miskie

It was IbProArcade but even the newest versions are not right. The more we dug, the less right we learned it was. Don't count on it coming back anytime soon.

To echo GC's post, there were just too many things wrong with the unofficial add-ons to make it worthwhile to keep them, especially the arcade. So many bugs including one I found that IPB regarded as a sign of unprofessionalism by those who coded it. And its something that could have been addressed in about 5 minutes with one line of code. That was the main source of the lengthy upgrade - beta-testing someone else's garbage. The arcade is a poorly written hack at best - and a massive breach of security at the worst. I'm glad its gone. The FAS has one bug that I feel is fairly minor, as I figured out how to resolve it. However, GC decided to wait on the coder's for an official fix - since there may be more beneath the surface that I didn't see. A wise decision. I'm sure it will be addressed soon.

Ill be blunt. It'll never work. Sorry. Why ? USB and other 'chainable' interfaces rely on polling to get the job done - one can connect 127 devices to a single USB port, but one also needs polling circuitry to call each device in series to keep the port from getting confused. Consider it like an intersection with a stop light. The light goes red, the other traffic moves. then it switches. What you are doing is setting up an intersection with no light, which, as you could imagine, results in data smashing together and going nowhere. to complicate matters further, USB port powered devices try to claim the port as their own, and will deny any intrusion from anything else, So, if you plug a passive device into a USB port, and a cellphone that can be charged via USB into your split-cable, the cellphone will win every time.

Small bug issues. We took the time to upload a few songs to a private folder as files, when one goes to download the files, it hangs the browser if it has an .mp3 extension. M4a seems to work fine. Im using Firefox3. The data that does download needs to be renamed after download as well - the file comes down Named as "get_file" instead of the original file name.

I cant see why a laptop HD couldnt be adapted to serve this purpose. They are small, reasonably large capacity, and have low power requirements.

I took a look at the logs, there is no recorded downtime, slowness or congestion -- however, If you try to access 1emu while its backing itself up, it may be unavailable for a short time as the server needs to take the site down to insure no database corruption - I have different sites set to back themselves up at different times of the day. In the case of 1emu its in the wee hours of the morning, So that wasnt it. I suspect it was probably internet related congestion that I have no control over.

Distributed Denial of Service -- Basically sending thousands of requests to a website to flood it to the point of collapsing - Some do it out of anger, jealousy, or just plain fun.

Naaa, bounced off of university servers in Taiwan

what it should bring is less a speed increase, but consistancy in speed and availability. Since the ram install there has been no downtime or slow service periods. The server is running pretty much entirely in ram now, which is what needs to happen to keep speed and availability up. You see, once it runs out of ram, it starts using swap space, which causes slowness. the slowness leads to backups, which eventually leads to the system cannibalizing its own resources which results in the system running so slowly, most people think its down. Usually it isnt, its just takes 5 minutes or so for it to respond to anything - your browser will time out way before that. As long as there continues to be nothing running that eats vast amounts of ram - service should run well. For example -- there was a typical DDoS attack about 8 hours after I had the upgrade completed. it resulted in nothing tangible since the server has the ram to respond to about 10Mb/s that the assault came in. Before it would have tied the resources up for hours. I suspect there is enough ram for the future, its a wait and see to determine if I calculated needed resources right

Walmart has a couple of laptops for under 500 -- and if you time it right you can usually get a closeout model for the 400 you are looking to spend on this thing - I know they had some low cost Acer Aspire models, you might want to check walmart.com or your local store (Im sure there is one nearby, because everyone lives near a Walmart nowadays )

Occasionally Ill get a craving for vinegar, and will drink Italian salad dressing. Balsamic Vinegar straight from the bottle is good too.

You don't want to know half the things Ive eaten, most of them on a dare. But, I pretty much have a digestive system made from steel and filled with molten lava, so I can get away with it. Probably the strangest thing though was on a dare with a friend of mine -- better than 20 years ago we ate whole bananas (peel and all) dipped in a can of long-expired Hershey's chocolate syrup -- it was so old the taste of metal leeched into the chocolate -- sprinkled with bits of broken glass -- tempered --so they were squarish, and not sharp and pointy.. we also used to make random cookies -- filled with whatever we could find -- the best though was chocolate chip cookies, with baked in bits of jolly rancher candy and busted up peppermints -- they were actually quite tasty.

flip the motherboard over and look for a fried trace -- Im going to guess that the video-slot torched, or maybe the ram, but Im leaning toward video with this one.

on this particular box, 27 clients and 30 domains.. when you add in subdomains (http://something.domain.com) the hosted sites increases to about 75 or so.

