Category Archives: Announcements

Busy busy busy!

Pardon the rambling. Just blowing off steam here.

We’re going on a full week since the rehost here. And things are starting to settle into normalcy again.

The IRC servers are reachable, we have a working frontpage that I can post to easily, and teh forums are back online.

Now I start running across weird stuff I didn’t have to deal with before. Like phpBB abusers. We didn’t have them before, because, frankly, we were on an ancient version of UBB. But, since we were (forcibly) starting fresh, and the host provides access to phpBB, I figured why not. Now we get weirdos coming into the forums just to get themselves linked or spaming for…well, you’ve probably received spam before. So you know what these idiots are advertising.

I mean, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

Sometimes I wonder about people.

Luckily, we had someone involved in the forums who was more with it (with regards to securing phpBB) than I was. He made a few good suggestions for preventative measures to keep the forums from being overrun by bots or idiot link-seekers. And I’ve begun putting this advice into effect.

But GOD I wish I didn’t need to.

Oh well…

Chas’ social calendar!

Okay, in my copious free time, I’m going to be attending a couple of conventions this year.

And that’s about it. CODCon and Acen, I’ll be just wandering around as an attendee.

DefCon, I’m supposed to be goonsquad (security).

GenCon, I’ll either be working the pods again this year, or doing booth and gopher duty.

So, if you’re attending any one of these cons, I hope to see you there.

Another update? So soon?

I dunno. Maybe I’m not feeling well or something. But yep. Another update.

Took a cruise out to Phil’s casa last night and came back loaded for bear (or at least a really pisssed chihuahua) with computer hardware.

[Image Removed]

These are three of the four machines I acquired. Two are dual Celeron 500 (don’t laugh, it’s not like I’m gonna game on the damn things). The third is a dual P3 800 system.

System 4 is a decomissioned Dell 2400. Dual P3 1Ghz with 2 gigs of RAM and six 9.1 GB SCSI drives. I currently have Ubuntu Linux installed on it and it’s in the process of updating.

Man. It’s been a while since I actually, I dunno UPDATED!

Heck. Eleven months since I last posted an update.

Sorry I haven’t been more active people. Between work, and work, and school. Well, let’s just say 95 hour weeks (plus commute times) doesn’t leave me a hell of a lot of time to get active online.

The bad news? There’s at least another year or so of it ahead. Once I finish my degree, I should have a bit more free time (will still be working a lot though).

IRC Server Updates

Okay guys, the EvilNET IRC has been experiencing problems, as of late, with it’s current IRC service provider. Random, over-broad bans, unresponsive mods, etc.

As such, the decision was made to move the IRC group off to another service.

As we control our own DNS, it took a massive effort of about three minutes with a word text editor to make the changes.

The lengths we go to…..

Anyhow, as such, we’re in the process of moving off to a network known as slashnet.org.

Here are the current server mappings:

irc.evilnet.net Random Server on the network
irc2.evilnet.net
irc3.evilnet.net
irc4.evilnet.net
irc5.evilnet.net
irc6.evilnet.net
irc7.evilnet.net
us.evilnet.net Random US Server
eu.evilnet.net Random European Server
au.evilnet.net Random Australian Server

This change-over should aleviate most, if not all, of the problems we’ve been experiencing.

If you have any questions, comments, grips, etc, feel free to e-mail me.

CBT offline for a short while here.

My apologies for the abrupt loss of the CBT.com domain guys.

Some work is being done on the server and the website to find out exactly what’s been causing a MASSIVE overload on the server over the last few days.

We had to shut the site down for a short while so that we could dig around in the server without it coming to a standstill.

CBT.com will be back shortly.

If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me.

Final notice guys.

Okay. Coming up on November 14th of 2003, it’ll have been one year since the billing for EvilNET was taken over by our host, PurpleHat.net.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t gone smoothly at all. In that timeframe, I’ve received exactly TWO payments from users of our services. And only ONE has actually switched over to a standard PurpleHat account.
Essentially, some of you have gotten a year of free hosting from us.
That’s ending quite soon though.
As of yesterday, every user on the server was notified by e-mail that they had exactly 30 days to either remove their content from the server, or to transition over to a paying PurpleHat account.
After that time, the user account will be deleted, along with the contents of the user’s directory.

I’m sorry to take such a hard-line stance with this. But it’s not fair (nor particularly affordable) for EviNET or PurpleHat to foot your bills for service.

Notice is served.

A few problems.

Okay. Two things here for edification.

FIRST!

I probably should have posted this to the main page before.

Currently EvilNET is outgrowing it’s main server’s capacity.

Most of this load is from the SQL daemon (which is handling lots of interactive content for various accounts).

While it’s nice that our server is able to provide dynamic content for people, it’s usually a Bad Thing <TM> when it comes at the cost of drowning out the ability of your web server to function.

So we’re collaborating with PurpleHat, our connectivity provider, to implement another system. The new box will act as a dedicated SQL server, taking the load off the main system.

In the mean time, we’ve lowered the connection limit on the SQL daemon to prevent it from gobbling up the server and spitting it out. The connection limit hasn’t been DRASTICALLY lowered. Just enough to keep things functional. However, this is going to result in some dropped connections for people using services connected to the SQL server (some message boards).

For the most part, people will merely have to refresh a page, or back up and go forward again. Annoying, but not a soul-sucking experience.

This will also result in a number of errors being generated by individual databases, essentially telling you that the database doesn’t like it when it’s connection limit has been reached.

Please be patient with us. The new server should be implemented in short order, and the connection limits will be removed.

SECOND

An FYI, currently our IRC connection is a bit sharky. IRCWorld.org is experiencing connectivity issues of an unspecified nature. The service should resume, reliably, soon.