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/566532 http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/72981/ [2] http://php.net/manual/en/migration53.php