The year 2023 slowly comes to an end – and with it the festive season begins! Cinnamon smell, snow and lights everywhere. It is the time of contemplation and togetherness.
Cross-site Scripting (XSS) issue in the Kolab Webclient?
Lately we got a lot of questions at Support about a possible vulnerability in Roundcube, the Kolab Now webclient. The listing in question is CVE-2023-47272 which upstream in the Roundcube development has been handled and patched.
To see the version of Roundcube running as the Kolab now webclient, login and press the ‘About’ button in the left side of the screen. This will reveal that Kolab Now is running:
Roundcube Webmail 1.5.6.3-30.1
This tells, that the fix was already installed, and that the Kolab Now webclient is not impacted by the vulnerability.
We are thankful for having an observant and active user base.
Announcing Service Window: 25th of October 2023
The operations team is going to make an update to the Kolab Now dashboard applications framework. Therefore we declare a service window on:
Wednesday 2023-10-25 from 07:00 UTC until 09:00 UTC.
Changes: The Kolab Now support system
As most of our users probably know, Bifrost was our support system of choice for many years. It was a great system that served us well all those years, however it also had it’s weaknesses and it is time for a change.
Announcing Service Window on Wednesday 4th of October 2023: Larry skin & Spellcheck
The Kolab Now Staff is going to deploy the “old” larry skin and enable the English spellcheck option (again). Therefore we declare a service window on:
Wednesday 2023-10-04 at 07:00 UTC until 08:00 UTC.
Incident report: Service not restarting automatically on failure
In the very late hours (UTC) of 2023-09-18 Some users experienced that they could not receive mails, or do administrative activities – like making payments or creating new users. When they tried they were given an error message: ‘Internal Server error’. This lasted until the morning (UTC) of 2023-09-19.
The issue was caused by the in-memory data store (Redis) going out of memory.
The Kolab skins
Some users probably remember when we first released the new Responsive skin back in 2018. Since then, the responsive skin has been developed further, some improvements were made, and the skin was promoted to be the default skin for new Kolab Now users.
We in the Kolab Now team love the Responsive skin, and we were not going to miss the old static skin when it was not deployed during the update to the latest version of the webclient. We had only received positive feedback about the responsive skin so far, but it turned out that some users still were very fond of the old look and feel.
Incident report: “Stability!”
Welcome back!
We were finally able to bring our blog back. During the past 2 weeks we had a long lasting incident. We did what we could to make sure that users could use their primary services during our work on the systems, but we know that there was unplanned downtime. As the blog was a victim of the situation, we couldn’t inform users as well as we wanted (we really do not like X (‘formerly known as Twitter’)), so here is finally the incident report from the beginning to the end.
Service window postponed – Due diligence..
Last week we announced a service window that was supposed to start and be in session about now. However, following due diligence we went through the list of activities last night and found that we had overseen an important step in the plan. The operations that are going to happen are on the backend servers, are quite sensitive, and we would like to avoid any problems. We therefore suspend the current service window and hereby declare it for the coming Friday:
Friday 2023-06-30 at 08:00 UTC until 13:00 UTC.
Announcing Service Window Friday 23rd of June: The everlasting race to get rid of old infrastructure..
The Kolab Now Staff is going to update parts of the platform to get rid of even more old infrastructure, and to ensure the best possible solution for users. Therefore we declare a service window on:
Friday 2023-06-23 at 08:00 UTC until 13:00 UTC.
