Both Phil and Bill, another reader who got in touch, complained about a lack of information from DomainMonster throughout the degraded service.DomainMonster's status page – which currently suggests everything's A-OK – was often unavailable during the outage. Replies to support messages were made but these often took days to appear, possibly because festive-period support staff were overstretched.Reg reader Bill pointed out that the latest extended outage of DomainMonster's hosted email service had a similar effect on users, if not necessarily been down to the same cause, as when the service went TITSUP for around a week back in 2014. Bill described the latest problems as a repetition of 2014 events, covered in a Reg article at the time here.The latest outage resulted in multiple frustrated complaints directed towards DomainMonster's hard-pressed social media support team via Twitter.Copies of correspondence forwarded to El Reg provide a timeline of sorts. A day after the outage begun on 22 December, DomainMonster was telling customers it was on top of the issue but there was still a large backlog of emails that need to be delivered.

By 29 December, and without any resolution in sight, the firm began blaming DNS problems for the snafu. It seems the domain was using the old email DNS records, its support staff told our tipster Phil. We moved across to new records recently, however the old set should still work but recently we have had reports of issues caused by the old set.Only by the start of the new year had DomainMonster isolated the issue, which it blamed on a networking problem. We believe that this is a network issue and our data centre team are looking into this, support staff said. This issue seems to be preventing our external and internal email services from talking to each other and this has caused a massive backlog of email.Critics blame poor network architecture choices for creating the problem in the first place. Two of the three listed @domainmonster DNS servers are still down and all three sit behind the same router in London, said one such critic, Alastair Mackinlay, in a Twitter update on Sunday. A spokesperson for DomainMonster has been in touch to say: We are always working hard to ensure our system can be the best it can possibly be for our customers, and this mail connectivity issue was the result of one of our planned system upgrades. We are really sorry for any inconvenience caused, as we know email is one of the most important assets to our customers. We would like to assure our customers the issue has now been resolved.CES 2017 With two Seagate LaCie drive revisions, we see the storage industry doing what it does best at a device level; capacity and connectivity upgrades so as to store more data and get at it faster.

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The LaCie d2 and Rugged products are nattily designed by Neil Poulton and are external drives for creative video, image and music workers, or anyone else working on complex collections of files on their laptop or all-in-one desktop. The d2 is a single 3.5-inch drive while the Rugged is a shock-protected 2.5-incher inside a bright orange rubberised case. Both have been given capacity and connection upgrades to cope with storing and accessing, for example, higher-resolution videos and images, and more detailed music files.The Rugged drive is a shock-insulated 2.5-inch drive inside a bright orange rubberised protective case. There was a bus-powered version in June 2014 with 1TB or 2TB disk capacity, or a 250GB or 500GB SSD inside instead. Transfer speeds were up to 122MB/sec from the disk model and up to 387MB/sec from the SSD version.The 2017 Rugged Thunderbolt USB-C has up to 5TB of capacity from its 5,400rpm BarraCuda disk drive. For faster data transfer, there is a 1TB SSD version with speeds of up to 510MB/sec; Seagate saying this is a 30 per cent increase over the previous SSD generation. The disk version transfer speed is up to 130MB/sec.

It gets USB-C connectivity, which combines USB 3.x and Thunderbolt connectivity, supporting 40Gbit/s Thunderbolt 3. The integrated Thunderbolt 3 cable is compatible with Thunderbolt 1 and 2 standards.With Thunderbolt 3, users can daisy-chain dual 4K displays or a single 5K display to a storage device. LaCie has been adding USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 connectivity to its external drives throughout 2016. The USB-C protocol supports gen 1 (5Gbit/s) and gen 2 (10Gbit/s) USB 3.x protocols. Apple's updated MacBook Pro only offers USB-C connectivity, with dongles available to convert from USB 2.0 to USB-C for example.The Rugged drive is shock, dust, and water resistant to IP54 standard, meaning it is protected against drops of up to two metres (6.6 feet), dust, water, and being run over by a 1-tonne car. It can be protected against unauthorised access with separately downloadable AES 256-bit software encryption*, and has a three-year warranty.The Thunderbolt 2 d2 external 3.5-inch drive was announced in September 2014. Inside its Neil Poulton-designed aluminium case it contained a single Seagate 6TB 7,200rpm drive with transfer speeds of up to 220MB/sec though dual Thunderbolt 2 ports. Up to six of these devices could be daisy-chained together and USB 3.0 is also supported. Seagate said there would be a USB 3.0-only model with 3, 4 and 5TB capacities.

This d2 could have an SSD upgrade via a 128GB PCIe flash card installed through the d2’s rear panel.The 2017 d2 has up to 10TB of capacity from a 7,200rpm BarraCuda Pro 3-5-inch disk drive and transfer speeds up to 240MB/sec. It has USB-C and dual Thunderbolt 3 port and supports USB 3.1.Seagate made no mention of any add-on SSD card for the updated d2 and said the new d2 has a 5-year warranty.The new Rugged drive will come in 2TB, 4TB and 5TB HDD and 500GB and 1TB SSD capacities starting at $249.99. The updated d2 drive will come in 6TB, 8TB and 10TB capacities starting at $429.99. Both new Rugged and d2 drives will be available at LaCie resellers worldwide this quarter. Lenovo has a ThinkPad T570 notebook computer coming out which will be able to use Intel Optane 3D XPoint memory as a cache.XPoint is the faster-than-flash, slower-than-DRAM non-volatile memory being produced by Intel and Micron. Optane is Intel's brand, QuantX is Micron's. An Optane cache should be faster than a cache using flash.The T570 will reportedly arrive in March with a 15.6-inch display and a starting price of $909. Expect to pay much more for a top-end model.The specification will include a range of compute and storage options, such as Intel Kaby Lake CPUs, Nvidia GeForce 940MX graphics, 32GB of DRAM, a 4K touch display option and Windows 10, plus the ability to use 16GB of M.2 PCIe-connected Optane cache – when Intel ships it.

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Lenovo is providing an Optane-equipped server test bed in IBM's BlueMix cloud.With this spec (PDF) such a notebook with XPoint glamour could make Apple's MacBook line look outdated, out-performed, and vastly over-priced – especially if Lenovo is not alone in enjoying Intel's Optane largesse. The latest Linux 4.10-rc2 build nearly didn't happen because L-triptophaniac developers were Christmassing, but Linus Torvalds decided to set it free as a New Year treat.Explaining the build, Torvalds wrote that “rc2 is ridiculously and uzrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody”.DAX (direct access for files, which reads from and writes to storage directly) drivers got the most work, with fixes from Jan Kara. Torvalds describes the rest as “trivial small fixes”.Since it's less than a month since the production version of Linux 4.9 landed, there's still plenty of time for the devs to catch up with the graphics, processor support, and broader laptop and mobile targets planned for 4.10. Updated Russian hackers have not penetrated America's electricity grid, in spite of an end-of-year media flurry saying they did.

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