[Completed] Hosted Email server maintenance

We will be performing maintenance on our Hosted Email infrastructure which unfortunately will require a brief disruption to service.

Inbound mail will be queued for delivery once the server is back online. Access to Webmail, POP3, IMAP and SMTP will be temporarily unavailable.

The disruption is anticipated to last approximately 45 minutes and will commence at 00:00 CET on 2022-10-31

Apologies for any inconvenience caused while we perform this essential maintenance work.

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.

SpamTitan Upgrade

On Sunday 27 February 2022 we upgraded our SpamTitan service to a new server. As well as faster, more modern hardware, new appliance uses a new version of FreeBSD under the hood which brings many performance and security enhancements.

While we do not anticipate any disruption to service, there are two potential issues to be aware of:

  1. The source IP address of SMTP connections from our SpamTitan server has changed. If you are running your own email server and previously had 83.96.156.210 configured explicitly in your firewall, please update this to 193.189.141.10 in order to continue receiving clean email. Our SpamTitan server will queue your mail for up to 3 days. The old IP address will continue to accept inbound SMTP connections on port 25 for 14 days, after which it will be disabled.
  2. Unfortunately it has not been possible to migrate the existing Spam Quarantine, so if you need to access any mail that was quarantined prior to 27 February you will need to log in at https://ams2-spamtitan.anu.net/ in order to release it from your quarantine.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to drop us an email to support@anu.net.