ehh, maybe so, maybe not.. I think that whole episode went wrong -- the server was hacked, And I spent a few days putting it back together. I was tired, waaay tired from salvaging data, reinstalling a server and putting everyones stuff back who was affected. I think both the admin of VFTW and I were busy pushing each others buttons. When he went after me telling me the server hack was my fault, I got angry.. And when I discovered in the logs that the server hack was his fault, I got really, really angry. You see, when I identified the first three affected sites, all of them were getting logged into at the same time, kinda a chicken and egg scenario -- one of them had to be first, so I figured I would find the original leak. after I went back far enough in the logs, I found that what the hacker did was he got into VFTW first, then from there found other weak logins and passwords. He/she then abandoned VFTW and logged into the three affected sites 'cleanly' -- meaning right login, right password, first time. Which, of course, raises no alarms, except that the hacker logged into all three of them at the same time, every time. BUt, a computer isnt going to notice that, it only picks up on mistakes. So, I blew up. I was tired, hungry and feeling sick from the lack of sleep, and I let my emotions get the beter of me. And for that I apologise, And wish them well.. There is still the matter of the back door in his site - It's a renamed copy of Php Shell -- its an old old tool that basically allows the user to fire off shell commands from a php interface. the file is in there, but has been renamed to something else -- I dont remember what. This is what the hacker did to his site and the three others affected, the names were something that made the file look like part of the software used. the one giveaway is the date.What I would sugggest to VFTW at this point is deleting all the control files from that site, and replacing them with clean copies. Leave the database intact. that should catch that program., and result in minimal downtime. Ive picked though all remaning hostees and have found no other instances.

Im prett sure it will -- It kinda did when he tried to take his data and run, and he lost an entire days worth of posts. Then he and his new admin apparantly couldnt fix it. And they blamed me Or so it seems, since he was all pissed off and wouldnt share why publically.. After I locked the door behind them I fixed the data. took one MySQL command to do it. BTW, this self-corruption is a phpBB trademark - the forum is craptacular. So, in short, within 24 hours, they lost a day worth of posts, had many other posts vanish, or endup posting wrong (wrong thread, wrong user etc) and people locked out of their own accounts who needed manual resetting. Im sure they blame me -- SO, I got myself totally banned -- screamed the truth about their forum in the most obtuse way I could, so when it all starts to come totally unraveled, I can have nothing to do with it.. everyone including the owner should have changed logins and passwords, and most of the clients should have as well. I know when the ship is sinking, and I know when to run. IF the transition went smoothly, I would have said/done none of this.. but as I watched the bricks fall one by one I knew I needed to do something totally erm, UnMiskie... If any of you see any other gems in that forum, dont be afraid to amuse me by posting them

I've seen so many phpBB sites wiped out from hacker's attentions (although mostly last year), certainly if I was to have a forum it wouldn't be that brand. I note the site is called Vote For The Worst - they'll be able to vote for themselves soon enough I imagine. the only reason its survived so far is because of the blankets of server security Ive thrown on top of it.. One of my sets of hack-protection rules has pages of exploits to check for specifically on phpBB -- when I first got him as a client I advised against it, but since his buddy had a skin good to go, he refused. I have stopped many attacks on that forum each day, one day, someone spent about 4 hours banging it at about 3 hits persecond from a series of rotating IPs -- it was a sight to behold. but his forum, and the server, stood tall. All I had was reams of log data from it. since he as already angried the blood of the hacker natives, they will learn soon that most of those layers of security have vanished. Im sure in a few days, the site will redirtect to a web-page somewhere in russia or china once it gets tagged. But, Im IP banned -- so, its not going to be me in those logs, thats for sure.

you might want to, but my sugestion is that everyone with FTP access into the forum change their passwords. there seems to be no operating trojans within 1emulation or any of the satellites. Here the post referred to: http://www.vftwforum.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=907 Thats correct -- this webmaster used a version of his own sitename and a persons name as passwords -- for example, if I owned the website http://miskies-hot-chix.com and my made my login miskie, and my password hot-chix -- It was that stupid. And it seemed nothing I could do could get the stubborn ass to budge.. well, I forced his hand, now he has to change it all. and, since I can know nothing about any of the changes (since im even IP banned) once his site is hacked -- its PhpBB-- its coming.. they can't blame me for doing out of vengance.

here is the latest, copied from http://society.miskie.net/index.php?showtopic=1119 read the whole thread to get the jist of it.

yes it would.. however it would take considerably longer because the old server needs to have some maintenance done on it.. Its been online and running nearly 24/7 for the last few years. that harddisk has got to be getting tired.

well, thats the thing with DNS -- after I took down both of my servers, other DNS servers acting as relays needed to learn that something was wrong, so, some people lost connectivity sooner than others, and thats also why a proxy 'sort of' worked.. after about 10 hours all sites were down for everyone, and thats when the backup began.

okay -- to answer some questions -- Yes, everything that was on the old server is getting moved to this one. In terms of hardware, the new server is about the same as the old one -- its the software changes that matter the most. the old server was based on RedHat9 -- this new one is CentOS4 (redhat enterprise linux 4) and is Sooo much better -- For example, I havent even optimised anything for high traffic use yet.. its all set at default, yet its not even close to overloading. Since there are now too many sites and running forums on this server, I pulled down DNS first, making it impossible for anyone to connect to any of the sites or services, except by IP number. -- I cant run around putting everyones stuff into offline mode anymore, there is just too many of them nowadays. After that I backed up all the sites and databaases, and moved them.

A second Item

test entry

Woah! I just visited A@H and then I saw they said they require you to use Firefox! This is the first time I've ever seen a site that REQUIRES you to use something other than IE to visit the site! Does this mean Firefox is the most secure browser? Will you consider a browser requirement like that for this site? No -- Unless GC implemets that.. there is no reason to use one browser over another, other than some browsers do not display pages as they were intended to be displayed.