Category: Site News

This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.

Switches do die

That NoName 100 Mbps switch that I was using for my internal network has strangely died today. I’ve experienced problems with it before, but it was different all the time. I always had a hub as a temporary backup solution, but I gave it away some time ago. Thanks to my brother, I now have a brand new 3Com 100Mbps switch. It is only 5 ports instead of 8 ports of the dead one, but it should be enough. I have only 3 ports occupied now, so there are another 2 for my guests.

The funny coincidence is that two days ago I had to repeat three times that network administration is not my biggest interest. :)

Comment control owns

One of the greatest things about Nucleus CMS is the number of available plugins. And one of the best plugins available is Comment Control. With a simple interface I as an administrator of the site can either Allow or Deny each and every comment made by unregistered users. Usually, I of course Allow them. Today though I’ve been under SPAM attack. Some script added lots of comments to different posts in here with links to pornish sites and other crap. All of these comments ended up in the approval interface and, of course, were thrown away. Regular users didn’t even have to start swearing. Viva la Comment Control! :)

New category ‘Personal’

I think that it is about time that I start separating posts that contain general stuff from my personal stuff. For that reason, I have created a new category – ‘Personal’. As usual, I have moved a good number of posts there dating back to the beginning of year and even more.

On the other hand, I still see some buggy behavior. For example, category switching is not working sometimes (after playing with Today/Archives). I will track it down and get rid of it as time permits. Meanwhile all bug reports are welcome, so that I can find a trend.

Downtime investigated

I have investigated why the server went down today morning. Apparently, the server was a victim to a dictionary spam attack. I didn’t have any limits configured for Exim and that resulted in load avereages exceeding 60. Gucho went extremely busy another couple of times during the course of the day, but now it should be OK. I have set a few load average related limits and added few domains into the blacklist. I have also upgraded Exim to a newer version (4.40), so I hope it will run for awhile now.

# Do not do any deliveries if load average is greater that this value
queue_only_load = 12
# Do not run runq if load average is greater than this value
deliver_queue_load_max = 14
# Do not accept any SMTP sessions (except for hosts in smtp_reserve_hosts) if
# load average is greater than this value
smtp_load_reserve = 20

If anyone has any other suggestions, let me know via comments.

Downtime

I woke up today to find that gucho.kirzis – my home server – was totally dead. Total of about 7 hours downtime. I’ve restarted it and now it seems OK. I’ll check the logs to see what happened…

It starts to sound like I am using MS Windows or something. :)