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Website back up after server outage


webmaster

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Hi guys,

The site was down since the 16th and just came back up. Sadly the restore somehow triggered the old malicious redirect code and the site was blacklisted again. Dreamhost was at first less than communicative and I was getting pretty upset - but today I got a lot of great helpful e-mails and support for identifying what needed to get done and how to do it. Quite impressed with them now even though it took 3 days to have the restore done.

I hope to get the majority of the clean up done this weekend, but I will also be trying to implement a donation post or button to try and build a maintenance budget for keeping the site in good shape as well as developing more content.

Webmaster

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if you use a mac and safari to visit this site, you will continue to get malware warnings even after the site has been cleaned up. here's how to fix that:

open terminal (applications>utilities)

type (or copy & paste) the following:

open "`getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR`com.apple.Safari"

this will open a finder window showing the directory that contains your SafeBrowsing.db file; trash this file and restart safari...this will recreate your SafeBrowsing.db file. quit terminal.

happy to answer any questions about this...

andré

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That was because the site got blacklisted during the server restore after the server host we're on had a disk controller issue on july 16th. Site wasn't accessible - but on the 18th of July there were a rash of redirects detected by Google (no idea how since the site wasn't accessible).

I was sick and tired of the blacklisting issues so I put in a LOT of hours to totally remove all the old site data from the hosted server, and I worked with Dreamhost to ensure all the files being hosted were good. Reset passwords of all the accounts, and worked with August to get the forum updated to the latest version.

I just requested a review from Google to hopefully get the site whitelisted again, and that should propagate to the other seach engines soon.

Andre showed about how to white list sites in Safari (Mac), and I know you can manually white list in other browsers as well.

Site is VERY secure now, and I should hope all the site warnings disappear shorty.

Rabin

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just to explain a little better -- the safari browser on the mac keeps a local copy of a black list -- it gets this from authoritative internet sources (google, et al). so even after a site has been removed from the source blacklist, a site will show up as bad (malware warnings, etc.). i'm not sure why the local blacklist doesn't get updated to remove sites, i'm guessing it works that way because it's more secure (so no one will bother spoofing the source blacklists, etc.).

the local blacklist for safari is the SafeBrowsing.db file...the only way to update it is to delete it. the next time you start up safari, it looks for that file and if it can't find it, it recreates a new blank one in the proper format (this checking process is one reason why some apps take so long to start up sometimes). this whole delete-and-recreate business is a standard way to fix a corrupt preference file for mac apps, by the way.

the reason i am explaining this in such depth is because i think that several other browsers, including those on the windows platform, have a similar logic to them. you need to somehow update a local information store to get rid of the warnings, since that's where they are still coming from since the original source of the information, the authoritative internet source, has been updated.

andré

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Thanks Andre - I'll have to do some checking to see if there's any similar logic on Windows based browsers for keeping a specific blacklist history aside from the usual url history info.

As an update for the site - My searching for the site as well as hitting up the site directly shows no attack warnings anymore. Google's Webtools also report a clean bill of health. Should be good to go now.

Rabin

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Love the new forum software. Much more user friendly. I had a national hosting service screw me (Hostway). They moved some 1500 servers in Florida some 1000 miles and mine ended up in a swamp somewhere. The installed a fresh copy of RedHat on it and was surprised that I wasn't happy. Bottom line is they got more lawyers that you do so their SLAs don't mean squat. Your best best is to take charge of your own backups, expect failure, be prepared and when you can afford it, just pay for bandwidth..

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I knew - and Dreamhost admits their backups are not to be trusted. I've been researching the best way to get an automated incremental back up happening, but still working on it. I've got a windows home server I could use for back ups, but not a lot of experience with Linux...

Funny enough - We just had our Windows laptops replaces with Red Hat Open Client Enterprise - so just starting to build my Linux skill set. I hope to fix an an old laptop so I can install Xubuntu on it to get a bit more familiar and then see what I can do about backups. I found some decent articles on how to set up the backups I wanted - but they were all for Linux. If I get the laptop set up it can become my website admin box and house the site backups as well.

If you have any suggestions for how you deal with backups I'd be most interested to hear how you do it.

Rabin

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