Barracuda problems

Folks were posting earlier today noticing problems delivering to Barracuda hosted services. The good news is Barracuda has been updating their status page. As of now, the status page says things are improving.

Monitoring – Since 7PM PDT 11/1/2016, the Barracuda Essentials for Email Security service has been experiencing a sustained and unusually large number of inbound connections from unverified sources. This resulted in some customers experiencing delays in email delivery and issues accessing the message/quarantine logs. We have made significant progress sanitizing these connections. At this point, email processing capabilities have returned to normal and backlogged messages are being delivered. Also, access to the message and quarantine logs is fully restored. We are continuously monitoring the connection load, taking further steps to mitigate the impact and tracing the root cause. Our priority is to restore the service to full capacity. We will provide more information through the course of the investigation. Thank you for your patience.

There have been a lot of attacks over the recent past, some against mail servers some against other systems. There’s not enough data to know if this is related to any of that but it’s certainly worth paying attention to.

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Do system administrators have too much power?

Yesterday, Laura brought a thread from last week to my attention, and the old-school ISP admin and mail geek in me felt the need to jump up and say something in response to Paul’s comment. My text here is all my own, and is based upon personal experience as well as those of my friends. That said, I’m not speaking on their behalf, either. 🙂
I found Paul’s use of the word ‘SysAdmin’ to be a mighty wide (and — in my experience — probably incorrect) brush to be painting with, particularly when referring to operations at ISPs with any significant number of mailboxes. My fundamental opposition to use of the term comes down to this: It’s no longer 1998.
The sort of rogue (or perhaps ‘maverick’) behavior to which you refer absolutely used to be a thing, back when a clean 56k dial-up connection was the stuff of dreams and any ISP that had gone through the trouble to figure out how to get past the 64k user limit in the UNIX password file was considered both large and technically competent. Outside of a few edge cases, I don’t know many system administrators these days who are able to (whether by policy or by access controls) — much less want to — make such unilateral deliverability decisions.
While specialization may be for insects, it’s also inevitable whenever a system grows past a certain point. When I started in the field, there were entire ISPs that were one-man shows (at least on the technical side). This simply doesn’t scale. Eventually, you start breaking things up into departments, then into services, then teams assigned to services, then parts of services assigned to teams, and back up the other side of the mountain, until you end up with a whole department whose job it is to run one component of one service.
For instance, let’s take inbound (just inbound) email. It’s not uncommon for a large ISP to have several technical teams responsible for the processing of mail being sent to their users:

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Ask Laura: Should we allow tagged addresses?

AmsCanal1

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Thoughts on filters

One of the questions we received during the EEC16 closing keynote panel was why isn’t there a single blocklist that everyone uses and why don’t ISPs share data more. It would be so much easier for senders if every ISP handled mail the same as every other. But the world isn’t that simple, and it’s not always clear which mail stream is spam and which is good mail.

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