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Messages - alberthrocks

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16
Web Programming and Design / withgusto is done - the end
« on: April 01, 2015, 12:30:43 am »
The End :'(

Officially, withgusto will close down starting today. Unofficially, it was shut down a few months ago, right after the DDoS attack.

We no longer have the resources nor time to write code, manage the server, run our services, and purchase server capacity. This is evident with our downtime for the last 3 months.

For those who have data on our server, we are providing a request form for backups:
http://withg.org/backup/

Please submit a request as soon as possible, and our backup script will create a backup within 24-48 hours.

Data will be permanently erased within 7 days. Backups that are not made are subject to data sale to 3rd party advertisers, as a way of recouping the costs of the server.

In the mean time, air forces rcfreak0 and Eeems are available to help transition your move to their servers.

Thank you to those who decisively flew withgusto. It has been a great ride, but as the captain, we must come to a landing and to an end.

Thanks everyone for a great 6 years!

Sorry for the troubles,
Captain alberthrocks


EDIT: APRIL FOOLS! Though it looks like many people took it seriously... :p

17
Miscellaneous / Re: March Madness Brackets and Stuff
« on: March 18, 2015, 02:19:19 am »
Rooting for a certain college team because I'm a college student myself! (So I guess I might be a bit biased when making my brackets...)

I'm still working on my brackets, but will be done soon...

18
The East Server works best for me. I hope ZNC gets back up soon!
Thanks! I'll keep that in mind.

Hey, no worries alberthrocks, every body makes mistakes, what counts is that you can figure that out and prevent such things in the future ;)
Thanks for the support!

The London and US servers seem to be all equally fast to me, at 2MB/s.
Is there a particular US server location that works best?



Update on Server Downtime
Thanks again for the support! If you haven't already, please go here and test out which location downloads the fastest. Once you have figured it out, post your best location here!.

Regarding ZNC and friends... soon (TM). But seriously, I'm working on the scripts at the moment and once they're done, we're heading to a new undiscovered land!

If you want to know specifics:
  • I need to finish up the package backup stuff (not too much left, 80% complete).
  • After that, I need to write a semi-restoration script (0%, but shouldn't be too bad).
  • Then, I'll need to write the restore script for user data (0%).
  • User data backup is pretty much done! Just needs a bit of polish. (Specifically, I need to add arguments and such so I can easily say "backup TestUser!" and it'll do it, rather than edit a variable! :P ) (95%)

Once the scripts are written, the migration will immediately start. During that time, I will be using your emails that you provided in the survey to contact you about the new server details. Due to the attack, we will not be releasing the domain name or IP to access the website publicly. The information will only be given to current users of withgusto. You must use the server we give you to access services - Cloudflare will be sitting on the rest of the withgusto Network, and you will NOT be able to access key services (SSH, ZNC) from there.

Finally - if you guys really want ZNC up ASAP, I can try to get it up on a temporary server. If that's something that you want, please reply to this topic to ask for it! A minimum of 4 ZNC users need to request this in order for this server to be set up. Note that it will be taken down and ZNC will be moved to the new server once things are set up, so you will have a brief period of downtime. (Or not - we may use a graceful migration to make this work.)

That's it for now - please let me know if you guys are interested, and if you have any questions! (Oh, and tell me which server is the fastest!)

EDIT: If your email is incorrect, or you haven't responded to the mandatory survey, click here.

19
Computer Programming / Re: How to make a IRC bot
« on: February 09, 2015, 12:29:23 pm »
    The tutorial is showing setting up Python with the terminal. I want to know how to do this in Windows.
    • Open your Start Menu.
    • Go to Programs.
    • Go to Accessories.
    • Click on Command Prompt.
    • Type in: C:\PythonXX\python, where XX is your version number. If you downloaded Python 2.7.x, this should be Python27. If you download Python 3.3.x, this should be Python33.
    • You may now start programming in Python!

    Ignore this: [/list][/list]

    20
    Computer Programming / Re: How to make a IRC bot
    « on: February 08, 2015, 11:07:44 pm »
    I want to do it with Java because I'll need to learn it eventually for Web Programming. How do I program a IRC Bot in Java?
    I feel that Python will bloat my computer and I also need to download it on my school computer if I want to program the IRC bot on he school computer. I feel that programming the IRC Bot in C will be more portable for coding. Where's the IRC Bot tutorial for C?
    Java requires installing a massive JRE (50+ MBs) and JDK (157+ MBs), and is known to have many, many security risks. Python, on the other hand, is a very minimal language, coming in only at 17 MBs - both the development environment and the things you need to run what you make.

    Also, it's unlikely that your computer will have a C compiler available. Most schools (AFAIK) don't have a professional C compiler available on their systems. Installing Visual Studio or MinGW on a flash drive is also a hassle, and can easily weigh in at over 1 GB.

    Therefore, I strongly recommend Python, as it's extremely portable and very handy to use.

    21
    Update on Server Downtime

    withgusto is now back up... but ZNC will continue to remain down for another day or so. SSH and other services requiring a direct connection will remain down as well. Sorry about that.

    I'll say it now - we screwed up. The DDoS was pretty bad, but it definitely could have been preventable. In fact, a free solution like CloudFlare was really all we needed to prevent it.

    What was the attack? Well, a certain user's public folder was harassed by many online bots, to the point where 10000+ requests to the user's folder were made per day in the past few days, totaling 40386 requests overall... just in February! (29581 of those requests were made to a single 18 MB file!) Obviously, this is enough to trigger a DDoS null-route.

