Channel Islands, France, and the USA. All servers in our dns network replicate changes in real time to their partners around the world.

Existing users do not need to make any changes to their domain name configurations to take advantage of this new server.

The addition of this server considerably lowers the average response time to dns requests from that side of the world and is a welcome addition to our dns network.

For any further information, please contact our sales department.

To view your DNS stats, click the icon in the management panel next to your domain name.

Regards,

Support

Spammanager provides a quick and easy to use interface so that end users can check if any mail might be held in their spam queues. They have options to delete, release, and exempt mail from spam filtering.

No account is required on the Microtech site to register and use the spammanager pages. As long as you have a qualifying mail service, your users can use the spammanager pages. Each user registers for the service individually and chooses their own password. Users will only see mail relevant to their own email account and will not see mail related to other account in the same domain.

The spammanager registration page can be found at http://www.mtgsy.net/spammanager/register.php

Please feel free to try the spammanager pages and provide suggestions and comments on the beta to support@mtgsy.net.

Thank you.

If you were not aware of the changes to the mail queue status page, please take a look. You can delete messages from your queue, forward messages to another mailbox, suspend and resume the queue, check your quota, as well as view all mail items in the queue in real time.

Please let us know if you'd like to see other features.

Please be aware that there is a fraudulent WorldPay chargeback email doing the rounds at the moment.  Our mailscan service has been stopping large quantities of these, but we have also been alerted by other users that they have been receiving them from other sources.  This has caused some confusion as our primary payment provider is currently WorldPay.

If you receive an email regarding WorldPay chargeback’s or errors, please do not open any attachment with this email.  We do not send such mails, and WorldPay does not send attachments of this sort with any shopper confirmation or error message.

If in any doubt, please contact us or Worldpay to verify the message is genuine.

Thank you.

If you are a mailscan subscriber, be sure to take a look.

Regards,

Support

Improvements have been made to retrieve live data faster and enable drill downs right down to individual message delivery details.

Regards,

Support

Notable changes that are being introduced are

• response checking
• multiple alert profiles for single tests
• new statistics and information
• definable statistic storage periods
• more reliable and faster failovers, including optional 'fail back'

Please feel free to provide any feedback on the new layout.

Regards,

Microtech support.

Microtech have made some enhancements to the dns editing pages.

We have added scripts that automatically run on any dns zone each time you make a change. These scripts check for common problems users sometimes make we configuring a dns zone. If any issues are found, there will be a warning " Possible issues " displayed near the top of the zone file. This will help to alert you to any possible problems before they become actual problems. To view the warnings, hover the cursor over the warning message.

The new TLD is fully supported by Microtech's DNS services.

To check availability of .eu names, please visit our domain page

These new features enable the user to perform the following functions

• delete emails from the backup mail queue
• forward emails from the backup email queue to another email address (useful if you server is down and you need an email urgently)
• suspend and resume delivery of the backup mail queue

All of these functions can be performed on individual emails or by bulk selecting a quantity of the emails in the queue.

These features have been automatically applied to all existing backup mail services and apply to all quotas.

The see the new queue page, login to the web site and go to 'Email', 'Backup email', 'Management Panel', then click on the 'show queue' link for the relevant service.

Please log a call via the service centre or email support@mtgsy.net if you have any queries.

Thank you.

We are happy to say this latest upgrade was completed as planed without difficulties, and all existing users are now benefiting.

This upgrade changes the previous POP3/IMAP/WEBMail host to provide multiple redundant hosts here at our main site. In addition, all mailbox data is replicated in real time across 2 or more data storage hosts. We can suffer complete failure of either mailbox storage subsystem or a complete mail host, and users should be unaware of any difficulties. This also allows us to perform maintenance where required, without interupting service. This new configuration brings the option of allowing us to host mirror mail servers outside our network, even in other countries, as demand and scalability requirements increase. This wil secure the future of the POP/IMAP mail system for several years to come.

This upgrade has been undertaken as part of an expansion and development program to cope with Microtechs growing client base. This is just one step in increasing the availability and performance of our products over the coming months. We hope, that as with this textbook upgrade, with careful planning and implementation, users will suffer little to no inconvenience as we upgrade our network.

For mor information on Microtechs hosted POP and IMAP services, please see our website here

We hope this will make it easier for users to start adding SPF records to their DNS zones.

As usual, feedback is appreciated. Please send any comments to support@mtgsy.net.

With support for RSS feeds due with Outlook 12, and the general growing popularity and usefulness of RSS we decided to make this enhancement. It's a great, and most of all convenient and time saving way to stay up to date with the latest news.

To use the feed you'll need an RSS news feed reader. There are quite a few around, but 2 free good ones are Awasu and RSSReader. If you're not up to speed with RSS yet, it's worth your time to have a quick read of this good BBC news article on the subject.

We will also shortly add RSS feeds to the support news and maybe the knowledgebase, to enable you to get news, alerts, and new kb articles direct to your desktop.

Please send any comments to support@mtgsy.net

Hello,

We’ve changed the appearance of the site to what we think is a cleaner design.  We’d also like to go over a few changes to the site in the past few weeks.

A new dns server has been added
Our dns network now consists of four separate DNS servers.  Due to the recent issues with our previous providers BGP routing, we have added a new server on a completely different BGP routed dual homed network.  This will provide greatly increased fault tolerance.  The domain pages have been modified to take advantage of this and new registrations and dns setups will use all the dns servers by default.  If you have default zones files setup, please be sure to update them to include the new dns servers. Log a call via the support centre if you need any help.

Support Centre
Microtech has traditionally always responded to support calls via email.  However, with the abundance of spam nowadays and clients running all sorts of spam protection systems, emails occasionally go astray.  A more reliable way of logging a call is via our new ‘support centre’, accessible via the support menu.  This web based support method means requests for assistance arrive here and can be distributed to the correct department immediately.  It also means we have an easily accessible history of the call and any previous calls, which helps us tremendously to provide you with a quicker answer.  Please use the support centre for support calls where possible from now on.  We’ll be making further improvements in this area shortly.

DNS Statistics
Dns stats have been updated to show hits for each individual server rather than just the total hits.  This will show you actual dns server hit distributions.  Stats are updated daily.  Check your dns graphs via the management panel to see the new stats.  

Account documentation
We have added a facility to document client’s domain setups.  This will help our clients keep a local record of all domain details including dns setups.  This is a beta page.  Please let us have feedback.  We are also working on an offline version for PDA’s which will enable you to keep an offline copy of your complete domain configurations with you at all times.  You can view this report here http://www.mtgsy.net/document.php

User preferences
The preferences page has been updated.  You can set options here for you account.  Options include domains per page, news alerts, status alerts, zone update notifications, etc.  You can get this page via the ‘My Microtech’ page on the ‘Your account’ menu.

Status page
The status page now indicates live status of all the main servers.  When services are down for any reason, a note will be placed alongside the status line acknowledging any maintenance etc.  If you want to receive alerts when the status page is updated, check your preferences page to set the relevant option.  This information will also shortly be replicated to our phone system so that callers can check the status of the system by calling our offices at any time.

 
Microtech is committed to improving service wherever it can.  If you have a site or feature suggestion, please do not hesitate to let us know.

Thanks,

Support
support@mtgsy.net