RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

Zitat:

Originally posted by i-p-tel Our DNS provider, Hostway is down after a DDOS attack. You can access PBXes by using the numerical IP 188.40.65.148.

nice to give an ip but when logged in it goes to www5 and this does not work !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.

It's a new business day and my phones are dead. I rely on this service for my company and phones are dead, do you really care or not. it seems not !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Is it really that difficult to say what we should do, let me help.

List the ip's of www 1 to www whatever so everyone can acces their server. Mine is www5

What Ip should we use for sip.pbxes.org where our phones are registered.

Give some support, it looks like you don't care are we are left to wait untill this dns problem is solved.

I have said it several times in the past that you seem to be unable to communicate with us and only seem to write a single like of comment and we have to keep asking to get a decent comment.

For future I would suggest you get some backup domains and use a different dns provider in case there is another ddos attack or have at least the second nameserver from a different provider. there are easy solution to prevent this.

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Edited by moderator to remove offensive language. Warning! We do not tolerate offensive language in this public forum.

This post has been edited 2 time(s), it was last edited by i-p on 09.10.2009 at 12:34.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

For the phones it is sufficient to temporarily use 188.40.65.148 no matter which of our servers your account is hosted on.

If you have problems accessing the web interface you might need the following IPs if your browser has not cached them:

www1 http://188.40.65.148
www2 http://76.191.104.53
www3 http://88.198.69.237
www4 http://67.231.245.210
www5 http://91.121.209.5
www6 http://124.108.37.109
newskyvoip http://124.108.37.233

Hostway has just restored their nameservice. We will work on a more reliable configuration with them. If we have a DNS issue again we will send out an info by email to all customers. But please bobmats now bear in mind that you ealier asked for removal from the mailing list. Since 2005 when PBXes started this was the first issue of this kind, and happening during the night. Not the best premises for a 100% troubleshooting.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

This post has been edited 3 time(s), it was last edited by Dia on 21.01.2010 at 01:34.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

I can't remember asking for removal from the mailing list. I also can't see why sending a mail in this case would be any problem for anyone. If there is a major issue like this I don't see any problem informing your customers and offer them a solution.

Now I had to google to find the ip address for the forum. In this case your first response should have been to offer the solution by telling customers to replace pbxes.org for the ip address and to give the correct ip address for each www server. You did this now but everything was working than.

A dns attack is always a bad thing but as said you can host your ns2 at a complete different provider. This way when 1 is down the other one will still resolve, isn't that the idea to having minimum 2 nameservers.
Now it happened so you can learn and find a solution in case it happens again.

PBXes is a greeat service and it's promoted also as a replacement for your own pbx or asterisk server. You are not offering a consumer type product but a product that means communication for customers. If companies use your service for communication they rely on it.
This also means that you should make a book of problems that can happen and what the solution can be.

A dns attack is an example and now you are looking for a solution. The same book should have issue like what if 1 datacenter goed down complete, fire or whatever, same for harddrive failure which you mentioned in this thread and your failure system did not pick it up.
If you offer a critial service like this it's my opinion that you should be prepared and inform customers.

I am glad it happened during the night and not business hours as I don't want to spent hours on getting things to work.

I switched everything to ip address instead of domain name but that's not the solution because if the ip goed down I have to change everything to the domain again and when that does not resolve the other way around.

So i am looking forward to the solutions where dns will still work even if there is a ddos attack.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

Hey bobmats,

Don't get me wrong, since I agree with most of what you mentioned in your last post. PBXes should have had redundant nameservers, the outage should have been communicated better, this is not just an amateur's testing PBX platform, but a corporate type PBX replacement solution, especially for distributed workforce companies. I also had customers which were affected by the DNS outage, as well as the www1 meltdown the previous day. So I had to do enough back-pedaling to smooth their ruffled feathers.

But to put all this in perspective though, we should examine the other side of the coin too. To get extra DNS servers, staff to send out email messages, to update the website in a timely fashion, to create better documentation, and to handle the graveyard shift, (since the Japanese working hours are out of whack with the European and the US working hours) etc, costs quite a sum of money.

