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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



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  • There's no question that we could have handled this better and we certainly understand the limitations of our beta (and MVP) community. As both Sherwin and Alan mentioned, we're working on improvements daily. You can bet that this experience has sensitized us to the urgency of these improvements. If you'd like to discuss this--or anything else Sophos-- give me a call.

    +1 408 334 7300.

    Michael Anderson
    SVP, Global Technical Support
    Sophos
  • Hm - almost one week passed and:
    - I see no progress on restoring the good old very useful and high frequented support forum in any way
    - I see just one subforum (this General discussion - copernicus is a 'ga' product now). This would make searching hard (if there would be more questions - but why are there so less questions?)
    - Today my UTM has dowloaded some new versions (9.317 seems to be GA now): where will the information exchange (good/bad release, problems and workarounds) take place?

    All in all I'm disapointed about sophos's comunication and the way this is managed.

    Regards
    Manfred
  • in reply to Hallowach2
    agree..

    seems i have to run out the 3 UTM Full-Guard licenses next year and change my firewall completely to a new one..

    ...time to say goodbye..

    greets

    zaphod
    ___________________________________________

    Home: Zotac CI321 (8GB RAM / 120GB SSD)  with latest Sophos UTM
    Work: 2 SG430 Cluster / many other models like SG105/SG115/SG135/SG135w/...

  • Gee... this is awesome. Trying to refer to my notes at astaro.org and guess what?... That's right, they're not there. And... they're not here either. You guys rock.

    Last I checked the definition of migration was... to move something from one place to another so... where's my stuff?

    Wow, I would love to tell my coworkers when I'm "migrating" them to their new computers that it's okay that their 20GB of email and documents aren't on there "yet", but Microsoft just published a critical vulnerability so just go ahead and use the new pc and I'll get your documents on there "sometime".

    I've yet to see one of you employees answer the previous posters question about how you are going to move my Astaro SWGOCI profile here since I'm occupying that profile here already (with no content).

    These are the questions that I would like answered for the record and I'm gonna go ahead and bet you don't answer these just like you didn't answer the previous posters valid question:

    Are you going to merge my profiles?

    How do you know I'm the same SWGOCI?

    Are you going to "migrate" all of my posts including the extremely critical ones?

    Was there anyone involved in this lack of thought process who was NOT wearing a suit?

    And lastly, could you please ask these suits if they are aware that publicly traded companies actually have investors that they have to answer to, these suits aren't really calling the shots anymore, they do know that right?

  • in reply to SWGOCI
    Email is the unique key - same email address, same user. That's not the difficult part. This is what we did when we migrated the the posts from our two other forums to this community. And yes, we'll move all the posts - good, bad, ugly.

    Just to say it again, we never wanted this to happen like it has. I talked openly, and it's no secret (ask for example Bob and BarryG about the discussions I had on Astaro.org), that we were in the planning stage of decommissioning the Astaro.org site as we needed all three forums to come together and benefit from being in one place. I wish the full thread was there right now, but for what it's worth this is a link to one of the discussions I had www.astaro.org/.../54613-forum-admins-do-you-know-vbulletin-3-8-6-now-end-life-security-threat.html. There were one or two others in the hidden moderators board also. We recognized that forum was a mature, happy (maybe just fairly contented for some), well organized community of peer-to-peer members helping each other, and that the site has a ton of information (over 700,000 pages) that everyone relied on. Hence we didn't rush the migration - we kept delaying it. The discussion started in February. We knew it had to come and that we probably would upset some users if not handled right as a change like this is more an art than a science. So we asked for feedback and comments before proceeding. We were busy planning the content migration, user profile migration, the group and board structure, and prioritizing features needed for the site so we could show that we're listening and that the software platform the community runs on will be developed for its users and then - bang.

    So none of us wants this situation but here's where we find ourselves. How do we make it right. How do we move forwards. Bob continues to be excellent by providing suggestions and comments on this site and others are doing the same - I want to thank all of them. For starters we need more forums (boards) in the UTM group of the community so posts on different topics can be separated from each other. That's something we can do immediately, and I'll start a thread to discuss that and get opinions. We are still working on getting the full content of Astaro.org back up, and we're working on getting it migrated, along with user profiles, to this group so it's in one place. As with all software, there are a set of bug fixes and features we want to release and are working on those too.

