New to Squidge.org - SSL Everywhere!

Over the next few days, you may have your web browsing session interrupted slightly. I am installing SSL certificates for every domain that is hosted on Squidge.org, which is quite a few in number. Now anytime you go to a website hosted on Squidge.org without the secure "https://" prefix, your browser should be redirected to the secure session instead.

Doing this means that we have to move configuration files around, causing us to have to cycle the webserver twice per domain group. This is going to be a bit frustrating, and I'll apologize in advance. But we need to have https everywhere for everyone's web surfing safety!

Questions? Let me know!

Here's what's going on.

Our server farm is located in our home, specifically in a loft in the detached garage.  As it's a separate building, it has its own power, which is fed from a powerline from the house.

This winter has been more brutal than most, and the powerline to the garage (which is original to the dwelling) has frayed with the influx of ice.  This fraying has caused the line to short out.  This is why the power is out, and Squidge.org is down.

An electrician was able to come out last night on an emergency call (electricians are about 30 days out where we are, due to weather).  He diagnosed the issue, and said that he was going to have to replace the line between the house and the garage.  He was going to expedite it; someone is supposed to come out today - but that doesn't necessarily mean that the job will be completed today.  I'm hoping it will be, but I'm not holding my breath.

More updates as I get them.  Think good thoughts for them to complete the work today and that we can come up later on - hopefully that will happen.   

There were a few pressing issues that caused the outage we're in right now; this is what's going on.

First, there was intermittent Internet outages due to our ISP.  Then, our mini "datacenter" (which in reality is a loft in our garage) started having power fluctuation issues.  The circuit breaker to the garage blew for some unknown reason, and stayed on for a short period of time.

During that time, it was found that the power issues caused the firewall server to go kaput; so the firewall machine is dead.  It will not boot at all, so I took it out of service and started installing on another machine as a backup.

Then the circuit breaker tripped a few more times.  After doing research, it seems that there is a short somewhere in the wiring, so the system is shutting itself off - which means no power to the garage, and thus, no power to the servers.

So an eletrician is being contacted to come out and figure out what's going on.  They'll have to fix whatever the issue is, and then we'll be able to restore service.  Hopefully that will be in the next 24 hours.  Then once completed, we'll run without a firewall until a new one is put into place.

My apologies for this unforseen issue; we've been running in this space for 12 years now with no real power issues (besides the occasional outage) so I know this is disconcerting.  More updates as I get them.

So after the hacking event, I put NCISFiction.com on lockdown, changing everyone's passwords and locking down the site to read-only while I converted to a new, more secure software package.  The work for that is complete, and all access has been restored.

NCISFiction.com (as well as mirrored domains NCISFiction.net and NCISFiction.org) is now up on a software package called eFiction.  I managed to import all users (except spam users), all stories, and all comments.  You can head over to NCISFiction.com and you should see the archive in a slightly different format, but everything should still be available.

An email is going out now to all users saying that you need to change your password.  If you need assistance, don't hesitate to ping me on here, on Facebook.com/Squidge.org or on Twitter @squidgeorg

Thank you!

We have acquired a new webserver, which should hopefully help with some of the stability issues we've seen as of late.  Over the next few days, I'll be prepping that new server to make sure everything is up to date, installed, and ready to go.  And once that is completed (probably mid next week) we will do a switchover.  It should be transparent to end users, though there will be some downtime involved.

I'm going to be installing and setting up a firewall in response to the massive amount of hacking attempts that are escalating as of late.  This should help both with keeping the hackers out, as well as cut down on the amount of spam Squidge users receive.

It will be important to let me know if there are any issues with access (web, mail, IRC, etc).

I will implement the firewall about 3pm Pacific time today, 8/29/14.  You can contact me here, or my off-squidge email: squidgeadmin@icloud.com

Taking the webserver offline for about an hour starting at 11am Pacific to do some major upgrades.  More news as it happens!