In the current economic climate, in which everyone is trying to run lean and mean organizations, how would you like to be paying let's say 50 to 80 Euros per month for that Premium PBXes account, instead of just 10 Euros? You would have all the above mentioned bells and whistles, for 5 to 8 times the amount of money you pay now per month.

Because a simple email or a forum post takes some time to prepare, and what would you have the technical people do first? Do everything they can to identify the issue, communicate with the right people to discuss it and fix it, or prepare an email and send it to the 32747 account holders, and in addition update the website?

Everything takes time or money to do. Most of the times it takes both. We are all here because we don't want to host our own PBX service, deal with the viruses, attacks, upgrade and maintenance issues of running our own telephony server, for a really good price. In return, we are getting a stable platform, with a no frills website to slow down our browsers (except on the first page where FlashBlock is a godsend), no ITSP attachments of any kind where you can setup your existing ITSPs, and six geographically separated servers to minimize delays and provide real-time backup if you are willing to invest in a second PBXes account.

We get no coherent A-Z documentation, but a forum we have to search through, with a few good people willing to help us along, most of the time. There is however a paid support option where anyone can arrange to talk to a human, and that option is available on selected regular support cases as well.

Regarding the two issues you brought up, redundancy for the telephony servers as well as for the DNS servers, things are looking up. Following the current DNS issue, I am sure i-p-tel will be considering options for backup DNS servers. I have also mentioned on another related thread, a quite simple solution to setup an in-house DNS server, which would have helped tremendously during this outage.

As for building a redundant telephony solution using PBXes, this has been available since the time the 2nd and 3rd servers were put into production. With any SIP UA that supports more than one registration, there is a procedure where you can duplicate the setup of an existing account on another server. If one server goes down for any reason, the other one takes over with minimal to no downtime. I have mentioned this a couple of times in the past, and I will be glad to discuss it again, with anyone interested.

Let me know what you think, and consider that RAID which is quite popular in our days, stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. A second PBXes account with a home or office DNS offers similar inexpensive protection.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

@bobmats

This was your post http://www1.pbxes.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=1222672639 asking to be removed from the mailing list.

Actually you were the one who asked for reducing communications and blocking general availability of more information on PBXes.

Now you wanted more. Please calm down and don't make a mountain out of a molehill. This is a site of professionals and they know that every system - even PBXes - can fail and how to deal with it. Currently there is no technically known way of totally prohibiting DNS outages caused by DDOS attacks (see wikipedia, your favorite lexicon!).

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

Please, I have around 15 extension with your services that no works from 48 hours.

This extension are registered to Pbxes but not are able to receiving calls. Outbond calla work fine. I Have tried to change name of server with IP without any positive issue.

Can I solve this situation?

Any suggestion are appreciate, thx.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

@giopri

I have resaved all of your extensions by opening https://www1.pbxes.com/config.php?displa...action=resetall

Please re-enter your call forwardings if any.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

We have added more DNS servers for pbxes.com and pbxes.org to avoid DNS problems in future. Monitoring systems have also been further improved.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

Zitat:

Originally posted by i-p-tel @bobmats This was your post http://www1.pbxes.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=1222672639 asking to be removed from the mailing list. Actually you were the one who asked for reducing communications and blocking general availability of more information on PBXes. Now you wanted more. Please calm down and don't make a mountain out of a molehill. This is a site of professionals and they know that every system - even PBXes - can fail and how to deal with it. Currently there is no technically known way of totally prohibiting DNS outages caused by DDOS attacks (see wikipedia, your favorite lexicon!).

I think your are mixing up 2 things.

The mails I refered to were plain and simple spam in the way that your were advertising a wiki of whatever. I am not interested in those kind of things.

I do mention that information on this can be found on the forum.

But now whe have to talk like grown ups.
Sending out a mail if there is a major failure is informing your customers about an actual problem, it's not about advertising a new service of other non important information.

