Server Blog

[asavage]

Forgot to enable spam countermeasures, and three spammers registered (with bad email addresses) before I could enable them!

[waynosworld]

Forgot to enable spam countermeasures, and three spammers registered (with bad email addresses) before I could enable them!

I noticed the spam, great job on the change, it's been smooth so far.

[asavage]

The spammers are still getting registered; I deleted three this morning. I gotta find out how to crank up the gates.

[later]

Turns out that Captcha doesn't work so well anymore. I've swapped for a Q&A test: during registration, it asks a simple question, but humans shouldn't have a problem figuring out the answer. Let's see how well that works for today.

[asavage]

This version of the board software has a tool to list all inactive users, and the reason why. I just deleted about thirty inactive users that registered but didn't activate (via the email link). That usually occurs because they gave a bogus email address.

Five of them were from yesterday/today But there were some going back to 2009.

[asavage]

I found a code patch (not formalized, so not a real MOD) that makes mail from the board now read "NissanDiesel forums" (like the front page banner) instead of just from my email address. That should make email from the board make more sense in our Inboxes.

[Nissan_Ranger]

Forgot to enable spam countermeasures, and three spammers registered (with bad email addresses) before I could enable them!

Hah! They're laying in wait!

Did the banlist I built make the transition?

Should we try having manual confirmation of new accounts?

Kewl new look, by the way

[asavage]

I don't like the new look, myself. I miss having Quote and Edit buttons at both bottom and the top of posts, for example.

Yes, the banned IP list transitioned.

[asavage]

Wayne emailed me (Thanks!) that the site was down, and I checked the server, found it FUBAR'd in some fashion this morning. The CMOS was wiped. Odd.

It's running now, but I need to do some more diagnostics, perhaps tonight.

[waynosworld]

Thankyou for getting it back up, it's been 2 days since I was able to get anything at all, it just sat there and said it was waiting for a reply, but nothing ever happened.
Thanks again

Wayne emailed me (Thanks!) that the site was down, and I checked the server, found it FUBAR'd in some fashion this morning. The CMOS was wiped. Odd.

It's running now, but I need to do some more diagnostics, perhaps tonight.

[asavage]

The entire town had a power outage that lasted about 29 hours (the Puget Sound region had around 150,000 without power, due to the first windstorm of the season); power was restored at 0105 today. The server is on a big honking UPS that can carry it for several hours, but as the local cable broadband hub was down, there was no point in running the server so I'd shut it down.

One good thing came of this: I found that all the CMOS batteries on these four 2004-era HP DC7100s are needing to be changed. Both the server and my personal workstation lost their BIOS settings, and this time I had the case open on the server, so I removed and measured the CMOS battery: 1.4v -- it's a 3v battery.

I'll pick up four of them today.

[waynosworld]

Thankyou for getting it going again, I had no idea why it was down, but I always give it a couple days before sending you a message about it.

Thanks again

[asavage]

The cable broadband is severely limited in throughput. I have a service call scheduled for today, as they can't find anything wrong over the phone.

[asavage]

The broadband provider did about an hour of work outside the house, and it's working better. He's going to send out a follow-up person to scope the underground cable between my house and some point five driveways north, and see if there's more damage to be fixed, as the numbers are not as good as they could be.

Cable was buried in 1996, before cable internet.

[plenzen]

Thanks Al

Appreciate all you do

P

[waynosworld]

I have a lot of issues getting on here, I am wondering if it is my internet provider, maybe this site is not on their list of preferred sites, so it gets dial up speed or something like that, it took over 5 minutes to get a reply from this site, then I could not get anything, so I closed the window and started over, and it took over 5 minutes again, it took 5 minutes to log on, after that happened I started not waiting for it to load that page, and it would go to the next page and start loading that one.

Could this be an issue with my internet provider?
Is it the server that the site is hosted at?
I am not a 5 minute a page patient type of guy, none of the other forums I am on have this issue, well that is not true, it happened at Ratsun way back, they had to go with another host for the site.