The machines are in their new location with better connectivity, though the main server is still in dire need of an upgrade. Writing will resume soon, though likely more personal entries than news and analysis for a while.

Thanks to our first comment HTML abuser, I've had to strip div and table tags from people using the Default filter (previously named "BBCode+Smilies") on comments or posted entries. Tables are still accessible with a new (and even easier) syntax. See the table demo page for further instructions. I have also reduced some of the abilities of the WikiText input filter, and gone through and cleaned up the filters in a general sense.

To the best of my knowledge, this only affected one existing entry, which I have fixed by hand. Core users and guest bloggers still have access to additional formats that allow these restrictions to be bypassed.

I'm having some problems with a new access control module, to replace the previous one that was randomly failing to protect entries. I should have it sorted out shortly; please forgive the disruption.

Update: I have managed to successfully remove the offending module. This means that users have lost the ability to restrict access to nodes again, but at least the site is stable, and no longer vulnerable to attack.

A security problem in the version of Drupal I was running finally prompted me to spend the day upgrading the system to the new 4.6 series. The good things: the new trackback anti-spam system is working very well, so trackbacks have been re-enabled. The new image system is much less buggy than it used to be, and in particular, resizing properly happens only in one direction now. Access permissions specific to taxonomy terms are actually working now, so works of fiction are now only accessible to users who are logged in (at Lynne's long request). There's now a type of node for storing recipes, should that become of interest. Nodes can now accept arbitrary files as attachments. The image filter actually works now, making it easier to publish linked thumbnails.

First, the good news: the Resonant Information server is now twice as fast as it used to be. The bad news is that it still isn't really fast enough.

The server that runs resonant.org and brttc.org is an ancient piece of hardware, running on an ABIT KT7A-RAID motherboard with a mere gigabyte of memory. The processor for quite some time had been a 750 MHz Duron chip, the cheap replacement that got dropped in when a failed watercooling experiment destroyed the Athlon 1800+ chip that had been in it originally. Unfortunately, as the size of the site grew, this became more noticeably insufficient, and I was finally spurred to action today when it completely keeled over, killed by processor churn.

The base URL for Resonant Information is now http://www.resonant.org:81 (shifting from port 80 to port 81, thanks to some idiocy at my workplace that is blocking access to ports on my own home system, despite the fact that I really do use information on it as a reference for work. I am hoping that this situation will be taken care of soon, and that not too many readers are behind restrictive firewalls or proxies that will freak out at this.

Despite having patched Drupal to run its anti-spam module on trackbacks, too much trackback spam is getting through, even of the form of stuff that it's been theoretically trained on and should know for certain is spam, and the attacks are coming ever more frequently. Thus, I have no alternative but to disable trackbacks until enough of the Drupal modules for 4.6.0 are working well enough for me to attempt a major upgrade and test the systems again.

Days like this make me think the Chinese had the right idea when they started executing spammers.

Or at least mostly complete. The new gigabit connection is working (that doesn't affect the average reader on the other side of a much smaller pipe, but helps inter-server communications here), and the new storage is online. Home directory space is greatly enlarged, for those who were complaining about it. And there's room for my photos now, which are currently transferring.

Not upgraded was the CPU. I'm putting that off to another week.

Over the last couple weeks, half of my main entries have been announcements of one technical problem or another, and the trend continues tonight. It appears that port 80 is now being blocked by my provider (Cox) on SOME connections (but not all), despite the fact that I'm on a business account that is not supposed to have any blocking whatsoever.

Those who are seeing this anyway should take note that port 443 is NOT being blocked, so you can still access the site by:

https://www.resonant.org/

(Note the https rather than the http.)

Well, that was a nightmare. I realized only after finishing a long entry and logging out for the night that my attempt to put in per-category access controls earlier completely broke access for any unauthenticated users. It still looked fine to me, of course, since I was necessarily logged in when I activated the new module, and then seeing some errors in the logs and not wanting to deal with them immediately, deactivated the module again.

A good chunk of time later (in which I would have much rather been sleeping), I appear to have gotten basic access working again, though I'm now stuck with the taxonomy_access module in a partially working and unremovable state.