Transition Technology: Ticket Query

#737: SPF / Emails rejected from the website contact form

sam — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 15:46:13 GMT

We had a user report that they could not send a message via our contact form:

"Yesterday I sent a message to you via the contact form on the website. But obviously something went wrong: for I got a failure notice saying my message could not be delivered. Therefore I'm sending it directly via email (see below) hoping that you're receiving my message this way."

<info@…>: host mx1.spamfiltering.com[72.249.150.158] said:

550 81.95.XX.XX is not allowed to send mail from gmx.de. Please see http://www.openspf.net/Why?scope=mfrom;identity=userXX@gmx.de;ip=81.95.XX.XX (in reply to end of DATA command)

(User details edited as this is publicly archived)

I'm not sure I quite understand what's going on here. Chris indicated in email that this would affect other users whose email provider has set this kind of SPF record.

Can we make an educated guess as to what proportion of email providers set this kind of SPF?

How many messages do we never get to see? Is it a problem? Or a small enough number of users that we just don't worry about it?

Thanks

Sam

#746: New comment notifications not being sent to content owners.

sam — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 09:27:11 GMT

Hi Paul, Annesley, Chris

Ed hasn't been getting notifications for new comments.

"Please check if new comment notifications are being sent to content owners. I don’t think I am receiving email alerts for my blog posts."

I'll email Rob to see if he's getting any.

Could you investigate?

Thanks

Sam

#763: Server Backups

chris — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 17:09:21 GMT

Two weeks ago annesley asked:

what off-site data storage, file backup and quick setup do we have?

I answered:

The 3 virtual servers have their file system mounted off a BSD/NFS/ZFS file server and the whole file system is backed up and stored onto another BSD/ZFS server in the same data centre. We did have backups also being copied to a server in Manchester but this is currently off-line as the Manchester server needs a disk swapping and rebuilding as a BSD/ZFS server.

A problem with this is that it's only me and Alan that have access to these backups, so I'd like to suggest I set up a new account for backups on our backup server and sort out cron jobs to rsync data to this account and document how people can access these backups.

The result would be that everybody would have SFTP access to 60 days worth of snapshots of backups from all three servers whenever needed without any need for my or Alan's intervention.

I expect this would take abount an hour to set up and another hour to document and help people understand it.

There would be no additional cost to the TN because backup space is already paid for.

#814: Higher that usual loads on PuffinServer since early September

chris — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 17:12:35 GMT

The following load graph from PuffinServer shows that the load increased substantially in early September 2014, does anyone know why?

When I found I went to Drupal 7.33 and all I got was a slow site I thought that perhaps a Drupal 7 site on the server could be the cause but 7.33 came out on 7th November 2014.

Anyone have any ideas?

#824: Analysis of the 2014 maintenance ticket time

chris — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 15:48:14 GMT

Ed has ask that I spend up to 2 hours on an analysis of the 2014 maintenance ticket time for our meeting tomorrow in Bristol.

#924: Sheffield Server Shutdown Timetable?

chris — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 08:46:27 GMT

Since www.transitionnetwork.org is now running on dedi2835.your-server.de there seems little point in the Transition Network continuing to pay for the PuffinServer and my time doing sysadmin updates on it?

If the Transition Network would like Webarchitects to shutdown and delete this server and all it's backups could you please let me know when you would like it doing?

I guess the same goes for PenguinServer and ParrotServer, though these servers still have live sites on them, including this Trac site that I use to keep track of time worked -- when PenguinServer is shutdown I will no longer have a public place to document the time I work for the Transition Network and all the server and site documentation from the last six years will be lost.

#587: Puffin MySQL Tuning

chris — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 12:54:47 GMT

This ticket is to track the tuning we do to MySQL on PuffinServer.

See also previous comments on this issue:

#712: Create a new stgX.transitionnetwork.org site

sam — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 15:03:53 GMT

Hi Paul

I have been trying to build a staging site using your Github repository with the changes you made for ticket : https://trac.transitionnetwork.org/trac/ticket/693

I have edited the D6 s008 platform: https://tn.puffin.webarch.net/node/1157/edit to use your makefile.

