Author: Ashley Lipscombe

OpenVPN Upgrade

We are rolling out an upgrade to our OpenVPN server – replacing a primary/backup configuration with a high availability cluster of servers. If the primary server ever goes down, a secondary one can immediately take over and continue to serve traffic as normal.

We are mitigating the VORACLE attack vulnerability at the same time (CLICK HERE) by disabling compression. This is now deprecated and will be removed from OpenVPN soon. This is to protect against a hard to exploit but theoretical idea that you can extract certain information from encrypted traffic by how well it compresses. Unfortunately, this change means that existing client configurations can’t automatically connect to the new servers as compression is explicitly specified.

All clients connecting will need to download a new OpenVPN profile containing the new server addresses and without compression specified. Click HERE to begin this process – you need to know your VPN username and password. This will connect you to our new servers and you’ll be ready to go.

If you would prefer, you can manually edit your config file, changing ‘openvpn.anu.net’ to ‘vpn.anu.net’ and removing any line stating ‘compress lzo’ or ‘comp-lzo’.

We plan to keep our old OpenVPN server running for 6 months – it will be shut down Monday, 10th October 2022 at 12 noon.

If you have any questions or need any assistance, do not hesitate to get in touch with us by emailing support@anu.net or opening up a live chat at https://anu.net.

[Complete] Hosted Email Maintenance

Update 10:10PM UK / 11:10PM CET Saturday 5th February 2022: This maintenance is now complete.

Update 10PM UK / 11PM CET Saturday 5th February 2022: This maintenance has started.

This upcoming weekend, at 10PM UK / 11PM CET Saturday 5th February 2022, we will be performing a short period of maintenance on our Hosted Email platform.

For up to 15 minutes, your mail clients will not able to connect to our server to send / receive emails. Mail will be queued for delivery and will be delivered shortly after.

We apologise in advance for any inconvenience. If you have any concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us by emailing support@anu.net.

Hosted Email: Disabling TLS 1.0/1.1 support in January 2022

We take the security of your confidential data very seriously which is why we take proactive steps to adopt modern security and phase out older protocols over a period of time.

Back in 2020, we enforced encrypted connections on our Hosted Email platform. This meant that all connections had to be encrypted, keeping your emails safe in transit. You can read more about this here.

TLS is the successor to SSL although the term SSL is often still used to describe TLS. On January 31st 2022 at 9PM UK time we will be disabling TLS 1.0/1.1 support on our Hosted Email platform. This will mean that all connections will require TLS 1.2 or higher. TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are deprecated, deemed insecure and should be avoided to prevent the compromise of your private emails.

All modern mail clients and our Roundcube webmail already support TLS 1.2 and the vast majority of our clients will not be affected. Our latest investigation showed that 2.2% of connections used TLS 1.0, and 0.1% of connections used TLS 1.1. You can read more about our recommended mail client settings here.

If your mail client does not support TLS 1.2, we recommend that you check out Mozilla Thunderbird. It is free, open source, very easy to use and the client used by most team members at Anu: https://www.thunderbird.net/. We have a handy guide available for customers here.

Another alternative is to use our Roundcube Webmail: https://roundcube.anu.net/ – recent updates have brought in a new, modern web interface which works seamlessly across all devices (PCs, Laptops, Tablets and Phones).

We will be contacting affected customers directly over the next 8-12 weeks to make them aware and provide assistance where necessary.

If you need any further help or advice, please do not hesitate to contact us by emailing support@anu.net.