Our hosting and software providers have investigated the problem and issued us a patch to install. We plan on doing that today (22/02/12) at 16:00. We anticipate the change to take no longer than a couple of minutes. We’d like to stress that this is not a security related issue in any way. Your data is safe and secure. This is purely closing a loophole so that spammers can’t register accounts in future. Thanks for your understanding.

UPDATE 23/02/12 @ 14:45: Our mail servers have been removed from all remote black lists (which cause delays or stop mails from being delivered) bar two. We can’t force a removal from those two but expect them to de-list us within 48 hours and it doesn’t seem to be affecting a lot of outbound mail. We’re continuing to monitor the issue until it’s fully resolved.

With over 1,200 people trained by over 150 community volunteers since 2008, the Getting Started computer training programme has been a great success. A joint initiative between the City Council and Age Action, Getting Started provides free one-to-one tuition  to over 55s who are residents of 17 Sheltered Housing Complexes and also to members of the surrounding community. We’ve just completed an upgrade to make Wi-Fi available in the common rooms of the complexes.

This will be a major benefit in running classes as:

• students can bring their own laptops (as well as iPads and other tablets) to class and learn on their own machines.
• tutors can provide basic IT support for the students (ie. install anti-virus software, updates etc)
• it allows us to run larger classes as we’re not limited by the amount of computers.
• we can organise “drop-in” sessions where learners can get extra support outside of class times.

The project is supported by the dublin.ie unit and the corporate IS Department. For further information on the project, including a map of complexes where training is happening, please see: http://dublin.ie/gettingstarted If you’d like to volunteer as a trainer, please contact Robert Carroll of Age Action at 01-4756989 or rcarroll [at] ageaction.ie.

View Getting Started – Dublin City Council Initiative in a larger map

Shortly before 3.30pm we disabled webmail to make the changes and webmail was operational again at 3.50pm. Inbound email was queued whilst we worked on the system. Due to the seriousness of the issue, we decided to enact the fix as soon as we had it so we were unable to warn of the outage. If you experience any further problems related to ‘connection closed’ or the system operating slowly, please open a helpdesk ticket.

UPDATE 18/01 @ 16:41: We were unable to run the update this morning but have re-scheduled for the same time window tomorrow. There was no interruption in service this morning.

UPDATE 19/01 @ 11:24: We’re happy to report that everything went smoothly this morning and we were back online at 08:44. The patch has made a lot of changes in the background but one notable inclusion is drag and drop to folders in both mail and contacts for Internet Explorer 9 users.

New web sites:

- Dublin City Children’s Services Committee: We built a new site for the DCCSC who collaborate to improve policy development and delivery of services for children and families in Dublin City. It’s brand new so let us know what you think.

- Dublin City Comhairle na nÓg: Comhairle Na nÓg is Dublin’s Parliament for Young People. The Parliament is made up of a group of approximately 50 young people aged between 12 and 17 from areas all over Dublin. They wanted to be able to publish articles about the work of Comhairle and colloborate online with each other.

Continued development of:

- dublin.ie email: It’s 16 months since we moved from Atmail v5 to v6 and we’ve applied numerous patches since to add functionality and aid stability. We’re acutely aware that people want to connect to their dublin.ie account from their phones so we created two helpdesk articles: for iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch) and Android (phone/tablet). We hope to add additional storage space early in 2012 and speed up peformance too.

- Dublin City Community Maps: We’ve come a long way in our development of a mapping tool for community related data. Through our analysis of how people use it, we brought in a single search box. We’ve spent many months tweaking how it works and we believe it will be even more effective with the final raft of changes due to be installed in early 2012.

- Dublin City Cycling: Dublin’s cycling population has expanded hugely with the success of the Dublin Bikes Scheme and the cycling site has lots of content to assist. The blog has been quite busy too with posts on bike security, Dublin’s first Skyride, the lunchtime Bike Ride in June and more.

Assisting other projects:

- Dublin Tall Ships 2012: Dublin, as Final Host Port, is expecting to see up to 100 Tall Ships visit for a four day festival between August 23rd-26th 2012. We’ve been consulting with the project team in regards to the development of dublintallships.ie and the social media elements like Facebook (give it a Like!) and Twitter. Watch for more in the new year.

- Creative Dublin Alliance: The Creative Dublin Alliance is a network led by the Dublin City Manager, with members drawn from the most senior level in Local Government, Commerce, Industry, Education, State Agencies and Not-for-Profit Sector. We’re hosting the site and you can have a look at the many projects underway (like Dublinked and Innovation Dublin) over on creativedublinalliance.ie.

We’d like to thank Sabrina Dent, Katherine Nolan, Xwerx and X-Communications who were our external collaborators on the projects mentioned above.

UPDATE: We were unable to complete the update this morning as remote software license servers were unavailable to us at short notice. We realised this quickly and rolled all backups into place. As this was out of our control, we’ll need to re-schedule and a notice will go up on the site in due course.