EduFor Blog

2FA in Nextcloud

2021-06-01T12:00:00+02:00

Our Nextcloud instance now supports optional two-factor authentication via TOTP based tokens.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a way to protect your Nextcloud account against unauthorized access. It works by requiring two different ‘proofs’ of your identity. For example, something you know (like a password) and something you have (like a key). Typically, the first factor is a password like you already have and the second can be a code you generate on your phone or another device (something you have).

Time-based One-time Password (TOTP) is a common standard of 2FA supported by many authenticator clients. It uses numeric passwords which are generated based on a unique secret, and the current time.

Follow the given steps to setup 2FA in your Nextcloud account :

Login to your account via the website.
Navigate to the Settings page, and then the Security panel.
Select the "Enable TOTP" option.
Scan the generated QR-code with your authenticator client.
Enter the verification code.

After this procedure, you will be able to login to your Nextcloud account ONLY with 2FA, till you disable it. Please make sure to keep your authentication client safe! Also ensure that you generate and safeguard a backup code for your account!

Roundcube

2021-02-09T11:11:00+01:00

Starting today, we have experimental support for Roundcube at EduFor!

Roundcube is a modern web based email client written in PHP, and will serve as a stop-gap upgrade from SquirrelMail as we wait for the Alps email client to mature.

You can read more about Roundcube on their official website here, or jump right into your mailbox at https://roundcube.edufor.me

Nextcloud Update brings Hub

2021-01-17T11:11:00+01:00

Today we have upgraded our instance of the cloud software to the latest and greatest version 20.0.5

Apart from standard improvements in performance and security, Nextcloud 20 “Hub” introduces the dashboard : an overview page for your cloud. The dashboard is the new default page for Nextcloud, and offers at a glance recent activities, as well as status and weather. More information about the dashboard can be found here .

We have also enabled the option to customise the style of your navigation menu, and the tabs it shows. This setting can be found in the settings page under the “Custom Menu” and “App Order” tabs.

Taking the fight to spam

2021-01-17T11:11:00+01:00

As of today, our email server fights spam!

We have added spam detection capabilities to the server today. This feature was a long time overdue, and is finally here.

The email server will now process all incoming email, and if its detected as spam, automatically move it to the Junk section of your Inbox. For now, we also add *SPAM* to the subject of emails detected as spam, just to demarkate what the server thought was spam, as opposed to any anti spam training your client may have already had. We do not expect many false positives or things slipping through the spam filter, but nothing is absolutely perfect, and user feedback is much appreciated so we can more finely tune our spam filters.

Additionally, in this most recent round of updates, we have also added auto delete functionality for trash and spam. Previously, things would sit in your Trash or Junk folders till you manually decided to flush those away, and would eat precious space on your account. Now, any email older than 30 days in Junk or Trash is deleted automatically. This functionality does not affect any other folders.

Degraded Performance

2020-12-30T02:32:40+01:00

Starting December 28, 2020 at around 19:38 UTC, our upstream storage provider reported experiencing DNS resolve issues to its domain names. We noticed this issue as erratic performance in network access to the storage drives around 23:30 UTC.

The issue, explained by Wasabi, was because someone had uploaded malicious content on the service, and the relevant domain names were blacklisted by the DNS providers. You can find the full incident report as published by Wasabi here .

We did not expect this problem, and as such, did not have anything in place to automatically deal with this. Luckily for us, the resolution wasn’t completely broken, only mostly broken. So, we set up a script to constantly poll their domain name, till we finally got a hit on the IP. We quickly checked with a dummy drive whether the IP we got was the one which lead to our data, or just some faulty resolution.

We hard coded this IP address into our server’s local hosts file as a workaround to the upstream issue, and remounted the affected drives. As a result, we were able to mitigate the upstream issue which lasted till 17:57 UTC on 29 December 2020 (22 hours, 19 minutes). Our services experienced degraded performance for just under 5 hours, and the mitigation was applied within an hour of noticing the performance drops.

This issue has motivated us to think of having a fallback DNS resolution mechanism which returns a last known good value upon an upstream failure. It has also motivated us to explore mirroring of data to an alternative provider so we can be more resilient against a drawn out upstream issue.