Coin,

=== LDAP Work ==

Since 2007, most of our core infrastructure has remained identical. To improve it, we have begun an heavy work on the LDAP database and related softwares. We no longer rely on firewalling for security, as every involved server now use TLS communications with certificate check. The schema is being improved and work on better administration/user tools will follow. The LDAP infrastructure will soon be opened to all properly authenticated and securized access to everyone. This should allow more transparency on retained user information, and is a continuation of the "Experimental Tool" Banya (see previous mail in march).

That is to say, this work could introduce some disturbance, mostly at night (from a GMT+2 point of view) or during legal holidays, even if we try to minimize it as much as possible.

=== Mail ===

Latest sunday (and probably the previous one), you may have experienced problems connecting to the mail services. Unfortunately, our SPAM database suddenly grow quite large, and it was necessary to shutdown to do some urgent maintenance. Several things were done to improve the situation, and the software was also upgraded to take advantage of several database optimizations. The web interface and processing speed have been improved a bit too. As several persons do not use much the spam filtering facility, the default training method was changed to ensure a reduced ressource usage when unnecessary (it can still be changed in the web interface).

The mail software has been upgraded too, coming with a much better server-side mail filtering engine (SIEVE), with many fixes compared to the previous one, and the following new extensions: - variables - imap4flags (replacing the obsolete imapflags) - enotify (replacing the obsolete notify) - encoded-character More info on SIEVE and these extensions can be found here: http://sieve.info/

People using our SMTP from a roaming connections may have had a few problems with certain restrictions, this is now fixed.

=== Mail from Webapps ===

We spotted a few strange mails, and found a few of you are using forum or website with open registration with no or not-very-efficient anti-bot protection, leading to a few SPAM messages. From now on, webapps using the traditionnal mail functions will have their mail follow a special path, to ensure we can spot these problems easily and be able to train our antispam with problematic mails. This should ensure our mail servers are not banned.

=== Webmails ===

First, a few weeks ago, a Horde upgrade led to firstnames being screwed in the Contacts, due to a bug in the upgrade script. We had not enough time to work on restauration, and as very few of you were concerned, we decided this was too much of a workload. Sorry for the bother.

The SIEVE filtering plugin for webmail.duckcorp.org has been upgraded and has better support for SIEVE extensions (but not 'variables' yet).

=== RCS ===

The Arch webdav access was broken, not working with https and auth with tla, and buggy with baz, so it was merely dropped. Moreover, Arch not updated upstream since a while (baz was even dropped and corpse hidden by Canonical a few years ago), so, Arch support is scheduled for removal in September. You are not obliged to move to a new RCS, but tools will disapear on our servers. WHen times come to and end, remaining archives in '/rcs/arch-devel-archives' will be moved to the corresponding user's home directory.

== SAFT is Back ===

In DuckCorp, we like oldies, abandonwares and the like. Once upon a time, DC servers were prodiving a service to send files to a remote UNIX user, SAFT. This funny service is asynchronous and retry-aware, and can be used when the sender and recipient can't share a common place to exchange data (FTP for example), and sending a huge mail would be horrible or even impossible. The receiver needs to run a simple and light server, and the receiver to use the 'sendfile' command (available in Debian). One is now running on Toushirou, and received files can then be found with your shell access and the 'receive' command, or via your FTP account in '/sendfile/<uid>/'. You're address for the service would then be <uid>@saft.duckcorp.org. More info on this subject can be found here: http://fex.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/saft/sendfile.html

Have FUN !!!