Trac and Subversion Moved
By: Jesse Morgan on 2008-05-23 18:29:18
Trac and subversion are now running off the new server. The url for subversion is now svn://svn.jesterpm.net. Trac runs much better.New Server
By: Jesse Morgan on 2008-05-21 17:24:55
So, I bought the parts and assembled a new server at the beginning of the quarter. As of last week is was setup in a good home, now I just need to migrate stuff over. That's going to go slowly, a bit here and there when I have free time. I just finished transfering DNS over and cleaning up my dns records (like those broken AAAA records from the downed sixxs pop). ns1.jesterpm.net now points to the new server. Other services to follow.Captcha and Other New Things
By: Jesse Morgan on 2008-04-17 10:33:53
So, on March 28th I made a few changes to the site. I've added a captcha to the create account form, I've setup anonymous filebin uploads, and I've made infinite uploads publicly accessable for registered users. I must say though, the captcha is the most genious part of it. If you look at the profiles page, you'll notice about 350 users, over 300 of those (and that's just being kind to me) were created by spam bots. To provent further account creation I decided to implement a captcha. The problem, however, is that I hate those annoying letter things. My solution: make good use of xkcd (http://xkcd.com/233/). My, well Randall Munroe's, solution hardly qualifies as a captcha, if someone seriously wanted to create accounts they could easily customize a bot for it as the answer never changes. However, my problem isn't a targeted a attack, but random bots scanning through, and until I become a target, this works perfectly. If I didn't mention, I haven't had a single spam bot account created since I set it up (don't read that as a challenge). Anyways, that about sums up what I did.Hanging System
By: Jesse Morgan on 2007-05-31 23:03:54
(Seems all I have time to write is failure reports...)On Wednesday, May 30 krypton was frozen from about 12:48 to 17:00 PDT.
I have not had time to investigate why the system froze. Currently all I know is that when monitoring software lost its connection, 22 HTTP connections were active and RAM and Swap usage was at about 90%. More information will be posted when I know.
(And appearently I don't even have time to write the failure reports.)
MySql Issues
By: Jesse Morgan on 2007-05-10 16:04:44
Krypton had MySql (and other issues) from an unknown time until 16:00 PDT. My /var wasn't designed to hold multiple PHP and Kernel sources (<3 portage... most of the time).Internet Again
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-12-18 09:16:07
Thursday's windstorm caused me to lose power a few times, but it didn't last more than a minute. However, after our one short outage, my modem didn't come back online. It appears that from Friday through Sunday evening my ISP was without power. From their website:
The nature of the destruction that devastated the Pacific Northwest caused most of our emergency measures to either be inadequate or irreparably damaged. The hurricane force winds downed many power lines and trees and caused flying debris to become missiles upon impact.
Seems to be back online now. Although I do have 346ms ping times to my ISP's DNS server and 5% packet loss to said server. Perhaps one of their lines was... uprooted by the wind.
Metacode and Downtime
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-11-28 13:07:28
If anyone was wondering, the server was down last Saturday while I switched rooms. Everything's been back to normal for the last few days.
I also added some metacode tags since I'm too lazy to type </p><p class="paragraph"> when I want to start a new paragraph, and I got tired of typing
when I wanted a new line, so, now there is [para] to start a new paragraph, [raw] and [/raw] for blocks of text that should not be effected by the codes, and newlines (\n) are automatically changed into <br />.
I also made the homepage display only the first paragraph in the listings. If there's more to be read, it now provides a Read More link :)
W00T No more bouncing text
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-09-06 20:36:43
YAY! Security alerts don't make the text bounce anymore. Oh, and I made some minor changes to the content stuff, but most wont notice anything. Thank You Jonbo! for indirectly leading me to a fix:
(16:34:05) Jonbo: apparently you don't know about line-height: (20:17:38) Jesse: as I said, your the CSS guy (20:18:09) Jonbo: it's what you expect height to do ;) (20:18:28) Jesse: ermm.. that looks like the space between each line to me (20:18:36) Jesse: i.e. if you wanted something doubled spaced? (20:19:03) Jonbo: probably does that.. (20:19:09) Jesse: now that I think of it, I bet there's a min-height property that I could use though :P
Again, thanks :D
More New Filebin Features
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-09-05 12:16:13
More new filebin changes! I decided it would be nice to be able to send files you've already uploaded to people, so now there are Send To and Send Email To Fields in the User Center. Oh, and I added an Email To field to the filebin2 page. Put an email address in it and, if the file is a public upload, they'll receive a link to the file. I may also increase the default max upload time to 7 days. Speaking of increasing, I've also increased the max upload size to 10 MB. I've also made some changes to the content system. Articles names are not required to be unique anymore, so if you try to click a namebased link which is not unique you'll get a list of articles by that name. There is also a search content id that performs a mysql fulltext boolean search for your keywords. To play with it try http://jesterpm.net/view/search:filebin. On the todo list: a forum (already made the database, just need to code it), some admin functions for the filebin (those don't matter to you), multiple upload directories and overwrite protection for the filebin -- and why did my "L" key just come off -- and some deletion changes: content related stuff and users won't be removed, just marked as deleted. (Private stuff such as IMs will always be permanently deleted.)
