Server upgrades

The server has had a few hardware upgrades to add cooling, sound levels and storage. I have added a Lite-on DVD-RW as I burn large amounts of data from the server that won’t fit on a DVD. I’ve put an 80mm fan on the back to take out the hot air from the case and changed the 200W Seagate PSU for a 350W Lite-on to decrease the sound levels. At the moment there is a ATI 9550 256MB graphics card installed in the server that I’m using to set up the DVD-RW but I may leave it in there as it may come in handy, but normally there wouldn’t be a graphics card due to heat and because I never use them.

There are some planned upgrades for the future which include a SATAII PCI controller and some SATAII hard drives to boost the storage space. Another upgrade would be from 100Mb/s to 1000Mb/s network card that greatly boost the speed of the network when I backup my computers.

New Email

After talking to Graham from IdleEntity.net about my email he added me to his server’s mail domain hosting list. Graham was the previous host for my websites but now he provides me with email as I have a dynamic IP address meaning that it is hard to prove where emails came from. The new email address for black flag is blackflag[at]black-flag.co.uk . Any other email send to the black-flag.co.uk domain will be rejected by the server.

Email bounces

Hello everyone. I have moved all my domains and that of Amiapoil Burmese over from 1and1 to Heart Internet. The reason for this was because Heart Internet provide DNS services for free along with the domain hosting. Due to this move all email send to black-flag.co.uk will bounce back because there is currently no email server controlling the email but you can email at cosmo1847.co.uk, you just put something @ infront of the domain to email me. I hope to have Amiapoil Burmese moved over and sorted out over soon.

FTP yays

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.

FTP Whoes

I have got a working FTP server installed on the server but there is a problem, A very big problem. It accepts my user fine but not the new one that I made for Keaton. Using my ftp client, CyberDuck, I can’t log in using FTP but I can using SSH as I have made Keaton a user on the computer. The problem with SSH is the securety risk is poses to the server as they can get into all sorts out places inclusing the root, web and my person files that are stored on the server. For this reason I shell not allow using SSH access until I have sorted out a way to limit their access to directories. I will be working on FTP in the hoildays to hopefully fix this problem. Until then no one can upload stuff to the server.

PSU replacement

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.

Black Flag Blogs

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

EveryDNS DoS

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.

Mozbot

Something I wanted on the IRC channel was a bot that would keep the operator position and make allowed users operators when they log into the server. With Mozbot I have been able to do that. It sits there and makes me a operator when I ask it to instead of waiting for the operator to promote mt status. A operator is a user in the IRC channel that has control to manage the channel and to kick other users off the server if need be.
Mozbot Homepage

IRC Server

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.