Work is commencing to upgrade waxworlds.org servers which will incur some downtime to services.

Currently, oak and ash run Debian 10 (Buster). They will be upgraded to Debian 11 (Bullseye), which is an LTS release.

On Friday 13th January 2023, work will commence to upgrade waxworlds.org servers which will incur some downtime to services.

Currently, oak and ash run Debian 10 (Buster). They will be upgraded to Debian 11 (Bullseye), which is an LTS release.

Appologies for the unscheduled outage this morning. A payment card expired. :(

All waxworlds.org services should be back up and running again now.

Work to complete migration of oak to the cloud is being undertaken now.

This includes:

• mail services
• user accounts
• (secondary) web services
• ssh keys

Data to be migrated later (upon request):

• MySQL databases

Updates

• [2020-11-23] (secondary) web services migrated
• [2020-11-23] ssh keys migrated
• [2020-11-24] mail on (old) oak disabled
• [2020-11-24] user accounts migrated (changes on oak will now be lost!!)
• [2020-11-24] DNS records changed
• [2020-11-24] mail spools migrated
• [2020-11-24] mail on (new) oak enabled

PHP on ash has been upgraded from 5.6 to 7.3. PHP 7.3 introduces lots of breaking changes. Please check that your websites still function correctly.

Both oak and ash are to upgraded to Debian 10 (Buster) immediately. This is in order to address security issues with packages that, while supported by Debian, are no longer maintained.

Notes

• OpenSSH removed support for
  • DSA keys
  • SSH protocol version 1

Updates

• [2019-12-17] Synapse server (matrix) is currently broken by the upgrade.
• [2019-12-18] Symapse server is upgraded and fixed.

Our internet provider has confirmed that there is an equipment fault at their end which is causing an outage of oak.waxworlds.org. An engineer has already been scheduled to address and resolve the issue but he will not be on-site until Monday 16th December. Until then, oak will be down, I'm afraid.

Effect

Since oak has been partially migrated in to the cloud, web, DNS and chat services are unaffected. The major service affected by this is email. We shouldn't lose any mail -- SMTP replays hang on to it and retry delivery when it fails -- but I'm also going to look in to whether or not I can migrating mail to the cloud immediately.

Updates

• (2019-12-15) There seems to be intermittent line sync and some mail is getting through.

• (2019-12-16 1:32pm) Fault is fixed. We're back up!

Over the next couple of weeks I will be migrating the user accounts and network services that currently run on oak to a new cloud-based server.

This includes:

• email
• matrix
• user accounts

As discussed, the jabber service is now EOL. RIP.

The XMPP (jabber) server is in a rather sorry state. It has not been operational since an upgrade at the end of last year broke it. The database needs to be upgraded to a new format, and neither the Debian package maintainers nor the upstream ejabberd project provide such a facility. I had always intended to manually migrate the data, but this now seems unlikely, give the constraints on my time.

To that end, I plan to retire the waxworlds XMPP (Jabber) services on 12th June 2018.

We also now host a matrix server for chat. Matrix (and riot) have proved to be a very successful alternative to jabber that also works well on mobile platforms, handles multiple connections better, facilitates posting images/files/links and is generally much more modern in its approach to chat. Essentially, I would propose that he Jabber service is also now redundant and my recommendation, going forwards, would be to use matrix anyway.

If there are any significant reasons why you think I shouldn't EOL the jabber service, or why you think I should attempt to manually migrate the data and revive it, please get in touch before 12th June.