grommit.com

upgraded to snv_109 in preparation for this weekend's datacentre move

after 263 days of uptime, i rebooted into a newly upgraded snv_95 build.

upgraded the shared wordpress blog installation to 2.6

upgraded gallery to 2.2.5

the new grommit has been up for 100 days now! woohoo!

just finished installation of the new machine. grommit is now powered by a quad-core Intel Xeon 2.4GHz with 4GB of RAM and 1.5 TB of disk (in a RAID mirror of two 750GB drives). major software upgrades include a full OS upgrade from Solaris 10 to Solaris Express snv_75, PHP 4 upgraded to PHP 5, and SquirrelMail bumped up to 1.4.11. additionally, the IMAP software was upgraded to Dovecot for even better imappy mail goodness.

wow, it's been a long 8 months without grommit news updates. i upgraded grommit to gallery 2.2 today - and we now have two features i've been jonesing for for quite a while now: dynamic keyword/tag based albums, and EXIF auto-rotate! woohoo!

after three and a half good years with CCCP, we've moved homes over to the Cernio Co-op. we've moved from the Hurricane Electric datacentre in Fremont, to the 200 Paul UnitedLayer datacentre in San Francisco.

upgraded gallery to 2.1.2 today

upgraded the shared wordpress blog installation to 2.0.4

finally finished the 3 stage ZFS migration. all home directories and webspace is now on ZFS.

updated to the latest patches and rebooted so we could get some ZFS goodness. mmmmmm.....ZFS...

upgraded all the shared wordpress installation blogs to 2.0.3

i upgraded gallery to 2.1.1 for some minor bugfixes today

huge huge major gallery upgrade today! we finally have a bunch of features you guys have been bugging me about for ages now :) hidden items, the ability to password-protect individual items (that one's for you jesse), the ability to link to other items/albums/external sites within an album (for you farrah!), rss feeds (for a gazillion people that asked), as well as tons more. read the changelog to see what's new in gallery 2.1

i upgraded the webmail software to squirrelmail 1.4.6. this was a fairly substantial upgrade, so please let me know if anything isn't working as expected.

i installed a bunch of patches last night, including a new kernel and a new boot loader. installing a new boot loader remotely is a scary thing. anyway, everything looks smooth except for one hiccup that left the MySQL database down all night, rendering the blogs and gallery offline. sorry, totally my bad for not verifying they came up succesfully after the reboot. everything looks good now though. let me know if you see anything awry.

and then there were none.

with canada's conversion to wordpress, that leaves grommit with only one blog user left using MT.

i switched gallery2 to NetPBM in an attempt to fix the "broken thumbnail" problem that has been plaguing us sporadically since the gallery2 conversion. it looks like it's fixed the problem.

just noticed planet grommit wasn't updating the xanga folks' blogs correctly. fixed now!

installed and updated lots of patches. a new kernel was installed. the system was rebooted.

chester just switched to wordpress

woohoo. grommit's first production zone: cr.grommit.com went live hosting code reviews/webrevs for the OpenSolaris project.

so did esther. btw, all wordpress users: i just installed 124 new themes for you to use.

we're also now hosting geoff's PlanetStorage, a planet aggregation of storage related blogs (following the Sun/StorageTek acquisition)

dan just switched to wordpress.

i did a system update, downloading lots of system patches. i also added a couple of external drives for backup. oh yeah, and i added a bunch of affinity badges to the homepage for the heck of it.

i did a slight redesign of the grommit pages today, slightly shortening the header graphic, and moving the menu onto an overlay. i also changed the blogs sidebar to only show recent updates (the most recent 5 entries). the recent albums sidebar has been changed to show the most recent 5 photo gallery album updates. it also now shows the thumbnail graphic highlight. on the blogs/planet grommit page, it drops the 'recent blogs' sidebar (since, what's the point if you're looking at the planet page), and expands the gallery sidebar to show the most recent 10 entries.

i did a massive gallery upgrade today. we're now running gallery 2.0. basically everything changed... please check over your albums and have fun.

welcome tammy to the grommit blog world. i also ported erik's blog over to WordPress as well. so now we've got 5 out of 11 people running on Wordpress. not bad.

ported jesse's blog to WordPress

mike has the newest blog on grommit. he's also the first to use the new wordpress blog installation. if you'd like to convert your blog from MoveableType to the newer Wordpress software (which is what i use to power my blog), let me know and i'll set you up.

