More changes to the vouching system

Posted on January 4, 2015 by independence

I’ve evaluated the changes to the vouching system in the signup system that was made a few months back and I’m mostly happy with the changes, but as you might have guessed from the title there are a few things that I felt had to change. It seems like it’s gotten a bit too hard to pass the vouching step since we started requiring three vouches, therefore I’m going to change it back to two vouches to pass the step. I still want the community to be able to grow with new members. It should be hard to get an account, but not too hard 🙂

I’ve also changed negative vouches so they give -1 point instead of -2. Some people get very discouraged by a negative vouch, and it required a lot to get past a -2 vouch. Also it seems fair that each vouch is worth the same, negative or positive.

Lastly, you can no longer vouch users directly from IRC. You have to make an effort and log in to the signup program and actually give a short comment/reason for your vouch. This is to make sure that you actually considered the vouched before giving it.

I hope you think the changes are good, feedback is always welcome! Comment on the blog,  send an email or discuss on IRC (main chat or pm is fine)

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Shirt design contest

Posted on October 12, 2014 by independence

Okay, it’s finally time to have a vote on the best shirt motif design. There was only two valid submissions emailed to me, so I’ve included the original design that I made as well. Go and check out the designs!

When you have made up your mind go and vote for your favorite design (Google account required, if you don’t have a Google account E-mail me your vote).

The winning design will be put up at the Blinkenshell T-shirt Shop at Spreadshirt: http://blinkenshell.spreadshirt.net/

 

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Blinkenshell T-shirt Design Contest

Posted on August 1, 2014 by independence

Someone asked me if it’s possible to buy a Blinkenshell T-shirt earlier today, this has not been available earlier but I think it’s a great idea. I’m not the best with graphical design however so I might need some help with creating a nice motif for the shirts (a cool tagline would also be nice!). If you have an idea and know your way around vector graphics please give it a try!

The graphic has to be in vector format (preferrably SVG), and there are some limitations on how small the lines etc can be: Spreadshirt Vector Graphics Recommendations

If you want you can use the Blinkenshell logotype (modified to have thicker lines) in the graphics

Email me your submissions before the 10th of August (23.59 CET) and then we will let the community vote on the best design. I’ll buy one T-shirt and send it to the winner for free! 🙂

The Blinkenshell merch shop will look something like this (you can see what T-shirt models, colors and sizes are available in the shop now or on Spreadshirt.com)

Update1: The contest deadline has been pushed forward to the 25th of August

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Top vouchers giveaway #2

Posted on January 19, 2014 by independence

It’s time for Blinkenshells second Top vouchers giveaway where where the three users who has vouched most new members since the last giveaway are awarded with some extras for their Blinkenshell account. Vouching is very important too keeping the community alive. I want to show my appreciation to the people who spend some time on getting to know the new users. The rewards are the same as last time, you can choose one of the following:

  • 6 months supporter account
  • Permanent +32MB memory limit
  • Permanent +100MB disk quota

The winners are:

  1. lmca (tidalwaters)
  2. dirtydawg
  3. jerd

Thank you and everyone else who vouches newcomers! The winners can contact me via IRC or email to receive their award.

Posted in vouching | 2 Comments

January Maintenance Report

Posted on January 12, 2014 by independence

The maintenance went very well I think, but it did take a long time. Triton was back online at around 23.00 on Friday, and Web and Mailservices was not online until Saturday. I’ve been at the computer all waking hours for the last two days, not stepping outside my appartment until today (apparently it started snowing some time during the weekend, who knew…), but it has been a lot of fun! It’s been a long time since sat down to do some serious work on Blinkenshell, it’s mostly been the day-to-day stuff since last spring basically (200 days uptime). I think I’ve missed getting my hands dirty with the details of the Linux kernel configuration options and such 🙂

So, what has actually changed then? I guess most of the stuff is not very visible to the end user. Some programs on Triton are running new versions, there is a new kernel witch has the new reworked OOM-killer which might affect how/which programs gets killed when you run out of memory, but most of the things are behind-the-scene things. I’ve upgraded the hypervisor, the fileserver, I’ve replaced 4 harddrives and a CPU fan. I’ve installed a UPS and changed some logging and monitoring stuff. I’ve upgraded the web and mail servers, including anti-spam settings and some security things. One of the changes I’m personally most excited about is the new server-side mail filtering options via Sieve. You can for example automatically move spam messages to the Junk folder serverside or filter senders to specific folders etc. Previously I’ve had to do this in my Email client, and that is not very neat if you run a lot of different clients (Alpine/textmode, Webmail, standalone client, smartphone etc).

