Version 3.3 of our Cloud Platform released

Version 3.3 of our Cloud Platform was released on September 22. While many months have flown by, we’ve packed this one full of several new features that many have been waiting for, as well as fixes to all of the known bugs up until September 15th.

Here are the new features we’ve included in this release:

• DNS Web Redirect enhancement: Our unique DNS Web Redirect record-type now has a new option. “Carry Original Path”. This allows you to carry the entire URL from the entered URL to the new one. For example, if you have a redirect on example.com to go to www.example.com, someone who visited example.com/directory/page.htm would be sent to www.example.com. But now that directory or page structure will be carried along too (if you want it to.)
• New Email Alert Templates: Users of our DNS Failover or Networking solutions can receive email alerts when servers go UP or DOWN depending on how they are monitored. By default, the emails that are sent use generic templates. You can now create your own Email Template and include different information that can give you better insight into what events have transpired.
• Networking Alerts: We’ve now added email alerting functionality to our Networking solutions (e.g. Load Balancing, Failover etc.). Choose if you’d like to receive an alert when a device goes UP or DOWN or both. And, of course, customize the template too!
• Server Status Logging: Users of DNS Failover or Networking solutions now see a tab in the Account section that logs all of the UP/DOWN activity for their servers or devices. You no longer have to comb through emails to find a history of network events. Simply look at the Server Status tab to see a complete history.
• DNS Change Log: Users of Cloud DNS will now see a new Change Log tab in the Account section. Effective 9/22/2013 we began logging all changes made to DNS records and display them for your review. This is a feature our larger Enterprise customers have been asking for. You can audit changes that have been made, or know who to blame if a change was made incorrectly! Of course, you can’t delete the logs either.
• User Adjustable Time Zones: Yep, it’s finally here. Each user account now has a drop-down to choose the time zone. The Last Modified date for DNS records, UP/DOWN alert emails, Change Log and Server Status information is all displayed with the time zone you selected. No more adding or subtracting from GMT/UTC to figure out when something happened.

Here is a list of the bug fixes:

• PASSWORD RESET: We changed our password reset functionality to increase security. Now, when you request a password reset, you’ll be asked for the answer to your secret question. When answered correctly, a random password is generated and emailed to you.
• PASSWORD QUESTION & ANSWER: If the first character of your password reset question was UPPERCASE, it would not recognize your answer properly.
• NEW DOMAIN DIALOG: When adding a new domain, if you toggled the “Domain Type” drop-down menu more than once, field validation would not always validate properly.
• ZONE IMPORT: When importing a zip file full of domains, even when all imported correctly, an error message was displayed in addition to an “import successful” message, which was confusing. The erroneous error message has been removed.
• ZONE IMPORT: We improved our import functionality and tested it with a few formats created by different DNS providers to ensure everything imports as expected.
• ZONE EXPORT: We changed the zone export to have a more RFC compliant format.
• PERMISSIONS: We updated the ‘read/write’ role permission for the DOMAIN tab to only show EDIT, SEARCH, RELOAD. ADD was an option that has now been removed. For the ‘read’ permission, EDIT has also been removed.
• USERS: We added the ability to search users by their email address.
• INTERNET EXPLORER 10: We’ve made tweaks and adjustments to ensure that everything works swimmingly in IE 10. Occasionally users would have difficulty adding new record types or changing passwords.
• USERS: The toolbar buttons in the Users tab were not properly spacing, causing them to overlap slightly.
• SUB-COMPANIES: For resellers, when deleting a sub-company, the dialog box would not always display the correct ‘success’ message upon completion.
• REVERSE ZONES: We updated validation to better accept standard notations including RFC2317, RFC4183 and DeGroot.
• GEO POOLS AND A RECORDS: When creating an A record for the domain apex (@ symbol) a message would be displayed warning about GEO Pools, even though the client may not have GEO Pool functionality in their account.
• FAILOVER: When opening a failover pool, we changed the default sort to be by the priority instead of the name. This seemed to make more sense.
• FAILOVER: If a failover pool is in use when being deleted, the conflict resolution dialog now better assists users in updating records on-the-fly vs. simply advising that it is “in use” and cannot be deleted.
• FAILOVER: If you unchecked “enable monitoring” the “alert if up” and “alert if down” would remain checked. Not that this would actually send out alerts, it was simply visually confusing.
• GEO: We updated how our GEO works to better support traffic routing using NS records.
• SUSPENDING: Suspending and un-suspending DNS records did not alter the “Last Changed” date/time, which was not a positive thing for change log purposes.
• LOAD BALANCING: Uploading an SSL Intermediate Certificate would not always work.
• MONITORS: When editing a TCP-CONTENT monitor where the “send string” value was used, you could not save.
• DNS SOA SERIAL NUMBER: We updated the SOA serial number to use standard RFC recommended format vs. our own format.
• SOA TTL: When importing a domain using the import tool, the SOA TTL value was often unrecognized in the import file. The value is now properly detected and entered into the database.
• A RECORDS: In a previous release, we accidentally removed the ability to use underscores “_” in A records. How stupid was that. This was actually a side effect of another change, so we didn’t notice right away.
• AAAA: We improved our IPv6 validation a little bit. Occasionally an IP would not be allowed if it used a shortened notation.
• CNAME RECORDS: We improved validation to prevent records from being created where an identical CNAME already exists.
• CNAME RECORDS: We now allow the use of a wildcard (*) in CNAME records.
• CNAME RECORDS: Oddly enough, we allowed IP addresses in the CNAME “points to” field. This did not save properly, so now we’ve added proper validation to prevent the use of an IP address. Only FQDNs are allowed.
• TXT RECORDS: Hyphen (-) and underscore (_) would occasionally not be accepted in TXT records.
• MX RECORDS: We changed the default table column widths for MX records so it looks better and is easier to read.
• MX RECORDS: Editing an MX record with a trailing dot (.) would often present an error.
• We also implemented the reverse so a CNAME cannot be created if an identical record exists elsewhere.
• SECONDARY ZONES: When editing a secondary zone’s configuration, the option to select a zone transfer group and to configure Also Notify IPs was provided. This was only applicable to primary zones, and has now been hidden.
• SECONDARY ZONES: Now, when you double click on a secondary zone (or choose ‘view records’ from the toolbar), you will see a copy of the zone as we currently have it in our database.
• HELP FILES: We freshened the online help to add some additional information to a few key areas.