Several Fixes, Bind Updated <div style="color: #000080; padding: 2px;">Several Fixes, Bind Updated</div><div style="font-size: .9em; margin-bottom: 12px; border-bottom: 1px solid #000080; padding: 2px; border-top: 1px solid #000080;">Saturday, July 26, 2003 by Kevin Stange</div><div style="font-size: 1em;">I just wanted to let everyone know that I have gotten several major problems fixed, all of which should result in much more responsive servers and more reliability. I still can't make any guarantees, but please report anything that's still troubling you directly to me, and I'll get on it. Things fixed/changed in the past week:<ul>[*]Our database server's network issues were resolved. The access time lag and packet loss that were causing errors and slow loading of things that use MySQL should be minimalized.[*]I discovered and eliminated an abusive user that had hacked one of the local terminal accounts. He was using a large amount of bandwidth and appears to have been causing the periodic failures of the web server. The server should be significantly faster.[*]I enhanced the security of the server with new passwords for the admin accounts and the closing of several previously overlooked holes.[*]I enabled network usage monitoring on our servers. At any time, you can see the average network utilization graphs for our two servers, here: MRTG Graphs.[*]Bind (services related to nameservers) was updated with several security patches. Apache will be updated to 1.3.28 as soon as the update package is available to repair several bugs and security issues.[*]Users can no longer upload bittorrent files. These files are used almost exclusively for illegal file distribution, and they were the cause of a recent downtime. I have made the decision to prevent this by force, because we all prefer uptime anyway.[*]I cleaned up the default server pages for both servers to link to most of the useful tools we have available. Try checking out the web.nozonenet.com page.[*]Reverse lookup for our servers is now working correctly. Our server IPs previously both would return "." for the reverse lookup. 66.227.96.173 should now lookup to "web.nozonenet.com" and 66.227.96.176 should show up as "cp.nozonenet.com." Lookup will now go both directions, and make anything that depends on this sort of thing work correctly.[/list] I realize that the web site is still "missing." It should hopefully be at least partially up later today! All the emergency security issues have, understandably, taken precedence.</div>
