Blinkenshell Blog

I’ve been having some problems with WordPress and Reverse Proxy, but it seems like most problems are quite easy to fix (check Howto/Wordpress if you’re interested). There is however one problem which I can’t seem to figure out. When enabling Permalinks in WordPress, several things seems to go wrong.

First, the .htaccess file is created with wrong URLs and wrong permissions, but after fixing that, it still doesn’t work. It seems like WordPress can’t interpret the URLs when changing the .htaccess file or something. I’ve now started a topic on WordPress support forums, I hope I get some replies there. This setup seems to be quite rare however, but there are a couple of other users out there atleast. Hopefully someone else had the same problem and created a workaround until WordPress devs get around to fixing this 🙂

WordPress Support: Reverse Proxy and Permalinks

I’ve updated the SSL certificate for Blinkenshell today. Before, HTTPS was only available for webmail and phpmyadmin, but now the main wiki is also available via HTTPS. I recommend using the HTTPS version of the site if you want to log in so your password is not sent in cleartext over the Internet.

The certificate is signed by CACert as before. If you have the CACert root installed, you should be able to browse the site without any warnings about the new certificate. If you do not have CACert’s root certificate, you will get a warning that the CA is unknown or something similar. You can choose to trust the individual certificate, but I recommend installing CACert’s root certificate instead. It’s very easy: Howto: Import CACert root certificate

If you havn’t noticed already, I’ve also updated the wiki software and applied a new theme earlier this week. Also, the wiki is now only accepting signup account logins!

I’m going to make an attempt at upgrading the kernel on the server from 2.6.22 to 2.6.27 tomorrow, 8 January 2009. I’m going to start at about 12 CET. Hopefully it won’t take too long, but I suspect there might be some problems since it’s a big upgrade (not only the kernel version, but of the vserver patches). I don’t think it will take more than a couple of hours however, so everything should be back at maybe 15 CET at the latest (if nothing goes horribly wrong).

If things does work out as planned, we will have better IPv6 support after this is completed. Currently the only thing having IPv6 support is the main website, but nothing on Titan.

I also created a little helper script to set up autostart. If you run this script and specify irssi for example, the system will always start a screened irssi for your user when it boots up. This way reboots will go much smoother for you, especially if you have set up irssi properly with autoconnect and autojoin etc. You can run the script by executing: autostart-setup in your shell.

I had to reboot the server this morning. One apache process got stuck in “uninterruptible sleep”, which is pretty bad because it’s impossible to kill it without rebooting. This has happened once before, so I’m starting to think we have some odd bug in the kernel that shows up after a month or so of uptime. I recompiled the kernel with the old SLAB allocator again, instead of SLUB (which is maybe not perfectly stable in 2.6.22).

Edit 2008-09-19: It seems there was a bug in Grsec/PaX that could cause this problem.

The downtime was a bit longer than expected because since I couldn’t kill the process, it was impossible to shut down the system properly. Then I wanted to make sure the filesystem was ok before I started up everything again.

I do not think this problem is related to some connectivity issues that have been reported lately. They are more likely related to some problem at my ISP, maybe rebooting some router or similar (the downtime is usually 2-3 min or something, and it’s happened a couple of times during the last few weeks).

Today marks the two year anniversary of the domain Blinkenshell.org, which was registered on the 10th of August 2006. I don’t have an exact date for when the signups opened, but this date is a good marker in my opinion 🙂

I want to thank everyone who has stuck with us, and helped me build this awesome community! 😀

Not very many free shell providers make it this long, many providers disappear after crackers attacking the service, DoS attacks or general abuse from the members. Blinkenshell has done very well, there has been some issues and some downtime, but we havn’t given up!

Yay for us, and thank you again everyone for being part of this! Go Blinkenshell! \o/

Our IRC channel #blinkenshell reached 100+ nicks yesterday, and blinkenbot reports having seen more than 1900 different nicknames since it started recording statistics 336 days ago. To help prevent any issues with abuse/spam a few changes has been introduced.

Firstly, we now have three new helpops in the channel. They will help keeping things in order, and they can kick and ban people who misbehave. Please welcome the new helpops: djweezy, billnye and InDigo176!

Sencondly, blinkenbot has a new feature which lets blinkenshell members vote to kick people in the channel. You can use the command !votekick <nickname> to vote to kick someone. Three votes are required. The command only works if you are connecting from the shell server titan. Do not abuse this command, abuse will get you kick+banned from the channel!

I believe this will help stopping abuse and/or spam as the channel grows further, it’s very important that it remains a place where you can talk and have fun without being interrputed by spammers etc. Happy hacking! 🙂