June 28, 2008

Today's Server Flakiness Brought To You By...

Rogue webcrawlers from Lockheed Martin (seriously).
Saudi Arabian script kiddies.
And Movable Type 3 suddenly deciding it needs 2.8GB of memory.  PER PROCESS.

All dealt with now.  Fun day.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:09 PM | Comments (38) | Add Comment
Post contains 36 words, total size 1 kb.

June 19, 2008

Movable Type Glitches

A couple of people (Ace, Bou, Quality Weenie) reported glitches with their sites overnight and this morning (my time).  I fixed up Ace's site first, but then it happened again for Bou and repeatedly for QW.

When I took a closer look at the server, it turned out that we were getting bombarded with hits from another server elsewhere, and the load on our web server was about five times normal.  I blocked off that server, and suddenly everything works again.

If you are still having problems with your site, try editing and saving your most recent post.  That should rebuild the necessary files.

If that doesn't fix everything, comment here or email me (help@mu.nu) and I'll get it sorted out for you.

Update: Bou got bit again, and so did Rhodey, so I did some more cleanup work (blocking spammers and other resource hogs at the firewall, general tidying up, tweaking Apache config settings, updating the database index statistics) and suddenly everything is running much nicer. 

As before, let me know if you have this problem, or you see another mu.nu blog that's gone funny, and I'll jump right on it.  It's easy for me to fix a blog that's gone wrong (or you can edit and save a post or use the Rebuild feature), but I need to track this down and make certain that it's fixed.

It seems that Movable Type sometimes simply gives up half-way through building a page if the server is too busy.  No error, no nothing, just half a page, or no page at all.  So my first goal is to keep the server happy so that it doesn't happen, and my second goal is to migrate people over to Minx so that it doesn't happen.  

Ace stated pointing readers to his new blog today, which should help smooth things out too.

Update: Problem found and fixed - fixed properly, this time.  And it was so simple, in the end.  It wasn't a software problem with Movable Type.  It wasn't a hardware problem with the server.

The main blogging account was simply out of disk space.

I increased its limit by 10000%, and now it's happy again.

If you're still seeing a blank or incomplete main page on your blog, just edit and save your last post, and that will fix it right up.

Update: Oh, yeah.  The truly irritating part was that I must have done a couple of hundred rebuilds, either through the Movable Type interface or through my little rebuild script before one of them finally gave me an error message instead of just silently not working.  If it had actually given the error properly, this would have been fixed in less than a minute.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:03 AM | Comments (27) | Add Comment
Post contains 462 words, total size 3 kb.

May 22, 2008

Bleh

We're having a few problems with the server that runs the Movable Type side of things.  I'm working on it right now, and it should be fixed within a few hours.

Since I'm planning on going on holidays tomorrow, it had better be fixed within a few hours...

Update: Had to reboot.  Back up in a couple of minutes.  (9:52 PM Sydney time.)

Update: Okay, reboot went smoothly, and now back to the software update.  Dum de dum.  Okay, that will take a few minutes, so time for a quick bathroom break.

Update: Okay, MT is still acting all weird.  But the second copy of MT that some people use (Ace, for one) is fine.  I'm going to back up copy one and wrote copy two over it, and see if that fixes the weirdness.

Update: Nope.  Um.  Head-scratching time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:37 AM | Comments (27) | Add Comment
Post contains 143 words, total size 1 kb.

May 01, 2008

Spucking Fammers

Server overwhelmed by a spamflood, film at 11.

Dammit.

I've got four days clear starting now for the Minx migration.  Minx, being 40 times faster than MT and having better filtering, isn't as easily overwhelmed, so the sooner we can get across to it, the better.

Update: Deleted about 9000 comments, banned a few more IP addresses at the firewall.  Global spam epicenter rapidly moving from Russia to China.  Bleh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:03 PM | Comments (30) | Add Comment
Post contains 72 words, total size 1 kb.

