Oh, your back.

[K.H]

Nice one Tony & Julian

[Julian]

Nice one Tony & Julian

Julian did nothing except upset the nice man at Ecohosting ... a task achieved with both ease and speed!

[Tony]

We should stop paying them... did we pay 12 months up front?  I'm not even sure when the renewal date was supposed to be.

I'm somewhat dumbfounded that it's easier to host it from a machine at home than on a professional hosting site.  I haven't had to change anything - it just works.  I can't help but feel that they had a problem with their mysql database server and were blaming it on excess traffic - but from what Julian said of the logs, the accesses weren't exactly back to back fast - so why the problem?

[Julian]

We should stop paying them... did we pay 12 months up front?  I'm not even sure when the renewal date was supposed to be.

I'm somewhat dumbfounded that it's easier to host it from a machine at home than on a professional hosting site.  I haven't had to change anything - it just works.  I can't help but feel that they had a problem with their mysql database server and were blaming it on excess traffic - but from what Julian said of the logs, the accesses weren't exactly back to back fast - so why the problem?

Didn't you pay for the Ecohost web space not too long ago?  I guess you, or someone, could go on using the space until the next renewal.  We could try asking for a refund ... although I rather suspect I know what their answer will be.

There will be some small print somewhere within a multi page terms and conditions that says sod off in legal jargon!

One thing that did stand out when I was looking through the logs was that Bing appeared to be making frequent requests for really obscure pages.  It may be worth banning them in the robots.txt file if it becomes an issue.  I did have a look at that file after Ecohosting said they had banned all SEs except Google, but I couldn't their addition (unless they removed all their modifications before giving us the final chop).

[Julian]

And now the wiki front page is visible ... blinding work Tony!

[Tony]

It just started working on its own, I can't take credit for that!  (Maybe some cache timed out, or someone editted and saved the page?  Dunno - but I'm glad it's OK again)

Wiki pages should be edittable via the auth bridge too.

I'm sure there will be other bits broken, like uploading images for the wiki, or avatars for the forum.  Just have to fix them when we find them.

[Julian]

Can you log into the wiki?  When I try it's the same as before.

[Tony]

Oh, that's not right.  If I log out of the forum I stay logged in on the wiki.  It should all match up.

Also, e-mail notifications don't seem to be working.  That might be a problem, I think virgin block outbound e-mail by default.  So no verifying accounts possible (IE new users can't register, unless we disable the requirement to verify e-mail addresses - what a mess).

[Tony]

Yes, that's a problem all right:

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Networking-and-wireless/Super-Hub-3-bans-port-forwarding-for-SMTP-port-25/td-p/3056341

And even if it could be un-banned, one user points out that many mail servers will disallow mail delivery from blocks of dynamic IP addresses such as the one I'm using.

[Julian]

Are you talking about the "welcome" email?

We don't get that many genuine newcomers, so we could send the welcome email manually?

[Tony]

It's the "click here to verify your account" one which we can't do manually.  (EDIT: well, we can manually verify accounts, but then would have to e-mail the registrant from our personal e-mail to say "come on in")

[julesandtash]

Is there some way you could operate on a vpn? That way Virginia can't tell what traffic you are sending / receiving and you would have a static IP (albeit one provided by the VPN server?

[Tony]

Sure, if we could find a willing VPN endpoint/gateway.

[Julian]

Is it possible to set up the registration process without using that email facility ... we manually vet applicants anyway?

[Tony]

Yes I think it is.