Version 3.4 of our Cloud Platform was released on March 16, 2014. It includes a significant number of new features and enhancements as well as bug fixes. Below is a complete rundown of the changes you’ll see today.
New General System/Account Features:
- Password Reset: Previously, if a user forgot their password and did not have a security question set, they would have to contact support to have it reset. Now a user with appropriate permissions within the same company (or higher e.g. reseller) can click the “new password” link on the User toolbar to immediately reset and email them a password.
- Two-Factor Authentication: We’ve added a new feature that further secures access to the Cloud management portal. By adding a mobile number in your user profile and enabling company-wide two-factor authentication in the company profile, users will be sent a random 6-digit code that they must enter to complete their log-in.
- Product Options: We updated the product options settings for resellers to better control what features are made available to sub-accounts. These now correspond with how we sell features on our own website based on package choices.
- Alert Lists: You can now receive alerts to your mobile device via SMS without having to rig it to forward through an email address. Simply add your mobile number in the user profile and check “enable SMS”. This will allow alert list emails to go to your primary email and mobile device at the same time.
New DNS Features:
- Secondary Domains: We added new information for secondary domains so you can better understand how current they are. You can now see the Serial, whether or not the domain is loaded, the Primary IP, if it is stale/expired, the Last Refresh and the Next refresh.
- Secondary Domains: We also added a button to force an incremental zone transfer, just in case your domain goes stale, or it isn’t configured properly the first time you enter it. Clicking the button will immediately attempt to pull it from the primary.
- Secondary Domains: We also added the ability to update/edit the IP address of the master server after a secondary zone had been created. Previously you would have to delete and recreate the secondary zone if the master IP changed.
- Name Server Expansion: We added back-end functionality that will allow us to customize the name server assignment for individual accounts. This was most requested by partners who have custom/vanity name servers.
- Web Redirect Records: Web Redirects now support the ability to choose between 302 and 301 response types. Previously, only 302 response types were available.
New Load Balancing Features:
- Monitors: We added a new feature that allows you to choose when to mark a server down if multiple monitors are attached to it. Previously, when selecting multiple monitors, any one monitor would mark the server down if it failed the test. Now you can choose whether one monitor will mark the server down, or whether all attached monitors must go down before considering the server offline.
- Networking Ports: We cleaned up how the public and private ports are displayed in the configuration builder to make it a little easier to manage. They are in a table now.
- Networking Servers: We added a new feature to server configurations called “flush on down”. This feature can be set on a per-port basis, and when checked, it will terminate all connections when that port goes down. If unchecked, when a server goes down, connections will not be terminated and are allowed to continue until the client terminates or the session expires. This is handy if you want to take a server offline gracefully for maintenance.
- Auto Failback, for Server Groups: We added a new feature called Auto Failback. By default, when a Server Group goes offline (not just one server in the Server Group, unless that is the only one) and subsequently comes back online at a later time, it is automatically placed back into service and resumes receiving traffic. If you change the setting in your Failover Group to “Auto Failback OFF”, when a Server Group goes completely offline and subsequently comes back online, it will not receive any traffic until you toggle this option again and change it to “Auto Failback ON”. This is handy if the servers in your primary Server Group require you to do something to them before you want them to receive traffic again, e.g. synchronize a database.
- Load Balancing: We added a new weight feature for load balanced servers. Now, when you add a server to a load balanced configuration, you can choose what portion of traffic you would like it to receive compared to other servers in the group. The options are from 1 to 99. If all servers have the same weight (regardless of what the weight value is), they will receive the same amount of traffic.
General System/Account Bug Fixes:
- User Date: The last login field for users was not properly displaying that information. This has been corrected.
- Alert List Emails: If a company had many emails on an alert list (for DNS Failover or Cloud Load Balancing), some users would not receive a copy of all of the emails. This has been corrected.
- Server Log: When viewing the entries in the server log (for DNS Failover or Cloud Load Balancing), the date/time displayed in the table now uses the date/time of your user profile to make it easier to correlate events. The date/time in the description detail remains UTC.
- HELP: We updated the help information to provide guidance for new features.
DNS Bug Fixes:
- Secondary Domains: When clicking on a secondary zone, it would periodically show a blank zone file, even though the zone file may exist on our network.
- Domain Import: If a domain was imported without an SOA TTL value, it created a zone error that required manual fixing. We now set a default value of 14400 to prevent this error.
- Web Redirect Records: Web Redirects were not allowing directories or query strings in the URL, amongst other things. We’ve allowed this.
- Reverse IPv6: When adding a reverse Ipv6 domain, it would not allow very specific entries and generally only allowed a /30 or larger prefix. This has been corrected.
- Disabling Domains: If a domain was completely disabled, and then an A record added, it would prevent re-enabling of the domain later. This has been corrected.
- Failover Status: When you hover over the failover status icon in the DNS Failover section, it incorrectly displayed all locations as UP or DOWN because it was basing that status on the overall status of the Failover Pool depending on how many nodes you had configured to make that determination. This has been corrected and all nodes display their individual status when hovering.
- Server Status Log (DNS Failover): We added the Failover Pool name to the details and as a column in the server status log.
- MX Records: We previously did not support a wildcard (*) MX record hostname. This is now supported.
- TXT Records: We have always supported TXT records greater than 255 characters (for example for a 2048 bit Domain Key) but it required a little tweaking to save properly. We now allow you to enter very long TXT records and automatically break them up into 255 character TXT records on the back-end to comply with RFC but make it easy for you, the end-user.
- SOA MIN TTL: The SOA Min TTL value for new domains has been set to 300. This will help minimize issues with negative caching.
- Domain Record Loading: For domains with 50 or more A records, loading time has been improved. It could take up to 30 seconds for customers with 200 A records, and we certainly don’t want to test anyone’s patience.
- Domain Record Sort: When opening a record type (e.g. A records) the default sort was on the hostname column, and even though it said it was sorted from A to Z, it really wasn’t. It is now!
Load Balancing Bug Fixes:
- Networking Servers: Occasionally, information did not update properly when viewing the ports attached to specific servers, so we added a refresh button right there to make updating the window and the live status of each server port easier.
- Configuration Builder: The breadcrumb trail on the configuration builder would occasionally hide one of the trail items. This has been resolved.
- Networking Ports: We now allow you the ability to create a port with the ANY protocol and * for the port number. The same is true for TCP/* and UDP/* too, although the latter two cannot be used with the ANY/* at the same time for obvious reasons.
- Networking Ports: We now allow you to add the same port number for UDP and TCP protocols. Previously, if you added TCP/1234 (for example), it would not let you then add UDP/1234.
- Configuration Builder: The refresh icon in the configuration builder would close the servers group every time it was clicked, which was slightly annoying. This has been fixed.
- Monitors: If a new port was added to a published pack, it would not attach the correct monitor to it 100% of the time. This is resolved.
- Publishing a Pack: Previously it was possible to publish a pack even if you did not assign any public/private port mappings, which would give a false sense of success. This is now disallowed and proper help is given to create ports.
- Monitors: We added a cautionary dialog when customers fill in the destination IP box in monitors. It was not entirely obvious that when the destination IP box was left blank, that it would use the server’s IP address for monitoring. This resulted in customers often creating multiple monitors for each server when that was probably not necessary.