In addition to the new website, there are a number of infrastructure upgrades going on at Arces.  We upgraded the support infrastructure last year, migrating to a 10-node support cluster using Heartbeat and DRBD so that we can provide service separation and continuity during maintenance windows.  Here are the details of the projects currently underway.

LDAP Upgrade

We use LDAP for centralized management of account authentication and authorization.  We've recently completed an upgrade of the hardware to the latest version of our Gentoo administrative image, during which we also upgraded the software to version 2.4.16 of OpenLDAP.  This allows us to not only support the upgrades listed below, but also to offer backup LDAP services for our clients, wherein we provide off-site secondary LDAP services for static backups and fault tolerance.  In addition, we're deploying Samba and OpenLDAP domain controllers to provide domain services for the Windows systems we use.  Despite the good that Active Directory and other Microsoft services provide, the licensing cost doesn't make sense. If you factor in the instability of Vista, it's a recipe for headache. 

Mail Upgrade

When we last upgraded our mail infrastructure, we chose the combination of vpopmail and qmail to provide our customers with a reliable email hosting solution that they could manage themselves.  Vpopmail and qmail were on the cutting edge of functionality back then, but it required a fair amount of source code modification to get them to speak to LDAP, including modification of the vpopmail header files to hard-code our LDAP server information.  As you can imagine, this makes upgrading difficult, so we were relieved to find that we have many more options available to us now.  We've chosen to convert the system to Postfix with Postfix Admin.  This gives our customers the same flexibility for managing their own domains and for their users to manage their own accounts, but it's an open system with configurable parameters.  We're also reviewing candidates for the replacement of Horde with a less-bulky framework for mail and groupware services.  We'll let you know when we have that in place.

DNS Upgrade

Why leave out DNS?  The Arces DNS Admin is a great tool, and we haven't needed to upgrade it for a while.  However, since we're now providing direct support to Windows clients, we need the ability to add service records into DNS.  That means an upgrade to the DNS infrastructure and the DNS Admin software.  TNPI's NicTool is a great product, once again allowing the customers to control their own data and how we manage it.

IP Space Migration

Why all the upgrades?  We still have two IP blocks from Level 3 that we need to migrate services away from.  Since the services themselves are critical in nature, the safest way to migrate is to build new systems and move functionality across to them.  In doing so we'll be migrating the last of the systems to our own IP space, assuring that services will stay available even if we change providers in the future.