webalizer and the usage stats should be working now. you can't bookmark them directly anymore, as we were getting a lot of DoS attacks to the usage stats, so i used mod_rewrite to turn away spambots.

i generated new SSL certificates to replace the ones that expired yesterday. please permanently accept the ones your browser is asking you to..

subject says it all.

oh yeah baby.

planet grommit now works. planetidentity is still out of commission for some reason. salearn is still broken too. also, the imap SSL certificate doesn't match up...

things that now work: whacked.net things that still don't work: planets. my salearn plugin for squirrelmail.

things that now work: wordpress, mysql

things that also work: moveabletype/blogs, geoffarnold.com things that still don't work: wordpress, planets, whacked.net, mysql

things that work: photo gallery, uptime, incoming/outgoing email, webmail, https

installed solaris. things are still kinda fubar.
things that work: photo gallery, uptime, incoming/outgoing email
things that sorta work: geoffarnold.com
things that don't: webmail, planet grommit, mailing lists, whacked.net, https, wordpress, moveabletype, mysql

upgraded the webmail to squirrelmail 1.4.5

grommit was DDoS'd, and has been having intermittent issues. sorry for the problems, i'm trying to figure out how to stop them now

we're now hosting Pat Patterson's PlanetIdentity blog roll. It's an aggregation of various Identity related blogs that Pat and Ludo have put together.

sorry for the deluge of spam that's been coming in the past 4 or 5 days. i believe i've fixed the problem now (an unrelated software upgrade broke SpamAssassin).

the new hard drive was installed today. we're back up to full 100% backup capacity.

I will be bringing grommit down this coming Saturday, April 30th around 9am to install the new hard drive. It will be down for around 30mins to an hour.

i upgraded the photo gallery to gallery 1.5. there are a bunch of new features including a slightly modified look & feel, as well as bugfixes as usual. let me know if you see anything strange or broken...

after 351 days, 20 hours, and 30 seconds of continuous reliable uptime... grommit ate it. about 15 minutes of downtime occured while one of the HE techs rebooted grommit, and it went through the fsck process. it's up and running now... as far as i can tell, everything has restarted properly. let me know if anything seems amiss.

i wrote up a new gallery extension that allows for easy downloading of an entire album, including sub-albums. you can download albums as either a .zip archive complete with thumbnails, and Web pages for your complete offline browsing enjoyment; a zip archive with just the raw images, and nothing else; and a .ISO image with just the raw images, suitable for viewing in a PhotoCD/JpegCD capable DVD/VCD player.

upgraded the webmail to SquirrelMail 1.4.4. also found and fixed a Javascript bug in the spam learning plugin I wrote for SquirrelMail (thanks wendy!)

upgraded gallery to 1.4.4-pl6

just redesigned jaime & zac's practice's website. let me know what you think...

added the new google/msn/yahoo comment-spam rel=nofollow thingymajig to the grommit MoveableType blogs

happy new year everyone. i just upgraded SpamAssassin to 3.0.2. it was a fairly major upgrade, and it involved having to shut down SpamAssassin for about 10 minutes - so there was an open window where spam may have gotten in (believe it or not, but i got 18 spams in those 10 minutes). let me know if you encounter any problems...

the gallery has been upgraded to 1.4.4-pl4, and the webmail has been upgraded to SquirrelMail 1.4.3a with a security update.

since the old ssl (https) certificate i generated last year had expired, i had to generate a new one today. go ahead and install it as a new Top-level certificate, and you shouldn't be prompted everytime you try to login to webmail anymore. :)

removed the photos/images count from the root gallery page to speed up the parsing a bit. it was taking grommit about 8 or 9 seconds sometimes to parse the whole gallery database and produce those counts, which i really don't think people even look at. anyway, for what it's worth, there are currently about 20,000 photos in the gallery. :)

installed PerlMagick, the Image::Magick module that provides a Perl interface to ImageMagick. i can hear the "whaaa?!?" coming from all you non-geeks reading this. it basically means MoveableType (the blogging software on grommit) can do thumbnailing automatically now so you can use your blog as a photoblog easier. thank geoff for prompting me to install it.

added two more grommites to the fold. chester has decided to take up blogging once he realised i was posting/ripping-off his links he sent me via IM. now he will have unequivocal proof that he found them before i did. for those of you who don't know him, chester is my old roommate from san diego... he has had the personal disctinction of having lived with grommit.com in his living room for 3 years.

the other new grommite (is that even a word?) is Geoff Arnold, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun. his connection to grommit? his old service kept on having intermittent failures, so i pimped grommit out to him so i could keep reading his blog on a regular basis.

the gallery has been semi on and off broken since i did the 1.4.4 upgrade two weeks ago. i recompiled and upgraded php to 4.3.2, and that seems to have fixed the problems. albums are now working properly again, and listed in alphabetical order on the main gallery page.

