Coin,
=== Backup and Toushirou's recovery ===
Daneel's second disk died too (around 2010-02-06), but it was replaced
quickly and is working nicely now. As a reminder, Daneel is performing
our backup.
Toushirou was severely hot by a nasty kernel bug[1], but is back to
his "nominal" stability factor now.
=== Mail ===
Spammers worked hard, even during X-mas, and are online again brand
new methods to circonvents our filters, so it is time for
counter-attack :-).
First, our antispam software (DSPAM) was upgraded again (2010-02-09),
with a few fixes, both to the learning code and for optimizations.
You'll see the web interface now support translations and French is
now available (ask if you need another language).
Second, we added new sources for our anti-virus software (2010-03-11),
to now also be able to catch classic Phishing/fakes/... mails without
the need for any DSPAM learning.
Third, we are now using a new software (2010-03-13, policyd-weight)
aimed at doing extra checks (some using RBLs) at the early stage of
receiving mails, to be able to reject them as soon as possible.
We hope this would help keep the learning burden for you as low as possible..
=== IRC <-> IM gateway ===
Our new Gateway software has been upgraded and now support
authenticating users using our global database (PAM+LDAP), so don't
have to remember yet another password. To protect your password, TLS
support has also been activated: you
must then connect using implicit TLS/SSL, on the same 6670 port
(unsecured connections are no more possible, and STARTTLS is not yet
implemented in minbif as well as most IRC client softwares yet). Ask
for an account if you want to
try.
=== PHP 5.3 Migration ===
PHP was frozen on our hosts, as more recent 5.2.x versions were
crashing like hell quite often. Seems like the 5.3 branch is
stabilized a bit, and all oud hosts have migrated but Toushirou (the
hosting web server). One extension, php5-imagick, is still
non-functional, but we plan to switch to this new version at the end
of the month. Beware it introduces a few incompatibilities, so please
read the migration guide[2] if you are maintaining a PHP software on
Toushirou (packaged software will of course be handled by the Admin
Team). If you need a delay before upgrade, get in touch with the Team.
=== New pseudo-Machine ===
Thanks to the Nerim Root offer, we now have a new pseudo-machine
available, Thorfinn (thorfinn.duckcorp.org). As was quite unpleased to
see it was run by VMware, and ensured to cleanup the whole image
before using it first. I heard it is planned by Nerim internally to
replace VMware by something respectable (like XEN or KVM), but we have
no schedule yet. So, please welcome Thorfinn among us :-).
As Toushirou has to be rebooted once in a while, and even if it is not
so horrible these days (beside the recent kernel bug), we are
considering buying a new machine during this year. Before that, people
having long term SSH sessions may now switch it to Thorfinn, which is
expected to be more stable, and with a not so frequent need for major
upgrades; this could save you a lot of effort. Thus, people having SSH
access to Toushirou have automatically been grant
ed an SSH access to Thorfinn. Feel free to ask for necessary softwares.
=== SSH Keys ===
As you may have seen, most SSH Keys are now in our magical database
(LDAP), and managed automatically on all hosts where you have access
to. Managed keys are marked between comments in your 'authorized_keys'
file. They were initially seeded to ease transition, but it won't be
automatic since now. You can ask an administrator to
add/remove/replace keys as you see fit. You may add per-host keys
manually if you wish, and they will be preserved locally.
have a lot of FUN !
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/566532http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/72981/
[2] http://php.net/manual/en/migration53.php
--
Marc Dequènes (Duck)
