Ongoing maintenances and upgrades, gitlab external accounts creation, recurring issues on Lufi.
Banner of the month
You may not have seen it if you are browsing from a mobile device, but there is a banner in the top-right corner of our web page. We are using this space it to advertise on endeavours and projects of interest.
This month we are promoting the Courage Foundation, an international organisation that supports those who risk life or liberty to make significant contributions to the historical record. Courage Foundation fundraise for the legal and public defence of specific individuals who fit these criteria and are subject to serious prosecution or persecution. They also campaign for the protection of truth tellers and the public’s right to know generally.
The Courage Foundation is currently mobilised to fight the extradition of Julian Assange to the US. We encourage every one to raise awareness around you, and wholeheartedly recommend reading In Defense of Julian Assange.
“This book shows why the Julian Assange case is one of the most important press freedom cases of this century or any other century.” — James C. Goodale, former Vice Chairman and General Counsel of The New York Times.
As of today, the full extradition hearing is now set to open on February 24 at London’s Woolwich Crown Court, adjourning after one week, then continuing in May 18 with a three-week hearing.
Achievements
Website
- The catalogue page has been refreshed to include direct links to the different services (likewise Dokuwiki homepage in a way)
- We added a new section in the main menu, called Our selection. This page will gather all our recommendations for a better online experience. The first page, already available, is about web browsing on a computer.
- A new test result on our web-test page has been added, from CryptCheck on HTTPS.
- Also on that page, we added a comparison of Mozilla Observatory reports for a Nomagic hosted WordPress and a freely hosted one (on wordpress.com)
Services
We have added a note on the Gitlab landing page regarding acceptation of new account creation (note: external account creation only allow to open and participate to issues).
It is now required to contact us whenever applying for a new account. We are trying to keep things tidy, and noticed many accounts were created with no legitimate purpose, as 99% of those do not ever connect after being accepted. We will further disable next month all external active users that never connected.
Application upgrades
The following applications were upgraded to their latest stable version this month:
- Ethercalc
- Gitlab
- Matrix-synapse
- LSTU (Let’s Upload That File)
- LSTU is now limited to Nomagic users. This breaks the browser extension, as there is no way yet to set up your account/ password in the extension.
Backend
- We upgraded to Proxmox 6.1 last December
- We completed OCSP stapling for all Websites
- We upgraded our frontline servers (with almost no downtime!)
We continue our efforts to upgrade our machines towards Debian Buster. Important maintenance will show in advance on our calendar, which you can follow if you want to by following the ical feed.
Bugs and issues
We are currently awaiting the next stable version of Pleroma, hoping that it will fix the current incompatibilities between Pleroma and Peertube.
We have faced issues with Lufi. We have modified the number of Lufi processes to hopefully fix this on the long term. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions.
Coming up
Our road map now includes:
Short-term objectives
- Monitor Lufi
- Upgrade Pleroma when 1.1.9 becomes available
- Install a dedicated server to implement gitlab CD/CI functions (through gitlab-runner)
Mid-term objectives
- Update all servers to the latest release.
- Keep on implementing security/privacy policies
Long-term objectives
- implementing Single Sign-On (SSO) so that Nomagic users won’t have to authenticate on each and every service in their Web browser.
Nomagic in solidarity with the French protests
Nomagic answered the call from #onestlatech (page in French) in solidarity with the social movement in France against the reforms pushed by president Macron to break the current pension plans with little more than fairy dust for all explanation on how this was good news for all people. Requiring people to work longer in a country with 10% of people looking for a job will only ensure that no one gets a full pension when he retires.
This is why, on Friday, January 24th, we blocked access to our main website and to all our public services for 24 hours (all members-only services were uninterrupted).
Icons made by mavadee from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC 3.0 BY
