Well, the beef is in the form of some recent database upgrades!!

Today we put into production additional database servers with faster disks, beefier processors, and many gigs o’ram.

Let us know how the site feels. Faster we hope! 🙂

The IP address change for NS3 and NS4 are:

ns3.no-ip.com 69.65.5.106

ns4.no-ip.com 72.5.169.6

These changes primarily effect our No-IP Squared customers, however for any Managed DNS customers who are using vanity nameserver names this may effect you as well.

The old address will continue to provide resolution while customers migrate to the new address.  We will be disabling the old address on April 8, 2008.

This is part of our planned network upgrade at our Oakland and Chicago data centers.

Have questions regarding the change? Contact our support team now.

Well its been a while since our last blog entry so we wanted to update everyone.

WE GOT UPGRADES!

We are proud to announce that on 11/27/2007 that we replaced both of the air filters in the heating units to our office. Yes it was a big deal and we are happy to say that no employees were injured during the upgrades. Also on a much less impressive note, we added two additional DNS servers to better serve our customers and increase reliability.

With 2008 around the corner we are hoping to update the blog more often. We have some big things on the way for 2008. Just to give you a hint, it begins with an “A” and ends with a “T”.

We had a good run in Las Vegas and met a lot of great people but it is time to escape the heat. No-IP has relocated its corporate headquarters to Reno, NV. See ya Las Vegas, Hello Reno!

Our new corporate contact info is as follows.

9585 Prototype Ct Suite A
Reno, NV 89521
775-853-1883 phone
775-853-1886 fax

Recently No-IP has disabled all dns updates from D-Link routers to our main website www.no-ip.com. Over the past 3 years No-IP has supported the ability of these routers to perform updates to our dynupdate.no-ip.com host. We also allowed updates for people that incorrectly configured their router to point at www.no-ip.com. Unfortunately, traffic from these routers constitutes 50% of the requests our website receives and actions must be taken to reduce the impact from these misconfigured routers.

If you are using a D-Link router as your update client, please verify that your “Server Address” is dynupdate.no-ip.com and NOT www.no-ip.com. Also take the time to verify you still have the correct email address for the username and correct password and are running the most recent version of firmware for your router.

Users currently performing updates through www.no-ip.com will receive a “too many updates” error response. Adding salt to the wound, older D-Link routers do not listen to response codes (hence the insane amount of traffic) so at some point in the future we may begin blocking these at the connection level.

More information on configuring your D-Link router can be found over here.

A recent batch of malware has been targeted at users of the Skype VOIP phone service. Apparently the malware made use of a No-IP hostname (nsdf.no-ip.biz). No-IP received notification of this early on the 18th and promptly disabled the account and DNS host of the user that developed the malware. All logs related to this users account have been preserved and will be handed over to law enforcement for prosecution. More information regarding this Skype virus can be read at The Register and over at F-Secure and Symantec.

Please note that you should never click on suspicious links or run executables (.exe files) from unknown sources. Also, please be sure to update your virus scanning software frequently and run it often.

Earlier today ordb.org announced that it is discontinuing the Open Relay Database. The maintainers have moved on noting that blocking open relays just isn’t what it used to be. For No-IP Anti-spam Policies, this was a default list for the Aggressive, Strong, and Moderate presets. It has been removed from these as well as domains that had it as a customized selection. We are sorry to see ORDB go, but we look forward to what new enterprises their loosed time shall beget.

The success of the Anti-spam Policies addition has been staggering. Spam and spam scores are down an almost inconceivable amount. Customer’s inboxes are cleaner and so are ours! Reflector and Backup MX users should see better relay times when they have been offline for awhile due to the smaller queues (70% smaller!). We are currently blocking over one MEEHLLIAHN spam messages per day on mail1.no-ip.com alone, and that doesn’t even include what is filtered with greylisting. This has been a win for everyone, so thanks for putting up with our dust during the transition!

As time goes on we’ll be adding more options to the policies list. To get the ball rolling we’ve added the NJABL. This is an excellent list that is used in part by the Spamhaus XBL. It provides further protection with over 115MB of IP addresses! It is now part of the default for Aggressive and Strong presets. And for those pop3 users who do not enable NJABL, we’ve added custom spam scoring to this new list. The added score should help flag any spam that makes it through the Anti-spam Policies system and aids your local filters in keeping the bad messages out of your way. So read about the NJABL and start using it!

Spam is up, big time. Market reporters say spam has increased as much as 59% in the past two months and 120% from last year. We’ve noticed and we are sure you have too. So we put our heads together and came up with a solution to protect all of our email services, from Backup MX to POP3, included at no extra charge. It’s called Anti-spam Policies and this is how it works.

Log into No-IP.com and click on Mail in the left-hand navigation. Then click Modify for your domain, followed by Anti-spam Policies. You will be presented with a grid of policies on the left and presets across the top. To start, everyone has the “Minimal” setting, equivalent to our previous protection. This includes the No-IP.com custom blacklist, SpamCop, sender validation, and now greylisting(!). Other policies include the venerable Spamhaus.org SBL-XBL, SORBS, dsbl, ORDB and the Bogus MX list from RFC-Ignorant.org.

Probably the most exciting addition is greylisting. Basically, greylisting perform tests to make sure the message is coming from a real mail server and not an infected machine or spam operation. You can read more about greylisting in our guides. Currently, greylisting is in a training mode. On December 4th we will turn it on for all policies that use it.

We recommend you step up your protection to “Moderate.” I personally have been using the “Moderate” setting for three weeks on my account and have seen my amount of spam cut by 75%. Previously I was receiving about 65 spam emails per day. Now I get around 15 per day. And I haven’t had a single complaint from my friends, family, or business associates! When greylisting goes full-bore, I expect to have days where not a single spam message reaches my inbox.

And remember, this is for ALL email services, Forwarding and POP3, Reflector and Backup MX. So take a look, even if you don’t plan on changing anything. Someday you may need to!