This Saturday, 19th of June 2021 at 09:00 UTC, the Kolab Now operations team will perform an update of the Kolab software on the Kolab Now platform. The update will add a few features for our support and admin personnel, which are hidden from normal users. Of course we also take the opportunity to fix a line of minor defects with the same update.
The service window is expected to last for no more than 1 hour, ending on Saturday, 19th of June 2021, at 10:00 UTC.
This Saturday, 5th of June 2021 at 09:00 UTC, the Kolab Now operations team is performing an update of the firmware on the storage canisters in the datacenter. As Kolab Now is running the operations on high class professional IBM servers under great warranty (see the knowledge base article), the update will be performed under advice from the IBM technical support crew.
As the storage system is 100% redundant, we expect that there will be no interruption or downtime – planned or unplanned – in connection to this change. Users can follow the status of the change via the Kolab Ops Twitter account. They can keep working and collaborating online as usual.
Should you have any issues in this or any other context, then please contact Kolab Now Support
UPDATE 2021-05-05 @ 11:00 UTC: The update has happened, and as expected, there was no downtime. All systems are back up and running as they should be.
In what may come as a shock move to some, but is abundantly clear to need to have happened to many much more well informed, Kolab Systems AG, and therefore Kolab Now, is changing the IP space that it uses primarily.
A service window is needed to implement this progression, and this service window is, for now, scheduled early July 4th, 2019, from 05:30 to 07:00 UTC.
Our local Swiss datacenter and internet provider is a great, professional and stable provider of data connectivity and datacenter services. These services however demands updates of infrastructure, and such maintenance work is happening in a planned service window the night between Saturday 23.02.2019 and Sunday 24.02.2019.
As may have already been brought to your attention, some software mitigation is needed for vulnerabilities dubbed “Meltdown” (CVE-2017-5754) and “Spectre” (CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715).
If I were to summarize the issue with these vulnerabilities then in principle they would, when successfully exploited, allow reading memory that doesn’t belong to the process, the user or even the same operating system instance. In just that way, the Kolab Now infrastructure isn’t impacted.
However, we’re still going to need to patch this out. The only way we can is by updating software and rebooting systems, and this will happen during the weekend of Saturday January 13th and Sunday January 14th.
As we recently announced, we have pursued an opt-in second factor authentication feature on Kolab Now. As described, the implementation is limiting users to the web client, and this requires some reconfiguration of various servers and services.
