Sympl 9 - End of Life 2022-06-30

News & Updates
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Debian 9 (Stretch) was released on June 17, 2017, and will reach End of Life on June 30, 2022.

At the same time, the development of Sympl 9 will be frozen, and no further changes will be made other than emergency fixes for any critical security issues with Sympl itself.

At this time we’ll also push out an update for sympl-core which will add a banner on login reminding users that the underlying operating system has reached End of Life.

At this point, there’s no migration path from Sympl 9 to Sympl 10 or 11, and we would recommend users on this version install a clean version of Sympl on Debian 10 (Buster) or 11 (Bullseye) rather than attempting to upgrade, as there were significant background changes between Debian 9 and 10.

Development of Sympl 10 and 11 will continue, and new Sympl releases will continue to match Debian releases as closely as possible, but as always, if anyone has any questions about this, don’t hesitate to ask.

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I’ve just pushed and deployed what should be a final update to Sympl Stretch, which does two notable things:

MOTD Notice

A new message has been added to the Message Of The Day when you log in, which makes it clear the server is end of life. This is also emailed to the root user on a monthly basis as a reminder, as the server will become increasingly insecure.

Usage Reporting

A “usage reporting” function has been added, which reports some basic configuration information to us, specifically the total number of each of domains, aliases, websites, mailboxes and databases, as well as the count of domains configured with FTP and cron.

There’s no specific identifiable information reported (ie: domains, etc) and the traffic passes through the Mythic Beasts reverse proxy servers, so it’s reasonably anonymised (we don’t see the source IP), with the stats being reported once a day via cron so we can check the last 24 hours of logs and get a reasonable picture.

Of course, this doesn’t tell us what’s being used, only what’s configured, but it gives us a vague idea of how much each feature is being used, so we know where to focus development, and we plan to roll this out to the Buster and Bullseye versions of Sympl in the nearish future.

If you’re worried about privacy or similar and want to opt-out, this can be disabled with touch /etc/sympl/disable-usage-reporting, which will disable the reporting.

As always, if anyone has any questions, please don’t hesitate to post or contact me directly.

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