It builds a site, but I just get an empty pressflow site at the end.

Could you build a staging site using your makefile?

Thanks

Sam

#757: Research and Design for TNv3

ed — Fri, 11 Jul 2014 13:36:54 GMT

R&D for TNv3

#761: Spam account cull

ed — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 08:45:33 GMT

There are bucketloads of spam accounts swamping us. Spam commeting is swarming again. I just did several pages of deleting spam accounts. No doubt I nailed some humans too (sorry Sam if this comes back to you); but the overwhelming majority of new accounts are spam.

It's crap and we need to have another spam sweep - especially if we're staying in D6 for a while.

See work done in Feb 2013: #461 See wiki page done in Feb 2013: https://wiki.transitionnetwork.org/Spam_accounts

SAM I'm going to suggest you start looking at it, and get your head around it, and the various modules and processes we've got running, then ask you to act/escalate accordingly.

#764: Policy decisions re-assessment on BOA and Drupal security updates

annesley — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 14:10:38 GMT

on-line meeting 5 / August @ 14:00 GMT: we are phasing out the current D6 / BOA system. the new system may not use either. The TN.org website is not attractive to high level hackers or DOS attacks.

what are the risks with cancelling all further Unix, BOA and Drupal updates completely that do not allow direct un-mitigated access to the backend via bad PHP code / SQL?

#767: robots.txt on dev site

sam — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 11:07:39 GMT

Hi Paul

Could you fix the robots.txt here:

https://booker-stage-20140501.transitionnetwork.org/robots.txt

Sam

#802: Slovenian state information missing / 'Not listed' will not submit

sam — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 10:20:29 GMT

User reported: "I'm trying to register our fledgling initiative based in Dovje-Mojstrana, Slovenia. When I select the country, the Province/State? box automatically comes up as not listed. But then when I press preview to be ready to send, it says "The specified province was not found in the specified country." So I can't submit the form :-( Please help! I think we will be the first official Transition town in Slovenia!"

I had a go at creating the initiative in a different country, then editing it to Slovenia as a workaround, but that didn't work either: https://www.transitionnetwork.org/node/37435/edit

Any idea's as to why it won't accept 'not listed' as a valid choice? Or what we can do about it?

Thanks

Sam

#847: Upgrade Servers to Debian Jessie

chris — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 09:30:11 GMT

The latest version of Debian, Jessie, 8.0, came out over the weekend, we should consider upgrading the three servers, PuffinServer, PenguinServer and ParrotServer and what issues would arrise when we do.

See the documentation on Upgrades from Debian 7 (wheezy) and Issues to be aware of for jessie, specifically:

#851: Bot attacks on Transition Culture

chris — Sun, 10 May 2015 11:12:12 GMT

Yesterday there was a load spike on ParrotServer caused by a bot doing thousands of POSTs to xmlrpc.php.

#875: Free HTTPS certificates from Let's Encrypt

chris — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 10:48:11 GMT

From mid November 2015 Let's Encrypt should be live, providing free SSL/TLS certificates. Currently the TN pays for a Gandi wild card cert, costing £130.50 a year, in addition most the WordPress sites on ParrotServer don't have certs due to the cost, see ticket:540.

The Let's Encrypt code is designed to be set up to run automatically -- certs are only valid for 90 days and the automatic renewal process runs when the cert is 60 days old.

We should consider if we want to use Let's Encrypt and what things would need to be put in place to use it, the wild card cert is due to expire on 22/01/16.

PuffinServer -- are we still going to be running PuffinServer in January 2016? Is there any chance that we might be able to consider the suggestions in ticket:754#comment:61? I'm not sure if I want to spend time trying to get Let's Encrypt working with a old version of BOA, up to date versions of BOA might support it out of the box.
PenguinServer -- this site hosts a lot of sites, see the listing, automating Let's Encrypt would probably be a hour or two of work, it might makes sense to upgrade it to Debian Jessie at the same time.
ParrotServer -- I suggest we rebuild this server from scratch, this would enable it to have the latest version of the Webarch Secure Hosting scripts and this include support for fail2ban for WordPress and phpMyAdmin, thus solving ticket:871 and includes automatic provisioning of Let's Encrypt certs for sites.

