Lots Of Updates
Sorry for the long delay, I’ve been rather busy as of late. In my last post I mentioned that the site, or parts of it, would be down due to a large spam attack. After changing all my passwords, taking down the wiki, forum, calendar, and removing all cron jobs the spam seems to have subsided. Along the same lines I took down the contact me page just in case. To this point I don’t know where the spam was coming from. Most likely I was victim to email spoofing, at least that’s what my hosting company told me. I was skeptical because some of the spam that I received came from their server. Dreamhost, provides users with shell access if they want it which is uncommon for shared hosting. When you are granted shell access there are a couple of servers that you log on to. About half of the spam came from one of their servers. This is not a slap in Dreamhost’s face, it could very well have been a script that was exploited and the attackers gained access from it. The long and the short of it is I’m not 100% sure what happened but I’ll definitely be a little more precautious with the packages that I install.
In other news I have my Gentoo boxes up and running. Gentoo is a great Linux distro if you’re interested. It does have some draw backs, and pros, though when you compare it to other distros. First off you compile everything in Gentoo from source! There are ways to use some pre-built packages but for the most part you’re going to be doing a lot of compiling. When you compare this to Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, etc this doesn’t sound too hot. Don’t let if fool you! The packaging system in Gentoo is top notch. Portage, their packaging system, provides the most customization I’ve ever seen. I can install package A without installing package B and installing package C less than version x.x.x.x. It’s great! If you haven’t given it a try, check it out.
I have mixed feelings about this next topic. Recently I purchased another 20.1″ UltraSharp Flat Panel monitor from Dell. To quote a friend, “it rockers my boxers!” My original plan was to dual screen my main box. I have a Nvidia 6600GT with dual DVI and an S-Video port. I plug-in the new monitor and where did my multi display settings go? I checked my display settings, checked the NView software, updated the drivers and got nada. I played around with this for about an hour, checking out forums, checking driver settings, anything I could think of and for the life of me could not get it to recognize my second monitor. The more forums I checked out the more I realized that I wasn’t the only one with this problem. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing though. Eventually I replaced my old bulb monitor that my Gentoo box is using with the new 20.1″ and it works great. For some reason the DVI didn’t work but VGA works great. I guess it’s a good thing that I didn’t have dual 20.1″ monitors on my gaming box. That would suck to have a nice border right smack down in the middle of the game….
Last but not least, I’m working on a new theme for the site but progress has been slow. I’ve been really busy at work so I haven’t had too much time to work on it. I’ll get it done. Might take longer than I want ,but it will get done.
