Websiteblitz and Onedex Hosting outage for email and websites  

Wed 10.30am

Firstly what is the problem?

Our servers (where your wesites and email live) are housed in a data center as most other internet service providers in the country are. The servers then have an upstream service provider to supply bandwidth to the servers (connect the server to the internet).

Ours and many other isp's use Distribute IT as our upstream service provider.

On Saturday afternoon Distribute IT was the victim of a hacker which brought all services down (means we have no connection for our servers to the internet).

When did we become aware of the situation? Within 30 seconds of our servers going off line we receive an sms from our monitoring company so we were aware of the situation immediately.

What did we do? We tried to contact Distribute IT but to no avail they were not answering their phone and currently still have an answering machine on that line. We tried to email but got the same response no answer. We kept trying Saturday evening and throughtout Sunday.

We have in place a contingency plan and a back up server but to make this work we have to be able to change name servers on each domain name (so when people look for your website or send you an email it goes to the new server not the old one).

The problem is to change name servers we have to be able to access Distribute It's data base and we can't. I am led to believe that the AUDA can step in in situations like this.

Monday was still the same. I tried to contact AUDA (the contolling body for .au domain names) but because it was a holiday Monday in the Eastern States they had the day off. I also sent AUDA an email Moday which I am still waiting for a reply.

Tuesday I actually spoke to AUDA and told them of the situation and asked for a resolution to the problem as Distribute IT would not talk to anyone, their answer was we think DIT is doing a great job and we don't think it is our place to talk to them on your behalf. I then asked if we transfer our clients domains over to the new server could they speed up the process (normally takes at least 2 days to transfer) and they said no but Distribute IT could ok them for immediate transfer if they wished.
I again stressed the point that we could not communicate with DIT would it be possible for AUDA to ask DIT if we put the domains up for transfer to ok them immediately and again they stated we don't think it our place to do so.

Tuesday DIT finnally made a statement on twitter and on a blog post that services should be back up today (tuesday) it is evident that they weren't. They have stated the same thing today.

Had we been able to access the name servers we could have had most websites back up Sunday (some take a bit longer that others) but we certainly would have had emails working again.

 

 

92779505

support@onedex.com