Email upgrades

Over the last many months Robert has worked on upgrading cleaning up some of the (more than a decade old) email forwarding and spam filtering infrastructure.

We switched some more MX records over the last 24 hours and some domains and email addresses didn't work correctly. The relevant DNS changes have been reverted. We'll try again sometime soon.

Thanks to Digital Craftsmen

I just wanted to take a moment to give a quick "thank you" to Ben, Fahimul, Simon and the rest of the team at Digital Craftsmen.  They host the European CPAN Search mirror.  Recently they noticed the mirror wasn't performing as well as it should have been.  Then they helped quickly track down and resolve the issue.  Most hosting providers won't do that.  So...

Dear Digital Craftsmen, 

  Thank you for your help and continued support of Perl!

-The perl.org Team.

Want to help?

We're looking for volunteers to help with some of the perl.org systems.  Here are some specific examples:

• Reply to some of the random emails that get sent to the wrong place.  (for example, "How do I do X in Perl?" sent to the webmaster address.)
• Improve our spam filtering.  (Also, clean up our postfix setup.)
• Migrate services to Docker.
• Identify inactive Perl Mongers groups (and clean up linked services.)

If you're interested in these (or other projects), please drop an email to webmaster at perl.org.

Update: We received a lot of responses and are working with our first batch of new volunteers to get these and some other projects done.  Thanks to everyone who responded! 

DMARC and Mailing Lists

We have reverted the filter that rejected postings to perl.org mailing lists from domains with strict DMARC configurations.  (For example: yahoo.com and aol.com)

We've chosen to implement the "rewrite From:" mechanism for supporting this (similar to option b).  It's not perfect, but it's relatively straightforward to understand and implement.

Unscheduled Unavailbility

We're currently having (unscheduled, unplanned, unwanted) unavailability of perl.org services.  We think it's a hardware failure in the critical path.

Apologies for the disruption.  We'll update this post as more information becomes available.

Update: 8:00pm America/Los_Angeles.
Everything is back up now.

rt.cpan.org SSL certificate update

Tis the season for SSL certificate renewals.  For the past five years, rt.cpan.org's SSL certificate was sponsored by IT-Kartellet.  This year, Best Practical Solutions has picked up the cert as part of our ongoing support of rt.cpan.org.

Please let us know of any problems with the update at our usual address, rt-cpan-admin at bestpractical.com.

Greylisting

We have experimentally enabled greylisting on the mail servers that accept mail for cpan.org and pm.org and some other domains.

We expect that this will result in a reduction in the amount of spam that makes it through our filters.

You may notice a slight delay in mail delivery, as your MTA may have to retry to satisfy the greylisting filter.

7/18/2014: Scheduled Maintenance -- Moving Day!

More details afterwards, but most perl.org services will be unavailable for most of the day on Friday, July 18th 2014.  We're moving!  DNS will still work, but anything running on one of our machines (many webservers and mailservers, etc) will be unavailable.  We'll post updates here.

export TZ=America/Los_Angeles

Updates:

• 8:48AM - the first batch of machines shut down and powered off cleanly, which is a good omen. We're in transit to the datacenters at high rates of speed and the unracking will begin when we get there. 
• 10:02AM 7/19/2014 - apologies for not posting any updates during the day yesterday, we were busy with actually doing the move.  Current state is that we're having trouble getting one of the key vm-hosting machines to boot, and the VMs on it include key servers.  We'll keep working on this this afternoon.
• 2:00PM 7/19/2014 - the last machine is up and happy again.  everything should be working fine now.

Heartbleed updates for rt.perl.org and rt.cpan.org

Both rt.cpan.org and rt.perl.org were running vulnerable versions of openssl.  They were updated on Tuesday April 8th.  At that time, the cert for rt.cpan.org was regenerated.  I'm still waiting for an updated cert for rt.perl.org.

Update 2014-04-16
A new cert for rt.perl.org has been deployed.

CPAN master mirror down for maintenance

The CPAN master rsync mirror is temporarily down. We expect it back around 06-08:00UTC. Another hard drive failed and then it went downhill from there while replacing it. Whee.

Update: Back since 8am UTC. Drives replaced, partition tables fixed, raid rebuilt, configuration files updated, initramfs updated, KVM firmware updated, cursing subsided.

Multiple Hard Drive Faliure

We've lost several of the drives from the machine that hosts PAUSE.  It's offline while we work to replace the drives and convince it to come back up.

Update 1/8/2013 5:49pm EST:  No good news so far.  We may need to restore from a backup.   <distraction>Did you hear that github was down?</distraction>

Update 1/10/2013 1:26am EST:  We're working to get PAUSE back up as soon as we can and apologize for any inconvenience this outage may be causing you.  It is taking a little longer than normal due to circumstances that are limiting our availability this week.  (i.e. bad timing for a failure.)

Update 1/11/2013 12:04pm EST: PAUSE is back up!  Thanks for your patience!

2013 Year End Maintenance

Happy Holidays!

We're doing some invasive maintenance and year-end cleanup down at the datacenter today (12/27/2013).  You may notice some service interruptions and glitches on perl.org, pm.org, cpan.org, and other hosted sites.

  One of the things we're doing:
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M &

Update 1:35pm:
  The maintenance completed without incident (and went very smoothly.  Almost too smoothly.)  We've been monitoring the systems for two hours, and everything seems stable and happy.

rt.perl.org down for maintenance (Complete)

We're now hard at work on rt.perl.org.  We'll update this post when it's back up and ready to use.

2000 GMT - https://rt.perl.org is now back and upgraded to a new version of RT.

If you encounter problems, please report them to the perlbug-admin email address on the footer of every rt.perl.org page.