September 27, 2007

Open Door Found; Closed

Aargh.

The problem wasn't in Movable Type at all; it was in phpBB, as in the old mu.nu forums. A combination of a hole in phpBB, the design of Movable Type, and an oversight on my part allowed the hackers to deface your pages.

I've shut down the mu.nu forums. Completely. I've had too many problems with phpBB 2, and version 3 still isn't out. phpBB can be kept reasonably secure if you attend to it regularly, but I have too many things to look after to worry about something with as bad a history as this.

The hackers managed to run some other scripts as well as the one that defaced your blogs. They never had administrator access, but it's possible they made a mess in some places I haven't found yet, so I get to spend the next day or three crawling all over the system and zapping anything that looks suspicious. This *has* to be done before we can move to the new server, so I might have to put that off for another week.

Fortunately, none of this affects Minx, which is on completely separate dedicated servers, and isn't affected by the same sort of security loophole. (Which is not to claim that it's immune to attack, but it's immune to that attack.)

Sigh.

At least now I know what it was, and I can close the door on it. Apologies to everyone affected, particularly George Roper, who ended up (not that this was my intention) almost acting as bait so that the attackers would come back and I could catch them in the act.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:49 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 273 words, total size 1 kb.

September 21, 2007

Good News, Crap News

Hi everyone.

Good news first: Minx is open for migration, as of right now. :D

If you don't mind a fairly standard Minx layout - see my site, mee.nu itself, AZ Resident, Brickmuppet for some samples - I can get you up and running very quickly.

Also, it's easier if you don't use CPanel or your mu.nu email address; it will be another few days before I have CPanel and Minx playing nicely together. If you don't mind losing CPanel just for a few days I can move you right away and enable CPanel later.

If you'd like me to do all the work and just hand you the keys to a shiny new Minx version of your blog, all you have to do is post here or email me at andrew -at- pixymisa -dot- net. Posting in Minx is very much like MT, except there's a fancy WYSIWYG editor, so you can get going in your new blog very easily.

There are twenty standard themes you can choose from: Blue, Green, Grey, Orange and White just have colour gradients for the banner (see Brickmuppet for an example); Beans, Bug, Butterfly, Cheese, Chips, Clover, Fire, Gargoyle, Green Tomatoes, Ireland, Mountains, Rosebud, Saltnpepper, Sunrise and Sunset have nice photos (see AZ Resident for an example of the Fire theme). (I'll post examples of all the themes shortly.)

You can switch between 1, 2 and 3-column layouts at the flick of, well, a switch, so no problems on that score.

I'll also be available to help converting existing layouts and stylesheets and banners and so on.

If you'd like to do the work yourself you can export from MT and import into Minx. Again, just comment or email me and I'll set you up for that.

Oh yes, one other thing: I need to get the number of page impressions and ad views up for mee.nu and mu.nu to attract advertisting (and hence, money!) If you're willing to have a small banner add on your site (see my site), let me know. I'm more than happy to split the revenue with you, or if you're not interested in that (for smaller bloggers it might only be a few dollars here and there), we can pool the money and donate it to a charity. (I'm thinking the American Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders, but I'm open to suggestions.)

And now for the crap news: We have a hacker defacing mu.nu blogs. Several blogs have been hit already. I've restored them all, but it's possible that more attacks will occur. If you see anything untowards, please let me know right away.

Just another reason to move to Minx, I guess. :|

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:54 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
Post contains 452 words, total size 3 kb.

September 06, 2007

Broken comments

Did someone add in open brackets to the MT Blacklist? I'm getting weird messages whenever I try to comment on any MuNu blog. Message fragment:



An error occurred:

Invalid [] range "d--" in regex;

Posted by: Physics Geek at 12:48 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 35 words, total size 1 kb.