SURBL's seem to be working great, so I'll give a brief explanation of how they work below. They've reduced the amount of spam going into my Inbox from about 7-10 a day down to 2 now.

uptime is past 100 days for the first time ever... 101 days and 20 hours!

SURBLs are a real-time block list which work not by blocking IP addresses or domains (which i am loathe to do due to the addr/domain forgery that is so prevalent in spam nowadays), but instead by blocking the URIs (usually web sites) that are in the text of the email. this works great since spammers typically don't obfuscate URLs since people have to click on them. the particular implementation we're using is SpamCopURI which is a plugin for SpamAssassin.

upgraded SpamAssassin to 2.64, and installed SURBL/SpamCopURI which should hopefully cut down on some of the spam that is starting to find its way into grommit.

uptime is at 95 days!

upgraded gallery to 1.4.4. a new gallery remote 1.4 was also released.

new uptime record! :) 87 days!

sorry anne, your plan wasn't being mirroured for the past two weeks due to the password change i made. stupid me. it's fixed now.

i've tweaked the spam learning plugin i wrote for SquirrelMail. it will now automatically delete emails that you learn as spam, and then automatically go back to the index instead of requiring you to manually go back. thank my dad for this user feedback.

also added a 'grommit' style for the webmail that uses Trebuchet instead of Helvetica. not a big deal, but i like the way it looks better. :) (Options->Display Preferences->Custom Stylesheet)

upgraded SquirrelMail to 1.4.3a

upgraded the MoveableType MT-Blacklist plugin to 1.64 to fix a security hole.

added an RSS/xml generator to generate XML feeds for grommit's news, also now included on Planet Grommit.

added aaron & grace's news from bellylint.net into the Planet Grommit fold. i should think about adding grommit's site news to Planet Grommit as well - but then i might have to actually make a better script to handle grommit's news.

grommit is now aggregating all of grommit's blogs, and fogs (friends of grommit, i.e.: friends who have blogs on other places) into Planet Grommit for your simplified and easier perusal.

upgraded gallery to 1.4.3-pl2

i added a security code authentication thing to prevent automated blog spamming.... hopefully it should cut down on this crap somewhat. let me know if you have any problems with people leaving comments...

i've been mirrouring jesse's plan for a while now and archiving it into his blog. i started doing the same for anne today.

i added the title attribute to the blogs on the right hand side so it will show the title of the most recent entry when you hover over it. whoop. big deal, i know. :)

more importantly, i've been trying out YAVR (Yet Another AntiVirus Recipe), a procmail recipe that helps to filter out a lot of the common e-mail worms, porn spam, and nigeria spam. it's been working really well for me personally, so i'm ready to make it available for other grommit users. if you want it enabled on your account, please let me know.

MoveableType 3.0 came out today. the problem is, it's not as free as it used to be. it's now limited to 3 blogs, and only ONE blog author per site. this is a problem given that grommit hosts 6 blogs, with 6 authors. anyway, i've heard good things about WordPress - it's just a pain to have to switch from one entire content management system to another.

i'll probably keep MoveableType 2.661 on grommit for a while unless there is a compelling reason (like security flaws/bugs), at which point i'll probably switch to WordPress.

who knows...maybe MoveableType will change their license, though not likely...

upgraded MT-Blacklist to 1.63

Hurricane Electric (HE) is still having network issues related to the power outage earlier this week. the network has been sporadically experiencing bad packet loss... most recently last night around midnight.

our colocation facility, Hurricane Electric lost all power to their facility during a UPS upgrade yesterday afternoon. grommit was down for about 10 minutes, but auto-booted up once power came on.

kernel was upgraded to 2.4.20-31.9smp, so i had to reboot grommit. let me know if you notice anything not working right.

