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 This is in order to address security issues with packages that, while supported by Debian, are no longer maintained.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.

Oak has two new SSH host keys, which were generated today. So the next time you ssh to oak with a recent ssh client you will most likely get warnings that the host key has changed.

The new host keys have the following SHA256 hashes:

• afl7rHgG55VCJNETep/aNZHzPnEssuWpEwx4JPrHr64 (ECDSA)
• nP2GP+gQ3AQNcbMzMpql9iy0MKP8e3guFUTCQNG0ci8 (ED25519)

Apologies for any spam received over the past couple of days. Due to a power failure, oak was restarted and Spamassassin didn't come back up. It is now running again and the issue preventing it restarting is resolved. I will be monitoring it next time oak restarts.

There was an issue on mail.waxworlds.org that was preventing procmail from running. This is now fixed.

Procmail is probably configured, amongst other things, to send your mail to SpamAssassin to be checked. So appologies to those of you who were receiving more spam.

oak.waxworlds.org will be down for approximately 30 minutes on the evening of Tuesday 24th October somewhere between 7pm and 11pm whilst work is carried out on electrical systems.

This will briefly affect mail.

Update: oak is now down... [2017-10-24 9:00pm]

Update: oak is back. All maintenance is finished. [2017-10-24 9:22pm]