SoAustin.Net Info

The IP addresses for www.soaustin.net and mail.soaustin.net have changed. The old IP addresses will continue to work for the time being, but will be de-supported in the coming weeks.

If we got everything right, you should not notice any of these changes. If you see any problems with mail or web, let Chip know.

We've had spam tagging on our mail system for some time. The system identifies which emails it's pretty sure are spam, and tags them as such.

Tagging is nice, but for many of our users it meant a flood of spam (albiet nicely tagged and marked) mixed with their regular mail. Some of our users use the "filtering" feature of their mail program to divert those messages to a folder where they didn't have to see them. Even still, that can be a colossal waste of time to do all that processing.

To solve these problem we've implemented a new "spam diversion" feature. Now, your tagged spam messages will be diverted to a separate Spam folder. You won't see the spam messages unless you go looking into that folder. (Which you should do from time to time, to make sure valid emails aren't getting caught. If that happens please let us know.)

You can access your Spam folder one of the following ways.

• You can use the web mail facility.
• If you use IMAP to access the mail server, you will now see a newSpam folder on the server. Subscribe to it.
• If your name is Mark, do: mutt -f imap://localhost/INBOX.Spam

Old messages in your Spam folder will be purged periodically. The retention time for spam messages will be at least 30 days.

Another year, another secure certificate update.

The soaustin secure certificates have been updated. These certificates are renewed annually, and used for secure mail and web communications.

So do not be surprised if your mail or web program issues an alert the next time you try to connect to mail.soaustin.net or secure.soaustin.net. If you tell it that you want to accept the certificate, then the error will go away (until next year).

For the extra security conscious, here are the fingerprints for the new certificates:

secure.soaustin.net -
B6:E2:7D:90:54:A2:78:99:DD:77:DD:54:05:1F:A3:D7:33:F5:CF:CA

mail.soaustin.net -
66:AE:82:B8:93:51:C6:0F:6E:24:AB:01:D0:C3:63:5B:E5:7F:9D:13

It's that time again.

The soaustin secure certificates have been updated. These certificates are renewed annually, and used for secure mail and web communications.

So do not be surprised if your mail or web program issues an alert the next time you try to connect to mail.soaustin.net or secure.soaustin.net. If you tell it that you want to accept the certificate, then the error will go away (until next year).

For the more security conscious (who don't like blindly accepting certs), here are the fingerprints:

• secure.soaustin.net - 34:20:AF:19:C8:19:EC:8B:D7:93:9E:CC:14:51:9A:DA:B8:B5:75:C3
• mail.soaustin.net - 47:CE:E7:3A:E8:18:50:D6:CA:DD:A4:4B:76:73:8F:42:8F:D7:6C:4F

The soaustin.net server suffered complete failure middle of last week.

We've relocated to a brand new server in a brand new data center.

The system was loaded from backups made on Aug. 22. If you made any changes to your web site (or other files or services), you will need to recreate them.

Other than that, everything should be as it was before (maybe just a little bit zippier). Please let us know if you encounter any problems. Send email to: root at soaustin.net

The soaustin secure certificates have been updated. These certificates are renewed annually, and used for secure mail and web communications.

So do not be surprised if your mail or web program issues an alert the next time you try to connect to mail.soaustin.net or secure.soaustin.net. If you tell it that you want to accept the certificate, then the error will go away (until next year).

For the more security conscious (who don't like blindly accepting certs), here are the fingerprints:

• secure.soaustin.net: 90:8C:5C:62:53:43:AC:1F:7F:59:68:6B:DD:96:A3:42
• mail.soaustin.net: 67:E0:89:83:AD:81:A5:B8:58:AA:DF:74:CB:8A:71:E9

Our server was out of commission for much of today. We're back and all services are restored.

The outage began about 3:30pm today. At the time the problem was diagnosed as a disk error. I arrived at the data center about 7:30pm this evening to begin repairs. Repairs were completed and the system was back into service about 11:30pm tonight.

So the total downtime was about 8 hours. No information was lost during the outage, and all systems should be working normally now.

Please let us know if you see any problems or have any questions.

Incoming email (to soaustin mailboxes) will now be filtered through SURBL–the "Spam URI Realtime Blocklists." The SURBL lists contain web addresses commonly found in spam emails (like "http://bigboobstory.info/").

Now when you receive email, spamassassin will consult SURBL to see if the email has any spammy web addresses. If so, points will be added to the spam score for the message.

If a messsage gets enough spam points it will be marked *****SPAM***** in the subject. (Not thrown away!) You should be able to configure your mail reading program to filter these marked messages off into a separate "probable spam" folder.

Huzzah! After much waiting, the automatic web stats are running again. The stats will update automatically every morning. This means when you view your web stats, they will be current to the previous day's activity.

Welcome to the new SoAustin user information portal. The information from the (yucky old) site has been loaded into the Help Library. Slowly we'll get that replaced with more...errr...helpful information. For instance, check out the spiffy, detailed instructions on how to setup Outlook Express to work with our mail server.