Category: News

After much annoyance with the FTP program because it wouldn’t allow Hyl1an to connect to the server but it allowed me to and I had no idea why. So after looking about the net and the difference between me and Hyl1an on the system I found that Hyl1an had no shell linked to his username. It turns out that Pro-FTPd needs a vaild shell for the user before it will allow them to connect to the server. I have now disabled this feature so that I can get users connect to the FTP server without being able to log in via SSH.

First I want to say I am sorry for the downtime. I moved the server so I had to turn it off but I also changed over the power supply unit (PSU) for the server for a few reasons. The main reason is that the old PSU was mounted on the top of the case so I couldn not put things on top of it without it over heating. The second reason was because the recommend Wattage is 150W and the old PSU is 140W even though the old one was the orginal in the computer. The third reason was that the PSU was non-ATX so it was mounted in a funny position, at the top of the case. It now has a nice 200W SeaSonic PSU installed that I took out of another old computer I was given.

I have also got the icon that is next to the URL to display my favicon instead of the browser default to give some nice relation to the hostee’s site and the server. Another reason the server went down was because in the process of moving the server and another desktop I managed to pull the router off it’s mounts and onto the floor that knocked out the ADSL cable. As you can see everything is up and running nicely now and you can see the favicon in the sites hosted on this server.

WordPress released a multi-user version of their system that allows people to sign up and create their own blogs. After some tinkering I have managed to install and get working this system on my server that will handle all new bloggers on my server. This has replaced the system of me coping the wordpress files and making a new database table and user so all I have now is only one set of files and a single database to handle all of the new blogs. The main problem I have at the moment is that I do know have a mail server installed so it can’t send you any emails with your password or activation key in. At the moment I have to get the key from the database and activate your blog for you but I am hoping to fix this at some point.
Black Flag Blogs

This morning EveryDNS who provide the DNS services for my domains had a large scale DoS (Denial of Service) attack that stopped the server from working. This has been restore from a 400Mb/s of DoS attacks into 2Mb/s of DNS queries. In other words the service has been restored for now.

This server has been online for one month now and within that time the services have in. It has web and IRC, that doesn’t seem that much but they work 🙂 It works well as a file server and it’s set up as the N drive on my desktop.

I’ve installed Hybrid IRCd server on Debian and now host the unoffical IRC channel for Kustom PCs. There are very few users on the IRC channel but I am hoping that this will grow over time. The service is currently limited to a maximum of 40 users to allow us to still play online games at home without to much lag. The server is ran from a domestic ISP but at the moment it doesn’t seem to be causing any problems.

After a lot of twiddling with the Samba configuration file I gave up and rewrote the whole thing from scratch so everything that was in that file I knew what it did. The file is now a lot smaller than the orginal but more importantly it works and allows me to access the server from over the network. Due to a difference in Finder between OSX Panther and Tiger I had to install the lastest verison of Samba onto the server which went very well and was much easier than I thought it would be. All that is really left for me to do is sort out ProFTPd and then I will start offering space.

I have been mucking around with a program on the server that runs other programs or scripts at a set time. Every one min past the hour a script updates the IP address for the dynamic DNS records. Simply it means that the server will be online a lot more than waiting for me to come home from school to fix it. So now if the server comes down it would come online within 10 mins. The main causes of server down time are, powercuts, ISP disconnections or me doing something with ther sevrer.

I have just got HTTPS to work. I’m not to sure what I did but it’s working. I un # some stuff in the Virtual Host SSL file and now it’s all working fine. So now I will set up the SSL FTP so you can use FTP safer than normally. The FTP address is https://ftp.black-flag.co.uk that you can use to access any FTP server and my own when I fix that.

The server is running debain and the web server programs and MySQL are running fine. The problem I am having is that I can not connect to the server apart from using SSH so I can’t update my website or let over people join my server. I have installed ProFTPD for the FTP server that is working but what I do need to sort out is vertural users. These are FTP only users that aren’t on the main system but at the moment I have access to my home directory and that is it. Once it is sorted I will be abled to connect to my server and upload sites and allow my hostees to upload stuff too.

Something else I am having troubles with is Samba. This is the program that allows other computers to connect to it over a network to access files or folders. At the moment I have fixed it so Finder on my laptop doesn’t crash when I try to connect to the server. To do this I had to install the latest version of Samba myself instead of using apt-get. Once I have gotten Samba to work I will update my site and when FTP is working and tested I will start to offer it to my hostees

I will keep you updated with developments. This is why I have made the WordPress blog that I was testing out the homepage for Black-Flag.co.uk instead of the PHP information page.

I have been having lots of problem with my server. It would crash or not connect to the network or something would go wrong making me have to go and fix it so yesterday it took it’s last straw. I replaced the OS with Debian Linux. This OS is much more stable because it does not have a desktop install, meaning that everything you do is command line making it a proper server. To add to this I took away it’s graphics and sound card leaving just the network card installed. I have come across teething troubles that is more than likely to have been caused by me mucking something up while trying to get something else to work. As a result of this I have had to make the changes by hand instead of letting the installer sort things out for me. The server is almost like it was before in the terms that the homepage and 3 of the sites hosted on it are working. All I have left to do is sort out the SSL (https) and the FTP vertural hosts. A new problem I found was that we had a powercut this morning which changed the IP address for all the computers on the network but this was easy to fix cos all I had to do was change the computer the network forwarded stuff to.