upgraded gallery to 1.4.3. let me know of any problems you notice... gallery remote 1.3.2 was also released today. you can download it here.

i've gotten the Chinese & Taiwanese language packs properly installed, so you can now click on the flags up top if you want to see the gallery in your own language. if you have requests for other languages to be installed, please let me know, and i'll be happy to install them.

dan's got a blog/trip reports journal now!

upgraded MoveableType (blogging software) to 2.661

kernel was upgraded to 2.4.20-30.9smp, a reboot was necessary :( bye-bye uptime

upgraded gallery to 1.4.2. installed the chinese (simplified & traditional) language packs, so you should be able to use gallery in Chinese if you care to.

gallery remote 1.3.1 was released today as well, with a major new UI as well as all sorts of new album inspector changes. it looks pretty cool...try it out to interact with your gallery. you can download it here

upgraded spamassassin to 2.63
upgraded gallery to 1.4.1-pl1

installed the MT-Blacklist plugin today to weed through and block blog spam.

a breaker blew in one of HE's cabinets last night that knocked out network connectivity for about 20 minutes to half an hour. sorry if that affected you accessing grommit

there is some new spam going around that is faking a Habeas signature to get past spamassassin. i'm trying to tweak the spamassassin scoring to eliminate it though. bear with me, thanks...

new version of gallery remote released, fixing a few bugs re: ImageMagick (rotation/etc.) and drag and drop. for those of you that use it, please get the new version here

happy new year guys! as a gift from me to you, i've upgraded spamassassin to version 2.61. i know i know, i'm a swell guy - no need to thank me.

for those grommit gallery mac users (all one of you, i don't know why i'm posting this on the homepage instead of emailing you), there is an iPhotoToGallery plugin available here

for those of you that use Gallery Remote to manage your photo gallery, the new version 1.2 just came out, so go download it here

red hat released a new kernel patching a security vulnerability, so grommit was rebooted. bye bye 79 day uptime. :(

the photo gallery has been upgraded to 1.4.1. some of the new features: new image frame styles, gallery-wide slideshow, skins, voting, and email updates. i set the image frame style for sub-albums to a new 'polaroid' look. tell me if you like it or whether you prefer the older 'narrower' sub-albums frame look.

since the album format changed slightly, albums will be seamlessly upgraded as they are viewed...

i accidentally killed apache, so the website was inaccessible from 4a to 10a this morning, sorry. uptime is at 59 days! :)

fixed the 'recent gallery updates' sidebar. it was keyed based on album names, meaning if two albums had the same name - they would overwrite each other's most recently updated entry. (problematic for albums with no name or "Untitled"). anyway, it's fixed now - it only affected whether or not the album would show up in the 'recent gallery updates' sidebar.

grommit has also reached 36 days and 12 hours of uptime. our longest yet on our new server...

upgraded the webmail software, squirrelmail, to 1.4.2.

if you're in the bay area and are interested in joining us for dinners, events, and what not.... sign up for the bay area events mailing list. it's like... fun. and stuff.

unless you're some sort of creep. or stalker. or serial axe-murderer. chainsaws are okay, but really...axes are sooooo faux pas these days.

added mike's "bay area events" mailing list

just a note - if you want to host a mailing list on grommit, let me know and i'll set it up for you. grommit is using the GNU Mailman mailing list manager software.

California passes new law banning spam.

oh joyous day...

upgraded spamassassin to 2.60.

removed the web directory sidebar, and replaced it with a blog directory sidebar showing the grommit users who maintain blogs, and when they were last updated.

also changed the 'recent gallery updates' sidebar to show sub-albums now, rather than just main user albums.

gallery's login page/dialog is now in SSL/HTTPS mode.

i've disabled imap and pop3 unsecured email logins. the secure versions: pop3s, and imaps are still open running on ports 995 and 993 respectively. all self-respecting email clients should support these secure versions instead, so please use them instead of imap and pop3 unsecured.

adding marc's blog finally persuaded me to install [MoveableType] site-wide, so it's easy to expand the blogging capabilities so anyone can maintain a blog easily now. if you want a blog on grommit, let me know and i'll set it up for you.

