Hi,
== TL;DR: ==
The BitFolk mailing lists changed address, but important stuff got
copied over. You don't need to do anything.
The new list archives are at:
https://mailman.bitfolk.com/mailman/hyperkitty/
and if you DO want to change any of your settings the main interface
is at:
https://mailman.bitfolk.com/mailman/postorius/lists/
But you'll have to do a Mailman password reset before you can log in
to it and change settings.
You can stop reading now unless you are particularly interested in
the details.
== What ==
BitFolk's announce@ and users@ mailing lists which used to be at
lists.bitfolk.com have now been migrated to
<listname>@mailman.bitfolk.com, which is Mailman 3.
== Why ==
The VM which runs lists.bitfolk.com needs to be upgraded. It runs
Mailman 2, which is a strictly Python 2 application. Python 2 was
EOL in 2020 sometime and is not available in newer releases of
Debian, and so neither is Mailman 2. An upgrade will leave Mailman 2
non-functional.
Running Mailman 3, which is a complete rewrite, is a major
undertaking that I have little experience of and I'm not entirely
happy about it. However, unless we either want to outsource the
mailing lists to another provider or switch to something like
Discourse¹, it seems to be still the best option.
While it may have been possible to install Python 2 and Mailman 2
from source on an otherwise upgraded host, that is a lot of work for
what seems like a dead end.
== Your subscriptions ==
All subscribed addresses have been copied over, which is why you are
seeing this email. You don't need to do anything, but if you do want
to adjust your settings you'll need to do a password reset in
Mailman as your passwords have not been copied over.
The web interface for the lists is at:
https://mailman.bitfolk.com/mailman/postorius/lists/
In the footer of messages to the "users" list it will have a link
and tell you which address you are subscribed with. The "announce"
list does not have a footer so if you're unsure what your subscribed
address is there you'll need to look at the email headers.
== Functional changes ==
=== Headers ===
I'm tired of list postings being rejected or going to spam folders.
We can't keep sending emails on your behalf, i.e. with a From:
address that is yours, because that breaks DKIM. So over on the
"users" list all posts will appear to come from:
From: Your Name via BitFolk Users <users(a)mailman.bitfolk.com>
Cc: Your Name <you(a)example.com>
The Cc header is so that people can still contact you off-list if
they want.
Obviously the List-Id: headers have changed so if you're filtering
email based upon those you will need to update your filters. Sorry
about that.
=== Reply-To: added, no more "users-replyto" ===
We used to have a separate mailing list "users-replyto" which got
all the same emails as the "users" list, but added:
Reply-To: users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
to them for people who preferred to explicitly have replies directed
back to the list.
The main "users" list is going to have an explicit Reply-To: added
now, making "users-replyto" redundant. Anyone who was subscribed to
"users-replyto" has been added to "users".
The reason for this is that I got feedback that despite it being a
long held belief that forcing Reply-To: is bad², these days most
people do prefer it. I'm happy to revisit that decision if people
don't like it, but the "users-replyto" hack won't be coming back.
=== List addresses ===
Obviously the list addresses have both changed from
@lists.bitfolk.com to @mailman.bitfolk.com. This was necessary so
that the older Mailman could continue working while the new one was
set up.
No doubt through muscle memory and address books the occasional
email will still end up being sent to whatever(a)lists.bitfolk.com.
These emails are being redirected to the correct place and I
anticipate keeping that redirection in place forever.
=== List archives ===
The public archives of the "announce" and "users" lists have been
imported into Mailman3's archiver, HyperKitty, at:
https://mailman.bitfolk.com/mailman/hyperkitty/
I tried to port over the existing Lurker archives but I just
couldn't get it to work. Lurker is mostly undocumented and hasn't
seen any development since 2007. This unfortunately means that all
the old archive links that are out there in previous emails and in
the wiki, etc. will break if and when I turn off Lurker on the old
host.
I hope to be able to transplant a static copy of
https://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/ over to
https://mailman.bitfolk.com/lurker/ so that old links will still
work, with automatic redirection. There doesn't appear to be any way
to map an individual Lurker message link to a HyperKitty link, sadly.
The new HyperKitty archives are fully searchable, so if you do
happen to see a Lurker link in a wiki article please do feel free to
find the same message in HyperKitty and update the article. If you
find it in some other place that you can't edit please do just let
me know and I'll update it. The same goes for any other references
to lists.bitfolk.com.
== Let us know about any issues or suggestions for the lists ==
As I say I'm not very experienced in running Mailman 3 so it's
possibly it might break or be misconfigured in some way that I
haven't yet found. So if you spot anything that you think looks
broken, please do let us know.
Also if you have suggestions for how it might work differently or
look differently, I am interested to hear and try to implement,
though I cannot promise that it is possible.
Certainly I am not in love with the default appearance of the
HyperKitty archives or the colour scheme of Mailman 3's web
interface in general, and it may be possible to improve those.
Thanks,
Andy
¹ Discourse: https://www.discourse.org/
² https://marc.merlins.org/netrants/reply-to-harmful.html and its
counter-argument
https://marc.merlins.org/netrants/reply-to-useful.html
Both of these are over 20 years old so I'm not sure how relevant
they are (or that mailing lists are) for the modern Internet.
It should also be noted that one of the objections to Reply-To:
munging is that it can remove all information about where the
author wants replies to go. In Mailman3's case, if you supply
Reply-To: headers of your own then it adds them, so that objection
doesn't hold.
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
TL;DR: If you're running in 32-bit PV mode you should not try to
update your kernel to version 5.9 or beyond, which means not to
Debian 11. Take some action first, like switching to PVH mode.
Otherwise it will not boot and you'll have to boot into the older
kernel again.
During this week's maintenance a worrying number of customer VMs
didn't boot because they were 32-bit PV and had been updated to a
kernel version of 5.9 or beyond. Debian 11 (bullseye) has kernel
version 5.10.
It's been mentioned a number of times here over the years that support
for 32-bit PV in the Linux kernel was going away at version 5.9, but
it looks like we haven't been able to communicate that as well as
we would have liked. The most recent attempt was here:
https://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/message/20210930.104643.2ab5f9c0.en.html
If 32-bit PV is you then probably what you want to do is just switch
to PVH mode as mentioned at the top of that email.
Possibly the remaining people who need to see this just aren't on
the announce@ list. We could email every customer who is running
32-bit PV mode, but it would probably just serve to annoy those of
you who are never planning to update your kernels.
Finally, although switching to PVH should allow you to continue for
many years to come, nobody should be running 32-bit. We strongly
advise you to be planning your switch to amd64 as soon as possible
[advice since 2015].
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
