Oolite Bulletins

I am spending some years dead for tax reasons. Indeed, it's not my wiki, I just provide server space. Incidentally I've not got any of those mails people have sent, it may be because the messages from the forum have been dropped and I forgot my password . . . If you want to run it on the current ser...

Would a tarball of the wiki and a database dump of wiki.alioth.net be helpful to you?

You can continue to host it on the alioth.net server if you like. Someone just needs to ask for an ssh login.

(Please direct replies to dyls at alioth.net rather than the BBS, I'm not a frequent reader)

If the database was accessed, then your usernames, email addresses and an MD5 hash (a fairly complex encryption) of your passwords could have been revealed. The biggest risk is if you have a password that's in the dictionary. You can crack MD5 passwords by running a simple dictionary attack, compar...

For all users of the IPv6 internet, the wiki is now available there. The address is: http://wiki.v6.alioth.net The IPv6 service is experimental. You can PM me if you encounter any problems. It's been put under the 'v6.alioth.net' domain to avoid the problems of incorrectly autoconfigured machines tr...

Well, for reasons that I don't know, the wiki seems to be handling quite a large number of concurrent users at the moment (which would account for any slowness, given the box it used to be on also has to do the job of spam filtering mail). The one it's on now only really does webservery stuff and ha...

Just some quick maintenance notes: The wiki server has moved to its sister server. If you're getting "connection refused" messages this is why - until the old DNS record times out you'll be connecting to the old server (which has its http daemon shut down so no one makes an edit on the old...

OK given that we have a new release and I've not yet heard any ETA on when the proper server will be fixed, I've made the backup version writeable so you can update it (I doubt many updates were made between the 01:00 backup and 12:00 on the day it fell over). If someone did do a mountain of editing...

Summary: There appears to be a network hardware problem with the server and/or the switch it connects to. This means while the server is running, it's unreachable. As it's several hundred miles from me, I have to rely on what the bods at TeleHouse can do, and given that the weekend has started and i...

Telehouse staff have looked at it, the server is up but the network connection isn't. They don't have the root password so they didn't do anything more to it.

Someone with the root password will be looking into it soon, hopefully it's just a bad port on the switch.

The idea about Elite ship isn't a good idea. The question/answer challenge is feeble in security point of view as only one identified question/answer is sufficient for a spammer. The idea isn't that it provides strong security (hopefully, users themselves are using decent passwords), the idea is th...

And in any case, I want Google to be able to find it too :-) I suspect the Elite pics thing will work (especially if it's type-a-text-string rather than multiple choice) simply because the spammers aren't going to bother to do the research for just one site, when there's plenty of other sites they c...

I've been mulling over an idea for the signup for the wiki. The problem: All CAPTCHAs have been broken by the spammers. They have OCR engines far better (as far as I can tell) than commercially available OCR (damn, sometimes I wish they'd share, we use OCR a lot at work). So even with reCAPTCHA and ...

Right.

The new server has been rebooted, and is back up again so I've switched the DNS back. The guy from telehouse said there were no messages-of-doom on the console, and it was still responding so it's all incredibly strange. (And it's back in read/write mode again).

We'll see how it goes.

OK, the old server is still around, so I've redirected DNS to it, but the wiki is in read-only mode until this is all sorted out. I don't know how long it will last before it crashes again and it might suddenly get pulled (because the rack space is due to be filled with something else)

Sorry, it's gone down again.

Brand new server, stayed up less than 36 hours

I suspect given the old one and the new one have had sudden deaths there may be a power delivery problem.