Coin,
The year is (almost) over. We are happy services have worked quite well
and hope you're happy with them. Feel free to report problems or leave
comments.
We wish you a Merry X-mas, nice meals and stuff :-)
Here are the last news of the year:
1) Orfeo move:
As you may have noticed, the move was a success. DC DNS zone was updated
quickly and many services were back online quickly. No reboot was
necessary and remaining services were working again during the night.
All DNS zones should have been corrected now. Please remember to use
CNAMEs for web vhosts instead of A records, to avoid delays for future
changes.
By the way, kernel was updated and PaX patch too, solving a w3m problem
called "absurd stack bottom value". No other problems were reported, but
similar behaviors with other programs should be solved too.
2) Web news:
Certificates are now up to date now. Because we were not able to get an
IP block, we are now using a wildcard certificate for each server, thus
fixing browser complaints for all DC vhosts (but not for hosted
projects' vhosts).
Horde configuration was fixed (PHP configuration indeed), solving file
uploads (so you can now import your keys to sign your mails in IMP for
example).
A PHP cache engine, with a good reputation (used to handle the scaring
skyblogs), eAccelerator, was installed. This should improve latency a
wee bit. Feel free to report / comment on it so we can decide if it is
worth running it.
A photo album dedicated to DC users and friends was setup here:
http://photos.duckcorp.org/main.php
Feel free to ask for an account.
3) Mail processing changes:
We are now using the experimental amavisd-new package, as the unstable
one was heavily outdated, fixing several problems, and allowing better
stats and quarantine. The system now complains on bad headers without
rejecting the mail completly, and is now storing intermediate scored
mails depending on their badness (virus, bad header, spam, banned)
during several days (final number would depend on available disk
space). Do not hesitate contacting us if you suspect a good mail was
trashed, quickly, so we can analyse the quarantine and changes settings
if necessary.
4) Chat tools upgrade:
Bitlbee 1.0 was out recently and fixed some issues (a security one, and
several others ; even if no one in here reported problems). Most visible
change is the channel renaming from #bitlbee to &bitlbee to avoid
confusion with OFTC channel name.
IRSSI 0.8.10 was out recently too and installed. If you are using it on
Orfeo, please /UPGRADE now (to use the new binary without
quitting). Many many leaks were fixed, and a recode engine is available,
so pleaaaaaaaase don't use the so bad existing scripts anymore
(/help recode). Beware some script may not behave correctly ; please
report problems affecting system-installed scripts to us.
5) Memory problems:
Recent memory problems are now solved. Services cleanup, tweaks, and
fixes (mostly IRSSI leaks fixes) gave us back an acceptable amount of
memory. This may improve services responsiveness (and thus jam PHP cache
tests too).
6) FTP bandwidth limitations:
As we are now on a bigger internet connection (100Mbps), rate limiting was
removed, and should stay removed if it is not slowering other services.
7) DC standing against EUCD:
As part of DC policy to react on important events, and after a vote of
the board, DC officially stand against DADVSI (as you may have seen in
the main news site). Useful links on the subject was given on the site,
please read them for your own sake.
--
Marc Dequènes (Duck)
Coin,
1) Orfeo moving:
Orfeo is moving from Ivry to LDCOM datacenter on thursday end of
afternoon. An almost dedicated VLAN is reserved, which is good, but host
IP is changing and some DNS problems may occur during a short while. We
did not manage to get an IP block, thus secure web hosts would still
trigger warnings in browsers.
Beware Orfeo may be restarted 2-3 times for necessary tests while
changing kernel and network configuration.
2) Minor other changes:
A) IRC server and services:
These were updated recently and major bugs, mostly due to buggy IPv6
support, were reported, kindly fixed by upstream authors, and new
packages were created, tested, and installed (corresponding Debian
packages are available in the DuckCorp repository: hyperion and theia).
Remind all members are welcome to join irc.milkypond.org. Most useful
channels being #MilkyPond (community channel) and #DuckCorp
(organization channel), and that you may create one yourself.
B) Certificates:
DuckCorp CA public certificate is available through:
https://www.duckcorp.org/dc/ca.crt
and signature:
https://www.duckcorp.org/dc/ca.crt.asc
You may have seen web certificates have expired during this weekend.
They are soon being regenerated and you will be able to check their
validity using the CA certificate if you have already signed my key
(if not, a keysigning party can be arranged).
If you did not understand what i said before, or why, feel free to ask
questions.
C) PHP:
The fileinfo module was added with some PEAR classes, but turck-mmcache
was removed (broken on Debian testing).
Have a Lot of Fun !
--
Marc Dequènes (Duck)
