Important notice to hostees

Attention, all Deletetheweb and other hostees! I’ve received notice that somehow, we’re using a ridiculous proportion of the processor time of our server. It’s likely that one of us is being hit by a security exploit again, and/or is doing something they shouldn’t. This is most likely to be my fault, but it could be one of you lot.

Dreamhost will shortly provide me with more detailed statistics, and hopefully I’ll be able to track down the errant process. Since I’m ferociously busy, the most likely control I’ll implement will be simply nuking whichever script is causing the problem.

So it’s possible that your site may either partially or entirely stop working at some point in the near future. If so, firstly my apologies, and secondly I’ll try to get it going again as soon as I can.

Please note, incidentally, that several of you still aren’t collecting your email from the server. It’s quite likely that I’ll have to get hard-nosed about that soon; I can’t host you here without giving you an email address, and you must clear that out every so often or it fills up and causes problems. If you don’t clear it yourself, I either have to spend hours clearing up after you (multiply by 24 – this takes me hours), or I’ll simply have to close your account.

10 thoughts on “Important notice to hostees”

  1. ooh, didn’t know, or rather there is a shadowy memory, of e-mail, tell me how to access it and I’ll delete all – as I don’t get any comments worth keeping [bar three]
    could it my prodigious addition of images to my blog?

  2. Can you keep us updated on thise please, JJ? I’d hate to think it was anything I’m doing and would leap, LEAP, sir, into action if it were.

  3. Oh yeah, I’m not that bright neither. I always collect my mail but do I have to delete it as well? Sometimes I get something on my laptop and then it comes up again on my mac mini and asks me if I want to delete it, so i say ‘yes please’ but that don’t make no difference, it just comes back again. computers? they ain’t what god intended, no sireee!

  4. My initial diagnoses suggest that the culprit is, in fact… er… me. Looks like my Trackbacks are being hammered really hard, so for the moment I’ve pulled them completely (they should fail with an error) to see if that mitigates the problem. Certainly, this site seems to be getting more spam attempts than the rest of you put together… and then some.
    But I will keep you posted. I’ve a support request in with Dreamhost, asking them to refine their statistics reporting since it’s rather hard to tell what’s going on from the data they’ve given me.
    Colin – no idea what you’re suggesting, but it’s probably OK. I’ll check that things look OK from my end, but I suspect you’ve something odd going on at your end. Check your settings in Mail – are you using POP or IMAP?

  5. Er, hmmm, I’m getting about 10-15 trackbacks every other day at the moment. I’ve given up blocking with blacklist and picking out the common IP’s. But that seems to have been picked up, and they’ve been back with a vengance this last week 🙁

  6. you can pull my trackbacks as far as I’m concered, I get plenty on a daily basis and de-ping them in a “go forth kind…” of way, be happy not to have any. and – er – and not really sure what they do anyway…

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