New Stuff
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-08-21 16:23:48
I've spent the afternoon adding new features and making small changes. The first addition is to the new Filebin. You can now send your uploaded file to a user who will receive an IM with a link. If your file is marked as private, its accessable by both the sender and the receiver. While I was adding this feature, I decided it would be much more pleasant to have a dropdown of all the users, instead of having to type their username by hand, so while I was adding that to the Filebin, I added it to the Send IM form. I also added a Reply button which should have been there from the start. The last minor change is a Permalink button on each article linking directly to the article's content id. The purpose behind this link is to allow articles to still be accessed even if I "delete" them to free up their title. If that doesn't make sense, it's because it has to do with the internal workings of the site.
Filebin 2 File Manager
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-08-18 12:30:05
I have just complete a file manager for the filebin 2. It is now on display in your User Center. Now you have more than just IM stuff in there ;) The file manager allows you to view lists of both your current public and private uploads. You can also edit the status (private or public), change the length of time the file stays on the server, and delete files. I also changed the default maximum upload length to 2 hours, instead of the former 30 minutes. As anyone who has used the new filebin should know, files set to never expire are automatically set as private uploads, and private uploads can only be downloaded by the uploading user. Would anyone be interested in paying a small fee to upload files for an infinite amount of time with the option of having them public? If there's enough interest I'll set it up.
Lag Time
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-08-17 22:15:19
I came home from PFC today to a 28.37 load average on my main server and reports of lag loading sites hosted on said server. After I got the server to settle down, I started to investigate the cause. It appeared to be a domino effect caused by an FTP bruteforce attack. FTP bruteforce attacks, usually aimed at insecure Windows Administrator accounts, have become increasingly popular. My server obviously doesn't run Windows, but that doesn't stop the kiddies from trying around 8 different passwords a second. I run a handy little program called swatch that monitors my logs and alerts to me issues such as failed FTP attempts. This is the first time I've had an FTP bruteforce attack go this fast, and regrettably I never setup a throttle on the FTP email alerts. This brings us to the second domino: every time a login failed, an email was sent. These emails had to go through qmail, then procmail, then spam assassin, then into my inbox. When I got home and ran top, I saw close to 100 processes working on delivering those messages to me. And swatch was still trying to send them. Fortunately it didn't take long to fix the issue, but sadly this started at 13:00, and I didn't get home to fix it until 17:30. Lesson learned, now to ensure it doesn't happen again.
New Filebin
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-08-15 21:05:36
I finished the new filebin in about one day and a few hours :D It can now be accessed at http://jesterpm.net/filebin2 (the link above has been updated). The old filebin will remain for a while, but it will eventually redirect to the new one. Within the next few days I'll add a listing of your uploaded files to the User Center. And I may add a list of the top most often downloaded files under the most recent upload list. If anyone has more feature ideas let me know.
Now Playing SOAP Server
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-08-12 15:33:07
I've completed a basic Now Playing SOAP server. The server has two methods, updateSong() and clearSong(). The updateSong method adds your current song info to your profile, and clearSong() removes it. Now all that's needed are plugins for media players to upload the song info. Here is more formal information about the methods:
updateSong()
Updates song information of profile.
Params
- username
- Your Jesterpm.net username. (required)
- password
- Your Jesterpm.net password. (required)
- title
- Song title. (required)
- artist
- Song artist. (optional)
- album
- Song album. (optional)
clearSong()
Removes song information of profile.
Params
- username
- Your Jesterpm.net username. (required)
- password
- Your Jesterpm.net password. (required)
If you write a plugin for a media player please send it to me so others may use it.
User Center Finished
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-08-11 21:35:10
I've spent the last two days working on the site. I've finally finished the User Center and it's awesome. Sadly no one gets to see it because everything I finished was administrative. I also fixed a couple bugs on the profiles and setup blog.jesterpm.net. Yeah, I'm surprised too. I didn't expect to ever have a blog, but I wanted to keep the homepage for site related stuff. Unfortunately I know forget what I wanted to put on the blog... Oh well. I also have a new project in mind. A few days ago I ran across NuSOAP and, having discovered it, wanted to create a SOAP server for something, but had no ideas. This evening I thought I'd like to create plugins for my media players to display a Now Playing thing on my site. A couple minutes later it clicked: create a now playing SOAP server. I may even extend it further so anyone can current song info to their profile.
Blog Button
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-07-18 00:00:53
If you want to link to me, I've created a nice little 80x15 button for you. It, and any other new buttons will be on my buttons page.
New Site Public
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-07-08 15:18:31
Ok, I've just finished the downloads page and I've switched jesterpm.net to the new (v4) site. The old site will be available as http://old.jesterpm.net for a little while. If you notice anything that needs fixed, email me.
Layout Change
By: Jesse Morgan on 2006-02-09 09:28:47
I was trying to make the page look a bit better in links (a text only browser), so I stuck a bar between the content area, and the quote and affilates areas. It unexpectedly moved those areas to the bottom of the page in Firefox, but I kind of like how it turned out, so I think I will keep it. Comments are welcome.
New Filename Layout
By: Jesse Morgan on 2005-12-21 20:37:18
I'm changing the filename layout, so some links may break. If you happen to find one of those, add a comment to this with the dead link, the page it was on, and anything else you can think of. If it happens to be the comment page itself that has a dead link, email the same info to webmaster@jesterpm.net.
News Working
By: Jesse Morgan on 2005-08-19 18:24:55
News Stuff is all working. Just need to add the Add News links and the news stuff should be done :) Feel free to create an account and play around and/or test the security of the site.