[sigh]. the people that attacked my neighbours' machines packet-sniffed all traffic. this means any passwords transmitted in plaintext are now potentially in someone else's hands. if you login to webmail through the homepage, your webmail password is fine. however, if you have the old webmail login page bookmarked directly - and it's not https - then your pw is compromised and you need to change it NOW.

gallery passwords are, unfortunately, transmitted in plaintext. i'm working on changing this to be secure - but that doesn't prevent the fact that passwords could have been compromised. if you can, please change your gallery password.

upgraded the gallery to version 1.4 which came out today

two three machines also hosted with CCCP (both in grommit's cabinet, and an adjoining cabinet) were compromised over the past few days. these machines were the probable cause of the network slowdowns we experienced a couple of days ago, and today.

i've implemented the multiple message learning code... you should be able to select messages from the mailbox index now and click the respective "Not Spam" or "Spam" buttons at the top. please let me know if you find any bugs, etc. :)

if you open up an email, you will now see on the bottom a "Learn Spam" ("Mark as Spam!") button which will train your personal spam filter that the current message is spam. I need to do a similar "This Ain't Spam!" button that will train it that the current email is misflagged as spam.

I'd also like to add a button in the mailfolder view that will let you learn/unlearn multiple messages at a time, as the current method is a bit unwieldy with lots of messages.

For your best interests...don't mark MAILER-DAEMON emails as spam. Just delete 'em. Cause someday you'll get a valid MAILER-DAEMON response (i.e.: if you mistype someone's email address) and you won't see it because you've trained it as spam. Just a word of warning... :)

update: finished the "This Ain't Spam!" button. so you should now see two buttons at the bottom of every email, "This Ain't Spam!" and "Mark as Spam!". i think it's pretty self-explanatory.

the switch in our rack at Hurricane Electric yesterday somehow got overloaded causing 50-80% packet loss and a general loss of connectivity to grommit. they've upgraded the network hardware in our rack now, so things should be fixed. i thought it was a recurrence of the flaky NIC on grommit, so aaron met me at HE with a new network card (thanks aaron!) and we swapped it into grommit. looks like it wasn't the problem, but oh well...new NIC - yay.

per wendy's request, i have implemented my greatest bit of grommit code ever. the webmail login text box is now automatically focused, so you don't have to click it before typing your loginname. wow. that's gotta save you AT LEAST 7 seconds per day.

just to let you guys know... grommit has built in email suffixing. meaning, if your username is 'foo@grommit.com', you can also be addressed at 'foo+whateveruwant@grommit.com'. so you can use 'foo+hotchicks@grommit.com' if you're signing up for an email list on baby farm animals. this way, your email address is not (as easily) given away, and you can set filters to delete any email coming to that address later.

i plan on adding a couple features to webmail soon. i'd like to add a 'report as spam' button to webmail that will let you train SpamAssassin when you get a spam in your inbox. i also would like to add a procmail filter configuration thing so you can specify your own filters easily.

rebooted grommit to install the new kernel that redhat updated today. buh-bye uptime. :(

any email with a microsoft executable attachment (typically *.exe, *.pif, etc.) is now automatically tagged as SPAM - this is SYSTEM-WIDE, not just on a per-user level.

someone in mexico seems to be trying to attack grommit via the ftp port, so i've turned off ftp. this will probably be a permanent thing, so you'll need to use a different way of accessing your data in your home directories. grommit has both scp (secure-copy) and sftp (secure-ftp) setup, so please use those to transfer data back and forth. to use them, you will need to generate ssh-keys, as passwords are disabled. i can help you do this if you like, so please get in touch with me if you need home directory access. sorry for the inconvenience, but hackers will be hackers....

for those of you crossing AT&T's network (which is a lot, including everyone on AT&T Broadband Internet, or Comcast Cable Modem) - AT&T is blocking all ICMP traffic in response to the MS-Blaster worm (and it's anti-worm). this is affecting latency issues causing grommit to respond slowly. bandwidth is still running fully (i.e.: if you were to download a 10 meg attachment, it would transfer fast) - but it causes grommit to respond slowly to initial requests. hopefully they should lift this soon...

update @ 11:45am - everything seems to be back to normal more or less for now

grommit has a spam filter called 'spamassassin' which uses something called 'bayesian filtering' to filter spam. basically, it's a personalised (for each user) filter which attempts to eliminate spam. bayesian filtering works best on a user-by-user basis, rather than having a system-wide database of known spam keywords. bayesian filtering requires a training/learning period where it learns what spam is. unfortunately, this means it's not so productive when you first set it up fresh. if you've been getting spam, and would like to kickstart your spam filter training, i've got a collection of 1000+ spam emails i can use to seed your bayesian database. let me know if you want it run on your email account or not.

