Because I have a vehicle tonight, I am attempting to upgrade the physical hosts to Ubuntu 20.04, starting with ice.  This will involve a, hopefully, brief interruption of mail and virtual private servers later this evening.

     Encryption is ubiquitous on the Internet and is necessary to protect your privacy and insure the security of your information.  Three areas it is commonly used here, on the web server when you connect to one of our web pages with a web browser, on shell servers, when you connect in with ssh, and on our mail servers when you use pop3, imap4, or smtp to receive or send e-mail.

     Because hackers, mathematicians, and government and corporate spies all are continuously working at ways to circumvent encryption to gain access to your credit card information, browser history and content, e-mail history and content, health information, etc, encryption is an ongoing evolutionary process where by old compromised methods and protocols are retired and new, more secure, protocols are added to replace them.

     The recent upgrade of some of our servers to Ubuntu 20.04 has resulted in problems with e-mail for customers using operating systems past the end of life.  All versions of Windows prior to Windows 8 are now at end of life and are no longer maintained and thus are vulnerable to hackers, viruses, and so forth even more so than maintained Windows versions.  The same is true for all versions of MacOS prior to High Sierra, and all versions of Ubuntu Linux prior to 16.04LTS.

     There are solutions and there are workarounds.  The solution of course is to upgrade to the most recent release, Windows 10, MacOS High Sierra, or Ubuntu 20.04 for example.

     The workarounds are to use third party software that is up to date even though the operating system is not, for example Thunderbird for e-mail, Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, or Edge for a web browser, and a third party ssh package such as openssh or putty that is up to date.

     With e-mail you can also turn off TLS and allow mail and your usernames and passwords to transverse the Internet in plain-text.  There is not much advantage to using a weak encryption algorithm verses plain-text except perhaps for a false sense of security.  You can rest assured in either case that all your data will be backed up at the big NSA data center in Utah.

     We were briefly under a denial of service attack around 5:30PM April 23rd, 2020.

     After performing upgrades here, I am getting many reports of people not being able to connect to mail.eskimo.com or to a shell server because of TLS or SSL negotiations failing.

     This is caused because OLD encryption protocols which have been compromised have been eliminated from the newest software on this end and replaced with newer encryption protocols.  If your software has ONLY the OLD protocols, it will fail to connect.

     Before calling or initiating a ticket, please be sure that your software is completely up to date.  On a Mac, pull down the Mac Apple and choose Update Software and let it run to completion.  On Windows use the Check for Updates function and install any outstanding updates.  On Linux, as root, type: “apt update; apt full-upgrade; apt autoremove –purge” (without the quotations).  Answer questions regarding restarting services with a y enter.

     Mail is upgraded to 20.04, this time successfully but I still have not fixed DKIM / DMARC, will work on that later this evening.

     The client mail server ‘mail.eskimo.com’ is in the process of upgrading again.  It failed last night but I think I know what I did wrong.  It will be unavailable to send mail or receive mail via imap or pop-3 or webmail until completed later this evening.  You may read mail via shell mailers like alpine but you can not send mail from shell presently.

     Ubuntu is now back online with Focal 20.04 release.  I’m still doing a bit of clean-up but it should be stable and usable at this point.

     I am going to make a second attempt at upgrading the mail server starting at around 6PM tonight.  I believe I know what I did wrong to cause it to fail the first time.  If all goes well there will be only minimal downtime (a minute or so to reboot).  If all doesn’t go well there will be 45 minutes or so to restore from backups again.

     Ubuntu is still in the process of upgrading.  Probably another two hours or so to go, around 6PM I am estimating.  The 20.04 upgrade is large, over 6280 packages to be upgraded and close to 1000 to install.

     Ubuntu is out of service owing to an upgrade that blew up.  It is in the progress of updating still.  In the meantime please use one of the other available shell servers listed here:

     https://www.eskimo.com/services/shells/servers/

     Debian, Mint, Julinux, and Zorin are all based on similar code and will have most of the same applications available.