After having sent and received as many as 13,196 emails in 2010, I started thinking about how well this kind of communication is actually protected. The problem has a technical and legal perspective. I’ve long focused on the technical side. SSL, good passwords and some hard drive encryption should offer reasonable protection. The legal perspective is also not too bad. At least in Austria. As opposed to Germany, Austrian law gives emails a similar protection as letters, as long as they are in transit and haven’t been downloaded to a user’s personal computer (=letter is still closed).

A crashed server at a friend’s reminded me of the importance of backups. Regular backups are in place of course, but scattered throughout /var/www, /media, /var/lib/mysql, etc. The FHS recommend to put everything in /srv/[protocol]. This should make backups a lot simpler because only /etc, /home and /srv need to be saved. I changed the paths earlier today. Everything should still work fine and soft links for backwards-compatibility are in place for now.

It is happening. Conventional IPs will run out in less than 2 months from now. After that we might get by another year, by using the IPs we have more efficiently. Still the only long-term solution is to switch to the new IP-protocol version 6. I’m proud to announce that since today the snapdragon-servers are fully IPv6-ready. That means webserver, mailserver and IMAP. You shouldn’t notice any change, since IPv4 is still on as well.

One of the drives in the RAID1-array failed for good last night. It was struggling for quite a while before that. Some time in the next few hours, the server will be powered off to replace the drive and start RAID recovery. Downtime will be around 20 min or less. I don’t expect any data loss and off site-backups are in place as well.

Due to network capacity increases there might be some downtime on Friday, Aug 27 from 23:00 CET (21:00 UPC). We will be increasing our network’s transport capacity between Comfluent and our datacenter in Denver. We do not expect any downtime however there may be some routing changes during this maintenance window. The maintenance is scheduled between 3PM-Midnight mountain time. Thank you for your understanding.

If you’re not sure how to configure the Email Client of your choice, see here. Officially recommended clients: Apple Mail, Outlook 2010, Thunderbird

Out hosting provider is fixing some recent network issues. No downtime expected, but possible.