IPAD-OS Upgrade

IPAD 7.01 New Feature List

The IPAD-OS 7.01 version has many enhancements including noticeable improvements in function, compatibility, speed and reliability.

Some of these major advancements give you more power to fight spam and virus email attacks while at the same time making the IPAD services more available for your legitimate users and paying customers with less maintenance time from you.

The following is a short list of the changes between the IPAD 6.01 version and the IPAD 7.01 version. A more complete list including all of the details is included in your IPAD 7.01 documentation.

New 7.01 Features | IPAD 7.01 Bug Fixes

SOME NEW IPAD FEATURES

A lot of the work in the IPAD 7.01 release goes into enhanced core performance, reliability and stability. But there are some really powerful new features too!

• Block unwanted email sources based on geographic country codes! IPAD 7.01 now supports blocking unauthenticated mail to specific users that comes from IP addresses in countries identified by country code. This means you can block mail from all of the countries in Asia for the boss and still allow mail from China to reach the sales team. Blocking can be different for each user, each domain or for your whole server.
• IPAD 7.01 now has Automatic DNS Provisioning, DNS Orphan Removal and Fast Updating via DNS Notify! You no longer have to notify your cooperative DNS secondary host about PRIMARY domains added to, or removed from your IPAD. This allows IPAD 7.01 to notice when it should be secondary for an Internet domain name, automatically transfer the zone file and add the new SECONDARY statement to your BOOT.NAM file. It also notices when any automatic secondary zone it is hosting has been removed from the PRIMARY host and only after a very cautious series of tests, removes the orphan zone. Note that both the PRIMARY and SECONDARY servers must be on IPAD 7.01 to use this feature fully. Disperse Your DNS!
• New in IPAD-OS 7.01 you can subscribe to a dynamic status report by clicking the RSS icon in your web browser's address bar to track some interesting statistics for your IPAD.
• IPAD 7.01 drastically pushes the firewall efficiency off the charts and well out in front of all the competition. The technical details of how this works gets a little complicated, but it has to do with moving a task that potentially had to happen once every few milliseconds (hundreds or thousands of times a second) to happening once every five or ten minutes. The performance gain is hundreds of thousands of times faster!
• A new AcceptURI command for the DNSBL.CTL file allows selective white listing Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) that may mistakenly appear in black lists. This means you can still subscribe to public URIBL services and accept mail with popular link sites like YouTube and Facebook.
• A new email header is added to every message that passes through the SMTP server. This header starts with X- then the host name of the IPAD followed by -AS: and shows the internal workings of the mail blocking logic. Now it is easier to spot why mail was blocked or allowed through your list of filters.
• Increased the maximum DNS delegation depth from 7 to 28, to make the IPAD more like BIND. This can potentially slow down some first time DNS resolutions, but ultimately it allows poorly or excessively delegated domains to be resolved the first time.
• Modified the rules for DNS resolution to pass the DNS test at www.dns-oarc.net.
• New internal semaphores for DNS allow for more graceful reloading of DNS authority files while still handling a normal DNS work load. All previous IPAD version were forced to wait until all DNS work completed before the new zone files could load.
• If we reload the root zone, the new root info replaces Root_servers only when it is safe to do so.
• The IPAD used to resolve all of the NS (name server) records to IP addresses then start querying the name servers for answers. We now gather all the known IP addresses from the cache, query them, and query the root servers for other name servers only if needed. This method is more efficient and noticeably faster.
• Removed the old DNS RAM cache completely! This cache was originally designed to provide a buffer between the DNS resolver and the disk cache files. When the disk cache was moved into memory (called the extended cache), the RAM cache became redundant and actually restricted the performance. The DNS resolver is now allowed to go directly to the extended DNS cache to find answers which makes it almost 300 to 400 times faster to find a local answer than before. The cache update task is no longer needed and has been removed.
• The DOMAIN CACHE WAIT command has been removed because it only worked on the DNS RAM cache. The DOMAIN CACHE size and wait control file parameters are preserved, but no longer are used in the web manager or IPAD.CTL.
