Silicon Ashes

You may see a new warning message when accessing email; I have re-created the server SSL certificate.  Now instead of being expired, assigned to the wrong address, and being issued by an untrusted authority (that is, me) it is merely signed by an untrusted authority.

In case you’re curious: SSL certificates must be signed by some sort of certification authority.  Web browsers then check that signature and display a warning if they don’t see an authority they like.  Most “real” certification authorities charge a lot of money in order to sign a certificate for a year (which is why I don’t get a real signature).  Fortunately, it is possible to self-sign your own certificate, which is what we use here.

So your sign-on to the web-based email service is still encrypted, but the connection is not certified by an officially recognized authority.

I have temporarily removed the /archives drive from the system.  It will be back shortly.  Until then, if you desperately need something from that directory, let me know.

Not that I think anyone has used it lately, but, just in case.

There have been random periods where the mail server stopped accepting incoming mail for a day or two.  This should not have resulted in lost emails, since they should have been held and resent, but I apologize if anything didn’t get through.  I do believe I have finally tracked down the problem to an issue with the email virus scanner crashing intermittently.  I have upgraded the scanner and that should take care of the problem.  As always, feel free to contact me with any issues.

Wow… The system now has a script to clear out old mail from the Spam directories.  I just ran it and it found nearly 2.25 million old spam messages.  Clearing these out not only took care of a ton of garbage files, but reduced the amount of disk space being used by user directories by over 20GB.

So consider this an announcement of our new Spam folder policy.  Once per week the system will clear out all messages in the Spam folders that are more than three weeks old.  This should allow time to get any real messages that have been mistakenly categorized as Spam out into your main email folder, while not allowing so much cruft to build up.

Please let me know if you have any questions or issues about this new operation.

The title of this post is somewhat of an understatement.

I fucked up, big time, restoring the email system.  Some of you might have noticed that you have been receiving other peoples email.  That is pretty inexcusable from a system administration point of view, and I’m both embarassed and sorry for it.

It should be fixed now, and all of the mis-delivered email should be in the correct boxes.

Again, I’m sorry about the confusion and the misdelivered mails.

We have had some down time this past week due to a hardware failure on the system.  All data has been restored, and most websites and blogs are now back in action.  Notable items which are still broken are email and userdir blogs (specifically, Nerd Knits).

Hoping to have both of those items fixed shortly and be back up to full capacity on the new server hardware.

I apologize for the inconvenience!

Update: Everything should be more or less back to normal.  I’m not sure the spam filter is any better though.  Please let me know if you notice any problems.

I just built the latest version of SpamAssassin onto the server.  I have no idea if this will help with the levels of spam people have been seeing, but I hope so.  Please let me know if you notice any issues with e-mail.

Update: Didn’t seem to help.  Will keep working on it.

For those of you using the common WordPress installation, it has (finally) been updated to version 2.8.4.  You will need to login and allow WordPress to update your database (this is normal after a code update).

Please give me a shout if you have any issues with your blogs.

Comcast are kind of slow, and there may still be some DNS lag, but if you are reading this, then the server move has been successful.  If not… well, how would you know?

UPDATE: Just to be a little more clear, the connection from Comcast is fine.  They just didn’t have everything setup on their end when the tech came to install the line.  So it took a little extra time to get everything set up.

That is all.

Alright, the server will be moving on Friday, January 9th.  You may experience difficulty accessing the server Friday or Saturday; after that, things should clear up.  Please let me know if you have any questions.