The Fellowship blogging platform has been upgraded to the latest release of WordPress (3.2.1); we also upgraded all plugins and the atahualpa theme.

You can find more information about using the blogs on the “Blogs” page of our wiki, and send your suggestions for improvements to fellowship-hackers (at) fsfeurope (dot) org

Happy blogging!

The upgrade of the blogging platform has been performed successfully, thanks for your patience!

Warning: depending on the level of customisation of your blog, you might need to make some adjustments: please read the intructions at the page http://wiki.fsfe.org/Blogs/WP3.

You can find general information about the Fellowship blogs service at
http://wiki.fsfe.org/Blogs.

Happy blogging!

Dear Fellows, after last week’s upgrade of the Fellowship wiki and jabber services, we are now going to upgrade the Fellowship blog service blogs.fsfe.org.

On Friday 26 November, starting from 18.00 CET and for about 3 hours, the blog system will be in read-only mode. This will also affect our blog aggregator at planet.fsfe.org.

Additional information will be posted here on the Fellowship News blog.

Thanks for your patience!

Dear all,

on the evening of Tuesday May 4, the data center which hosts our web and mail servers suffered a power failure. As a consequence, the servers running FSFE’s mail services – the @fsfe.org forwarding, mailing lists and FSFE’s internal mail system – suffered hardware damage.

In the evening of Wednesday May 5, related problems caused FSFE’s web server to go offline.

Since the problems started, our system administrators have been working hard to fix the problem, reinstate basic mail services, and get FSFE’s website back online.

Recovering the mailing lists proved to be a trickier task. Only this Monday evening (May 17) were we able to get the mailing lists back online.

Mails sent to our mailing lists during the outage were stored on the server, and are now being delivered.

This sort of outage clearly shouldn’t happen. As a consequence, we have moved our servers to a different hosting facility with more reliable services. We are now reviewing and adapting our setup to make sure that outages will be extremely rare in future, and that we are able to recover more quickly from those outages that do occur.

Please accept our sincere apologies for this prolonged outage. Thank you for your understanding, and for your continued support of our work.

Kind regards,

Karsten Gerloff

President, Free Software Foundation Europe

After a power failure yesterday at the data centre that hosts FSFE’s servers, the mail server did not reboot correctly. As a consequence, mails sent to @fsfe.org addresses are bouncing at the moment. FSFE’s system administrators are working hard to fix the issue. We apologise for the inconvenience.

As soon as we have a good estimate for when services will be restored, we will post it here.

It is now possible to have guest accounts on wiki.fsfe.org. This helps a lot so more people can contribute to the wiki and work together with Fellows on activities. Thanks to Cri our sysadmin for implementing it! To register a guest account:

• Go to https://wiki.fsfe.org and click on the “Login” link in the upper-right menu bar
• Click the “request a guest account” link below the login form and you will get a registration form.
• Fill in all the registration form fields; please note that a “Guest-” prefix will be automatically prepended to your chosen username) and save your password in a secure place.
• Your account must be manually approved by one of our administrators; you will receive an e-mail message as soon as this is done.
• When you receive the confirmation e-mail message, you can log into the wiki, using the username contained in the message, and the password you chose at registration time.

A good start might be the Video or the audio section. Compared to the transcripts they lack more content and structure. So help us improving the infomation.

Dear Fellows, this morning the hosting centre where our Fellowship servers are located suffered a partial power outage.
Due to these circumstances beyond our control, the servers were offline until 14:30 today.

Unfortunately, this affected all Fellowship services, including the @fsfe.org mail forwarding. Delivery was delayed, no mail was lost. We apologise for any inconvenience.

For those of you sitting behind firewalls or proxies that block connections to the standard jabber/XMPP ports, the Fellowship jabber server now accepts connections also on ports 80 and 443.

To use this feature, just configure your jabber client to use port 80 or 443 instead of the standard port 5222, leaving all other settings unchanged.

Note: since some ISPs may block outgoing non-http traffic on port 80, port 443 is more likely to work. In both cases, the server enforces a secure TLS connection.

Want to learn more about jabber and other Fellowship services? See http://wiki.fsfe.org/FellowshipServices