mu.nu - It's mackerel stewed in chocolate!

November 14, 2005

Celebration

Thanks to MuNu guru Pixy, we've got new servers and new toys to play with. This definitely deserves a celebration, and when you celebrate, you want food, right?

Work with me here.

Rocket Jones is hosting this week's Carnival of Recipes, so It'd be cool if my fellow Munuvians swamped me with submitted recipes, celebratory or otherwise.

It's simple to do too:

1. Post a favorite recipe to your blog.
2. Send a link to your post to Recipe -dot- Carnival -at- gmail -dot- com.
3. Wait for the weekend, when the Carnival is posted and be amazed at the traffic spike!

It's a great way to draw new traffic to your blog too, so consider hosting a Carnival in the future.

Thanks!

Posted by: Ted at 02:16 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 13, 2005

Dumb Question #187

How should I go about 'backing up' my blog?

I know that Pixy might/probably does daily/hourly back ups, but I'm thinking that I should be a responsible blogger and do it myself.

Anyone care to leave a step-by-step method for this? And here's another stupid question: when I back it up, I'll be backing it up to a spot on my notebook i.e. a local hard drive, right?

Waiting and twidling my thumbs....

Posted by: Mad Mikey at 11:40 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Wanted: Victims Guinea Pigs Adventurous Souls

I'm looking for a few people interested in trying out a new blogging system - LifeType.

I've set it up at my.mu.nu. At the moment, blogs there will appear at my.mu.nu/blog/blogname or my.mu.nu/user/username, such as my.mu.nu/blog/trixielicious, my grand-daughter Trixie's new blog, which also appears at my.mu.nu/user/trixie. It can also be set up to provide proper subdomains like trixie.mu.nu, but I haven't done that yet.

It's got lots and lots of features, which makes the user interface a bit confusing, but that can be tweaked. (In fact, it can be changed completely; the user interace is templated just like the blogs.)

This is the closest thing I've seen to what we need here at mu.nu (apart from Expression Engine, which we're not allowed to use due to licensing restrictions). LifeType on the other hand is open source, and we can use it any way we want.

If you'd like to play around with it, leave a comment here or email me.

By the way, it's worth mentioning that (with the raft of plugins I've installed), LifeType's anti-spam features include Bayesian filtering, captchas, forced moderation, open relay blacklists, hidden input fields, trackback validation, the rel/nofollow thing, and host and content blacklists. All of which can be turned on or off for each blog.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:54 AM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Nu

nu may stand for:

In Chinese, Nu means woman
A Nu is a fictional species from the video game Chrono Trigger.

* .nu is the Internet Top-level domain for Niue

Niue is an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean. It is commonly known as "Rock of Polynesia". Although it is self-governing, it is in free association with New Zealand. This means that the sovereign in right of New Zealand is also the head of state of Niue, and most diplomatic relations are conducted by New Zealand on Niue's behalf. Niue is located 2,400 kilometres north-east of New Zealand in a triangle between Tonga, Samoa and the Cook Islands.

Posted by: Madfish Willie at 03:34 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Mu

Mu in hacker culture

According to the Jargon File, a collection of hacker jargon and culture, Mu (here pronounced "moo") is considered by Discordians to be the correct answer to the classic logical fallacy of the loaded question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" [1]. Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse because it suggests that you have once and are still beating her. As a result, various Discordians proposed "mu" as the correct answer, alleged by them to mean "Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions". An equivalent English reply would be 'not', instead of 'yes' or 'no', as 'not' is one possible meaning of 'mu'. Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies in language (one anecdote relates of Richard Stallman that he once was asked, in regard to the Editor Wars, if he preferred Vi or Emacs; he answered "Yes."), and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm.

Posted by: Madfish Willie at 03:33 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

2 Blogs??

Ok this is weird. I made an update to my main index template and the change shows up on http://www.sacramentorepublicrat.com but NOT on http://www.sacramentorepublicrat.mu.nu

Posted by: Sacramento Republicrat at 02:40 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Operation Was A Success

Though things looked dicey around 2 AM when Movable Type absolutely refused to work.