so i found the *real* fix for the HTTPS uploading problem, rather than a hack patch which is what i put in yesterday. also added a 'theme' selector thingy up on the top logo (bottom right corner) for fun.

as of yesterday afternoon, certain annoyingly long email signatures from certain friends who work for a certain firm specialising in 'strategic capital for consumer growth companies' are now being stripped.

esther pointed out to me that gallery uploads were broken (when doing the upload from a url/local dir option, not http upload). turns out HTTPS uploading is broken or something in gallery. what a pain. anyway, i think it's fixed now.

12:15am - esther just pointed out the nesting "grommit within a grommit" situation that occured when logging out of the webmail. it's fixed now. :)

if your photo gallery passwords don't work, please let me know and i'll reset it. i forgot to copy over the gallery password database apparently. :(

what do you think of this look?

integrated the graphic into the logo header. fixed the spacing between the sidebar & content on IE.

integrated webmail look and feel into the rest of the grommit site (added top frame, changed default theme to fit grommit color scheme, added webmail link to TOC, and changed default style sheets to use the Trebuchet/Tahoma fonts the rest of the site uses)

check this out. click here to go back to normal. what do you think? prefer the colour? let me know...

home directories from green have been restored! :)

the gallery is back up!!!

i'm back in the bay area, but i don't think i'm going to get a chance to install the new hard drives in grommit until saturday. so photo gallery is going to continue to be down this week. sorry! i've got a lot of work to do this week, and unfortunately, i need someone to help me hold on grommit when i screw him into the rack - so it's going to have to wait until saturday morning.

green has been shutdown - so the photo gallery is down for the weekend while i go down to LA to pick up the hard drive. i'll be installing it and bringing the photo gallery back online sometime on monday.

damnit. i knew i would find a hiccup sooner or later. so it looks like http://www.grommit.com/webmail was referring back to green somehow all this week. if you logged into webmail through this homepage, it was fine - but if anyone had webmail bookmarked as http://www.grommit.com/webmail and was wondering why they weren't getting any email - well - that was the problem. sorry! it's fixed now. green has been shutdown, so photo gallery is officially down until monday.

the majority of you use webmail, but for those that are interested. IMAP and POP are turned on, and both have TLS/SSL support for encryption - so PLEASE turn TLS/SSL on so nobody can intercept your mail password.

also, i turned on SMTP on port 25 for any grommit users that wish to use it. set your mail client to "mail.grommit.com", port 25. AUTHENTICATION IS NECESSARY. please let me know if you require SMTP access and i will add you to the list of users authorised to connect remotely.

once you are authorised, make sure you turn on authentication, and select TLS/SSL encryption to encrypt your username/mail password.

i've had some people ask about email limits. your inboxes are currently limited to a size of 512 megabytes. this is enormous, trust me. your home directories are limited to 20 gigabytes - so you can always move your mailboxes into mail folders outside your inbox. your mail folders fall under the 20 gigabyte limit. (not that i expect any of you to hit 512 MB anytime soon)

incoming emails are limited to a size of 100 megabytes now. they were set higher, but this seems like a ridiculous enough of a limit for now.

please let me know if for some reason you need a higher limit - i don't know why you would though... :)

squirrelmail upgraded to 1.4.1. spamassassin is now running as a daemon, running system-wide now. anything that it determines as spam will have its subject rewritten to look like "[SPAM] rest of subject". you can tweak its behaviour by playing with the user preferences, but i don't have an easy way of doing this other than ftping a new preferences file onto your homedir. maybe i'll add something later to allow more tweaking....

grommit.grommit.com has officially gone live publicly, and is now serving the entire grommit domain. hopefully mail and everything should transition properly. keep your fingers crossed... :)

the only thing that isn't going to be transferred yet is photo gallery. but that will be up by next week. for now, i'm going to link to the photo gallery still residing on green down in san diego.

grommit's new server went live today at hurricane electric. it's undergoing private testing and hopefully it will go live publicly monday.

redesigned the homepage. eliminated the random photo and grommit logo to reduce images and make the page load faster. it's all styled in CSS now, so it should be extremely fast and very cross-platform.

