DDoS war

Long story short, fucking shitstorm ddos. Details still emerging, but it seems that 420chan, not 420chan, partyvan.info, and 315chan.org were all taken out, and #xenu was fucked as well as /xenu/ on 711chan.

Nameserver problems

K, so apparently partyvan.info isn't working, due to the nameservers being being broken, but http://xyndros.ath.cx/ and http://67.228.193.162/ should both work.

EDIT: http://partyvan.info/ works again

New Feature

Just a small announcement--you can now embed youtube videos into wiki pages. It works like this:

<Youtube>

title=My test YouTube dealee
movie_url=http://www.youtube.com/v/yWQhBnpFEpg
embed_source_url=http://www.youtube.com/v/yWQhBnpFEpg
wrap = yes
width=500
height=400
</Youtube>

Downtime

Sorry, we had to take the server offline for maintenance. Here is an overview of what happened (copypasted from irc):

[18:31]  the ddos used up all available connections
[18:31]  so I used a config tool to up the connection limit
[18:31]  but the config tool added a newline in a comment in the config file
[18:31]  and part of the comment was parsed as a directive
[18:32]  this filled the error log with errors
[18:32]  and /var was completely full
[18:32]  because /var was full
[18:32]  mysql crashed
[18:32]  and the system wouldn't start except in single user mode
[18:32]  so I had to log in with vmware-server-console to get single user mode and delete the logs
[18:32]  In the process of restarting mysql, it broke the database
[18:33]  the auto-incrementing column in one of the tables broke
[18:33]  so I had to dump and reload the whole database
[18:33]  :D
[18:33]  A nice days work

DNS Censorship

So, we've gotten scattered reports of people being unable to access partyvan.info, even after giving isps 5 days for the dns stuff to propagate. These reports seem to mostly be coming from people with the Rogers ISP, though some people with RoadRunner have also had problems. I've also seen problems accessing partyvan.info from Qwest DSL.

Recently I just tried to recreate the old dns for the wiki (xyndros.ath.cx), but it seems that dyndns blacklisted it. If you don't want to remember the ip, try using http://partyvan.ath.cx/.

In the past, we've had complaints from comcast users that 420chan/711chan/the wiki are down, when they're not.

Clearing some shit up

The server that hosts the wiki has never been hacked. We've put up warnings to everyone to change their passwords before, but these were simply a precaution. The closest to being hacked that the server has ever been, was when Grawp was moving pages around to Hagger?? and the question marks fucked with our ability to delete/fix stuff normally. There have been times when it appeared that we were hacked, but these have all turned out to be misunderstandings--HD dieing, datacenter disabling stuff during ddos, etc. We've never actually been rooted.

Also, note that defacing an openly editable wiki doesn't count as hacking.

Up again (March 08, 2008)

I've finished enough that the wiki should be operational again. The downside is that the latest backup was from the 5th, since I was still working on the backup system the day it went down. Now we're (mainly wedtm) setting it up so that vmware snapshots of the wiki VPS are being sent to the offsite nas every hour.

Next week we expect a meteor strike followed by a plague of locusts, and the loss of all the firstborn.

Downtime (March 07, 2008)

The most recent downtime has been due to the failure of a 1 TB HD (i no rite). Currently I'm installing and configuring the software on the server. As a result of the downtime, WedTM is saying that he will have the wiki vps backed up to an offsite NAS hourly (win). Here is the progress of the wiki:

Done:
Creating disk for VMWare
Loaded freebsd 7
Compiled/configured mysql 5
Compiled/configured apache22
Compiled/configured php5
Compile/configure eaccelerator
Compile/configure memcached
Restore mediawiki files from backup
Restore mediawiki db from backup
Compile/configure php5-extensions
Configure mediawiki for memcached
Various Configuring (/etc/rc.conf, my.cnf, etc)

Currently:
Extra stuff, e.g. ftp, mailserver

Later:
Fix backup system