Upgrade to Debian Jessie planned

Publicado el Saturday 2 April 2016

Debian Wheezy security support is scheduled to end at the end of April, therefore we have to upgrade to Debian Jessie before this deadline. The good news is that it leaves you a few weeks to check that your installed webapps will continue to work after the upgrade.

Edit: Done!

Please welcome HTTPS

Publicado el Saturday 2 April 2016

Until recently, anything hosted by TuxFamily and reached over TLS (HTTPS, POPS, IMAPS, etc.) implied to accept a self-signed certificate.

Since the "Let's encrypt" initiative has become a reality, TuxFamily recently jumped on the bandwagon:

• *.tuxfamily.org web areas now benefit from a wildcard certificate (*.tuxfamily.org) kindly provided by GlobalSign.
• Most *.tuxfamily.org services also benefit from that wildcard certificate.
• Other TuxFamily-hosted web areas (e.g. vhffs.org or yabause.org) now benefit from a Let's Encrypt certificate.
• Due to technical limitations, *.*.tuxfamily.org web areas and domains remain plagued by a common name mismatch error; fortunately, those remain quite rare and should benefit from a Let's Encrypt certificate on the long run.

This setup should bring class-A HTTPS to your sites, and even A+ if you set up HSTS.

Since your web areas are now reachable by everybody over both HTTP and HTTPS, you are now free to adapt your sites accordingly; typical setups include (but are not restricted to):

• handling both protocols;
• enforcing only authenticated traffic to HTTPS;
• enforcing all traffic to HTTPS through redirections and/or HSTS implemented in .htaccess.

Please welcome IPv6

Publicado el Saturday 2 April 2016

All TuxFamily services are now reachable over IPv6, making them future-proof with regard to IPv4 address exhaustion.

Those of you managing their domains through DNS servers other than TuxFamily's may want to add some AAAA records pointing to 2a02:2178:1000:201::4 (IPv6 address for web.tuxfamily.net).

The TuxFamily team needs you for their therapy!

Publicado el Friday 1 April 2016

These times are rough. Or at least they seem so. Daily news look increasingly bad. Global warming, conflicts, terrorism, economical concerns, extremists fueled by global political disinterest, the list feels endless. All these events and the extraordinary noise they bring along with them divert our attention from many good things that also happen on a daily basis: scientific progress, environment-friendly innovation, constructive local initiatives, education-oriented projects and more generally people adding their humble yet significant contribution to the better side of Humanity. TuxFamily takes pride in providing such people with a free hosting platform that helps them achieve whatever good deed they are aiming for. And yet...

And yet, forgotten among the forsaken, the TuxFamily staff members are too often neglected. Hidden behind a machine that works too well for anybody to wonder who exactly winds up its clocks and replaces its gears, the TuxFamily staff recently managed to narrow down, thanks to the cheap services of an estimate psychotherapist who accepted to work for only 250% of TuxFamily's patiently-collected treasury, the true cause of their long-dwelling spleen: they lack recognition and gratitude. Medication for the whole team having been dismissed as too expensive, it was decided to fight and improve the situation through two ground breaking ideas.

The first idea consists in reminding both our hostees and their visitors that there are actual people working under the hood of each web site. To this end, starting in a few days, all TuxFamily-hosted websites, with no possible exception, will be altered on-the-fly so that they display the face of a random TuxFamily staff member. That modification should remain discreet in most cases, as pictures are only about 100 pixels wide. However, thanks to well-engineered heuristics, all sites that either lack proper backups or which are not up-to-date security-wise will inherit an extra feature: the face of a TuxFamily staff member will *follow* the mouse cursor. This revolutionary feature allows everyone to become aware that a given site needs some extra caring, thus boosting both TuxFamily's staff's egos and the amount of speculative applications from new contributors to your projects! And it can be seen right now on the following websites:

• https://tuxfamily.org
• https://faq.tuxfamily.org
• https://forum.tuxfamily.org
• https://vhffs.org
• https://poudreverte.org

Despite being under heavy discussions, the second idea was deemed ready for disclosure: in the coming months, a new TuxFamily service will enable you to bid for your favorite TuxFamily staff member; those of you who win these auctions will be entitled to spend an entire evening with that staff member. Whether "evening" actually means "night" and what exactly you will be allowed to do with that staff member is actually the "still under heavy discussions" part of that project. But we are confident that these questions will be duly addressed in no time.

All members of the TuxFamily team thank you in advance for your upcoming support to their mental health!

Edit: As most of you hopefully understood, yesterday's communication was our usual April's Fools' prank -- we hope it made you smile, laugh, choke on your dinner and/or other similar reactions that do not involve suing us in court. Some of you may wonder how close we actually are from the couch of a psychotherapist. Well, good news, most of us are fine.