The problem now also was that becuase dns server were down reaching the forum could only be done thru the ip, which you will need to know ?

If you would have sent out an email to customers you could have told them to replace the sip.pbxes.org with an ip so everything would work.
You also failed to do this on the forum or did this when the problem was allready solved.

What I find very ammusing to read is that you now blame me for the lack of communication. Come on grow up, you seem to be old enough to have your own opinion and you own this stuff here so you are responsible not me. I hope you are not doing everything I tell you to do (you give that impression by blaming me now) it might be nice if you did ;-)

So to make things clear. No i am not interested in commericla emails from you and everyone should have the option to receive them or opt-out.

That said informing your customers by mail about technical problems is a complet different thing. And no I have no problems receiving information about that.

So please don't mix emailing commercial mails with technical mails when there are problem. Real simple don't you think.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

@bobmats

The old discussion was about adding an article on Wikipedia about PBXes. You were opposing this. By doing so in the public you efficiently stopped the project.

Now imagine we had such an article. In the case of the DNS outage everybody could have added an info about the outage there, as a second source to the forum.

Do you ever see the positive aspects of what we are doing here?

This post has been edited 2 time(s), it was last edited by i-p on 11.10.2009 at 16:53.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

As it is not possible to reliably send out emails in real time in case of DNS attack - many email servers block mails from unexisting sources - we recommend to use Twitter as a medium in future cases.

The real time search on http://twitter.com will be available to look for status updates if http://pbxes.org/status gets unreachable.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

Zitat:

Originally posted by i-p-tel @bobmats The old discussion was about adding an article on Wikipedia about PBXes. You were opposing this. By doing so in the public you efficiently stopped the project. Now imagine we had such an article. In the case of the DNS outage everybody could have added an info about the outage there, as a second source to the forum. Do you ever see the positive aspects of what we are doing here?

Wikipedia is very clear what they allow and what they don't allow. Wikipedia is meant as information and is not meant to be used as a platform to promote a commercial service. Your service is still a commercial service and although you have free accounts they can only p\be possible by paid accounts.

The wike article would have been stopped anyhow because of these rules. So please stop blaming me for that. If you were than convinced that wikipedia is the right page for you you can still start a page and see what will happen.

I think I said I would love to have a page about my company and I have seen of of my competitors make one and got deleted very fast. The only information you see about a company is on bigger importnat companies, take apple, google, ibm and even than this is general information. wikipedia would never even allow you to post information on how to use your service, that is not what wikipedia is about. You can dislike this, but those are not my rules. By opposing the wiki articel is was just opposing it for good ground and it would have been stopped otherwise.

If you want to make a wiki, just buy the domain pbxeswiki.com.

Now you even suggest that i am to blame that there was not a second page where people could have found this information.

Back to the facts. Your dns failed because of a ddos attack, not your mistake. You did not have a dns server from a different company that would have enabled everyone to access the pages. This is your mistake not mine, but everyone makes mistakes and now you learned and have as you wrote dns servers from other companies..

You say imagine we would have such an article, fact is you don't even have an atricle on this on pbxes and yes you gave a guide how to do it when the problem was solved.
So who is here to blame ?. My opinion is that you time after time prove that you are a very difficult person to communicate with. It did not came in your mind to post a message on the forum yourself how to solve the problem by replacing the domains with ip addresses and giving the ipadresses for www1 2 3 .

Now it's somewhere in the forum written down and I hope that there will never be a problem like this again.
But to start you might want to write this down in your help section.

It does bring to my mind another potential problem. What happens if one of your servers or the datacenter of on of your servers is under a direct ddos attack. It has not happened but it's one thing you hope will not happend but it could.

Say i am on www3 my account will be unusable and I am unable to login. Will my account be moved to a different server automatically. Since I can't login I can't do this myself.

Or what if the main server to which pbxes.com links is in a datacenter under ddos attack, what will happen than.

As said there are many possible problems, most will never happen but you could look at trying to find a solution in case some will happen. This will make your service even better and more reliable.

