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TECHNEWS

We try to keep you up to date about our technical progress at our tech news blog. Visit: http://technews.blogs.sonance.net/

recent technews

  • up again, database recovered 19/02/09

    after a long night of beer blah hack splice graft perl miceql grunge splech pizza argh art blech … the database has been recovered.

    There may be errors or lost data … please let the support or stuff or tech lists know.

    Also the security updates were done on the raw machine … hold your breath!


  • Wordpress Mu update 18/02/09

    just upgraded wordpress mu to version 1.5.1

    new interface
    mhh the visual-editor is not working well in opera 9.5 on OSX …..


  • website down 18/02/09

    As of last weekend, all websites are down due to a hack.  Apologies.

    The problem is a lot of the websites are old and unmaintained.  We cannot see which ones, and we cannot fix them.  As there are hundreds of websites, it is beyond our capacity to keep them going or secure them.

    So they must be the responsibility of each site owner.  In order to deal with this general problem, the board met last wednesday and voted on a general policy of membership requirements.  See an email post thursday.

    Therefore two things are required for each website:

    • a systems administrator needs to be identified and responsible for the security of the site
    • a member needs to sponsor in some sense or other the site

    For Membership, see the email sent out by doris.


  • housing-related Outage 18/02/09

    Sonance suffered another housing-related outage again.  According to Matthias G who went down to the Krypta, the machine has been moved from one place to another, and whoever moved the machine did not plug in the network cable.

    Stuff that happens……..

    Blogs up, evolve up, mailing lists up…  Actually they never went down


  • sonance outage 200900218 18/02/09

    Sonance technical services suffered a complete outage today until 13:30 or so when the machine was rebooted.  Our thanks to Matthias for tramping through the snow to shiver for a while in the cold damp Keller poking at frozen iron.

    Basic issue looks like an IRQ failure on the machine.  Kernels were running (accepting connnections, returning pings) but no userland was getting any attention (no SSH, no keyboard on console!!!).

    Note that the database failure of last weekend is still with us, so many user processes are broken (evolve, php applications).  The basic issue here is that the passwords were all lost from the database, and we can’t figure out how to restore them from a backup as yet . . .  We’ll look at it tonight at our meeting and try and script our way through the MySQL jungle.


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