The new servers are quite zippy; even a full backup can't do that much to slow them down. Which is good, because we are moving to a twice-daily backup schedule.

There are probably still some odd corners of misbehaviour. If you do trip over something, post or comment here or send me an email.

And yeah, I know about this. I'm getting the latest updates to the portal software to see it that helps. Otherwise, it's some tedious SQL hacking for Pixy.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:53 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 12, 2005

Complaints Department

Is your little corner of Munuvia unexpectedly blowy-uppy following the move? Something doesn't seem to have come across quite right - or at all?

Leave a comment here.

As far as I know, all the blog stuff should be working. There are some problems still with the Munu portal which I need to sort out, and some of the automatic background thingies aren't running yet. Oh, and trackbacks are turned off; I'll turn those back on shortly.

Anything else, give me a yell, and I will poke at it with my Stick of Poking +1, +3 against databases.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:05 PM | Comments (43) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

COWS!!!!

Moved everything across to new servers. All happy and good. Load up Movable Type databases, all goes okay.

Start Movable Type. Refuses to connect to database. Oh, oops, MySQL 4.1. Known problem.

Change database authentication settings. Now we get a different error.

Change configuration. No good.

Change user settings. No good.

Change Movable Type settings. No good.

Move database to local host. No good.

Do all of the above at once while crawling the web in search of anything that might give me a hint. No good.

The database works. I can access it through the MySQL command line; it's just Movable Type that rejects it.

Dig out Perl DBI docs and hack Movable Type database drivers. Good.

But not what I wanted to be doing at 3 o'clock on a Sunday morning.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:57 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 11, 2005

Spell Check

Does anyone know of anyway to spell check in MT 2.64? I tried writing my posts in Word and then copy/paste but then the post is all messed up when I paste it in to MT. Any ideas other than a dictionary??? I tried the IESpell but I am on Mozilla.

Thanks,

SR

Posted by: Sacramento Republicrat at 02:07 AM | Comments (22) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 10, 2005

Squish 'Em Like The Bugs They Are

We got 1.3 million trackbacks over the past 30 days, and 550,000 comments. About 99.8% of trackbacks and over 90% of comments were spam. Over 99% of the spam got blocked, but that still left a lot of cleaning up.

You can turn off comments and trackbacks for specific posts in Movable Type, and we have set it up to do so automatically. Unfortunately, this doesn't do anything as far as I can see. It certainly doesn't stop spam.

So I've forcibly closed comments and trackbacks on all posts more than sixty days old. When I say "forcibly" I mean I went and hacked the Movable Type comment and trackback routines directly.

This appears to work. We still have Fluffy on the job, and we still have MT Blacklist backing up Fluffy, and hopefully this new measure will take us up to blocking 99.9%. We'll see how it goes.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:57 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Eat Our Dust!

This weekend - specifically, Saturday the 12th of November - we will be moving to our new servers. I expect this to take four to six hours, assuming that nothing goes horribly wrong. And if something does go horribly wrong, I will probably just postpone it until the following weekend. During that time, you won't be able to post, readers won't be able to comment, and we won't get any spam.

Every cloud, silver lining.

Our current server, Mew, is getting old and tired. It's a dual Xeon 2.4, something that hasn't been made for years. It was bright and shiny in its day, but lately the wheels have started falling off.

Our new servers - yes, servers, plural - are called Kei and Yuri. Each is a dual-core Pentium D 2.8, with 2GB of memory. Individually they're 50% to 100% faster than Mew, and they're connected via a private network, allowing them to co-operate on dishing out your bloggy goodness.

Yuri will be running Movable Type 2.6, which accounts for the bulk of the munu blogs, and a majority of the workload overall. Kei will be handling the various forums, the Movable Type 3 blogs, and the various WordPress blogs and other sites. Kei will also be handling the databases for all the applications, taking some of the work that Yuri would otherwise be doing for MT 2.6.

Each server is backed up to the other one twice a day, so even if we have a complete system failure, we can be up and running again quickly.

