11:41AM up 52 days, 33 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.27, 0.11, 0.07

Read about any important or simply notable events with Offwhite.net LLC and the server here. Below you can find a chronological update which is maintained as events happen. If you are having problems, please check here first.

The hosting provider had an outage which caused this and other servers to become unreachable for nearly 2 hours. Services are now restored.

The mail and web systems will be secured with the assistance of CACert.org. To do so, simply click on this link for the Root Certificate and add it to your system so you can trust it. Doing so will prevent your software from warning you each time you use the secured systems on this server. The new secure website will be located at https://secure.offwhite.net.

Offwhite.net will be shutting down Brighton and moving over to Pronto. As a part of the move some changes will take place to tighten security and better organize the hosting environment.

The X-Spam-Level settings are now adjusted to allow more spam to get through but the level still remains so that users can handle them as needed on the client side. Questionable levels are still quarantined while definate spam is deleted.

The second release from the Apache Foundation adds bug fixes and enhancements.

This morning between 5:30am and 1:00pm the ISP had a power outage despite having redundant backups. It left this server offline that entire period. The quality of service I am getting has been degrading rather quickly this past year and I will need a new ISP to co-locate soon.

The Apache Web Server has been upgraded to the latest version to take advantage of improvements, such as fixed bugs and security hole patches.

The SpamAssassin project was migrated to the Apache Foundation and brought up to their coding standards. Today they released it as Production ready and it has been installed. Additional features include SURLB which is a URL blacklist which will scan incoming email and determine if it provides links to blacklisted websites which are promoted via spam.

To increase the level of security the server FTP has been disabled. Due to the widespread popularity of SSH and SCP it is now possible to use a client like WinSCP to transfer files just like FTP, but it is done securely. Other clients can be found at freessh.org.

The hard disk holding the home directories, websites and mail failed last week. A replacement disk was put in place on Tuesday but the troubled drive was not readable at the time. Over the weekend the disk was restored and copied to another drive. All of the data is currently being uploaded from a remote system which is taking quite a while to complete. Some dat is already restored and the rest should be in place over the rest of the week.

There was a hungry process taking up all CPU resources overnight and the better part of the day today which caused the server to lock up. The tech support at the ISP has rebooted the machine and services are now restored. The likely culprit has also been stopped and steps will be put in place to prevent it from happening again.

In attempt to make some sites a bit faster the mod_gzip module has been put in place for the Apache web server. It implements Web Compression which shrinks the size of files while being transfered. Now pages which may have been 50k will be compressed to about 7k or so. The result will be faster loading pages and reduced bandwidth needs. In a more extreme case, a 300k html document was transferred with only 35k of data using this compression feature.

The Spam Assassin system is in place and has been flagging mail fairly well with various levels. As a part of the SA system, spam headers are placed in all emails which can be easily used with mail clients for filtering mail. The X-Spam-Level header will provide a star rating for each email. The more stars, the more likely it is spam. The server has been set to simply discard anything with 7 or more stars, and hold anything above 6 stars. SA is also set at 5.0 as the cutoff for the spam rating. For that mail the X-Spam-Status header will have the value Yes and will be continue along to the user. Mail users can simply move all header matches for Yes to a junk folder as it is most likely spam. For my personal email, I will be moving medium spam with 3 stars to my junk folder and a single level spam will simply be color coded as red and left in my inbox. So far it seems these auto-delete settings will help a great deal.

In another effort to block more and more of this vile spam, Spam Assassin has been installed!

The Movable Type blogging system has been put in place to be used as the blogging solution for all sites hosted by Offwhite.net.

The new secure services are being updated one by one. In order to use these services secured via SSL/TLS it will be necessary to install the Offwhite.net certificate. Documenation for Windows has been posted. Even after the certificate has been installed for Windows, it may also be necessary to independently install the certificate to your chosen mail client. Refer to the documentation for your mail client for instructions on importing SSL certificates.

The POP3 service has been enhanced to allow secure SSL communications. Using SSL will protect the password used to access the account. To use it, just change your mail client settings to use SSL to connect to the server. In order to trust the new SSL communication an SSL certificate created for this service will need to be imported into your mail cient. Download the certificate and import it into your mail client.

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