Unexpected downtime Feb. 19th at 3am

February 19th, 2010 No comments

Last night we experienced an unexpected crash of Prosody. The service wasn’t available for about two hours from 3am. Unfortunately the Prosody team couldn’t find the cause yet which is why we are going to restart the deamon in debug mode tonight. That will hopefully give us more information in case it happens again. The expected downtime is less than a minute.

Update: The issue has been identified and a fix is being worked on.

Categories: Downtimes

Happy Birthday Prosody

December 3rd, 2009 No comments

Prosody turned 1 today. Congratulations to the development team and everyone involved making Prosody the favorite XMPP Server for many people.

On Nov. 25th the 0.6 branch was released and brought a bunch of interesting new features
such as multi-session support in MUC, stream compression, encryption for server-to-server connections and per-host SSL/TLS certificates.
About a week later the 0.7 release seems to be just around the corner. Next to several bug-fixes it will add support for libevent, XEP-0065 (known as proxy65) and SASL SCRAM.

The Prosody team summarized the project’s history and published some graphs showing commit activity, lines of code and so on. Keep up the good work.

Categories: Uncategorized

Planned maintenance work

October 29th, 2009 No comments

The provider hosting our machines recently informed us about planned maintenance work. We expect they won’t be reachable a couple of times during late night hours CET (UTC +1).

Tonight this will affect de2.xmpp.thiessen.org which is currently hosting:

  • thiessen.im and its conference
  • thiessen.org
  • conference.spectrum.im

On sunday, november 1st de1.xmpp.thiessen.org will be affected which is currently hosting:

  • thiessen.it and its subdomains jabber.thiessen.it and im.thiessen.it
  • icq.im.thiessen.it
  • msn.im.thiessen.it

We are sorry for the inconvinience.

Categories: Maintenance

Privacy Lists are available now, Prosody 0.6 soon will be

October 15th, 2009 No comments

Today we enabled a module (mod_privacy) which implements XEP-0016 in Prosody.

This specification defines an XMPP protocol extension for enabling or disabling communication with other entities on a network. The protocol, which was first standardized in Section 10 of RFC 3921, can be used to block communication with unknown or undesirable entities. Blocking can be based on Jabber Identifier, subscription state, or roster group. The blocked stanzas can be messages, IQs, inbound or outbound presence stanzas, or all stanzas. The protocol also enables an entity to create, modify, or delete its privacy lists, apply different lists to different connected resources, define a default list, and decline the use of any privacy list during a particular communications session.

We thank Thilo Cestonaro for his work, he is currently working on mod_proxy65 (implementing XEP-0065, supposed to ease filetransfers), which is likely to be followed by a logging plugin. It will enable MUC owners to enable logging for their room.

But not only are there more and more plugins contributed by the growing Prosody community, Prosody itself is close to a release candidate of version 0.6.
As always it will include a lot of bug fixes as well as major new features, this time including S2S TLS support.

Categories: Features

General C2S encryption requirement?

September 4th, 2009 No comments

Not long ago we announced thiessen.org requiring C2S encryption.
We consider enabling the option for the thiessen.it domains as well and would like your opinion.

[poll id="8"]

Update: Sometime next week we will enable the option and update this post accordingly. done
Thanks for voting!

Categories: Security

Planned downtime on Saturday, August 29 (Server Migration)

August 25th, 2009 No comments

On Saturday, August 29 between 11:00 pm and 12:00 midnight (CEST) we will switch from ejabberd to Prosody.
We are also upgrading the host system from Debian Etch to Debian Lenny.

During this window, the domains thiessen.it, im.thiessen.it and jabber.thiessen.it won’t be available.

If you have any questions or encounter problems after the migration process
please join our support channel.

Update: Please login using your username in lowercase. Fixed, thanks Tobias Markmann.

Categories: Downtimes, Maintenance

DNS-Server change

August 12th, 2009 No comments

Short notice that we switched DNS-Servers today.
If you should encounter any problems (e.g. not being able to connect etc.) please use our webchat and notify us.

Categories: Maintenance

Sort of … “what’s next?”

July 3rd, 2009 No comments

This is a list of tasks that are planned for the next couple of weeks/months:

  • Migrate thiessen.it domains to Prosody done
  • Add a third xmpp-server to our network
  • Cluster thiessen.org and thiessen.it domains across those servers

Our long time goal is to have nodes not only in europe, but maybe on each continent. If you think this is worth contributing, consider a donation.

We will keep this post up to date and/or send notifications in case we expect a service outage. If that’s necessary it’s hopefully the last short downtime thanks to the clustered setup afterwards.

Update: Waqas Hussain, one of the Prosody developers, finished the migration script that allows us to switch to Prosody. He’s now working on completing Prosody’s MUC implementation after which we will start the migration process.

Categories: Uncategorized

‘thiessen.org’ requires client to server encryption

June 28th, 2009 No comments

Today we enabled an option that requires client to server connections to be encrypted.
In return this means if you are talking to someone on the same server, you can be certain
there’s no unencrypted connection between you and your counterpart.

Nevertheless we encourage you to use e2e (end to end) encryption using OpenPGP, OTR and so on.

Categories: Security

Maintenance work on Tuesday, June 2

May 29th, 2009 No comments

On Tuesday, June 2 between 8:00 am and 9:00 am (CEST) we will be performing maintenance work in our production environment.

During this window, the ‘thiessen.it’ domains won’t be available.

Update: The service is back up and running. From now on the ‘thiessen.it’ domains also listen on port 80 and 443. Please notify us if you encounter any problems.

Categories: Maintenance