Author: Ashley Lipscombe

[Complete] ams2-c6-1 changes

This is an announcement for any customer who has a website or email service running on ams2-c6-1. Unfortunately, the operating system running on ams2-c6-1 is end of life and needs replacing.

On 1st of May 2023 we will be transferring all hosting accounts from ams2-c6-1 to a newer web server, ams1-c8-1. This will include email and DNS data but not web data – this will remain on ams2-c6-1 via a secure local proxy. You won’t need to do anything. We will automatically be handling the transfer and after the maintenance everything including your email accounts will operate as normal.

Customers who wish to access their website files and data directly via FTP / MySQL on ams2-c6-1 will need to be connected to our VPN and access it via the local network – please contact support@anu.net if you either do not have a VPN account and need one, or are not sure how to connect to ams2-c6-1 using it.

We expect this maintenance to begin at 8PM Amsterdam Time and be complete 2AM Amsterdam time (6 hours). During this period, email accounts hosted on ams2-c6-1 will be offline throughout, and web/DNS traffic may experience 2-3 outages of up to 15 minutes each.

This only affects clients with websites and email hosted on ams2-c6-1 – we will also be contacting customers directly if this is the case.

Ashley

[Complete] ams2-c7-1 & ams2-c6-1 Migration

We will be migrating ams2-c7-1 and ams2-c6-1 Direct Admin servers from our Amsterdam 2 facility to Amsterdam 1.

This will be taking place on the 9th January at 10PM Amsterdam time – we estimate that this will be complete by 10th January at 2AM, 4 hours in total.

ams2-c7-1 currently runs on this public IP: 80.84.234.19 and ams2-c6-1 runs on: 80.84.234.13

We will be issuing each server a new public IP address. ams2-c7-1 will run on: 193.189.141.121 ams2-c6-1 will run on: 193.189.141.122

All customers who are using ams2-c7-1 (ns1.ams2-c7-1.anuhosting.net / ns2.ams2-c7-1.anuhosting.net ), ams2-c6-1 (ns1.ams2-c6-1.anuhosting.net / ns2.ams2-c7-1.anuhosting.net ) or ns1/2/3.anu.net will automatically have all DNS records pointing to the old IPs updated on their behalf.

We will forward traffic from the old IP to the new IP using a dumb proxy at the TCP/IP layer until Monday 30th January 2023 at approximately 12 noon.

We will run a scan to identify and proactively contact all affected customers where we do not have the ability to update DNS records ourselves. We advise that customers do this soon after the migration is complete to ensure the highest levels of performance and stability.

UPDATE 9TH JANUARY 2022 @ 10PM AMSTERDAM TIME:

We are going ahead with this migration as planned. Please note that due to unforeseen circumstances we are revising how long we will be forwarding the old IP until, from 3rd April 2023 at 12 noon, to 30th January 2023 at 12 noon, sorry for any inconvenience caused. Please also note that we will be maintaining the naming structure of these servers, ams2-c7-1 / ams2-c6-1, even though they will be housed in Amsterdam 1.

UPDATE 10TH JANUARY 2022 @ 1:45AM AMSTERDAM TIME:

The migration was successful. ams2-c6-1 and ams2-c7-1 are both now back online in Amsterdam 1. All DNS records we control have been updated. IP traffic from the old IP addresses are being forwarded until 30th January 2023 at 12 noon. We strongly recommend any DNS you control are updated as soon as possible for optimal performance and stability. We will proactively reach out to customers we find using the old IP addresses over the next couple of weeks.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us by emailing support@anu.net any time!

OpenVPN Upgrade

We are rolling out an upgrade to our OpenVPN server – replacing a primary/backup configuration with a high availability cluster of servers. If the primary server ever goes down, a secondary one can immediately take over and continue to serve traffic as normal.

We are mitigating the VORACLE attack vulnerability at the same time (CLICK HERE) by disabling compression. This is now deprecated and will be removed from OpenVPN soon. This is to protect against a hard to exploit but theoretical idea that you can extract certain information from encrypted traffic by how well it compresses. Unfortunately, this change means that existing client configurations can’t automatically connect to the new servers as compression is explicitly specified.

All clients connecting will need to download a new OpenVPN profile containing the new server addresses and without compression specified. Click HERE to begin this process – you need to know your VPN username and password. This will connect you to our new servers and you’ll be ready to go.

If you would prefer, you can manually edit your config file, changing ‘openvpn.anu.net’ to ‘vpn.anu.net’ and removing any line stating ‘compress lzo’ or ‘comp-lzo’.

We plan to keep our old OpenVPN server running for 6 months – it will be shut down Monday, 10th October 2022 at 12 noon.

If you have any questions or need any assistance, do not hesitate to get in touch with us by emailing support@anu.net or opening up a live chat at https://anu.net.