August 26, 2007

Blacklisting and recent spam

Ya know, I believe we might block a good amount of the spam comments that have hit us over the last couple of months by blocking this phrase:

"ite. Thank"

That'll cover all the "good site. Thanks." and "great site. Thank you." and numerous variations that I've been getting hit with (and I assume y'all have been too).

That's a space between the period and the capital T, if that matters.

I don't know enough about the blacklist to add this myself, so someone else could add this if it'll help.

Posted by: Ted at 12:23 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 95 words, total size 1 kb.

July 10, 2007

Who the&(%*&#!+* did it this time?

Comments are toast courtesy of yet another frigging fool who doesn't understand that they don't know how to use the blacklist.

Here's the error:

An error occurred:

Invalid [] range "t--" in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/([\w\-_.]+\.)?(l(so|os)tr)\.[a-z]{2,}|(babes|porn|boobs)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]{2,}|(cialis|meridia\b)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]{2,}|(diet|penis)[\w\-_.]*(pills|enlargement)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]{2,}|(free)[_.\-]?sex([\w\-_.]+)?\.[a-z]{2,}|(levitra|lolita|phentermine|viagra|vig-?rx|zyban|valtex|xenical|adipex|meridia\b)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]{2,}|(magazine)[\w\-_.]*(finder|netfirms)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]{2,}|(mike)[\w\-_.]*apartment[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]{2,}|(milf)[\w\-_.]*(hunter|moms|fucki at extlib/jayallen/Blacklist.pm line 3098.(and more......)

Can someone who knows what they are doing please get this sorted out? Thanks.

Posted by: caltechgirl at 02:28 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 63 words, total size 1 kb.

June 21, 2007

Die Spammy Bastiches!

Sorry about the latest server wobbles. Someone decided to grace Sarah of Trying to Grok with tens of thousands of pieces of email spam. I've deleted the garbage and blackholed the incoming spam, so we should be okay until the next wave of crap that comes our way.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:58 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 51 words, total size 1 kb.

May 27, 2007

beta.mu.nu Downage

A drive has failed on the beta machine, and it's broken beta.mu.nu. I'm recovering everything I can from the failed drive - the databases and user files are safe, but I want to see if I can recover some config files. Then I'll be moving both beta.mu.nu and mee.nu to the production cluster.

Update: After a period of utter panic when I thought I'd lost the entire beta system including all recent backups - only about ten minutes, though I feel like it took ten years off my life - I have managed to recover everything. The system is running again on the good disk, with nothing lost except 2d6 SAN.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:00 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 113 words, total size 1 kb.

March 19, 2007

EEEK!

Sorry about the comment outage, folks! I was concentrating on getting the new system set up and didn't drop by here during the weekend.

It should be working now.

If there are any more outages like this, feel free to contact me directly at andrew -at- pixymisa -dot- net.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:20 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 50 words, total size 1 kb.

December 17, 2006

Whoops!

The old servers seem to have gone offline - two weeks early.

If you were using them for you personal DNS, well, you probably just lost internet access.

If you can see this, that means that everything's fine.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:20 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 39 words, total size 1 kb.

November 23, 2006

Celebrity News Spamcock

Anyone else feel like finding this celebrity news spammer and stringing him up by the balls?????

Posted by: Mark at 01:02 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 19 words, total size 1 kb.

November 22, 2006

Shit

When I had to reboot the server because we were getting flooded with spam, the firewall rule that I had set up to block outgoing spam was erased, so we started spamming other people.

The result of that spam is that we've been blacklisted with some spam filters, so even once the whole mess is cleaned up, you might not be able to get your email.

So, a little request for Munuvians: Never, ever, ever even think about putting a contact form on your site that lets people email you. These things are bug-ridden beyond belief, when they are not deliberately designed to act as spam gateways.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:01 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 108 words, total size 1 kb.

November 21, 2006

Aaargh

Overrun by spammers. Forced to reboot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:03 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
Post contains 7 words, total size 1 kb.

November 20, 2006

Out Damn Fruitcake

Sorry about that folks.

