March 2010 Podcast is Scheduled
The March 2010 podcast is scheduled for Friday March 12 from 4PM to 5PM. Our guest this month will be Ken Sutton of Brigham.net, one of the newest providers on UTOPIA. Listen in online, join the chat room, and feel free to call in at any time at (347) 838-8025.
The Forum is Down Until Further Notice
I noticed that the forum wasn’t working properly earlier today. Both the RSS feeds and permalinks were broken without notice. An attempted upgrade to a newer version of bbPress did not resolve it (and, in fact, made the problem worse). I’ll let you know when it’s working again.
Coming Soon: Return of the Podcast
It’s been far too long since I’ve produced episodes of the FreeUTOPIA Podcast. Real life has kept me busy and I spent a lot of time sorting out licensing issues for the intro music. I’m glad to announce that starting next month, I will be recording podcasts again, this time with BlogTalkRadio. It includes a lot of nifty show features like listener dial-in, a chat room, and full show archive. I’m tentatively planning on Friday December 11 around 4PM. If you can’t make it live, be sure to pick up the show on iTunes or via the show page.
If You Work at Lucent, You're Not Reading This
I’m sure that some of you have noticed that the website has been less than reliable these last few weeks and I’m sure you’re curious as to why. Well, the short answer is that some jerk has been flooding the server with requests effectively launching a denial of service attack. A restart of Apache and MySQL fixes the problem, but I sometimes have to go to the console for my web host and do a hard reboot, the equivalent of pulling the power plug. Not cool.
Since most of the attacks originated from proxy.lucent.com, I have banned any connection attempt from this DNS name to the server. If that happens to be you, stop flooding my server with requests, dipstick.
Hacked! (Or, Why it's really REALLY important to keep WordPress up to date)
I noticed some rather, er, strange behavior when I had comments e-mailed to me this morning, specifically that some odd code was being appended to the end of permalinks in WordPress. It took all of about 5 seconds to realize that my install of WordPress had been compromised. I’ve since updated to the latest version of WordPress and removed the offending code snippets, so things should be back to normal. Thankfully, they didn’t gain access to the admin panel or appear to have modified any posts or comments. Apparently Apache and PHP are configured properly so that these injection attacks result in a big bucket of fail for the attackers.
Moral of the story? Keep WordPress up to date.
Server Maintenance
I made a few changes to the settings in Apache today to try and resolve some issues with memory usage. If you notice any odd behavior from the site, please let me know.
Also, my virtual server will be moved on Friday from a hosting center in St. Louis to one in Dallas to resolve some problems with frequent downtime. I’ll be updating the DNS entries in advance, but you may experience a few days of site unavailability in the meantime. If you do, just be patient as the DNS changes work their way around the Interweb.
A New Direction for Broadband Bytes
Some of you have probably noticed that the Broadband Bytes feature hasn’t been appearing on the website since March 17. There’s two reasons for this: it takes a large chunk of my Saturday to put it together (thus why it was frequently published late) and I haven’t been getting paid for it. My personal financial situation now demands that more of my time be spent earning a living, so free time is at a premium. All the same, I run into stories worth sharing on a regular basis. So do Mike and Jonathan.
To that end, I setup a Twitter account, @FreeUTOPIA, to publish those articles as we find them. It’s going to be powered by Phil Windley’s code used by the most excellent @utahpolitics. If you’re not using Twitter, that’s okay; I’m going to setup the Twitter Tools plugin to publish those tweets on a daily basis. It should be ready to go by tomorrow.
If you have any questions, comments, or rude noises, sound off in the comments.
The Recent Downtime
Sorry about the recent downtime, folks. The short of it is I don’t know why it happened, but rebooting my VM fixed it. I suspect my hosting company, Slicehost, did another unplanned reboot which more-or-less messed everything up. At least Apache didn’t require a full rebuild this time around.
New Podcast This Saturday at 1PM
I’ll be recording another podcast this Saturday at 1PM. Our guest will be Warren Woodward of XMission. Feel free to tune in live at podcast.freeutopia.org using TeamSpeak.