News from the Top

The Denial of Service attacks appear to have subsided; services are returning to normal.

The DNS servers that we use to manage our domain name records have been undergoing a Denial of Service attack since Monday, and the attacks have since intensified to include all 6 of our backup DNS servers. Our service provider have been working to mitigate the problem, however, a handful number of users may experience a delay in accessing HeavenGames – some may have to try visiting the site several times before they get through. We’re also in the process of setting up more backup nameservers for our DNS records with another provider to prevent problems in if the DOS attacks don’t subside over the next few days.

We’ve installed a Trac for the current version of our forums. If you come across a bug in the forums, please report it here so we can track it down and fix problems. The current system is in maintenance mode as we work on migrating the forums to use a database backend. Also a word of caution about that previous sentence: Don’t get too hyped up about the new version, or expect too much from it – there’s a lot of things we want to do but we need to do it in measured steps.

A Trac for the downloads is being setup and will be announced soon.

The following updates were applied to the server:

• Apache 1.3.37
• Rails 1.1.6
• Zope 2.9.4
• Python 2.4.3
• SQLite 3.3.6

If you come across isues, particularly in Zope, please notify me as soon as possible.

We’ve updated to Rails 1.1.2.

It’s done, completed, merged, finished. After a lot of work comparing accounts, coming up with business rules and how to tackle conflicting account names, and worrying constantly about possibly breaking various programs that connect to the user database, we now operate on one database only. We can finally move on to other projects at HG :)

Urchin hasn’t been processing daily webstats since November 16th when one of its processes hung over an attempt to update its GeoIP database. That process has since been unstuck and web stats should be up-to-date after 4am tomorrow.

Our installation of Ruby on Rails has been updated to 1.0 RC4. Read the official announcement if you are curious about what’s been changed, as well as steps needed to update your rails project to the latest version.

Our installation of phpMyAdmin has been updated from 2.6.1 to 2.6.4-pl3. Release Notes are available if you’re curious what the updates change and fix.

We’ve updated PHP to 4.4.1 on all our servers, which fixes some security vulnerabilities and bugs. Please read the Release Announcement and ChangeLog for more information.