As for email yes this will not work under ddos attach, but also for this you can have a special domain dns hosted as a different company to solve that problem

Twitter can be great for this. Just checked pbxes is still free so I suggest you register twitter.com/pbxes very fast ;-)

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Edited by moderator to remove offensive language. Second Warning! We do not tolerate offensive language in this public forum.

This post has been edited 1 time(s), it was last edited by i-p on 12.10.2009 at 00:26.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

I support twitter notifications idea.
It's an excellent channel for this kind of things

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

I noticed recently that my Grandstream IP phone can not login into the Pbxes account more and more often. I read all of this thread and tried to change the server IP to all the 5 IP addresses you provide (ww1-ww5). It did not help.
I know that my Internet connection is OK, since it is a 4 line phone and all the other 3 accounts login into other IP accounts with no problem.
I tried different extensions also, but it still won't login.
I did not change any definitions or hardware, it is something that just started recently and now it is offline for quite some time now.
Any idea what could be wrong?

Thank You

Dany

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

The IPs on the previous post, have been updated with the new ones from today's changes.

Dany, can you indicate to which server is your Grandstream phone loosing the registration to? I had intermittent issues with my Siemens and Snom phones, until I rebooted the router followed by the phones.

Some phones cache and use the old IP, even if they request the new one on the Register statement.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

I powered up the phone several times and also reset the router before doing other things. As of now the phone can not login yet.
Now It is not even loging on, so obviously it is not loosing it.
Before I started trying specific IP addresses, it was : pbxes.com
It is currently set to ip address: 91.121.209.5
I tried all teh IP addresses I have:
www[0].pbxes.com.-------->217.195.32.11
www[1].pbxes.com.-------->213.133.110.43
www[2].pbxes.com.-------->216.75.41.112
www[3].pbxes.com.-------->78.46.102.143
www[4].pbxes.com.-------->64.118.93.76
www[5].pbxes.com.-------->91.121.209.5

no luck so far

Dany

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

Dany,

Most of the IPs you mentioned are outdated. Here are the new set of IPs after today's changes:

www1 http://188.40.65.148
www2 http://76.191.104.53
www3 http://88.198.69.237
www4 http://67.231.245.210
www5 http://91.121.209.5
www6 http://124.108.37.109

You can try any of these, but I would suggest to try using the FQDN of the server your account is hosted at.

So if your account is on the www4 server use www[4].pbxes.com without the square [] brackets around the number.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

Thank you.
I did it, set it up to www5 where my account is, and it worked!!!

Is it a normal practice to always check the IP address of the account and use it when there is a problem?
I guess we need to find a way to find out when you are changing IP addresses, so we can update the settings in our phones.
Is there a setting I need to make to get such notifications next time?

Dany

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

Dany,

What I have found to work over the years using PBXes, is simply using the FQDN of the server each account is hosted on.

SIP UAs (IP-phones, ATAs, soft-phones) provisioned with the proper FQDN wwwX.pbxes{.}com without the square [] brackets and X=1,2,3,4,5,6, go through IP changes without a hitch most of the times. Stuck routers which propagate outdated DNS information are the culprit in the majority of the cases.

Having said that, using the IP instead of the proper FQDN is purely an emergency measure, to be used when and only when the authoritative DNS servers of the pbxes.com domain have dropped off the Internet.

Even when this rare case materializes, only once so far in the 4 year history of PBXes, there are resilient DNS servers which have cached the last good known IP addresses of our servers, thus you can get the server's IPs from them. OpenDNS's CacheCheck is such a service, which proved invaluable during the authoritative' DNS outage.

Having learnt from our shortcomings, we try to maintain the FQDN to IP list current in this support forum, after every change of an IP address. So as a conclusion, please refrain from using the actual IP addresses during normal circumstances. Using the proper FQDN just makes your life a lot easier, and with the advent of IPv6 much more saner too.

RE: Phone can't connect to PBXes - www down as well?

The routing for pbxes.com was incorrectly set since yesterday. Sorry about that. Registering to pbxes.org was OK.