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Twitter-Bots? April 14, 2008

Posted by Lucanos in : Uncategorized , add a comment

I am not sure whether I am alone in this, but I have noticed a slow increase in the number of notifications I am getting from Twitter, advising me that another user is now following me on their system. Especially as I am anything but an active Twitter user (predominantly due to the limited number of my real-world contacts being on Twitter, and the seemingly addictive and one-sided nature of the beast).

Some are your regular “camgirl” robots - posting links masked by tinyurl (or similar) to try and pull suckers in. But a couple of them also seem to be genuine, if somewhat Twitter-focused, users. The most recent follower I gained is following almost 4,000 other users!

Now, for these few, real, users, I would have to assume that watching that many people on Twitter would have to be 1) draining (think Superman and his need for “The Fortress Of Solitude”), 2) confusing and 3) nearing that point of “information overload”. I have been subscribing to RSS feeds all over the place through the Google Reader application and even just managing them (when I am certainly watching less than 4K different sources) is a freight train which is getting away from me…

How many people actually, solidly, use Twitter? Or is it essentially a system made up of nothing but the “Friend Update” segment of Facebook?

Unlimited Bandwidth - The Aphrodisiac Of The Noughties April 10, 2008

Posted by Lucanos in : Uncategorized , add a comment

Some time ago I wrote about rationalising my hosting accounts, and bundling the vast majority into MediaTemple as a result of their Grid-Server product and the 100 domains they allow hosted under the one account (with quite generous bandwidth limits). At that time, I had two “Unlimited” accounts with Precision-Media.net which I had purchased for the low, low price of US$10 a year. I made the note that something that is too good to be true, especially on the net, should be looked at very carefully. I wish I had listened to my own advice…

After requesting that they terminate my accounts (especially after being sent renewal notices quoting the regular price of US$120 a year), I was contacted by the company and offered the same package for the old price, should I wish to continue hosting with them. Ten dollars is pretty cheap, and as such, I agreed to this and decided to host a single domain on their servers - one which I was experimenting with, but did not yet consider “critical”. They provisioned an account for me on February 16th, 2008 and all was good… To start with…

On April 9th, 2008, I discovered that all traffic to the domain I had associated with that account (codeopsy.com) was returning DNS Error Messages. I retested this via OpenDNS’s CacheCheck tool, DIG Tools, my Domain-provider’s Control Panel, etc. All testing revealed that my domains were correctly provisioned and pointed at the DNS server for Precision-Media.net, however attempts to access any content or cPanel interface failed.

It was only when I visited their billing page, and later their main site that I saw the notice stating that they had suffered a “…harddrive failure and all data has been lost.” The site also stated “Please no further inquiries until site is fully operational.” … Fully operational? That may take a while…
The following day the page was updated to show that around 80 accounts had been recovered from backups up to a month old. My account was not mentioned as having been recovered. The page also noted that “If your account is not in this list, your backup was missed due to storage size, connection problem, new customer, custom packages.” and then had the audacity to remind us, as users to “Remember to take backups regularly!”

Seems that Precision-Media would be well advised to take that little tip to heart themselves.

I am lucky in that none of the content I had on this account was irreplaceable or invaluable - it was a project site and something that I may release to the world further down the track, but I will surely be wanting a more stable hosting provider when that happens.

This is the second time that I have suffered a major service interruption with Precision-Media in the 18 months I have been a customer of theirs. The initial interruption was due to the work of a hacker who attacked their system, and this time because of a hard drive failure and a lack of server-based backups.

The most frustrating aspect is that, whilst I can agree that taking backups is part of my responsibility as a customer, it seems that Precision-Media did not even have the foresight to have their own backups regarding their Customer accounts, subscription details, etc. as their website asks anyone who is not listed as a recovered account to email them with their domain, username, PayPal address and date of subscription. You would think that detail would, could and certainly should be retained, backed up and guarded with the life of the hosting provider.

We’ll wait and see whether they reprovision my account soon. The funny thing is that the US$10 is too little to worry about in demanding a refund - the time I wasted in just trying to find out what had happened to my account would easily be 10-20 times that amount.

33,000 hits and over 14Gb of traffic in two days? April 8, 2008

Posted by Lucanos in : programming, wordpress , add a comment

How, you may ask? Simple, I say - I was Hacked. The logs I have managed to extract from my server are sketchy at best, but I was lucky enough to be assisted by Kevon of TailRank.com who was very generous with his time and clued me into why I was being crippled by bandwidth overheads when his servers were doing their normal polling activity. (NOTE: TailRank were NOT responsible in any nature for this attack.)

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