Apologies while we get information ported to this new site

Who/What is Orion Networks

Orion Networks is a collective name (and domain) used by a group of technical peers to share/pool resources, so we all benifit from the whole being greater than the sum of the parts

It means we can have our services run redundatly accross muliple sites without having to expend additional resources each, a collective if you will

Members instead of hosting their own customers independantly, host them simultaniously across all the servers of the members, so they remain working even if an individual member site/server suffers a disasterous outage

Who is involved

Currently the system is sponsored by Narrowpoint and Sapient Security.

It runs on Infrastructure/IP space provided by both and hardware provided by individuals from both organisations and others

the main systems design and software evolved out of work done by Alan as a hobby project to provide free hosting for Goth and alternative Scene websites and to provide himself with a testlab to study/mitagate real/live attack/hack traffic on a daily basis, before he joined Sapient Security and continues to develop into a highly resiliant DNS/Web/Email hosting platform used by customers of all sizes

It is also a research lab used to study and respond to the attacks made against the websites servers routers firewalls and mail infrastructure constantly.

What is/will be here

Documentation for end users of our mailsystem

currently hosted here and here but soon to be ported and expanded on/updated here

Documentation for end users of our webhosting

currently hosted here and here but soon to be ported and expanded on/updated here

Documentation and information for DNShosting

currently not really setup, Still regarded by most as combined with web or mailhosting, but in reality completly independant as we can do 1 or more of these entirly independantly like any ISP but unlike others with experts doing the management, and you notifying us of changes and reasons in a timely way {24 hours before if possible} we can ensure, zero service outage, with pre-altered ttl's etc., and also unlike others we can host any dns record possible unlike most services which are limited to the functions within the GUI. examples include SRV records SPF records A records with multiple ip's WKS records and others.

Documentation and contact details for customers

as customers should normally contact the member organisation/individual who organised for their stuff to be hosted here it will not be normal for customers to contact orionnetworks directly, but we all know situations change passwords are lost phone numbers etc. so we will direct your enquirys if needed

Information for those wishing to avail of the network

Currently people wishing to look at either web/mail/dns hosting should talk to Sapient Security if corporate/private or Alan if Goth or alternative scene related.

Information for those wishing to copy the network or some component

All the software is gpl but source commenting is still poor and thus not ready for public release, but if wishing to roll your own rather than join the collective Alan can be contacted directly or you can hire Sapient Security to directly install/configure/manage a simmilar system or component theirof

Whats Currently Live

well DNS customers are currently live on 5 dns servers in 3 locations, providing maximum resiliance, with ip6 visible records (only on one server)

Webhosting customers are currently live on 3 servers across 2 locations with no single point of failure, ip4 only

Webhosting customers currently have live attack detection and automated defence responses in place by default

Webhosting customers also can enable anti-malicious-spidering/harvesting defences with slight invisible alterations to their pages

Webhosting customers also are also given the use of pre-built customisable mail-forms to ensure their own address' do not end up in the wrong hands

Mailhosting/Mailfiltering customers currently have some of the best and most exacting mail filtering technology between them and the multitude of spammers, ip4 only

soon to come

migration of 2 more dns servers to a dual stacked ip6+4 network

addition of ip6 web servers to make customer sites visible to ip6 only sites (none exist yet that we are aware of but someday)

mailhosting/pop3 backend to be made fully HA for customers needing 99.99% uptime

hopefully the addition of extra sites/partners/peers to our collective

mailhosting/mailfiltering customers will have web-based (instead of via support) access directly to the multitude of filtering options they may wish to turn on/off to filter the spam from the ham.


Last updated June. 2013 Alan Doherty