Noise to Signal

Login disabled.

And now I'm back again

So. Hello again. For the full story of why we went offline, see this G&T post - it's the same for both sites. Have a read if it if you haven't already, and then come back here. (Short version: we're now clean of viruses, and it wasn't our fault.) But whilst I used that post to complain about our hosting company did wrong - what about what we did wrong?

You wouldn't think there would be anything. After all, the problem was with the server itself, not with our account. We didn't cause the problem. It's Hosting Unlimited who are at fault here. Which is true. But actually, there's one fundamental thing I've learnt through this whole situation: Heed. Virus. Warnings.

We've been having reports of people getting virus warnings from NTS for a while. But when I FTPed in, I couldn't find anything - so I just assumed it was a false positive. But there's the problem - the word "assumed". It's not a helpful word to use in connection with any kind of virus issue. As soon as I'd heard that there were problems, we should have yanked the site and not put it back online until I knew what was causing them. Simple as that.

As a secondary issue, all I did to take the site "offline" was replace the front page here with a holding page. In retrospect this was dumb - the holding page was also injected with the exploit code, so what good did it do? Besides, anyone getting into the site via other means - a bookmarked permalink, or an archive page - just got straight into the site anyway. This was just dumb - especially once I knew there was a problem with viruses, I should have yanked the entire site properly. This is just stupid.

So, despite how irritating this whole event has been, I have actually learnt something. You never know quite how to deal with viruses on your site until you're actually confronted with them. This is especially true if you can't even see any evidence of them anywhere - either on your own computer, or via FTP. But if people are saying there's a problem - more than likely there's a problem. I should have been more on my guard. But I'll know for next time.

Now - can anyone recommend me a good hosting company to replace the fucking awful Hosting Unlimited? I need to be able to sell on webspace, so they need to offer a reseller account of some sort...

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Comments

I've *just* figured out what this article title is a reference to. Well done.

By Ian Symes
October 06, 2006 @ 9:53 am

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I'm surprised anyone got it at all!

By John Hoare
October 06, 2006 @ 10:19 am

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When are you going to fix the fact it keeps telling me I post comments too often? :P

By Jeffrey Lee
October 10, 2006 @ 1:57 am

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And as if by magic, it didn't say it that time.

By Jeffrey Lee
October 10, 2006 @ 1:57 am

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And that's magic! It's not very good, but it's magic.

By Ian Symes
October 10, 2006 @ 3:21 pm

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It's not very good, but it's magic.

Yes. Now it's complaining again!

I'm guessing that it's got confused and is complaining when it shouldn't be, and vice-versa.

By Jeffrey Lee
October 10, 2006 @ 8:53 pm

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I'm not getting it at all. I am, however, getting server not responding errors.

I think the new server doesn't like Perl. I'm moving hosts next week anyway...

By John Hoare
October 10, 2006 @ 8:55 pm

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I think my mammoth Ghost In The Shell article has succeeded in breaking Movable Tripe, so the sooner you change server/switch to Drupal the better :-P

By Jeffrey Lee
October 15, 2006 @ 7:23 pm

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Changing server next week. To 1.0!

We are changing to Drupal, but there is absolutely no way I'll have time to do it until Christmas. I'll have to put a week aside...

By John Hoare
October 15, 2006 @ 10:47 pm

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Tittybums!

I guess I'll split the article into two parts then, since MT fails to publish the entire thing.

By Jeffrey Lee
October 15, 2006 @ 11:01 pm

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Leave it until next week when it changes server, and try then. It's just a server problem - MT itself is fine.

By John Hoare
October 15, 2006 @ 11:24 pm

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MT seems to agree with you, as it gives an error when I try to publish the second part.

By Jeffrey Lee
October 15, 2006 @ 11:52 pm

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To those of you getting annoyed that the site keeps timing out when you try and post a comment (even though the comment still posts) - we're moving server in the next couple of days that should eliminate this problem.

By John Hoare
October 20, 2006 @ 1:33 am

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