    P.S. I don't wear a suit.

     - - - - - - - - - - - -

    Communities Moderator, SOPHOS
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  • in reply to ruckus
    "Email is the unique key - same email address, same user. "

    Except when it isn't? I'm the same user (or am I?) but I am not using the same email address.

  • I guess i'm somewhat against the grain here. I (so far) like the new forums potential (clearly we need more topics). In fact I was going to post about needing more topics and it graciously advised me there was already a post related to new topics (thank you). I originally came to find the Up2Date post that we usually see from the community on Astaro.org to determine whether or not the update should be applied in our production systems. Because of the lack of topics, I simply typed the version number and it showed all articles related to 9.351 (quickly too). I don't really care if there is a like button or not. I also think the answered posts save time (especially in long threads). So while the method wasn't desired, Sophos acted in a way to protect my data. To be honest when i joined Astaro.org I wasn't sure if the site was even legitimate or even maintained any more. 

    I suspect that if the DB and site were all in a read only mode everything would have been a little more accepting to the Astaro.org Community. Strip user information from the tables of course injecting dummy data in it's place since it's probably the key? There is a plethora of data that we all used that seems to be in shambles at the moment. :-/

    Just to point this out, the site appears to be working just fine to 'discuss' this topic. ;) lol

    Maybe I'm missing something, but that's my current opinion. I sure as hell am not going to abandon the product for a change in forum software. That's obnoxious to me. Support on the other hand... different thread...

    Action Items?

    • Add more topics, soon!
    • Restore Astaro.org to the way it was. Read Only Mode DB and Files and remove personal data from tables. This mitigates all the risk right? It also leaves the links as they were for SE results and makes all the mods and regulars who put in a lot of effort over the many years, happy (hopefully)
    • Add Upload button on the new 'forum'? It's buried in rich text i believe.
    • Eventually, attempt the painful process of migrating from one forum to another? Not sure if it would even be possible with the SSO in place.

  • For a very long time, we talked about transferring here all the gold we had in Astaro forum.

    The first thing Sophos should have done - BEFOR opening this new forum - was to transfer all of it (or at least the last years) to this new place, run it for a while as beta, listen to our comments, and only then closing the old forum.
    We all invest a lot of time on it!

    As I learn in my life – nothing is impossible – if you have the will.
    To be honest, I'm very skeptical about Sophos attention to do so.

    Things to add/change:
    1. Transfer all the users from the old forum.
    We all are going back for a long time.
    You can send a link, so we can keep our nickname, and just change the password.
    It is also important, so we can manage our posts and continue our thread.
    To be honest, I don’t feel like start all over again.

    2. If it isn't broken – don't fix it.
    Look at the way the old forum was organized.
    It was organized that way because that the way the users liked it.
    Much of the way it looked and organize was because of what we asked for.

    3. Like it's been said, Right now we have only "Copernicus Beta" (for me - hardly interesting yet), and "General".
    Really???
    That's all what was left from our previous glorious live forum of Astaro UTM?

    4. As it used to be, if someone wrote in thread we participated, we got a notification about it in our mail.

    5. In our profile, the red number should refer only to threads we participated (Right now – show all)

    5. Post should be ranked and appear accordingly.

    Bob:
    Does any of you have a backup of the database from the Astaro Forum?
    If security is such a big issue here (For god sake – It's only a Forum!), maybe I can do something about it.

    Ruckus:
    1. " so we steer the development of the community in the right direction"
    What is in sophos eyes "Right direction"?
    2. "I take all the comments (even bad ones) on board."
    Not sure what that mean, so please elaborate.
    Who in sophos decide about it?
    I really hope Sophos don’t' want a dead horse in here.

    A lot of us stayed here and follow Astaro/Sophs out of loyalty.
    Breaking this community, and I'm sure many of us will start looking around.
    After all Sophos aren’t the only kids in town.
    I don't think you meant it to come this way, but if Sophose would really listen to us from the beginning, People wouldn't feel totally deferent – and act deferent.
    Right or wrong, for now, the way it looks like people here are quite negative, frustrated and suspicions, so the burden of proof is on Sophose.

  • @Goldy "Does any of you have a backup of the database from the Astaro Forum": No we don't, there wasn't direct access to the DB to get this. Only Sophos Admins had this kind of access.
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