Overview of changes
There’s a number of updates happening, long overdue; here’s an overview:
- There are only 50 people actively using dialups, and dropping, and that isn’t covering the $600 phone bill, so the dialups are being handed off to Peak Internet, the ISP I work for for a day job in Corvallis, OR (they have Portland numbers).
- The level of spam took a dramatic increase in September, causing things to break on agora all too often. As a result, I made arrangements with Peak to route Raindrop’s mail through their spam filter. I’m also making other related changes to keep spammers from bypassing the spam filter (this is why pop/imap clients need to use vmail.rdrop.com:587 to send mail).
- Agora is several years out of date, and I’m making progress on getting new versions of the various services up and running. webmail has already moved to new software, vmail for outgoing is the next step
After that, I’ll be moving mailboxes to a new imap server on it (that, unfortunately, will be another painful transition, but should allow for transparent upgrades afterwards). After that, I’ll be moving web sites to a new server (that *should* be mostly transparent), and finally a new shell server for shell users. Once I get everything moved off the old server, I can rebuild it, and make some more improvements behind the scenes to improve things, but after the initial transitions, which should be done by this spring, everything should be pretty transparent.