So you decided to deploy a high availability Microsoft Exchange environment. You created a Database Availability Group for the databases on the Mailbox servers, carefully thought out the mailbox server roles and even deployed multiple Client Access Servers at two different sites with a nice WAN connection between them for timely synchronization. Your Exchange DR […]
On occasion we receive a request seeking assistance creating monitors to determine the availability of Microsoft Exchange, such as Internet-facing ActiveSync or OWA. After helping many customers, we have determined what works well, and what doesn’t work at all. Here are our tried and true suggestions for reliably monitoring your Exchange environment. Exchange 2013, 2016 […]
Periodically we talk to someone who says something along the lines of: “we don’t need Total Uptime since we moved to the cloud.” A most interesting statement that is simply the result of someone misinformed about the benefits and capabilities of cloud. Does the cloud provide incredible flexibility? Yes! Does it let you provision services […]
What is SPF? Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a protocol designed to help combat forged email. It allows the owner of a domain to specify which hosts are authorized to send email from that domain. Full details can be found in RFC 7208. How does SPF work? Domain owners publish SPF records in the Domain […]
On an Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas, two men walk into the base exchange. They show their IDs to the clerks, don Halloween masks, and proceed to play the part of terrorists. “This is a drill! We want liberation! This is only a drill!” Airmen shopping in the facility give them funny looks, […]
There have been plenty of zombie movies over the past few years. The plots are similar — the undead stalk the living — and the productions are generally not Oscar material. But somehow the threat hits a nerve with the general public. To illustrate a threat of a different kind, let’s come up with a […]
Alright, we admit that our company has a certain obsession with network availability we collectively call “uptime”. It’s even in our name. We’re totally committed to keeping services up and running for our clients. And while uptime is our best friend, we seem to spend a lot of time thinking about the enemy: downtime. We’ve […]
The internet is replete with Top Ten lists and other rankings. But the criteria for distinguishing between #1 and #10 is often no more than personal whim. So with the caveat that these are not necessarily the worst or the biggest, we’ve decided to list and describe some of the most interesting outages in the […]
Total Uptime’s Cloud DNS Service supports 27 different DNS resource record types. That includes 26 standard record types and 1 special web-redirect type that we’ve created. Below is a comprehensive list of each record type which you can find in the Cloud DNS management interface. DNS SOA Record This is the “Start of Authority” resource […]
Quick, name the most important server in your network – Web server? Active Directory server? Mail server? Those are all important no doubt, but your DNS servers are probably the most critical to your network operations. Imagine you were traveling within a foreign country you had never visited before and the area was totally […]