system

DNS glitch

Our domain registration was messed up for some time over the past day. You may have noticed antiflux.org hosts resolving to the wrong IP addresses. In particular, you probably couldn't connect to mail.antiflux.org. It's fixed now, but may take a day for the DNS update to completely propagate.

Sorry for the inconvenience. On the plus side, any mail sent during that time should have been queued on the sender's mail server and will be delivered soon.

WordPress upgraded to 3.0

As some people know, we have WordPress installed in a central location in case anyone wants to use it and not worry about having to maintain it themselves. Not many people do.

I've upgraded our installation to the new 3.0 release that came out a few weeks ago, along with all the themes and most of the plugins. Everything should still work as before, but please do 2 things.
1. Upgrade your database by going to yoursite/wp-admin/ and clicking the upgrade button.
2. Look around your site for anything not be compatible with 3.0 yet so we can fix it.

Version 3.0 brings some interesting new features, like cooler navigation menu options. Check out the release notes here. Apparently they merged WordPress MU, so it should be easier to manage a multi-site installation like log.antiflux.org that runs an ancient version of MovableType. Maybe we should migrate, but nobody seems to blog anymore here anyway. Oh well, I just thought I'd mention it.

mail delivery delay

There was a problem with mail delivery between about 13:00 and 22:30 today. Due to a ClamAV update, the mail server queued messages instead of delivering them. We jumped through the requisite hoops to upgrade and it should be working now. Let us know you run into further problems. We don't think any messages were lost or bounced back to the sender.

Yahoo! blocking! antiflux! mail!

For reasons unknkown to us, Yahoo! started blocking all mail from antiflux earlier this week. Anything sent from antiflux to a Yahoo! address is blocked but won't bounce until maybe a few days later when the antiflux mail server gives up.

Looks like it started last Sunday morning.

Jun 28 08:56:33 okcomputer postfix/smtp[20779]: 1E8BA38F9E: host b.mx.mail.yahoo.com[66.196.97.250] refused to talk to me: 421 4.7.1 [TS03] All messages from 216.234.161.200 will be permanently deferred; Retrying will NOT succeed. See http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts03.html

(That URL is wrong. It's actually here.)

There's no automated way to find out why they're blocking mail from us and they seem to be ignoring the query I sent. I started the process to sign up for their Complaint Feedback Loop but they won't do anything until we start signing outgoing mail with DomainKeys/DKIM. We're looking into that.

Update (July 5): Yahoo! seems to be accepting antiflux mail again, with no clue as to why they changed their minds. After a series of emails back and forth with their support department, I still have no idea why they were blocking us. Either they don't know either or they just refuse to give out any information. Their suggestions ranged from us being listed on a Spamhaus block list (we aren't) to us sending a "high volume" of emails "indicative of unsolicited mailings" (we weren't), but they refused to give any kind of definitive statement of why we were actually being blocked. Seriously, if you use Yahoo! Mail and want to actually receive email, I strongly suggest that you move to Gmail or someone else that doesn't randomly block mail servers.

outgoing SMTP service disruption

You may notice problems sending mail out through antiflux right now. We're working on it.

Update: fixed

Debian upgrade time

Greetings all,

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 was released last month [1] so we're in the process of upgrading everything on antiflux.org. This shouldn't involve taking the whole server offline until right at the end for the new kernel, but you may notice individual services (e.g. web server, email, databases) going offline briefly while the new packages are installed. The plan is to start this afternoon and it may take a day or two to get through everything.

We'll post updates at http://log.antiflux.org/system/ (or http://antiflux.blogspot.com/ if something happens and we go offline). If you notice anything severely broken that isn't noted in either of those places, please contact us at root@antiflux.org if it lasts more than a few minutes.

Thanks,
Tim

[1] http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214