I was able to add SMTP authentication to my installed mail system, which means people will have to log in to send email as well as receive it. This should thwart the misbegotten sons of diseased camels that are spammers.
I found that the Wayward Weblogger co-op isn’t the only server that had some technical difficulties yesterday. When I went to visit Dare Obasanjo’s weblog, I found this wonderful system message:
K5 is on vacation for the day
Yesterday those of you who were around might recall seeing the site down or really slow for a good chunk of the day. There were some database problems, then a really bizarre thing with the Scoop servers which was solved by rebooting them, but after the reboot one came back up without sshd running so I can’t get in to configure it, and then some kind person decided to DoS us mildly. Oh, and I upgraded the database somewhere in there too.
So we’re on one Scoop server at the moment, and the database really needs to be archived more. I wrote a script to do archiving a lot faster, but it needs to run for a while, and it’s 4AM here and what with everything else I think I’m just calling today a maintenance day so I can go to bed.
It’s summer, and I’m sure many of you have things you’ve been meaning to get to. So now’s the time. Enjoy your K5 vacation day, and we’ll see you bright and early on Wednesday.
–rusty
This is about the best description of a server problem – no holding back the details – followed by the best philosophy to take in these situations:
Here’s the problem. Here’s what we’re doing. In the meantime – I have a life, you have a life, these things happen, and don’t you have something fun to do, instead?
This just became the official policy at the Wayward Weblogger co-op.