the new server has the base install of Red Hat 9 on it. i'm planning on bringing it over to install it in Fremont on Friday or Saturday. i'll be doing private testing on it all next week, and then hopefully i'll be ready to bring mail & web over sometime next week.
i plan on re-using one of the old hard drives in green as the user home directories - i've still got to figure out the logistics of this first though. (i.e.: how to best bring the drive up without losing sync between data in the transition from green to grommit)

new server should arrive today...

i bought a new server for grommit! it's a dual Pentium-3 with both CPUs running at 866 MHz. it has 2GB of ram, and when i move all the hard drives over, it should have about 200GB of storage. hopefully i'll receive it by next week and i can get started on transitioning the domain to it. please check your email for the latest 'state of the grommit' address.

our co-location with the California Community Colocation Project has been approved. i'm in the process of acquiring some sort of a dual-Pentium 3 server. i'm looking for at least a dual-P3 600MHz system with at least 512 megs of RAM in a 2U form factor. i hope to have something by the end of this week which should allow me to bring the new 'grommit.grommit.com' server up next week sometime. i'm pretty excited...the new speed and bandwidth will hopefully make things like the random photo gallery processing go much faster.

periodic downtime occurred friday afternoon and yesterday. looks like time warner's san diego network was having some outages or something. i'm hoping to get a new server co-located up here in the bay area soon. hang tight.

upgraded gallery to 1.3.4. albums must be upgraded, but these will be done seamlessly as they are loaded.

just installed [MoveableType] (blogging software) on Erik's website, as well as my own. it's kinda neat...worth checking out. if you want it installed on your user webspace, let me know

just realised (thanks to aaron) that grommit's log usage/webalizer stuff was all fscked. i regenerated, but i only keep logs for about a month - so all logs prior to may was discarded. no big deal... at least the logs should be more spot on now.

weird usage information. i thought these were funny search strings:
average size dork
hands touched her swollen belly
male eyecandy

what's really weird are the referrers. all sorts of adult and porno sites. strange....

in preparation for my move up to the bay area, i've moved green to a new connection. he'll still be down in San Diego for a few months until i find a place to co-locate a new server up north. let me know if you notice something strange. ftp, web, smtp, pop, imap, ssh, etc. should all still be working.

updated Vipul's Razor to version 2.34.

added a link to 'about grommit' on the menu that gives info on what grommit is running

updated spamassassin to version 2.5.4, and Vipul's Razor to version 2.22

in other news, i'll be moving back up to the bay area on june 6th and 7th. i'll be keeping green at the old apartment until i can figure out a hosting situation to bring him up north.

updated the change_password plugin for squirrelmail to the most recent one that is compatible w/ the 1.4.0 release.

added a webmail login to the main homepage

installed spamassassin. it's not running site-wide, yet. it's still configured for specific user-cases, so let me know if you want it enabled on your account or not. there are currently a few of us using it - it's quite nice.

upgraded squirrelmail to the latest 1.4.0 release.

ugh. the new router (netgear mr814 w/ wireless 802.11b) has been giving me problems. i've put back the old netgear rt314 relegating the new mr814 to the role of a dumb WAP until the new firmware fixes the problems.

installed the new router today. let me know if you notice any weird hiccups or anything (or if you can't access a specific port you need)

sorry for the DNS downtime. my DNS provider EveryDNS suffered a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack last week starting on Wednesday. it appears to have been stopped now, but this caused some trouble for people trying to access the *.grommit.com domains.

rewrote the homepage as a php script to facilitate news updates. also put in a most-recently updated gallery block on the right hand side. it originally loaded pretty slow, so i took out the photo/album counter and now its almost instantaneous (unless it has to update the cache).

also moved the uptime to the left hand side to balance out the sides with the new updates block. also changed the colour of the headers

a sad day today.... while attempting to burn a CD, something got screwed up - and I couldn't eject the CD. despite all my valiant efforts, I finally had to reboot green. goodbye 97 day uptime. on the positive side, it was good to reboot green just to make sure all the services and everything came back on properly (which as far as i can tell, they did). also, it gave me a chance to boot the newest kernel with the latest security updates and features.

redid the layout for the grommit.com homepage. nothing major, just some slight reorganisation. added the uptime to the front page, more for my benefit than anything else. also made the page HTML 4.01 compliant (check the W3C link below to check for yourself if you really care)

removed an errant rule from the procmail filters that was filtering all email with supressed To: headers. this was catching some legitimate email, sorry.

