This is a single post from deeden.co.uk made during the period May 2002 to April 2009. During a previous grand redesign I decided to make a break with the past and consign the old entries to history. This entry is from October 2004 and lives here forevermore.

In communicado

Poor cabal has been having a very rough time of late; up and down like an exceptionally slow yo-yo. (I may need to work on that metaphor). Well as I write this it’s currently down, so I’m invisible to the online world. Once it comes back up I’ll have to deal with an avalanche of email and also try to coax the machine into a stable state again.

We think we know what has caused the last few crashes. I’m not naming names, but you know who you are :) Nothing to do with SYN flood attacks or MT-comment spammers thankfully, so once we’re up and running again I can do a few things, such as

  1. Upgrade MovableType to version 2.661 to get IP throttling.
  2. Block more spammers IP addresses and user-agents in httpd.conf.
  3. Add discordia to my backups (that will make sense to only a few people).

Of course this all assumes that cabal will reboot after the recent troubles. Currently this is looking like a 50-50 issue. We may have to take the poor machine away and subject it to some serious investigation for a while.