[Dune] List server outage last week

[Jö Fahlke]

Hi,

last week approx Tuesday the physical machine hosting the
lists.dune-project.org at Münster University had a hardware failure.  The
admin of that machine already had plans to move his services elsewhere, took
that as an opportunity to execute those plans, and thus did not want to bring
the machine back up.  As I had plans to also move the list server, I executed
them as well, thou a little more hastily when I liked.

Anyway, since about thursday evening the list server is now running in a VM
rented from Hetzner.  On Friday Münster University droppen it's special
handling of the domain name, allowing mail from there to be delivered to the
mailing lists again.

On sunday I got the list server whitelisted[1] at Office365/outlook.com, so
people at institutions buying email-services from Microsoft are now again able
to receive mail that's passed through our list server.  You may wan't to have
a look into the list archives for any mail that you've missed.  Namely,
warwick.ac.uk is affected by this, but there may be more I'm not aware of.

If you notice any problems, especially that you cannot send mail to a list
like you could before, or that you did not get mail that appeares in the list
archive, or spam being delivered to the lists, please let me know.

Regards,
Jorrit Fahlke.


[1] Apparently the mailing list server's IP address had been blacklisted by
    outlook.com for sending spam.  Which is funny because I reused an IP
    address which I've held for probably a year, and most of the time it did
    not even have a server running behind it.  Anyway, they want you to go to
    their webpage, enter the IP to whitelist and the Email-address that
    received the error, and then they'll send a mail with a special token to
    that address.

    Except that mail contains lines more then 3000 bytes long.  I mean, 3000
    bytes long in the raw SMTP conversation, before base64-decoding takes
    place.

    Why was that a problem?  Because the list server would reject mail content
    with lines longer than 1000 bytes.  Why would he do that?  Well, my guess
    is that someone read https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.3.1
    and https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.3.1.6, and decided to
    take a stand against those damn RFC-violators, and set Debian's default
    config to reject lines longer than the minimum the RFC requires.

    So great.  One bonehead who does not care about interoperability, sending
    messages with unnessecary .gif-files, not folding the base64-encoded
    version of those into 80-character lines like you're supposed to, thereby
    violating an RFC recommendation for no good reason.  Versus another
    bonehead who cares so much about interoperability, that he'll artificially
    limit interoperability for all of his users by default, in the hope
    they'll pressure the first bonehead to do the right thing.

    Of course, I may be wrong, but at least that's how I'm reading this
    situation...

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