Opensuse is presently unavailable owing to a problem in a library that breaks NIS authentication.  It has been reported, they are aware of it but at this point there is no indication of if/when it will be fixed.

     Mail is repaired.  It unfortunately required rebooting pretty much everything because after I recreated the file system and exported it, all the other servers which had it mounted gave “Stale File Handle”, and would not let me unmount it without a reboot.

     But that is all done now, everything is good until it’s not.

     There is a problem with the mail spool file system.  It is not a hardware problem but a file system corruption problem that fsck does not detect.

     I am going to have to copy and rebuild the file system.  At the rate files are copying this will take approximately 45 minutes to complete.

     I am having a problem with the mail spool file server.  There is something wrong with the file system that fsck -f -y does not find or correct.  I am in the process of troubleshooting but it may be necessary to copy and rebuild in which case it may be down for several hours.

     If you received an e-mail about your WordPress site like this:

Howdy!

Since WordPress 5.2 there is a built-in feature that detects when a plugin or theme causes a fatal error on your site, and notifies you with this automated email.

In this case, WordPress caught an error with one of your plugins, WPtouch Mobile Plugin.

     This can probably be safely ignored.  The web server ran out of file descriptors.  It was configured for a million but the total amount needed exceeded that today.  I believe there may be a file descriptor leak in libsasl but until a fix is made available I’ve bumped it up to 4,000,000 which hopefully will suffice.

     Upgrade of the web server to Ubuntu-Mate 20.04 with PHP7.4 has been completed.

     A lot of things are broken.  phpBB3 is broken.  If you discover other things please use Support->Tickets to generate a trouble ticket.

     Our web server is up but upgrades are in process. This involves restarting many things and eventually a reboot and then probably many things will need to be fixed.

It did not go as smooth as I would have liked, but the upgrade of physical host machines to Ubuntu Focal 20.04 has been completed.

All machines have been checked for NIS/NFS connectivity.

OpenSuse is broken until a library they broke is fixed.  We do not have an ETA.

     Because I have a vehicle tonight, I am attempting to upgrade the physical hosts to Ubuntu 20.04, starting with ice.  This will involve a, hopefully, brief interruption of mail and virtual private servers later this evening.

     Encryption is ubiquitous on the Internet and is necessary to protect your privacy and insure the security of your information.  Three areas it is commonly used here, on the web server when you connect to one of our web pages with a web browser, on shell servers, when you connect in with ssh, and on our mail servers when you use pop3, imap4, or smtp to receive or send e-mail.

     Because hackers, mathematicians, and government and corporate spies all are continuously working at ways to circumvent encryption to gain access to your credit card information, browser history and content, e-mail history and content, health information, etc, encryption is an ongoing evolutionary process where by old compromised methods and protocols are retired and new, more secure, protocols are added to replace them.

     The recent upgrade of some of our servers to Ubuntu 20.04 has resulted in problems with e-mail for customers using operating systems past the end of life.  All versions of Windows prior to Windows 8 are now at end of life and are no longer maintained and thus are vulnerable to hackers, viruses, and so forth even more so than maintained Windows versions.  The same is true for all versions of MacOS prior to High Sierra, and all versions of Ubuntu Linux prior to 16.04LTS.

     There are solutions and there are workarounds.  The solution of course is to upgrade to the most recent release, Windows 10, MacOS High Sierra, or Ubuntu 20.04 for example.

     The workarounds are to use third party software that is up to date even though the operating system is not, for example Thunderbird for e-mail, Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, or Edge for a web browser, and a third party ssh package such as openssh or putty that is up to date.

     With e-mail you can also turn off TLS and allow mail and your usernames and passwords to transverse the Internet in plain-text.  There is not much advantage to using a weak encryption algorithm verses plain-text except perhaps for a false sense of security.  You can rest assured in either case that all your data will be backed up at the big NSA data center in Utah.