Services! Updates! Voles!
Posted: April 17th, 2006, 1:32 am
I've been scurrying about behind the scenes here at austinimprov.com and I have a few announcements to make.
I spent the week upgrading security stuff here at the Global Command Center which houses our glorious web services. Sysadmin geeks migh be interested that I've installed mod_security to prevent blog and boards spam and a whole pile of other web badness. The downside it that if you make 'weird' requests, you're liable to have received the dread 412 error. No, I don't really know what that means either, but if your browser returned a 412 Precondition Failed error while poking around austinimprov.com, please let me know because that's my bad. Probably.
Regardless, I'm paying a lot more attention to whacking bad web traffic so Jay can stop sending me 'teh c14l15 spammer du jour' PMs
I also updated the intrusion detection system and additional 'touch me in the bikini area and I'll blacklist your ass' code. Heh.
BFD. I think I've worked the kinks out of mass bloghosting, so if you want a Serendipity blog in the austinimprov.com domain, let me know what you want your username to be and I'll set you up (fwiw, you can post to Serendipity and have it automagically post to LiveJournal...) Granted, Blogspot, MySpace, LiveJournal, FaceBook, etc. might do everything you need. That's cool. If you want something under austinimprov.com, let me know.
Also, I can do personal mail hosting and forwarding under people.austinimprov.com. You probably have your own mail provider already, but austinimprov.com has some pretty aggressive spam defenses, so if you're concerned about giving your main address out and getting spammed, let me know and I'll set up an account for you under 'whoever@people.austinimprov.com'. I can either set it up as a full mail account (POP3 and/or IMAP) or as an alias that forwards to your primary account. I can do the same for <whoever@troupe.austinimprov.com>
Similarly for IM and chat, jabber.austinimprov.com exists, so you can create an account with Gaim, Psi, Trillian, or whatever to IM. This takes a bit of poking to make work (thankfully, not on my end), but it's available if you want it.
I can run discussion lists via Mailman or announcement lists over Dadamail if your troupe needs a way to communicate among its members or to its audience. I trust that you get people's permission before sending them email. People have a love/hate relationship with mail, but again, it's here if you need it.
I do web hosting as well, but I suspect that everyone who needs it already has it. For grins, I can set <yourtroupe>.austinimprov.com to redirect to your actual domain so you can represent for Austin Improv. Or not.
The upshot is that I've been doing a lot of security work behind the scenes to keep forum.austinimprov.com, etc. crap-free and there are a lot of services available that nobody knows about because I haven't told anyone about them (cue Dr. Strangelove: "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you KEEP it a SECRET! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?")
Damn, I love that movie. George C. Scott is a comedic genius.
I spent the week upgrading security stuff here at the Global Command Center which houses our glorious web services. Sysadmin geeks migh be interested that I've installed mod_security to prevent blog and boards spam and a whole pile of other web badness. The downside it that if you make 'weird' requests, you're liable to have received the dread 412 error. No, I don't really know what that means either, but if your browser returned a 412 Precondition Failed error while poking around austinimprov.com, please let me know because that's my bad. Probably.
Regardless, I'm paying a lot more attention to whacking bad web traffic so Jay can stop sending me 'teh c14l15 spammer du jour' PMs
I also updated the intrusion detection system and additional 'touch me in the bikini area and I'll blacklist your ass' code. Heh.
BFD. I think I've worked the kinks out of mass bloghosting, so if you want a Serendipity blog in the austinimprov.com domain, let me know what you want your username to be and I'll set you up (fwiw, you can post to Serendipity and have it automagically post to LiveJournal...) Granted, Blogspot, MySpace, LiveJournal, FaceBook, etc. might do everything you need. That's cool. If you want something under austinimprov.com, let me know.
Also, I can do personal mail hosting and forwarding under people.austinimprov.com. You probably have your own mail provider already, but austinimprov.com has some pretty aggressive spam defenses, so if you're concerned about giving your main address out and getting spammed, let me know and I'll set up an account for you under 'whoever@people.austinimprov.com'. I can either set it up as a full mail account (POP3 and/or IMAP) or as an alias that forwards to your primary account. I can do the same for <whoever@troupe.austinimprov.com>
Similarly for IM and chat, jabber.austinimprov.com exists, so you can create an account with Gaim, Psi, Trillian, or whatever to IM. This takes a bit of poking to make work (thankfully, not on my end), but it's available if you want it.
I can run discussion lists via Mailman or announcement lists over Dadamail if your troupe needs a way to communicate among its members or to its audience. I trust that you get people's permission before sending them email. People have a love/hate relationship with mail, but again, it's here if you need it.
I do web hosting as well, but I suspect that everyone who needs it already has it. For grins, I can set <yourtroupe>.austinimprov.com to redirect to your actual domain so you can represent for Austin Improv. Or not.
The upshot is that I've been doing a lot of security work behind the scenes to keep forum.austinimprov.com, etc. crap-free and there are a lot of services available that nobody knows about because I haven't told anyone about them (cue Dr. Strangelove: "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you KEEP it a SECRET! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?")
Damn, I love that movie. George C. Scott is a comedic genius.