FolkWolf.Net

I've been wanting to upgrade the folkwolf, this humble server that I've had for over 10 years now. As some of you may know, and our motd attests to, reliability ain't been a hallmark.

This has been for a few reasons.

1. It's sitting on a home DSL connection.
2. It's on an ancient 500MHz machine, with 512 MB of RAM. Fercrissake the iphone has a faster CPU than the folkwolf does...
3. I think the disk is starting to go.

So last week, after a friend of mine on the well made up this chart, I bit the bullet and signed up for Rackspace Cloud". Rackspace Cloud is a nifty service that will let you run a Virtual Server in their datacenter. For 1.5c / hr, It'll cost me ~ $11/mo to run the folkwolf, which, really, is about the same as I pay for it having it sit under my desk. As pros for this, a better, more reliable connection, free snapshot backups, and an upgraded OS (CentOS 5, rather than the woefully out of date version of Fedora that's currently there)

The Folkwolf services will be temporarily unavailable sometime in the near future, hopefully this weekend, as I am moving into my new house.

That is all.

I deleted all the pings to the blog. It was 54000 records of spam. Sorry if someone had a valid one. I've also disabled them on all old posts.

One of these days I'll set up the anti-spam measures I had on my wordpress blog.

blogging from my new ipod touch. Mer and Colin's wedding was very nice

One of the users on my little system got their account hacked and the hackers put up a fake paypal site. I had my connection disabled, and was vaguely threatened with legal action if it happened again.

I've disabled all websites on the folkwolf for now, and I'm going to tighten up the password rules, as well as look at other options for tightening up security. It seems running a publicly accessible website is an invitation to get sued these days.

I want to keep the server publically accessible, but I can't have the risk of having being liable for other people having their account hacked.

If anyone has any ideas on how to resolve this, shoot me an email.

I'm going to disable all accounts. If you want your account re-enabled shoot me an email and I'll reset your password. Unfortunately, this is the only way to be sure that everyone has a secure password

Those of you who've tried to visit lately have noticed that the blog is almost unusably slow these days. I've tried to fix this by changing around a lot of the back end stuff. It's described in the new Installation page. I'll be monitoring it over the next few days to see if it's improved as much as I've hoped. If not, I may just hack on either the sample blog app that comes with Camping or the one that comes with Nitro. If there's one thing I've learned lately it's that writing a blog is easy. Writing a decent one is hard.

UPDATE: My plans suffered a huge setback when Scott Lairdsubmitted a huge patch to Typo That simultaneously broke (temporarily) the entire blog, and (permanently) the two custom sidebars I wrote. I'll re-write the sidebars.

I'm sorry for the blog outage over the past week. The move up to the bleeding-edge version of Typo brought a lot more pain than I thought it would. I had to rewrite a lot of mine, and other people's code to get it all working the way I thought I wanted. I ended up having to move from MySQL to PostgreSQL because of a weird Ruby on Rails issue where it was using up all of the MySQL connections, and not letting them go. That brought a whole new world of hurt because of MySQL's dumb way of handling boolean values. I had to pretty much edit the insert statements by hand. Nobody's written a good way of dumping data from a rails database out in a way that can be read in to another database. Anyway, long story short, it's back up now.

I put up a little TODO list for the blog.

I installed squirrelmail. They finally got it working right so that I could use it with UW-IMAP and pine, and it's less complicated and badly ambitious than the horde/imp webmail I was using before. It looks pretty ugly right now, but I might prettify it and add the address book feature in soon. As it is, hammer away at it here

Sorry all for the extended downtime from Saturday morning to Tuesday, noon. It was a tragedy of errors on Bell's part that kept them from being able to fix my phone line.