Originally published at: Mattermost is moving to... Mattermost - Mycroft
That’s right, we’ve made the big decision to move Mycroft Chat, our Mattermost instance, to Mattermost! More specifically their new managed cloud offering.
Mattermost is an open source collaboration platform that Mycroft has been using for many years. Over this time, we have always self-hosted Mattermost. As a free and open source project this made sense to us, however like any piece of infrastructure that comes with its own costs. Both the direct hosting costs, as well as the time cost of maintaining that infrastructure, testing and deploying new releases, amongst other things.
So we’ve made the decision to migrate our self-hosted instance to their new Mattermost Cloud offering. This means that our community gets the latest features of Mattermost as soon as they become available as well as robust and reliable infrastructure to maximize uptime. For our internal team it means we can spend more time focusing on our core business – creating the best privacy-focused open-source voice technologies.
Many people would have seen that we’ve had a few scheduled outages of Mattermost over the last few months, these have primarily been in preparation for the move, and now the time is upon us.
The final migration is scheduled for this Saturday the 29th of October. Mycroft Chat will be unavailable for the duration of the migration, and we will be making announcements in Chat and the Mycroft Forums before and after the migration is complete.
When the migration is complete, the primary url for Mycroft Chat will be at cloud.mattermost.com rather than mycroft.ai. However you will always be able to find Mycroft Chat by navigating to: https://chat.mycroft.ai
The first time you login to the new Mycroft Chat…
You will be prompted to reset your password. This is an intentional requirement as we will not be transferring server side secrets to the new cloud platform. Without going into too much detail, let’s have a quick look at everyone’s favorite food additive salt!
When your password is sent to a server it is passed through a one-way hashing algorithm along with a touch of salt (that’s actually what it’s called). The salt adds additional protections by further obfuscating your password against specific types of attacks. Just like with passwords, it’s best practice not to re-use a salt across multiple services. So when you first try to login to the new Mattermost Chat server, it will not recognize your password because it has used a different salt during hashing. This is why you have to change your password.
Once you’ve logged in you might notice a few other changes.
- All messages posted prior to the migration will be marked unread.
- Any favorited DM channels will need to be re-added to your favorites list.
- URL’s to specific messages will have changed. That means URL’s to channels will be consistent, but the hash identifying specific messages within a channel will have been recalculated.
Of course if you notice anything out of place and not included in this list, please reach out to us so we can investigate. Despite doing a range of testing, migrations always have the possibility of surprises.
We’ll see you on the other side…