[H-ANNOUNCE] [H-GEN] humbug.org.au is operational again

[Greg.Lehmann at csiro.au]

Thanks for your efforts Russell.

-----Original Message-----
From: General [mailto:general-bounces at lists.humbug.org.au] On Behalf Of Russell Stuart
Sent: Monday, 2 April 2018 6:44 PM
To: general at humbug.org.au; announce at humbug.org.au
Subject: [H-GEN] humbug.org.au is operational again

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

TL;DR - humbug.org.au is back again after an outage.

Humbug.org.au undergone renovations.  All the changes are internal. 
Members should see very little difference.

The renovations were triggered major email providers (eg, microsoft,
google) black listing .humbug.org.au and/or excalibur's IP address, which effectively disabled the mailing lists.  That in turn was caused by spam being relayed by Excalibur either by the mailing lists or via the few remaining member alias email addresses.  The changes needed (described below) to tackle the spam problem were large, so lots of other things were done at the same time:

- It is now running on Debian Stretch, and all packages have been
 
upgraded accordingly.

- humbug.org.au has x509 wildcard cert issued via letsencrypt.

- Email server now supports SMTP over SSL.

- Email server now implements DMARC http://dmarc.org.

- Email is only accepted from servers whose IP Address is reported by
  MaxMind GeoIP to be in Australia, Canada, New Zealand or the USA.
  These were the only countries that delivered valid email to use in
  the last 12 months.

- All member email aliases have been deleted.  Sorry if you were
  effected by this but there wasn't much choice.

- GET's to all humbug web sites redirect to https the 1st time you
  access them.

- Humbug wiki will only accept account creation attempts from IP
  address in Australia and New Zealand.  This is to prevent wiki
  spammers from DOS'ing us doing continuous login attempts, causing
  us to overshoot our CPU allowance which them makes our VPS provider
  shut us down.

- The web interface of the list servers only accept logins and
  subscription attempts from IP Addresses in Australia and New Zealand.

- People who have root access to the VM has been restricted to
  currently financial members only.



--
Regards,
Russell Stuart
http://www.humbug.org.au/RussellStuart

_______________________________________________
General mailing list
General at lists.humbug.org.au
http://lists.humbug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/general