Whats up?

I would like to take some time to talk about what is going on with development on OPI right now. This since it have been quiet on what is happening for a while.

Our main development focus right now is upgrading the mail configuration and infrastructure supporting this. Managing email is such a central service in the day to day digital life and initial feedback from you users indicate that this is one of the main problems with getting started with OPI. That and getting external access to OPI.

Problems with port opening for external access is a tough problem to solve. If a user is behind one or more NAT-routers that doesn’t let OPI making port forwards automatically we are left with the end user having to make these arrangements themselves if at all possible.

Another way to solve the port problem would be to bundle OPI with a anonymizing VPN service. Either as an external service or to ship with OPI out of the box. We are currently investigating this option since that would provide many benefits on initial setup, increased privacy, and sidestepping most port opening problems.

The VPN solution is being only in the investigating state right now. The email setup and configuration however is something that we are working on right now. Since many users are unable to send and receive email directly with OPI we are working on adding another option for doing this.

As it is today the user has the option to either let OPI manage email completely on its own or to manually configure the settings for the mail server, router etc etc. We are now adding a third alternative to make it easier to get this working out of the box. This solution is based on an external mail server provided by us at OpenProducts.

By selecting this option email going to and from third parties will be routed via the OP external server which is able to use non standard ports for communicating with OPI.

It should of course be noted that this somewhat lowers security since all email communication will be routed through the OP server and hence could be intercepted there. This is however nothing one easily can avoid except only ever sending emails to an end user hosting their own mail server (Such as an OPI 😉 ) Email should always be regarded approximately as safe as a post card readable by anyone in its path. If in need of privacy, always encrypt the email before sending it. (It should also be noted that email sent between local users at OPI is always encrypted during transfer)

Beyond the new email feature we are working on fixing bugs.  The main problem in this area right now is  a memory fragmentation problem that currently blocks the other bug fixes that are in the works or even finished awaiting release.

This problem, or rather its severity, where revealed when we about a week ago released the Owncloud upgrade. A few users reported that they where effectively locked out of their units since the upgrade. Investigation revealed that the internal storage area had been corrupted somehow. Further diggings made clear that we had some form of memory problem that hit systems especially with a long uptime and heavy load. (If you are affected by this, please contact us and we will help you out)

The problem is a bit special since its not a lack of memory but rather the lack of a big enough contiguous memory area to perform an operation. Because of the nature of the problem we have had to do quite some testing and experimentation on how to mitigate the problem. The problem as such is by its nature more or less impossible to completely avoid. We however have worked out tweaked settings and adding a bit of swap which should make OPI much less vulnerable to the problem in the future.

We are hoping to release an update with this fix shortly. Hopefully in the coming days or end next week at the latest.

Due to the fact that this bug where mostly exposed during an upgrade of the system we have postponed the release of other updates and thus we are a bit behind schedule on what we really would like to focus on right now.

I hope this give anyone interested in  what is going on over at OPI development a bit of an update. As always, please get back to us if you have any questions or comments!