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We are now using the experimental amavisd-new package, as the unstable one was heavily outdated, fixing several problems, and allowing better stats and quarantine.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.