Older News - July-September 2003

Welcome back to VGMusic.com

Posted by Powerlord on 09/24/03 05:58 AM

Due to us not having a recent database backup, I've been forced with a decision:

1. Restore UBB.threads from a July 17th backup and proceed to rerun the various forum upgrade scripts

2. Start fresh with a new UBB.threads installation

3. Start fresh with a different board software

You can see that I chose choice 3.

If you couldn't tell, this is phpBB2. You've probably seen it in use at other sites, such as VGMix, OCRemix, FruitCake Midi, CocoeBiz, and other game music sites. It is current the predominate board software in use. It addresses a number of problems that I had with UBB.threads.

That isn't to say it's perfect. I think it may fit this site better than the old boards did.

59 Comments

We're back!

As you can see, the site is back up. Not everything is operational yet, but hopefully it will be a bit more stable than it was *crosses fingers*.

I now get the fun and tedious process of going through and making sure everything works, plus the fun of installing new things on the forums. Oh, say, have you seen the forums? They look a bit different now, as we lost several months worth of posts. The forums database was the one thing we didn't seem to have a backup of.

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Onward to 100,000,000 we go!

Dear VGMusic.com visitors,

Thanks for causing a denial-of-service attack by causing our hit counter to be too wide to be rendered by modern web browsers. We do not expect to be back online until we start getting negative visits. Thank you.

- Management.

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Known issues that no one told us about

UPDATE 09/08/2003: Apache didn't start again today. I'm not sure why, but I've taken a few more steps to try to attempt to fix it.

End Update
--

One of Apache's log files went over 2GB this morning, so when Apache did its normal restart procedure (after rotating its other log files), it simply died instead of came back up.

I've addressed the issue and disabled the totally unnecessary service that was generating this log. However, since I didn't notice the problem right away (it happened at 4am EDT), the web server was down for 3 hours or so.

Edit: This service (Apache Tomcat) may also have been responsible for some additional webserver problems earlier in the week.

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Sorting in new-files

There's a problem with the new-files sorting mechanism. I'm working on this problem now.

Edit (10:16pm): The problem is now fixed.

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Site Operations

Most of the main site has been restored, including everyone's favorite section: The Newly Submitted Files area.

The only areas that should be left are the less commonly used parts of the site, and a PHP script or two that made its way past me.

That and getting the rest of the staff accounts back up.

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Forums operational again...

The forums are operational again
...but the rest of the site isn't. I still have to sort out the other files and stuff and things.

For those of you who missed it, our server was offline for the past day or two due to two things: A server power supply failure, and our server's hard drive having its root partition totally trashed.

Lucky for us, the partition that hosts all of our data seems to be intact, but I have to adjust a lot of the websites permissions.

Turns out, it's a lot easier to get the database up and running than the rest of the site.

Edit: Most of the site is operational. The exceptions are: new-files and some of the other non-music sections of the site, as well as email services. Also, the Update and QC staff currently does not have access to the site itself (a major problem, indeed).

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Megaman X Box Set & Storm of Progia Soundtracks Available for Pre-Order

The folks at CocoeBiz are currently taking pre-orders for the following soundtracks:



Rockman X1-6 Game Music Collection 5 CD Box Set - $52.50

Rockman X7 Original Soundtrack CD - $21.00

Storm of Progia (Progear) Original Soundtrack - $28.00

For those that are familiar with the Rockman (a.k.a. Megaman) X series soundtracks, they are very hard to find in the open marketplace. Given that most single CD game music soundtracks cost around $30 dollars alone, $52.50 for a five CD set is a steal! Keep in mind that the Rockman and Storm of Progia soundtracks are of a limited release. So once they're gone... well you get the point. :)

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Forum Redirects

I''m sure quite a few people noticed that our forums were redirecting to a different site earlier today. Believe it or not, there actually was a reason for this, not just because I'm a Despotic Ruler (although that is also true).

Lately, the forum staff have been getting a lot of grief from some of the forum users about the way that we run the forums. This demonstration was to remind everyone that the forums are a service, and as such, they can be taken away. It would have been just as easy to make it start throwing 503 Forbidden errors, but redirecting them might have gotten the message across to certain people better... plus it was a lot more fun.

Staff members: Regardless of what the FAQ says, you are expected to follow the forums rules. Failure to do so may result in termination of your Administrator status.

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COPPA and the forums

We have implemented COPPA on our forums. There's also more information about COPPA for parents.

I'm sure many of you are wondering "What is COPPA?" Basically, COPPA restricts us from collecting personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 13. In order to collect said information, we now require that a COPPA Form be mailed to us. Fax is also allowed for COPPA, but we do not have a fax machine.

4 Comments

Happy Birthday, FAQ!

In celebration of the FAQ's fifth birthday, we all pitched in and got it a fancy present: A new editor! Daniel Wright (dw_junon) has been selected to be the new Keeper of the Word. Everyone go easy on him for a while, would ya?
I'm off to California to run for Governor, but I'll still be posting the occasional discovery in the Gallery, if I can find the time.

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Windows 2K/XP exploit/worm on the loose

Please read Arrow's post about this exploit.

Update: Symantec has a page about this worm, which it calls W32.Blaster.Worm. Other names for it include: W32/Lovsan.worm [McAfee], Win32.Poza [CA], Lovsan [F-Secure], WORM_MSBLAST.A [Trend], W32/Blaster-A [Sophos], W32/Blaster [Panda].

The vulnerability that makes this exploit work has had a patch for almost a month now and people are still being hit by it. The Microsoft Support page about this vulnerability (including downloads for fixes, which are also available from the Windows Update site) is located here.

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Microsoft warns malformed MIDI music file could exploit flaw

To quote MSNBC:

Microsoft issued another passel of warnings about security holes Wednesday, including a “critical” flaw affecting most Windows PCs. The most serious of the flaws involves DirectX, a library of graphics and multimedia programming instructions used by most PC games, and could allow malicious users to run code of their choice on a vulnerable PC.

- Read this article

The fix is to visit the Windows Update site and apply the appropriate update.

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Apache and its bad little children

Apache decided that it wasn't going to actually kill off the processes that it wasn't using any longer.

The result? The server had so many programs running at once that it could hardly do anything!

Stopping the webserver fixed the problem, but we rebooted the machine just to be on the safe side.

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