When we get a lot of spam, and Fluffy has to repeatedly kill incoming spam comments, eventually the database server gets tired of connections dying and disables access to the database from the server that's causing the problems.

When that happens, you get fruitcake.

I've now set up a process that will monitor for this and fix it.

I HATE SPAMMERS!!!!!!!!!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:29 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 68 words, total size 1 kb.

November 12, 2006

Server Burpage

Looks like we just had our first hiccup with the new servers. I think it was probably just a spam overload; a quick reboot and all was fine again.

I'll keep an eye on things. But then, I always do. ;)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:31 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 43 words, total size 1 kb.

October 12, 2006

Not Exactly News

Movable Type is acting strange and annoying. Not necessarily MT's fault though, given the weird setup we have.

Anyway, a bunch of blogs went blank. Rebuilding them was... iffy. I have no idea why that is; it was working; it should have worked.

I went and reset all the permissions on the MT2.6 blogs to something simpler, and rebuilt the ones that are listed below, and they all seem to be fine now. (Munuviana went blank somewhere along the way, so I rebuilt that too.)

If your blog has gone blank, either edit and save your most recent post, or go into Rebuild Site and choose Rebuild Indexes.

If that doesn't work, post here. I might need to upgrade my bug gun to a larger calibre.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:44 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 129 words, total size 1 kb.

September 16, 2006

Bum

Sorry about the outage. Yuri, one of the two... three... well, right now, six mu.nu servers, albeit the one that hosts most of the blogs, fell over. Haven't worked out why, just yet, but it's back up and running.

I have two happy, healthy, brand new servers waiting to take over, but I simply haven't had the time to move mu.nu across. I'm hoping that the thing that's been eating my brain the past couple of months will finally be finished on Monday and after that things will be a lot happier for everyone.

If not, I might just go mad instead.

We'll see.

Update: The brain-eater has been banished! :D I am back and munuing more than ever.

I need to plan the move to the new servers, and then we'll open things up to new munus again. At the same time, I'll be rolling out Minx so that people can start moving to it for real. (My blog is already running under Minx, and Ace is using Minx comments, but it doesn't do everything it needs to just yet.)

And then comes the new site, which will bring a ton of new goodies with it.

I was hoping that this would be ready about now, but the brain eater sucked two months out of my life, so it will be sometime in November before it's ready. We'll have a continuous stream of new goodies starting in early October. Cool stuff happening all over the place... As long as my brain doesn't get eaten again.

La la la...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:47 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 260 words, total size 1 kb.

<< Page 1 of 6 >>
166kb generated in 0.311 seconds; 67 queries returned 337 records.
Powered by Minx 1.1.4-pink.

Search Thingy



Recent Comments

  • imprimante-wifi.fr/ Hello, I would like to subscribe for this webpage to obtain latest updates, therefore where can i ... entry
  • asd In the most suitable way wishes from central europe :-) I invite you to my blog about Kasyno ... entry
  • tin tuc online,tuc tuc 24h thanks, it cool entry
  • Julianne Ruff You don't have to worry about it, Apothegm is going to handle the technical details. entry
  • Foam tape good post, i love your post very much, thank you for share entry
  • Foam tape good post, i love your post very much, thank you for share entry
  • Paxil Lawsuits Thanks for sharing such a useful knowledge. The knowledge provided is very niche. I was one time s... entry
  • Supreme Jackets Made popular by the incomparable Pierce Brosnan, Panama hats are stylish and smart, and would make y... entry
  • card access control systems card access control systems I'm still learning from you, but I ... entry
  • wooden kitchen cabinets (*･ ･*) entry

Categories

Archives

Munuvians

Monthly Traffic

  • Pages: 696631
  • Files: 1211
  • Bytes: 6.6G
  • CPU Time: 264:10
  • Queries: 6965128

Content

  • Posts: 1987
  • Comments: 11951

Feeds


RSS 2.0 Atom 1.0