August 14, 2003
Editorial
So, what's going on? And where is it all headed? I wish I knew. I was taking a couple of photographs on Saturday morning, then edited them and bunched them into a gallery; when I was finished rather late in the evening and wanted to post the link to Tawawa, the site was gone.
Things went downhill from there.
I didn't immediately contact the host, but when the site still hadn't returned on Sunday morning, I sent a message to them. They had been talking about a "server move" for weeks on end; some things had been a bit wonky during that period, some things had actually improved, but an actual outage hadn't occurred yet -- until then. They never got back to me, but on Monday a message appeared on the host's front page saying that "several issues have been sorted out, some are still being worked on" and that "everything should be sorted out in a matter of days".
People were getting impatient on the host's support forum, particularly since nobody replied to the questions, neither in e-mail nor on the message board itself.
At some point some of the site came back, and it can be accessed at Tawawa's tilde address: Group Weblog, Zemi Note; both of these weblogs have lost all updates since mid-June, however, and the whole content management system has disappeared, along with a couple of other things. They may come back, they may not. If anyone knows, they're not telling.
Yesterday I lost patience waiting and set up the present Contingency Edition on the creative-writing.ch server which Franz Andres Morrissey kindly allowed me to use for this transition period. I also used the domain name registrar's DNS server to redirect incoming Tawawa.org traffic to the the current location. So here we are. How you doing?
If the host manages to sort out their difficulties "in a matter of days", we'll simply move back to the old place, hoping anything like this is not going to happen again; whether or not they'll be able to restore the data that has gone missing, I'd hate having to move the whole show to a new place, with or without the missing data.
What now, apart from the technical problems? Tawawa.org got started as a composition course in early April -- it ended with the final course session on 28 July, and the two remaining student portraits were scheduled to come in by Sunday, 10 August. It may continue outside the course framework: I offered assistance to anyone of the students who wanted to go on contributing to the site, and I was hoping other students, both graduate and undergraduate, would join the project and participate, much as they'd participate in some of the other extra-curricular activities offered here at the university.
I set up a mailing list on the old server, which was going to serve as the equivalent of the physical classroom in which we discussed the site and the writing, and I was just about to send out invitations to sign up for the list when down it went with everything else. It may come back if and when the other stuff comes back, or it may not, in which case I'll set up something else.
The iffy point is simply that I have never managed to assess the level of interest there is among students in continuing. Everyone who was involved in the project has been given a login to the new server, so, folks: if you're still game, post away! We may or may not have lost the contributions since mid-June, but I'm fairly sure we'll be able to move to the other server all contributions you make here.
And I'll be backing stuff up in the future. Promise.
Posted by Rudolf Ammann at August 14, 2003 02:59 PMHey Ruedi.
Thanks for rebuilding this site. I really appreciate it.
Wakako
Posted by: Wakako at August 18, 2003 12:23 PMGood morning, everyone.
Ruedi, thank you for trying to revive this site!
Be careful you don't catch the fastest computer virus in the world!
Posted by: Ayumi Sawa at August 19, 2003 02:05 PMHi there.
MS Blaster isn't particularly fast, but it'll be around for a good while. The Register ran a good article on the worm, pointing out what's new about it for home and office users, namely that it spreads via the network itself rather than via e-mail.
On Saturday, I finally got around to patching somebody else's XP machne here on campus, which went without a hitch. Microsoft users, if you haven't done so yet, go download the patch from Microsoft and apply it; this isn't rocket science; it's a .exe file which you download to your hard drive, and then you run it. After you've applied the patch, make sure you either turn on the built-in firewall, which is turned off by default in MS XP, or, better yet, get a firewall such as Zone Alarm, which has a free basic version that's pretty good.
Thanks for worrying about my systems, but I'm shuttling back and forth between Linux, Mac and Windows 98, none of which were ever at any danger from the worm.
On a side note: in the last few days I've been playing around with Knoppix, a Linux distribution that runs off a CD. There's no install required: you just pop it in your CD-dive and you immediately have a full Linux setup, complete with, amongst a whole raft of other things, e-mail, browser, and OpenOffice.org, an office software package that can handle all the Microsoft office formats (Word, Exel, Powerpoint). And, being open source, it's free. I haven't tested the Japanese version yet, but if anyone is trying to switch to a more reasonable operating system that's less vulnerable to attack -- hey, it might be for you. If you want a copy, just let me know.
But I digress.
The old web host still isn't avaible for comment, the archives since mid-June still haven't come back, and it all looks like one royal mess. We have probably lost a fair bit of data here.
Today, I signed up with a new host and I'm rebuilding the site from scratch at the new place. I'll be away for a couple of days, but I think the new site will be ready some time next week, complete with a new Japanese section. Anything you post here on the current setup will migrate to the new place; I'm confident we're not going to lose it.
The new place will also come with a mailing list, so we can discuss the things we used to discuss in the classroom, and there might be a few new contributors.
What has everyone been up to? You're all preparing for your practice teaching? How's it going? Does anyone want to post about it?
My computer was hit by Blaster on August 12 and I coudn't connect to the internet for a while. When I tried to download the necessary files( or programs? I don't know well.), the computer automatically shut down! After several tries, I managed to fix it. I had never thought that my computer would be hit by worms!
Hi All, sorry to hear you're having server problems with the site - seems everyone in the computer trade is having fun. However, I knew I could count on you to make sure Tawawa would be *somewhere*.
For me, as a network/server administrator, the last couple of weeks have been fun - long nights in the offices patching and testing systems, when windowsupdate.com managed to stay up (I believe MS were making heavy use of Akamai's caching system, but it still went down a couple of times).
Blaster/lovsan, then nachi, then sobig. I'd love to know who names these viruses - so if anyone knows, please let me know! If it were me I'd give them more practical names: dinnercancel.worm, latenightinoffice or buycoffeemachine.
Add to that our main office in New York going down in that powercut and it's been a fun time all around. The only silver lining is that my girlfriend is in Europe on holiday, so I didn't have to make any apologetic phone calls.
On my home front, my XP box (used for games, site testing and my company's software) is always well patched and runs Zone Alarm. However, my main 2 machines are my Mac and my Mandrake Linux box, so there was no problem there.
In MSs defence (for once) some of these viruses exploited things long since fixed, but having said that, I wonder how many people do run windowsupdate? For those in the business, how many of us actually check our configs too? How many IIS admins there have run the lockdown tool on their web server, how many have run the Baseline security analyser to assess config security? For those with Linux boxes, how many install those patches? A problem with Linux in some ways is that as it's known to be 'secure', is that people forget to check for updates and apply patches. A friend of mine did this and his webserver - run out of his kitchen - was 'owned' for a couple of weeks by someone using it as an MP3 ftp site..
Anyway, hope to see Tawawa back to full strength soon.
stay safe!
Posted by: graham at August 25, 2003 05:13 AM