mydomain has been giving weird redirect problems lately - so i've taken it off our DNS service. we're now using [EveryDNS] for our primary DNS, and [ZoneEdit] for our secondary DNS.

upgraded gallery to 1.3.3 to fix a security fix. uptime is at 78 days, 14 hours, 38 minutes!

changed the squirrelmail configuration to always stay in HTTPS mode both while and after logging in. i also added a plugin to allow you to change your password via squirrelmail. go to the Options menu, and then "Change of Password".

uptime is at 48 days, 22 hours and 19 minutes!

upgraded squirrelmail to 1.2.10... the new secondary DNS changes have been made (we're using mydomain.com for primary DNS, and EveryDNS for secondary DNS).

mydomain.com (our DNS service) was down last night and this morning. if, in the future, similar problems arise - try using 'green.dnsalias.com'. i'm also in the process of setting up some redundancy with another service like EveryDNS for backup DNS so this hopefully won't happen in the future.

upgraded gallery to 1.3.2. the speed increases are phenomenal. the new gallery remote has a ton of new features too...so if you use it, go download the newest gallery remote (1.0).

new spam filters are in place

upgraded squirrelmail to 1.2.9...

looks like it was a bad RAM module that was causing all the crashes. green has been stable the last few days now...

everything is relatively back to normal. i think i've rebuilt the RPM database, and hopefully nothing will crash. i'm trying to forego reinstalling the entire OS, but if any crashes occur, then that will still be an option. as it is, let me know if you see anything strange happening.

new hard drive arrived today... the old storage drive is being mirroured over to it. i plan on reinstalling green tommorrow, and then both storage drives will come back online and we'll be back up to full operational strength.

green at least had the courtesy to wait for me to get back to san diego before kernel panic'ing. it's been randomly oopsing all day yesterday - i'm not sure what the problem is, but i'm working on it now. user directories are going to be offline today, so please don't do anything via ftp. email and web should be more or less okay. :)

wild and crazy steve adds a random photo thing to the main index page.

upgraded gallery to 1.3.1 - i also re-sorted the main gallery page to be alphabetical. woohoo...big changes, i know..

i've turned on SSL (https) for grommit.com, so webmail should now be using SSL. you'll see warnings about certificates and whatnot, but go ahead and accept it - my system security, and your password thank you for it.

server was down for a few hours while it was moved to a new connection.

webmail packages upgraded (squirrelmail was upgraded to 1.2.7). a WAPmail interface was added, but i'm not convinced of its security. email me if you want to try it out. i also upgraded gallery (the photo gallery/albums software), and it seems to be working well. let me know if you find any problems with it. the slideshow feature is awesome..

sorry for the downtime of the httpd server, upgrading apache via up2date stopped the service, and i forgot to restart it.

grommit.com and all associated domains (whacked.net, youvegotmai.com) were down yesterday. sorry for the inconvenience...

8:44pm up 60 days, 21:28, 7 users, load average: 0.21, 0.06, 0.01 -- sweeeeeeet

i finally overhauled and unified all the pages under my whacked.net personal page.

w00t. i got my new digicam today!

green had a long downtime tonight (several hours) resulting in grommit.com and whacked.net being down while i attempted to upgrade green. it took me a while, but green now has a faster I/O controller and a redundant 10 gig drive for file storage backup.

domains are all sorted out...

all sorts of fun domain stuff... i've settled on having my personal web page at www.whacked.net - so i consolidated my existing whacked.net page (located at UCSD's CSE server) with my www.grommit.com/~steve page here into one page hosted here. i've now cname'd www.whacked.net to point to grommit.com with www.whacked.net setup as a VirtualHost inside Apache - so it *should* all point to the right place. however, this won't take effect for a day - so until then, all my domains are pointing every which way. :) hopefully they're all coming to here though - so if you're looking for www.whacked.net, please go here temporarily.

the jukebox has been upgraded to 4.0.1. i've also patched the icecast stream to support metadata updates. too bad my bandwidth is too slow for anyone to listen to the shoutcast stream. :P

photo gallery and webmail should be fully working now. contact me if you want a photo gallery user account. the photo gallery is also accessible at photos.grommit.com

grommit.com is back open for business...after a 2+ year hiatus.