A couple older relatives and friends of mine recently got burned by a spam/malware/phishing issue that traces back to desktopdate d0t net. Does anybody have any experience/knowledge of this?
I’ve found this but at least one of the people involved claims to have not clicked on the email, but still had many invites issued on their behalf to the contents of their address book.
As the intermittent availability of the blog has shown, dactyl doesn’t have the chops to be a web server with a significant load. It wasn’t a problem when it was just us… but when the web spiders (particularly fucking Bing) started hitting, it just didn’t have the power to run multiple sql queries to serve up the pages.
So, how to fix it? Well, it’s a situation of “dactyl is dead, long live dactyl!” dactyl.dartmouth.edu might not be able to handle things, but dactyl.whitman.edu can. I changed some files on the old dactyl to send all the blog traffic over to the new machine. The full archives are on the new machine, everyone’s user accounts, everything so it should work.
I’m leaving personal web pages and everything at dactyl.dartmouth.edu.
Basically, everything should just work now and if you type something that’s on the new server, it will automatically take you there.
Now we just need to work on getting some new blood into the system.
I just finished my online training in sexual harassment prevention. Despite the fact that I spent a half hour reading through the material, I feel like I know nothing more than I did before. In fact, I may be slightly dumber… Seriously though, how hard is it to recognize the blatantly obvious situations they come up with?
Speaking of that, two of the last five of my blog posts could be construed as sexual harassment.
Here’s a very interesting observation though. No where in the sexual harassment materials does it say that professors here can’t date students. You can’t trade sex for promotions/grades/whatever (and lack of “no” doesn’t imply “yes” given that the faculty are in a position of power) and you can’t walk around making suggestive comments. However, relationships with the consent of both parties are “imprudent” but not forbidden.
At Loyola, it was explicitly stated in the guidelines that relationships with students were firing offenses. Not at good old Whitman though. I should go talk to Prof. redacted.
This post is half for Nathaniel, but also directed to others who have friends who may have subscribed to the Soapbox. We have 16 listed subscribers, some of which I suspect are spammers given their .ru email suffix, but we also have some more legit-looking ones, such as accogypeall ‘kat’ mail.health-ua.com or the user “bombiafepaine” who has a gmail email. Any insight?
We have gotten a few spam items sneaking through the filters, but I just realized that subscriber-spam might be sneaking through the nets.
Two weeks ago, I thought I was going to have to pack dactyl up and call the experiment done. However, the recent software rebuilds and hard drive reformatting have ended up being very successful to the point where I’m not even getting interesting errors in the logs anymore.
Actually, it’s a little bit boring with nothing to fix.
So, don’t worry about the stability of dactyl, just post to the blog as much as you can. Remember, quantity over quality!
So, all of dactyl’s core system software has been rebuilt, anything that previously was causing errors has been replaced (speaking of which, dovecot imap is soooooooo much better than courier imap), and I’ve said several incantations.
There’s one more step that I’m going to take later to rebuild ALL of the software on dactyl. If that doesn’t fix things, then it’s a hardware issue. (Of course, hardware issues might be fixable just by using a little spray air.)
Think good thoughts and hopefully there won’t be any more freezes.
Oh, and while you’re blogging, be sure to click the little Turbo button at the top right of the screen once you’ve logged into the blog. It does fancy things to move more of the work to your computer instead of having dactyl prepare the pages and it might be a little bit faster.
Thanks to Meghan’s help yesterday, dactyl is back up and running and I’m madly trying to figure out what’s going wrong.
I’m trying to cut out a little bit of the load… dactyl was slow when it was built and now it’s crazy-slow compared to any reasonable computer, so I’ve turned off a couple of services. If anyone needs them, I can turn them back on.
Specifically, does anyone mount their dactyl home directory on the desktop of the computer for backup or to edit their web pages etc?
Does anyone listen to the “woodbox” music on dactyl?
Last, does anyone use dactyl as a dns server?
If you have strong feelings about any of these things, let me know.
