ninth level down

Well, my ubuntusatanic.org domain renewal came up this week, so I wasted no time in transferring it away from Streamline. I was going to try Sackheads on the recommendation of Andy at Bitfolk, but I just wanted something slightly more… professional. So I went with his second choice, Gandi. I’m very impressed with their service and user interface. They seem dedicated to domain registration and their site is easy to use with advanced features at your fingertips. It’s a French site, so their correspondence is in French with an English translation at the bottom. That’s fine by me, unlike many English people I love the French. They have a great attitude to freedom and open source. Plus they make some great hot hatches. Va, va, voom!

Eternity Screensaver packages are now available for Ubuntu Hardy 8.04. I’ve moved the repo to my dedicated server, so downloads should be pretty fast.

Packages are also available for Edgy, Feisty and Gutsy.

I’ve now moved parker1.co.uk to my new dedicated Ubuntu server hosted by bitfolk.com.

The server also hosts ubuntusatanic.org and is a Xen virtual machine running Ubuntu Hardy 8.04. It’s got 480 MiB RAM a 30 GiB disk allocation split into two disks for redundancy.

I’m really pleased with bitfolk. Their service is exemplary and it makes a wonderful change from dealing with the sharks at streamline.net.

I have to say that having ubuntusatanic.org kicked off Streamline.net’s [un]limited servers was one of the best things which could have happened. It’s forced me to get off my arse, put my hand in my pocket and move the site onto a dedicated virtual server. The journey I’ve gone through in the last week has been an interesting one and has uncovered a surprising number of small projects run by enthusiasts providing cheap services for sysadmins who know what they’re doing. It’s taught me that if you ignore the first few pages of Google there are plenty of operators out there who give you a lot more for a lot less.

First up is bitfolk.com. I stumbled upon their link on the Xen WIKI. They’re pretty much a one man operation, offering nothing but Xen virtual servers running Linux. There’s a raft of distros to choose from, including Ubuntu Hardy beta. Even the big boys weren’t offering that at the time. The sysadmin is a very friendly and knowledgeable guy called Andy Smith who had my Hardy server up and running within a day. Apparently I was the first person to choose this option.

I had the box secured and a LAMP stack installed within a couple of hours and it was a lot of fun. I’ll post a tutorial on this shortly, but I was left with an extremely speedy and secure website, and one over which I have complete control.

The only thing missing was a DNS server. I could have set one up on the box, but the less services running and ports through the firewall the better, so I opted to let xname.org host my primary DNS - completely free. It was configured and working in ten minutes and all I had to do was point my domain registrar’s zone file to the new DNS servers.

Talking of domain registrars, here’s another area where you can save a packet if you avoid the big hitters. sackheads.org provides very cheap registration and seems to have a pretty large and dedicated following. I’ll definitely give them a look when my domains come up for renewal.

The only problem I have now is the sheer volume of downloads which Ubuntu SE is generating during the Hardy release period. I currently have a predicted monthly bandwidth usage of 223 GB for the month. As I now pay per GB its popularity is getting quite worrying…

As if having my parker1.co.uk site hacked and dropped from the Google index wasn’t enough, I was notified yesterday by Streamline, the host of my ubuntusatanic.org site, that they are going to suspend my site in 5 days’ time! The reason they gave was:

“Whilst diagnosing performance issues with the server that hosted this site, it was noted that large downloads from this site were affecting the performance of the server.”

It seems that even though Hardy is still in beta and the Ubuntu SE changes aren’t even released yet, the downloads of Ubuntu SE have been enough to get me kicked off… and I pay for so-called “unlimited” downloads!

Streamline state in their terms and conditions that they will refund the entire subscription fee if they cannot host a site due to high bandwidth, so we’ll see about that.

Until then, I’ve signed up with BitFolk to provide a dedicated server running Ubuntu Hardy. It’s completely unmanaged and I’ve never run a server on the ‘net before, so I’ve got a lot to learn, but it should be a lot of fun.