What do people think?

#890: Site offline.

sam — Sat, 12 Dec 2015 10:54:36 GMT

It's serving a page, so may be Drupal level problem rather than server level?

https://www.transitionnetwork.org/

#893: BOA Cron Jobs

chris — Thu, 24 Dec 2015 11:39:51 GMT

All the BOA cron jobs were stopped on ticket:846#comment:88. This ticket is for looking at them all and deciding which, if any, are needed.

#899: Managing security after Feb 24th, 2016.

paul — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 15:22:28 GMT

Hello,

Just did some research to check how we will manage security after Feb 24th, 2016.

A small group of vendors (approved by the security team) will provide patches for core and some of the most commonly used contributed modules, that are used on their client websites. Security patches will be put in the Git repo for the D6LTS project on Drupal.org, and will be announced in the issue queue. We will just need to monitor this issue queue and apply any security patches.

However, these vendors will not be supporting ALL contributed modules. Each of the vendors will be maintaining lists, and providing them to the Drupal Security Team so they know which issues to include them on. With this in mind shall we send a copy of our list of contributed modules to each of the vendor companies and ask them to provide us with a list of our modules that they are currently not supporting? We can then decide how we should support the modules that are not supported by the vendors.

Best, Paul

#903: Large load spike on PuffinServer

chris — Mon, 08 Feb 2016 08:46:37 GMT

There was a large load spike this morning on PuffinServer, which appears to have been caused by 12k requests for pages (Nginx doesn't log requests for anything other than PHP generated pages) from one IP address, this IP address has been blocked and I'll post some details below.

#904: Issues to consider in the migration from Drupal to WordPress

chris — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 10:41:04 GMT

A few weeks ago Ade said he though it would be worth me opening a ticket to use to flag up some issues to be considered in the migration of the Transition Network site from Drupal 6 to WordPress.

#907: TN Drupal database size

chris — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 10:20:10 GMT

6 weeks ago the datadase dump was 447M, see trac:ticket/896#comment:3 but now it is 1.8G:

ls -lah /var/backups/mysql/sqldump/transitionnetw_0.sql
-rw------- 1 root root 1.8G Mar  2 01:23 /var/backups/mysql/sqldump/transitionnetw_0.sql

Anyone have any idea what happened to cause this? Are we keeping too many log entries?

#919: Site offline

chris — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 18:17:26 GMT

The https://www.transitionnetwork.org/ site has been "off-line" since about 7pm, I see that Paul is logged on via ssh -- is this something that we should worry about or is this intentional?

#716: Heartbleed

chris — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 08:53:58 GMT

Following on from ticket:692#comment:18 we should undertake the steps Drupal have taken: https://drupal.org/news/2014-04-08-security-update

#812: space.transitionnetwork.org hacked?

chris — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 11:09:32 GMT

BOA email from PuffinServer:

Hello,
Our system detected that the site space.transitionnetwork.org has been hacked!
Common signatures of an attack which triggered this alert:
You are required to change your password immediately (password aged)
su: Authentication token is no longer valid; new one required
(Ignored)
Site tested positive for known Drupalgeddon exploit checks               [error]
Update module is disabled and Drupalgeddon cannot check for Drupal       [error]
Security Updates. Please check for a security update manually.
You are running Drupal 7.31
https://www.drupal.org/node/3060/release?api_version%5B%5D=103
The platform root directory for this site is:
  /data/disk/tn/distro/008/openatrium-7.x-2.19-7.31.1
The system hostname is:
  puffin.webarch.net
To learn more on what happened, how it was possible and
how to survive #Drupageddon, please read:
  https://omega8.cc/drupageddon-psa-2014-003-342
--
This e-mail has been sent by your Aegir system monitor.

#821: Projects forms being hammered by Spam

ed — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 09:53:33 GMT

Projects forms being hammered by spammers. I got 24 in the last 45 minutes.

What to do?

Lock off to a certain type of user?

Adding Sam as owner to follow this up

#905: TN site down due to redis not running

chris — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 10:28:40 GMT

I'm working on this...