The new server arrived today and we have already started work on migrating to the new server. It will not be long until we take the forum down to run back ups and to migrate everything to the new server. The new server is situated in a new IP block, however, there will be no wait for DNS propagation because we will forward the traffic from the old IP to the new IP until DNS has been fully propagated.

There has been improvements made to the search while it’s down. So when it does come back up, you should expect a much better search. We’re currently working on fixing a major bug where newest topics which should be on the first page of the results end up at the bottom or in the middle of the results. We’re also working on implementing near live updates of the search system. Basically any moved, deleted, new topics will appear into the search within a minute. It will also feature much faster author based searches.

Our main database server is almost useless if it continues to corrupt the database everytime we run the forum. The hardware replacements of the RAM had failed. The mobo rejected all new RAM we threw at it. We’re now giving up on the old Opteron server and we will be going forth looking into the options of either purchasing a new server or renting a new server.

We use memtest86. It is a good old program that has been used for quite some time. There are 8 stressing tests. But out of the 8, all fail in comparison to the 3 hour long 9th extruciating test. Thankfully this is excluded by complaints of finger twitching nutters and has to be executed manually by authorization of your fingers (and a bit of brain).

Currently we’re flying (not really) away on our 7th test at 18% completion. Just enough time to watch another episode of Top Gear.

If all this sounded too sporty (or awkward), say it in Jeremy Clarkson’s voice and you’ll know what I mean.

It is common knowledge that the memory test will take long and I have expected this memory test to last hours. However just a heads up for those who don’t know, this memory taste is poised to take roughly 2-3 hours.

Skipping this test is an option but I’d rather be sure that the memory is the problem first.

We will be taking down our servers down for a hardware inspection and hardware replacement very soon. Within the next 5 minutes the forum will go down.

While we’re waiting for the DC guys to come in, I think it’s already 12:15PM Monday in HK, lets take a look at an unfortunate incident to the organization who programmed the base of our forum – phpBB.

It was hacked yesterday by someone who exploited the PHPlist (PHPlist is used to manage email lists) script on their servers and it did not take long to get access to everything once he/she was able to get in. The full story can be read here.

I don’t condone what this person has done. It is rather sad to know that almost all of the passwords of members and their emails have been leaked into spam lists. And worse, the full extent of this hack may not be known, if there were no transparency or if the phpBB group fails to notify members. The immediate implication is that many phpBB.com members may get their other logins compromised if they ever use a universal password. For example, the same password used on phpBB.com is used on their email. This is a tragic lesson but one we must all learn, make sure your passwords are fully random and have different passwords for different logins. If you’re not someone who can memorize 16 character passwords then at least use a few random passwords for the sites you go to, rather than a different one at each login.

Random passwords can be generated here.

I do hope that the phpBB group learns from this attack and updates their phpBB 3.x software to prevent any future hacking attempts. Our team’s condolences goes out to the phpBB community.

Seems like when we reinstalled our img5 server we had forgotten to correctly configure the rewrites for WordPress. We run lighttpd and since lighty cannot parse .htaccess files (thank god for that since htaccess in Apache is a performance bog), it’s .htaccess file was never in effect.

For those who’re also on Lighty and want permanent links to work this is what you add to your lighty configuration. Mind you, this is for when your blog is hosted on the root of the domain or subdomain – without a subfolder to access.

url.rewrite = (
“^/(wp-.+).*/?” => “$0″,
“^/(sitemap.xml)” => “$0″,
“^/(xmlrpc.php)” => “$0″,
“^/(.+)/?$” => “/index.php/$1″
)

And of course you have to enable mod_rewrite in your module.

I’d like to share with you a bug report I read today, out of all the depress induced bug reports I read this is a good one.

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=2

There has been reports that we’re down because of a security issue. This not the case. We do not have any security breaches on our servers. All of our data is fine and we have sufficient back ups to restore all of our posts and topics and users.

This problem seems more and more like a hardware problem. We’ll be running diagnostic software on our DB server in a few hours.