• The DOMAIN CACHE LIST command now lists one bucket in the extended cache.
• Cap DNS expiration times to a minimum of 60 minutes for the extended cache and 1 minute for the authoritative cache. This helps limit the negative effects from domains configured with stupidly short expire times.
• New DOMAIN TEST command tests for a number of common DNS errors. This makes it must easier to spot and fix DNS configuration errors.
• The new DOMAIN WALK command walks the DNS tree and reports on some of the more common errors. This can help explain why some domain names do not work correctly and points out places that may need your attention for domains you host.
• The DNS resolver now avoids some intermediate lookups to increase resolving speed.
• IPAD 7.01 implements a new SMTP directory fan-out and rescan logic that makes it 4096 times harder to suffer from directory extension performance problems even with a very heavily loaded mail server. The IPAD is now able to recover from directory extensions in the mail server at least 64 times faster than IPAD 6.0.
• The IPAD mail server now logs at the detailed level when EXEMPT or EXEMPTFROM statements allow a message through. This helps track down the reason why some mail is not blocked.
• New command SMTP QUEUE command sends mail sitting outside the MAIL_OUT directory. This is a controlled import to prevent overloading the server or blocking mail from your users. It allows for easy incorporation of large quantities of mail from any external source that can write to the input directory.
• A new process now handles messages that need to be expanded or delivered locally. This decouples the expanding operation from the scan operation and allows mail to local users to be delivered with minimum load on the processing of external mail.
• When disk space gets low the IPAD now slows processing mail for multiple recipients. This has been tested on some of the smallest drives we have been able to find, but we suggest your mail processing drive should have a minimum of 2 gigabytes of free space. If you have a smaller drive, your mail delivery performance may suffer but it will not crash the IPAD.
• When we reach the maximum number of outbound client sessions, the IPAD now keeps building up to the maximum possible (e.g. 40) number of sessions. When a mail session ends, the IPAD starts one of the pending sessions that has been built but not yet started. This gets mail moving faster even when the SMTP client is heavily loaded.
• The IPAD now counts big sessions (groups of messages), not just big messages and raises the big session limit. This allows the IPAD to process larger mail and more quickly deliver large groups of mail with minimum impact on smaller mail sessions.
• Added new SMTP SCHED DETAIL report to show the details of mail processing.
• In all prior versions, you could tell the IPAD to allow more than one session per site, or only one per site. In IPAD 7.01 you can set duplicate sessions to the actual number you wish to allow. This way, if a major provider is down, the SMTP server won't use all of its sessions trying to deliver mail to just that one site.
• In all IPAD WebLite servers HTTP requests (file or CGI call) that are not found on the web server return a 404 Page Not Found error message with the HTTP result code of 404 so the web browser knows not to try that page again. This can now be overridden on each web site with a single file in the web site's root directory. The contents of this file are entirely up to you or the webmaster for that site.
• The web manager has been trimmed down again; smaller, faster, lighter and more compatible. This time it removes some of the display graphics used for things like the round corners on the menus. These have been replaced by CSS (cascading style sheet) instructions that are much more flexible and lighter weight (meaning faster) and entirely in your control to edit through the PRIMARY.CSS file in the WWWMAN directory.
• This IPAD distribution includes a number of new and updated external programs for use directly on or with the IPAD. These are all located in the C:\UTILS directory on your IPAD after you have installed the IPAD 7.01 upgrade.
• This version is updated to be compatible with Internet Explorer 8 (strongly recommended upgrade for all Internet Explorer users) and is designed to gracefully degrade for older web browsers. Users with more advanced web rendering technology (e.g. webkit or gecko) will also notice a nice change in the interface style complete with highlights to show when a group of input fields are related. This helps to reduce confusion when more than one group of input fields and buttons are found on the same page.
• And much more...

Bug Fixes

This release of the IPAD has some significant changes, optimizations and improvements to the kernel. This was inevitable because the world is continually demanding more work out of the IPAD and we have no choice but to rise to the occasion. We knew this would be a major undertaking and did our best to budget the time wisely. Little did we know the depths this task would take us or the improvements it would make.

• Over the past decade and a half, the IPAD has experienced a few transient bugs that happened very rarely, were hard to describe and even harder to reproduce. This was a small irritation, but impossible to fix without a way to reliably reproduce the problem consistently. That was then. In the process of researching and optimizing the IPAD multitasking kernel a number of very long term and deep seated bugs were discovered. Many of these date back to before the very first official IPAD release. The good news is a very elusive bug is found and fixed! The IPAD is now able to remain rock solid through the most demanding work load many times worse than any previous version.
• Copy (and RESP) messages might collide with the original message ID, so we now make sure the IPAD always gets a new one and logs both message IDs.
• SNMP now returns the correct DNS cache sizes and the actual number of running sessions.
• Fixed a crash in the Web Manager List Management tab and a bunch of other Web Manager crashes that suffered from the same kind of cause.
• Fixed a potential crash when too many new members were added to a mailing list at the same time.
• Big mail to be delivered locally was still subject to the Big Mail rate limiting rules, so expanding and delivering big messages tended to hang the SCAN process. These messages are now considered normal mail.
• Fixed a potential race condition where the DNS Authoritative cache is loading a local zone file to RAM and another DNS resolve query tries to use it.
• The IPAD now creates the required temp (C:\IPAD\TMP) file directory at startup rather than aborting.
• DNS resolver: we didn't always resolve the first NS record returned. Now we always resolve it. This gives us a tiny bit more randomness which makes more domains work even if they contain multiple lame (non-authoritative) name servers.
• The DNS resolver now limits TTL for negative response messages to 1 hour. This prevents the DNS resolver from wasting too much time trying to contact unreachable servers.
• Shorten the Authoritative cache to the 4 to 8 minute range (was 10 to 15). This helps give valuable resources back to other processes sooner if needed.
• Give the WWWMAN backup operation more stack, which helps prevent cramped memory conditions when working under a heavy load.
• Revise the DNS resolver bailiwick rules so that we base the bailiwick only on the question. This makes UPS.COM always resolve correctly even though they have a very strange resolver loop through external DNS servers.
• A lot of large mail could cause a deadly-embrace in the mail scanning function. Large, local mail is now processed by a separate daemon so it never gets in the way of external mail delivery.
• STAT SMTP sometimes listed the same message more than once, now it doesn't.
• A corrupt GREYLIST.DB is automatically fixed at boot time to prevent multiple crashes.
• Under very specific circumstances, which were allowed so some problem sites could resolve, the DNS cache could be poisoned. This has been addressed and resolution is improved for other poorly configured sites.
• The SMTP retry logic is more horologically accurate than all previous IPAD versions.
• The IPAD now reserves more disk space for SMTP processing. This helps avoid most full disk conditions that could cause a crash. The IPAD is now much more aware of the available disk space and stops expanding multi-recipient messages well before it completely fills the disk. Expanding only continues after some of the outbound email is sent or when more disk space is made available. The credit for this comes directly from a report made by Kommer. Thank you!
• There were also a number of smaller bugs found and fixed along the way that are not really worth mentioning here. It is important to point out that virtually all of these smaller bugs were reported by an IPAD owner like you. Even if you didn't realize it at the time, your report made this IPAD better.

This is a partial list of the additions and changes found in the IPAD-OS 7.0 release compared to the previous 6.01 release. A more complete list is included with your upgrade package.

• DNS Notify and DNS Autoupdate did not work if you did not have at least one secondary DNS zone.
• Long File Name support in the FTP server is now much more robust.

This is a partial list of the additions and changes found in the IPAD-OS 7.01 release compared to the previous 7.0 release.