IP Address Management service announcements and updates.

The development IP Address Management appliance grid at https://dev.ipam.illinois.edu/ has been upgraded to a new software release from the vendor, and the login procedure has changed.

(see full post for details)

Mozilla has announced plans to begin enabling DNS over HTTPS by default for a small percentage of Firefox users in the USA, "starting in late September." This is motivated by a desire to improve consumer privacy on untrusted networks, but could negatively impact people on the University of Illinois campus network, so Technology Services is taking action to avoid impairing the default user experience.

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In the coming weeks, the authoritative DNS nameservers dns1.illinois.edu, dns2.illinois.edu, and dns3.illinois.edu will be migrated from commodity GNU/Linux servers running ISC BIND to new Infoblox appliances. In addition, the IPv4 address of dns3.illinois.edu will change from 204.93.1.5 to 3.16.92.183, a new IPv6 address (2620:0:e00:c::53) will be added to dns2.illinois.edu, and the default record TTL in IPAM will change from 7200 (2 hours) to 3600 (1 hour).

No customer action is required as a result of these changes, and there will be no interruption to DNS service as a whole.

(see full post for details)

On Thu Jul 5 between 5:00-7:00am, the production IP Address Management appliance grid will be upgraded to a new software release from the vendor (8.2.6).

(see full post for details)

Important Reminder for Legacy Perl-only API (PAPI) Users

After the upgrade, you will need to update your installation of the Infoblox PAPI perl modules on any client systems from which you run PAPI scripts.  Do not apply this change to a production environment ahead of time, as the modules are not backward-compatible.

RESTful Web API (WAPI) users do not need to take any action; previously advertised WAPI versions (1.4.2, 2.2.2) are still supported by the new software release.

On Thu Aug 24, additional read-only permissions will be granted to the default role for all IPAM users.  No service impact is expected.

(see full post for details)

On Thu Jun 22, we will be temporarily re-enabling the "Immediate Fixed Addresses" feature which is known to cause some long-term instability for the DHCP service. It is anticipated that sometime after this (possibly weeks later), one or both of the main campus DHCP servers will experience a crash event (in the worst case causing a 30-minute outage), after which we will disable the feature again to restore full stability. The goal is to provide the vendor with diagnostic information that they can use to implement a fix, so that we will eventually be able to re-enable the feature long-term.

(see full post for details)

On Tue Oct 4 between 5:00-7:00am, the production IP Address Management appliance grid will be upgraded to a new software release from the vendor (7.2.12).

Important Reminder for Perl API (PAPI) Users

After the upgrade, you will need to update your installation of the Infoblox PAPI perl modules on any client systems from which you run PAPI scripts.  Do not apply this change to a production environment ahead of time, as the modules are not backward-compatible.

RESTful Web API (WAPI) users do not need to take any action.

On Thu Mar 24 between 5:00-7:00am, the production IP Address Management appliance grid will be upgraded to a new software release from the vendor (7.2.7).

Important Reminder for Perl API (PAPI) Users

After the upgrade, you will need to update your installation of the Infoblox PAPI perl modules on any client systems from which you run PAPI scripts.  Do not apply this change to a production environment ahead of time, as the modules are not backward-compatible.

We have recently updated the IPAM service documentation to reflect a new best practice recommendation for deciding between Host Aliases and stand-alone CNAME records.

The development IPAM grid, formerly located at ipam-dev.illinois.edu, will be down for the next several days to facilitate a hardware transition.  When it returns, it will have a new hostname: https://dev.ipam.illinois.edu