Preparing for D Day for Me...

Hello All,

I've been doing a lot of "house keeping" lately before "D" Day. "D" day being delivery day. My wife is due with our 3rd child. While my wife is nesting, I'm doing the equivalent for an IT person. We had a false alarm when we thought it was happening, so now I feel like I'm living on borrowed time and have all this "extra" time. In the last week I've done the following:

• getting our REEF NY & TX SonicWall firewalls updated to the latest code (VPN tunnel speed to my TX off-site environment doubled in speed)
• rolling out a SonicWall based network bandwidth and auditing solution (we currently monitor it using another solution) for REEF's networks.
• NY based on-site servers replication operating system re-installed (for REEF environment, the on-site server is 2008 R2 based. The replication data was not touched, since it is iSCSI based.)
• NY based on-site servers replication software upgraded (to improve performance, noticeable positive difference between AppAssure Replay 4.6.1,31257 and 4.7.2.40512 [found a bug in the replication UI and alerted AppAssure about it and received a support response in 5 minutes. Impressive. I wish all AppAssure support techs responded so quickly]). For REEF environment. Enjoy the image below.
• TX based off-site servers replication upgraded (same AppAssure Replay versions upgraded)
• rolled out my digital photo album solution based on a BlackBerry PlayBook. Considered an iPad, but security, performance, and low cost of the 64GB PlayBook ($300) made it the better solution.
• NY on-site server operating system re-installed (for clients environment, the server environment is Windows 2003 x86 based. Currently using a stable release of Ahsay. Planning to upgrade to latest stable version shortly.
• working on deploying a new wireless SonicWall based solution so guests at home will be on a separate VLAN based network. In preparation for all those home visitors.

Notice the replication speed showing “10.22MBit/sec”. It should be “Mb”, not MB. A capital “B” is BYTES, while a lower case “b” is bits. This is on the latest version 4.7.2.40512. Dev has been alerted per support's response.

Back to spending time with the existing kids and wife,
-Ben

DoS of DNS by an Exchange Focused Backup Software (AppAssure Replay)

 Ehlo All,

Imagine to my surprise that my favorite Exchange & Windows backup solution (AppAssure Replay 4.5.1.27532) was attempting to cause a denial of service (DoS). This version has a major problem with it's use of DNS lookups within the problem. Within 3 days, one Replay Server had performed over 450,000 queries of the hostname I used for Replay replication. This is almost 100 queries every minute 24 hours a day. That's what the product is doing. This is a serious issue. I've alerted the vendor, so I'm sure a fix will be included in a future release. In the mean-time, see below for the work-around until that happens.

The Issue
Inside AppAssure's Replay for replication, you specify a "Replication Target Host Name". This can be a hostname or IP address. See below for setting within Replay.

 This "Select Replication Target" configuration is per protected server (e.g. your Exchange Server, etc). I normally use a hostname for these types of settings since I'm a big fan of using DNS instead of IPs when possible (saves time when changing IPs & saves brain memory space for Exchange Server things). So, when you add your Replication Target hostname, the Replication target and source perform lookups more often than the snap-shot period (x min/hrs). In reality, Replay should only perform a DNS lookup when a replication needs to occur and NOT almost a 100 per minute.

AppAssure's Replay abusing DNS lookups. View from my Firewall hostname query  logs.

The Workaround Until a Permanent Fix is Released by AppAssure
If you use a hostname within the Replication option, make sure you add the corresponding information inside the hosts file (c:\windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts - format is IP address space and hostname - use notepad to open the "hosts" file) on the source AND target Replay Replication Server. This avoids the use of an external DNS query and the query is handled by the operating system. So, this speeds up the process of performing a lookup and reduces your hostname's name server load. Otherwise prepare for your DNS to be attacked by your Replay environment.

Sadly, this isn't the first time I have seen a product mis-use DNS, but it's one of the worst in recent memory.

-Ben