I’ve also cleared out a few bugs, but there’s probably a few new bugs in there somewhere as well. I’ve also updated some wiki pages, and I’ve created Bitcoin wallet if you want to donate something 😉

Yesterday there was some unexpected downtime on Triton during the afternoon, this was because someone actually hijacked the IP-space that Triton and a lot of other servers use. Someone on AS62196 started announcing a /21 prefix containing Tritons public IP, which caused all the traffic to get routed towards Iran. This also happened to Youtube a few years back, but I didn’t think it was anything common to occur. It was sorted in a few hours though 🙂

Okay, I think that’s all for now (well, maybe we’re going to upgrade the IRCd soon also). Thanks for using Blinkenshell, see you on IRC!

Posted in downtime, hardware, maintenance | 4 Comments

Planned maintanance January 10th

Posted on January 6, 2014 by independence

I’m planning on taking the system down for maintenance, Triton has an uptime of almost 200 days and it’s time for a new kernel as well as some other updates. I will also take this opportunity to upgrade/replace some hard drives in the server.

I will take down Triton/SSH, web and mail services. Since it’s some hardware replacement and upgrade of Triton (compiling stuff on Gentoo) this will probably take almost a full day. I’m planning on starting at 10.00 CET on Friday January the 10th. I’m going to try and post some updates as I’m going along on the Blinkenshell twitter account if you’re interested in following the progress/see when the services are going to be back up again.

Please make a (mental) note about this so you won’t be surprised when you can’t log in on Friday or when your screen session has been killed when you get back 🙂

Posted in maintenance | 1 Comment

Top vouchers giveaway #1

Posted on April 7, 2013 by independence

I wanted to show my appreciation for the awesome Blinkenshell members who take their time to get to know newcomers and vouch for them so they so we can grow our great community, and therefore I’m arranging this little giveaway. I’ve looked up the three members who vouched the most new users during the last 6 months (I’ll exclude anyone who vouched for a users who got banned, thankfully none of the top three vouched for someone who got banned this time!)

The three most active vouchers are:

  • dirtydawg
  • indigo6
  • volkow

Thank you! You can contact me (via IRC or email) to get one of the following bonuses:

  • 6 months supporter account
  • permanent +32MB memory limit
  • permanent +100MB disk quota

I want to make this a recurring thing so there will most likely be a similar announcement during the fall. 🙂

Posted in vouching | 1 Comment

Buildserver

Posted on March 30, 2013 by independence

If you’ve been having problems compiling programs on Triton you’ll be glad to know that there is now a new server where you can compile things with more relaxed resource/memory limits. The idea is that you can use much more memory than on Triton, but only for a short while. The server does not allow any outgoing network connections, and you can’t have any long-running or background processes. There are also more debugging tools installed, like Valgrind.

Try it out by connecting via SSH from Triton: ssh buildserver

More info on the wiki: Info/Compiling

Posted in compiling, services, software | 2 Comments

Happy 2013

Posted on January 5, 2013 by independence

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here, but I thought I might summarize the past year and tell you a bit about what’s been happening behind the scenes at Blinkenshell. The service is much the same, but there has been some changes that you might not be aware of.

In August I moved from Linköping to Stockholm, and the main server moved with me. There was quite a long downtime here, but everything went well overall. I’ve also started a new job in Stockholm, so I’ve not put very much time into Blinkenshell this autumn.

In November when I was just about to start my one week vacation to go to Dreamhack and help build the network infrastructure, something happened with the server I use to tunnel IPv4 traffic. This was ofcourse on a friday, so the service provided did not respond until monday. It tunrned out that the server had rebooted, and the harddrive was not ok. They helped me install a new server the next week I tried to recreate the configuration from old backups and some from memory. Everything did come back up online, but it was a long downtime of several days.

Everything seemed to work fine for some weeks, but on the 21st of December the new server I had been moved to stopped responding. Since this was also on a Friday, and there was Christmas holidays after that, the service provider has still not responded to me about why the server went down. A friend of mine helped me set up a new server for tunnelling the IPv4 traffic now, so everything is back online. This was however an even longer downtime than the one in November.

The new server means we do have a new IPv4 address, and some IRC networks has not updated their I-lines yet so we’ve had issues connecting to Freenode and IRCnet for a couple of days for example. I do however think this new server should help improve response times since it has better connectivity in general.

I believe the new server will be more stable then the old was was this last autumn, but I can’t guarantee anything as usual. I hope you will stick around and see what happens in 2013, and a big welcome to all the new members that continue to join this great community! 🙂

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments