Thread Info
  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 79 replies
  • Subscribers 6 subscribers
  • Views 143453 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Suggested
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Astaro.org

AlanT

Hi Everyone,

we've been planning a migration to a newer and more capable forum site for some time now, and were just a few weeks away from kicking off this process. Unfortunately, a recent vulnerability has appeared in the wild, affecting vBulletin, the software we were using for the astaro.org communities site. Astaro.org was not compromised from this vulnerability, but as a precaution, we did take the site down, to protect our users. 

The site used a number of add-ons, and some custom plugins, which would need weeks of effort to convert and replace, if we were to upgrade the site and apply fixes for this vulnerability. As we were planning to migrate by that time anyway, we've made the decision to cut immediately to the new communities site, which has been running successfully for other Sophos products. To that end, we've spun up two forums quickly, where astaro.org users can again congregate. unfortunately, it will still take some time to complete the migration, so user accounts, and previously posted content has not yet been migrated. This process will take a matter of weeks to complete. In the interim, we will create a static view of the astaro.org, so content there will still be accessible. This should be completed later today.

This certainly wasn't the introduction we wanted for our new communities site, but we are excited about the new platform, and its capabilities. Please be patient as we step through this transition as quickly as we can. There will be some pain, but we will try our best to minimize it for you. 

Thanks everyone for your patience, and understanding!

Alan Toews

Technical Product Manager, Network Security, Sophos



This thread was automatically locked due to age.
Parents
  • I guess I'll have to be the second one to go negative so that BillyBob doesn't have to go it alone.

    This new form software and the way the old one was taken down absolutely suck. There I said it!

    astaro.org was like a reference Bible and to simply vaporize it off the face of the earth was to quote Rush Limbaugh, "industrial-strength stupid!"

    I have no doubt that the moderators will step up and we will be able to ask questions of Bob, Scott and some of the other greats on this new vTurdBoard and we will receive receive their astute reply, but the loss of a decade worth of information and hundreds of thousands of posts to read through on vBulletin so that you don't actually even have to ask for lots of things will be a major setback to getting things done when deploying UTMs.

    I second the comment that the content at the old URL should have been left as read only so that all of the information was not lost. Everything on that site is indexed by Google and it is a crying shame that any Google search for an answer will now result in a redirect instead of an actual answer. Will we really have to resort to archive.org for answers?

    Also, I side with Bob in his statement that the vBulletin site being behind a UTMs Web Protection would have been more than adequate to protect it from any vulnerability, especially in read-only mode. In read-only mode even if it did somehow get hacked a real IT person could just restore from another backup copy in minutes and once again the information would not be lost. They could have even used something like Faronics Deep Freeze and a simple reboot could have restored the old site to normal operation in mere seconds. Sophos could not have handled this more poorly.

    As for Alan's statement that all of the content from the old site will be migrated over I must say I am more than a bit skeptical. I imagine it can be done but my initial thought is how do you migrate a users posts if the user does not exist on this new site or alternatively if the people that have come to this new site because they have no choice and registered will not be able to be migrated because they have already registered their username over here. One of these scenarios or both would seem to present a problem.

    In any case I just had to come here and give my two cents on how poor of a decision it is for Sophos to eliminate an extremely vibrant community and replace it with this empty shell. Most will be well if the content is restored to this new site from the old site but if not then much has been lost.

    I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

    HTG

    Best Regards - HTG
    Frustrated Sophos Partner seeing all the things
    that brought me to Sophos slowly slip away.
    RIP astaro.org

Reply
  • I guess I'll have to be the second one to go negative so that BillyBob doesn't have to go it alone.

    This new form software and the way the old one was taken down absolutely suck. There I said it!

    astaro.org was like a reference Bible and to simply vaporize it off the face of the earth was to quote Rush Limbaugh, "industrial-strength stupid!"

    I have no doubt that the moderators will step up and we will be able to ask questions of Bob, Scott and some of the other greats on this new vTurdBoard and we will receive receive their astute reply, but the loss of a decade worth of information and hundreds of thousands of posts to read through on vBulletin so that you don't actually even have to ask for lots of things will be a major setback to getting things done when deploying UTMs.

    I second the comment that the content at the old URL should have been left as read only so that all of the information was not lost. Everything on that site is indexed by Google and it is a crying shame that any Google search for an answer will now result in a redirect instead of an actual answer. Will we really have to resort to archive.org for answers?

    Also, I side with Bob in his statement that the vBulletin site being behind a UTMs Web Protection would have been more than adequate to protect it from any vulnerability, especially in read-only mode. In read-only mode even if it did somehow get hacked a real IT person could just restore from another backup copy in minutes and once again the information would not be lost. They could have even used something like Faronics Deep Freeze and a simple reboot could have restored the old site to normal operation in mere seconds. Sophos could not have handled this more poorly.

    As for Alan's statement that all of the content from the old site will be migrated over I must say I am more than a bit skeptical. I imagine it can be done but my initial thought is how do you migrate a users posts if the user does not exist on this new site or alternatively if the people that have come to this new site because they have no choice and registered will not be able to be migrated because they have already registered their username over here. One of these scenarios or both would seem to present a problem.

    In any case I just had to come here and give my two cents on how poor of a decision it is for Sophos to eliminate an extremely vibrant community and replace it with this empty shell. Most will be well if the content is restored to this new site from the old site but if not then much has been lost.

    I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

    HTG

    Best Regards - HTG
    Frustrated Sophos Partner seeing all the things
    that brought me to Sophos slowly slip away.
    RIP astaro.org

Children
No Data
Unfiltered HTML