Author: Roi

Categories
Downtimes Maintenance Problems

Outages in the past weeks

There were some outages in the past weeks.

A big outage was from yesterday to today, almost one day. Coming back just two hours ago. But everything is fine again. We had some server hardware problems which are solved now. No data loss and no need to restore our backups.

The other outages are much harder to detect. There is a annoying bug in Prosody at the moment which causes database connections to fail at some point. Then a restart is needed. We need the information then (because most of the time it only affects users who want to login, not already logged in users) to restart the server. Another bug which is unknown at the moment is that connections to jabber.ccc.de are failing from time to time. A restart solves it – or causes it. You choose… ;-) But these problems are Prosody related (the first for sure, the second maybe) and we work on it.

So we need your help. If you cannot login, tell us. Here or Twitter, does not matter. If you see your buddies from other servers offline at once, tell us. At the moment we just know about this jabber.ccc.de problem which happened two times.

Thanks!

PS: We are not thinking about cancelling our Jabber services here, do not worry! Some people were afraid.

Categories
Maintenance

Jappix web client up to date again

We just upgraded the Jappix web client to 1.1.6 from a older 0.9 version. Have fun! ;-)

JWchat is offline, it did not work anymore after we upgraded something on our server a while ago.

Categories
Maintenance Problems Security

More new certs

We updated our old expired certificates a while ago. And now I just updated the website. You can find the new fingerprints here.

Also we had some problems with certificates, especially on this website. Sometimes the webserver delivered the old and expired certificate. This was because some old tasks of Apache were still in the memory. Problem solved three days ago.

Categories
Maintenance Security

New certs for jabber.hot-chilli.net, hot-chilli.net and im.hot-chilli.net

A short time before the old certificates expire we setup some new ones:

jabber.hot-chilli.net
Fingerprint: b1:38:25:b4:8d:4b:de:b0:83:18:88:21:95:3b:82:41:00:0f:24:8d

hot-chilli.net and im.hot-chilli.net (and also for this website):
Fingerprint: f3:74:6e:f0:bc:f6:7a:7e:15:d1:0b:83:6f:02:06:be:29:38:d5:f7

Categories
Features Transports

Deprecation of Facebook XMPP Chat API

We are sorry to announce that Facebook will put down their Facebook XMPP Chat API in April 30th 2015. For official Facebook information please see here. Key information quoted from there:

On April 30, 2014, we announced the deprecation of the XMPP Chat API as part of the release of Platform API v2.0. The service and API this document covers will no longer be available after April 30, 2015.

Once version 1.0 is deprecated on April 30, 2015, chat.facebook.com and the xmpp_login permission will no longer be available.

We will turn off our Facebook transport in the days after April 30th 2015. All data will be deleted. But you have to make sure that you clean up your roster and remove all @facebook.jabber.hot-chilli.net contacts.

Categories
Security Website

New and secure website online

A few day ago we activated a new theme on our website. Also we switched from http to https. The benefits are that we do not get spam comments so much anymore with the features of the new WordPress theme. Also if you use our (now completly working) online account management tools (register, change password, remove, transport pre-registration) and online clients (JWChat and Jappix) you will not have to send any data unencrypted over the internet.

We love to read what you think about the changes. ;-)

Categories
Maintenance Problems Transports

New SSL certificates

Because there are problems/bugs with ejabberd 13.x connecting to our transports we just replaced the certificate for our main virtual host jabber.hot-chilli.net. This host also does service our transports.

Until then we had used a certificate with the common name *.hot-chilli.net, now we have one with jabber.hot-chilli.net and *.jabber.hot-chilli.net common names which does not lead to the problem.

Some days ago we already replaced the *.hot-chilli.net due to the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug.

Categories
Features

Hashed passwords for Prosody

We just changed the Prosody authentication provider module to hashed SCRAM-SHA-1 passwords.

You most probably will not notice anything. But if your client does not support SCRAM-SHA-1 the password will be sent in plain, not DIGEST-MD5 like until now. So be sure you only use a TLS/SSL connection to the server to protect the password (and also all your other XMPP data like chat messages) inside an encrypted data stream. Some clients might show a warning that DIGEST-MD5 is not longer available on the server.

The next time you log in the password will be automaticly hashed with SCRAM-SHA-1 mechanism.