[BlueOnyx:14917] Re: Squirrelmail broken again

[Chris Gebhardt - VIRTBIZ Internet]

On 3/12/2014 2:56 PM, Michael Stauber wrote:
> The inertia is surely catching up. I no longer consider CentOS 5 a
> viable hosting platform and I'm not alone in that assessment. The
> problem centers around OpenSSL, which for CentOS 5 is locked in at v0.9.8e.
>
> All front facing services and all internal libraries that rely on
> cryptology are compiled against that horribly outdated and crippled
> version of OpenSSL.
>
> This trows a wrench into the available encryption ciphers and protocols
> for all services: HTTPS, POP3S, IMAPS, SMTPS, FTPS and also OpenSSH to a
> lesser degree. That is already hurting and it'll only get worse as more
> time passes.

And of course, our customers love that, right?


> If RedHat can't commit the resources to at least include a more modern
> OpenSSL into the next minor release, they should just give up and
> announce an earlier EOL date for RHEL5 (like Summer of 2014) and be done
> with it. They did it before (including a more modern OpenSSL as separate
> library and compiled the included services against it). I can't
> understand why they aren't doing that now.
>
> While I have some faith that RedHat can keep PHP-5.3 patched until the
> currently scheduled EOL of RHEL5 (and its clones), the age of all
> services is showing and people are ceding a lot of security and
> usability related ground by clinging to CentOS 5 and its outdated
> services and libraries.

Let's put it another way.  If you were going to install a vanilla RHEL 
(or clone) box tomorrow, would you choose RHEL5?   Of course not. 
You'd be half crazy to do so.   Or you'd have some application that you 
haven't yet ported to run on a modern platform.

> As for giving up features and usability: The new BlueOnyx GUI will
> probably enter public beta in four weeks.
>
> I was contemplating making it available for CentOS 5 based BlueOnyx
> 5106R as well and there are reasons for doing it and reasons against it.
> Now that would require a lot of haggling and code bending or possibly
> upgrading the PHP of AdmServ to a newer PHP version.
>
> Still, it would be like beating a half-dead horse.

To be fair, and to stave off any backlash against Michael, this was 
given some amount of conversation within the Dev group and consensus was 
to not focus heavily on 5106R.   Any time spent on 5106R is time away 
from more modern platforms and time is a precious resource.

> As for Squirrelmail: I indeed don't really care much about it. I did
> what I could to fix it after it got broken. But that again felt like
> beating a dead horse. Both Squirrelmail and OpenWebmail are horrible
> contraptions that I don't really want to bother myself with. Good
> alternatives are available and it's 2014. If "Back to the Future" is
> right, we'll have hoverboards next year. Still using pink roller blades
> from the '80's doesn't make any sense. :p

Now wait a minute... I guess I'm glad my roller blades are florescent 
green.  But that aside, we put Roundcube up for one of our older hosting 
boxes last week and customer response has been overwhelmingly positive. 
  Customers were previously using OpenWebmail (as has been the case from 
the days of the RaQ2).

The only thing "missing" is an migration script that would automatically 
export the address book, signature and name settings from all 
OpenWebmail accounts and run them into Roundcube.   But now I'm just 
getting pie-in-the-sky crazy.

-- 
Chris Gebhardt
VIRTBIZ Internet Services
Access, Web Hosting, Colocation, Dedicated
www.virtbiz.com | toll-free (866) 4 VIRTBIZ