Tier Four Updates DNS Servers

In response to the recent security vulnerability found in the DNS protocol, Tier Four has patched its customer-facing, Caching Name Servers. The Caching Name Servers are now running the latest release of Bind 9 with the patch for the DNS caching exploit.

Because Tier Four's Caching Name Servers are not accessible to users outside the Tier Four network, they were not as vulnerable as those of many other providers. Therefore, Tier Four tested the patched version of Bind (as it was beta software) before releasing it to the production Caching Name Servers, and then released it in a phased deployment to further mitigate the rist of downtime.

Tier Four also had outside testing performed on its name servers and on the name servers of its cusomeers (all those with IPs allocated from the Tier Four netblocks) for vulnerability. All customers with vulnerable name servers that could be detected during this test were notified of the vulnerability and advised to upgrade.

At this time Tier Four believes that most of its customers have patched their servers.

Tier Four also took advantage of this opportunity to add a new Caching Name Server to its collection of name servers. The new Caching name server is located in the Salt Lake City, Utah Colocation facility. This geographic separation provides better fault tolerance and redundancy to customers using Tier Four's name resolution services. Tier Four will also consolidate the two Orem Caching Name Servers onto one server, because the new Caching name server located in Salt Lake City serves the same purpose as the existing second server located in Orem.

The IP Addresses of the new production Caching Name Servers are now available on Tier Four's network setup page.

First Published: 2008-08-06
Last Modified: 2008-08-07

Synopsis: Tier Four updated its Customer Facing DNS Servers today and added a new Caching Name Server to provide better redundancy to customers.