The current forum, a vBulletin license is about to get obsolete. We started this forum for several years ago. In facto, the forum has been kept alive approximately since tornevall.net was registered as a domain in may 2000. The most active period of the forum has been registered between that date and 2007. When people got aware of Facebook a few years later (around 2007) the big masses jumped on that train which made many of the smaller actors out of job. And users. This also hit Tornevall Networks old forum variant, that hardly follows the technical development anymore. So it’s time to rethink how it’s done further on.

I think the worst hit came when Jelsoft changed crew and tried to rebuild the platform to match social medias. This failed, and the prior “customer stock” became very disappointed with how things happened.

This is why the portal and forum itself will move out from the primary domain. It will not be removed, just archived somewhere else, leaving new fresh space for better ideas.

The archive will be created at https://archive.tornevall.net.

As Tornevall Networks isn’t considered “operations safe” (by means, Tornevall Networks can never guarantee your uptime). However, since there are plenty of tunneling options it is possible to actually apply to smaller networks (depending on the network size). There are also virtualizations availabel, but the IPv4 networks are much more limited so we usually don’t create virtual environments (besides there’s neither automation nor billing systems available, since there’s no company in bottom of this service).

Most of the network ranges allows open SMTP since many services has those sections closed. Mostly because of abuse actually; so Tornevall Networks services for SMTP is regular which means bulk or spamservices are not allowed. Detected abuse will have your service shutdown instantly.

For more information about the tunneling options, take a look at https://docs.tornevall.net/x/EYCD

During the yesterday evening, a server silently rebooted and ran into a corrupted InnoDB database. This was discovered today (https://status.tornevall.net is updated) and the database server was completely restored around 15:00-16:00 CET. Bitbucket, Confluence and JIRA was unaffected by the disruption.

As of summer 2019 the email-server upgrade is going to be final. During a few weeks the support for virtual domains is in place, DKIM and DMARC is new features and together with SpamAssassin upgrades and the restoring of DNSBL with FraudBL spam filtering should now hopefully be quite effective. Besides of this, there’s a global whitelist installed, which means that some domains that are considered important will be able to duck spam triggering. Users has also, via TorneAUTH the ability to whitelist senders themselves.

The last big change being done this far is the trigger on the spam itself. Historically, spam has been kept intact with a tagged Subject straight into the inbox of the mail account. By means, for each new spammail the messages has been staying put and disturbed the normal mailflow. The last change done, moves all mail flagged with spam to a new Spam-folder, which is automatically created if it does not exist. If you miss any mail – check there.

The final step now is to make all this configurable too. I’m aware that the Spambox may get filled if noone ever checks that mailbox out. What’s up next, is something that cleans up that folder periodically if noone else does it, so we can keep down the mailbox size more effective.

This release of the DNSBL for WordPress is a half-minor update. In a few days back in time a raised act against our contact forms has been observed. ContactForm7 is used on most of the tornevall.net-sites, so it has become frustrating when spam passes through the forms without the ability to instantly blacklist the posts (except for moments when akismet for example helps with the job). So I’ve just added support for WPCF7 into the plugin.

By means, if anything bad arrives via the mail, that has been posted via the contact form there’s just a few seconds between me and a complete blacklist of the sender. In this particular case I’m activating flag 16 (IP_MAILSERVER_SPAM) in the detection configuration and for v2.0.8 a new setting under “Protective options”, called “Turn on support for WPCF7”.

The issue tracker has this case added at https://tracker.tornevall.net/browse/DNSBLWP-63 and has been tested with WPCF7 5.1.4 this far.