Well, it’s been a few days since this site was hacked via a Wordpress vulnerability and was dropped from Google. I’ve found out more about what went wrong…

The site was cracked using the “magic include shell”. Not only did it put invisible links in the Wordpress main page and in one of my posts, but also in the main page of my site. Here are some links on fixing this and protecting Wordpress:

• How to protect your wordpress blog from hacking
• WordPress Backdoor
• Protecting Wordpress from Magic Include Shell

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and installed a security plugin, so hopefully it shouldn’t happen again.

The more I think about it, the more annoying it is. It’s not really the fact that the site was hacked, but that Google dropped it from its indexes. Sure, the pages only contain details on a few of my hobbies, but they ranked number one for searches such as “mythtv ubuntu” and even “building a shed”! Now they don’t even appear. It’s as if they never existed.

I’ve put a lot of work into them over the years and everything from my Myth TV pages to my Eternity Screensaver project has been affected. I’m sure it will be back up there soon enough, but I can only imagine what affect this kind of thing would have on small business sites - what if this was my livelihood? Imagine if I ran my business from here and 80% of the traffic on the site came from Google?

The fact is that I was naive and stupid, but the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. I know that what Google did was fully automated, but the rules are set by humans. They knew full well that this was a hack as they stated it in the email they sent me. I just think that they should have given me a chance to sort out the problem before taking such drastic action.

I got an email yesterday from Google informing me that this site had been dropped from their index. Sure enough, instead of being the top hit in a number of searches, it’s now completely disappeared from all search results. Don’t really know why I’m writing this, coz nobody will ever find it…

…and the reason… the site had been hacked and contained a load of viagra links. When you viewed the page, there was nothing unusual, but look at the source and there were a load of links to dodgy sites. It was this Wordpress blog which had the vulnerability. Two files in the theme, header.php and footer.php had be overwritten and also in one of *my* posts, there was a hidden font reference which contained a load of spam.

I’ve upgraded to the latest Wordpress and removed the offending files. It’s good of Google to let me know - they sent an email to all the usual “webmaster” addresses telling me what had happened. Still, it’s a bit annoying that they dropped the site first without letting me fix the problem. It’s a kind of “guilty until proven innocent” approach.

I’ve learnt my lesson, though. I thought of ditching Wordpress and using a hosted blog, but there are too many links to my blog from other sites - MythTV questions and the like, so I’m reluctant to do that. I guess I’m stuck fighting the spammers for now.

(No, “Gutsy Backports” has nothing to do with what curry I had last night…)

Following on from my last post, if you can’t wait for Hardy to be released, MythTV 0.21 is now available for Ubuntu 7.10 in the Gutsy Backports repository. Just adding the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list and it should be installed automatically as an update:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-backports main restricted universe multiverse

Well, MythTV 0.21 is out and has quite a lot of interesting new features. See the release notes for more details.

Of most interest to me are:

• The ability to do multiple recording on the same DVB multiplex.
• Storage groups, allowing recorded files to be stored in different places very easily. Great if you run out of disk space, which happens to us all!
• Reduced mythfrontend memory consumption by upto 75% depending on theme and resolution.

If you run Ubuntu, I’d suggest waiting until next month when Hardy is released and doing an upgrade. Hardy comes with 0.21 and I’ve heard that it works fine. When it’s released (probably on April 24th) you’ll get a button in the “update manager” offering the upgrade. Just hit this and it will upgrade every element of your system to the latest version, including MythTV.

It should preserve all your recordings and settings. I’ve had no issues with this in the past, but it might be worth backing up your database first as a precaution:

mysqldump -u root mythconverg -c > mythconverg_020.dmp

Just a quick note to say that I’m finally moving house on Friday. It’s been a long slog, but it should all be worth it. So, if I’m late replying to emails or posts then it’s because I’m up to my eyeballs in boxes!