Last night, a failure in the storage layer caused most of our services to be unavailable. In the week before, we replaced a failed hard drive. In the week before that, a so-called Virtual Fabric Adapter failed, causing a hypervisor to shut itself off. Since the most recent incident was the more serious downtime, that’s what we’ll start our reporting on.
Kube Campaign: Last Chance
The proposition of the Kube campaign is the following:
You sign-up now via Kube for a Kolab Now account, and pay only for the currently available feature-set that Kube provides at the moment. The web client will be limited to the same feature-set, but as Kube progresses and covers more features you will also get those features for the web client, while you get to keep your reduced subscription price.
Quick keyboard navigation in Kube
It was already previously possible to navigate through Kube by moving the keyboard focus using tab and arrow keys, however that is neither fast nor efficient. To be able to really blaze through your Inbox we naturally require VIM style keybindings. To move through the UI we want to be able to go through folders, threads and mails using a single key press, without worrying where the focus currently is.
Kolab Now Responsive Skin
We’ve received many requests to make the web client more useful on mobile devices, so we’ve put some of our development focus on a responsive skin for the Kolab Now web client, and in turn Kolab. The result already got great feedback from the early adopters, now the skin has been updated with fixes and additional functionality.
To test the new skin and functionality, please go to: https://beta.kolabnow.com/apps/ and login with your Kolab Now user login.
Implementing overlapping date-range queries in Kube
Warning: this post is about me experimenting and researching on the subject, I am not an authority in the matter.
I want my calendar view to be optimized, how hard can it be?
To be more precise, I want the events displayed in a calendar view (week view, month view, etc.) to be fetched quickly from the database, without having to load them all into memory, while not overblowing the size of the database. Some people use their calendar extensively and we do not want to make Kube memory or disk heavy for them.
A short guide to LMDB
LMDB is a great embeddable key-value store that we use extensively for Kube.
Using it is not completely straightforward though, so here’s a short guide for future reference.
Collabora Online 3.2 for Kolab Now
Over the course of today, we’ve upgraded our environment to run Collabora Online 3.2. Having waited for a point in time where no collaborative editing sessions had been ongoing, no-one should have noticed any service interruption.
Short-Form GDPR Compliance
Our team has received multiple inquiries about our service’s compliance with GDPR. We answer these individually, but here’s a short-form of the types of questions that we answer.
Deprecation of TLS version 1.0
For most people, it’s been looming about pretty silently over the past few years, but TLS v1.0, the oldest and earliest version of Transport Layer Security is considered deprecated. The Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard (DSS) version 3.2 from April 2016 recommends full deprecation by the end of June 2018.
In compliance with these standards, while originating from the payment card industry, widely regarded to as a guiding standard for other industries, Kolab Now has disabled support for TLS v1.0.
Why? What does that mean?
Use Privacy Badger
Privacy Badger is a browser extension by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that prevents sites from tracking your visits across the web. It’s available for Chrome (the most popular browser among our visitors and customers), Firefox (second) and Opera (nowhere to be found).