In addition to the shiny new hardware, we have shiny new software. Newer versions of Linux, MySQL and CPanel for starters. Fantastico, which died recently after an upgrade, is back. XController has arrived to make CPanel pretty.

Once that's done, I'll be addressing our blogging software. We have to move off Movable Type; we have no choice in the matter. However, no-one will be forced off MT before they're ready. The new servers will be able to cope with the existing users just fine; the problem is that further growth will bring serious problems. We're already the largest MT installation in the world, and worse, we are stuck on version 2.6 due to licensing issues.

I have a plan - but more on that later.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:06 AM | Comments (21) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 09, 2005

Trackbacks... Not spam.

For the last three days, everytime I try to send a track back it wont go through. It doesn't matter if it's a MuNu site or not? I'm just curious if others are having this problem or if I'm doing something horribly wrong that is going to result in the internet exploding all over my desk.

Posted by: Contagion at 04:28 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

They Just Keep Coming!

I've been getting loards of trackback spam lately-are we any closer to a magical cure to remedy this? I'm a little tired of seeing 10 comments trackbacks, all letting me know about blackjack or animal porn.

Strangely, all thr trackbacks seem to come from the same posts, some very old some more recent.

Thanks!

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 07:41 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 04, 2005

stealth trackback spam

I've gotten a couple of trackback spams loaded to my site. Normally I get notified via email when someone sends me a trackback, which means I can find the post and delete the spam. These didn't send email, and I don't know of a way to hunt them down and delete them.

Any ideas?

Posted by: Ted at 12:19 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 03, 2005

Keschun

How can someone leave a comment when the IP address they're using has been banned, for quite a while even?

Posted by: Stacy at 04:42 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 01, 2005

Spam = comments error?

I am assuming the recent spam attack is causing the error message one gets when trying to comment? The message reads:

An error occurred:

Invalid [] range "s-b" in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/ http://mp3-audio-search.tripod.com| http://parrot.stopsneg.com/parrot-picture/|"http://customordered.com/penis-enlargement|([\w\-_.]+\.)?(l(so|os)tr)\.[a-z]2,|(babes|porn|boobs)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]2,|(cialis|meridia\b)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]2,|(diet|penis)[\w\-_.]*(pills|enlargement)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]2,|(free)[_.\-]?sex([\w\-_.]+)?\.[a-z]2,|(levitra|lolita|phentermine|viagra|vig-?rx|zyban|valtex|xenical|adipex|meridia\b)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]2,|(magazine)[\ at /home/blog/public_html/cgi/extlib/jayallen/Blacklist.pm line 3098.

FYI.

Posted by: Rhodey at 08:24 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 31, 2005

I DON'T LIKE SPAM!!!!

Waiting for something to finish here at work, so I'm just sitting and watching the log files scroll by. Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam.

Fluffy seems to be doing her job. I intervened to capture some of it, so if you ended up with ads for Berlin hotels, that was my fault.

Oh, and it's a zombie network (appropriate for this time of year), so no blocking an IP address and getting rid of the lot. Vampires are much easier to deal with than zombie hordes.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:28 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Munupanel!

Still configuring the new servers, but things are going pretty smoothly now. One of the toys I wanted to install on our existing server but never got around to is called Xcontroller. It makes CPanel prettier and less cluttered and easier to use.

I was determined to buy it and install it this time around... And then I discovered that the new hosting company supplies it for free.

Here's a sample of how it looks:

munupanel.gif

(Click for full-size version.)

The new hosting company has been very good so far. They've supplied Xcontroller for free, upgraded my 160GB drives to 200GB drives for free (well, they ran out of 160GB drives, but whatever), and gave me the benefit of their Halloween special even though I ordered the servers before the special started. (Effectively, they upgraded both servers to 2GB of memory for $199.90 - normally this would cost $60 per month.)

Yay for DedicatedNOW!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:31 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

October 29, 2005

Die You Fuckers!

New spammer at bat. Five minutes, 10,710 spams. The previous instance was unusual only in its duration.

Oh, and this one struck out. Probably thanks to Super-Fluffy.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:54 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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