As part of scheduled maintenance, waxworlds.org servers are being upgraded from 17:00 BST and service outages should be expected.

The upgrade affects all servers and relates to the operating system, which is being moved to Debian 12 (bookworm). This upgrade includes new versions of python (3.11) and php (2.8) and introduces exclusions to some outdated security-related protocols/ciphers.

Notably, the following services may become temporarily unavailable and, following the upgrade, should be watched to ensure that they are functioning correctly:

• Websites
• Email
• SSH

Updates will be posted below.

Progress

• 17:05 Start
• 17:51 Issues with SASL (email authentication) resolved

Server operating system upgrades are scheduled for evening of Friday 20th September.

All waxworlds.org servers and services (including virtual hosting) will be affected. Updates will be posted on the day.

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 This is in order to address security issues with packages that, while supported by Debian, are no longer maintained.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