    Security has been lacking as of late, and I feel that we definitely could do better. As of today, CloudFlare is enabled on all withgusto domains... with the exception of a secret domain, which is being purposely withheld for now. We are planning on developing much better mitigation methods in the future so that this kind of attack won't take us out again.

    At the same time, we should also examine the cause of the attack. Usually, these kind of attacks are caused by conflicts/arguments with other people, hence causing a DDoS. As some may know, we host a ZNC on withgusto. We'd like to continue ZNC service, but at the same time develop policies to avoid getting into this kind of situation again. These policies are in development, but include ZNC usage guidelines, as well as security guidelines for setting up ZNC. Even if we do get better DDoS protection in the future, it's way better to prevent a DDoS than to fight one!

    Again, we apologize for the massive downtime. It was unexpected, but we definitely could have done better to prevent this kind of problem from occurring.

    That's it - stay tuned for more information as we recover.

    EDIT: For everyone that uses withgusto services (IRC, ZNC, etc.), please visit here and test out which location downloads the fastest. Once you have figured it out, post your best location here!

    22
    Due to a DDoS attack, withg.org is down for the moment. It may not be back up for a while. We'll keep you posted as things update. Sorry about that!


    23
    Other / Re: 3 Android Phone Errors
    « on: February 02, 2015, 08:59:16 pm »
    #1: Well, no, shaking doesn't seem to affect it. Maybe I should take it apart and look at the connector? :P Any other possibilities?
    Not that I know of - it almost certainly sounds like a display issue to me. The only other option is to replace, so there's that.

    #2: Walp, that's about all there is to it, I'll look into replacing it. It's a shame it doesn't happen to have a seperate charging board like say the HTC 8X!
    You should tell that to my other devices, all with SMT soldered on USB ports!

    #3: Yup, Developer Mode now enabled. What next?
    So you should do the following:
    Installing ADB
      • Find the drivers for your phone. You should look for general USB drivers. If there's a developer driver for your phone, install that as well.
      • Install ADB. You can either get it from the official Android SDK (found here), or if you're more adventurous, get it from here. (The latter link is for Windows users. For Linux users, you can try here for some information about getting ADB directly.)
      • Locate your ADB program. On Windows, it's called adb.exe, if you show extensions. For everything else, it's simply a file called adb. Note the folder where ADB resides. On Linux, if you are able to install ADB to your system, skip this step.
      • Open a terminal/command prompt, and change directory into your adb directory. (You would usually use a command like cd C:\ADB_INSTALL_DIR or cd ~/adb_install_dir to do this.) On Linux, if you are able to install ADB to your system, skip this step.
      • Now run adb: adb on Windows (or if you installed it to your system on Linux), ./adb otherwise (Mac/Linux). Remember which one you used - we'll be referring to the program as adb from now on.
      • If you see a lot of help output, yay! You got it! If you get command not found or The system cannot find the path specified, let me know.
      Phone Debugging
      At this point, you should have ADB working in order to continue on to the following steps.
      • Ensure Developer Mode is enabled on your phone, then plug your phone into your computer.
      • Run: adb devices - on Linux, you may need to add a sudo or su -c before that command for it to work.
      • On newer devices/OSes, you may get a prompt from your phone to allow debugging. Simply tap "Yes" or "Allow" to enable USB debugging.
      • You should see your device in the list. If not, try running it again.
      • Now, type the following: adb logcat > logfile.txt - this will start dumping logs from the phone to your computer.
      • Use the phone normally, until it crashes.
      • Once it crashes, the command should exit. Immediately after that, run: adb logcat > logfile-postcrash.txt. If it doesn't work the first time, keep trying until it works.
      • Now you can examine both logs to see if there's any software issues that might be causing this! Feel free to post the logs here for everyone to look at!

      Good luck!

      EDIT: Please ignore this really weird thing at the end, it's an SMF bug: [/list]

      24
      Other / Re: 3 Android Phone Errors
      « on: February 02, 2015, 12:17:40 am »
      #1: HTC Droid Incredible
       Error: it's screen has a blue hue to it, and sometimes what looks like general color distortion - installing Screen Adjuster only helped a tiny bit. Anyone know how I can determine if this is a software problem or a damaged GPU?
      This sounds like a hardware issue. I looked around, and it seems to indicate a potentially loose LCD ribbon...? If the colors changes when shaked, it's likely to be the cause. (Don't shake too hard, since you might cause permanent damage!)

      Source

      #2: HTC EVO 4G
       Error: It cannot charge it's battery, I assume the MicroUSB port is damaged. Is it possible to replace it's port?
      It's always possible! Of course, the question is whether it's hard or not... ;)

      Looking at the phone's replacement parts, it *might* be fixable if you're really good at soldering. It does have very tiny pins though, so beware: Replacement Part for USB port

      #3: HTC Thunderbolt
      Error: It randomly reboots. How can I tell if this is damaged hardware or a software issue? Also, it has a smaller HTC HD7 battery taped into it, if that could be an issue.

      All three have been reset.
      If you are able to, you will want to enable the Android Developer Mode. See this guide for some steps to do that! (Not sure if it's too new for the phone or not, but it should be similar...)

      If you can achieve that, and successfully connect the phone to your computer, I can help you out with the next steps to get the logs from the phone. Those logs will really help with understanding what is wrong with the phone.

      25
      TI Z80 / Re: SPASM-ng, now with eZ80 support!
      « on: January 30, 2015, 09:30:44 am »
      Oh, am I able to use it on my Raspberry Pi? :3
      Yup - I pre-compiled a Debian package and a static binary for Raspberry Pi users out there! :D

      On another note, I guess people really like compiling the source themselves, since this is the download statistics so far:
      spasm-ng_0.5-beta.1-1_amd64.deb: 0 downloads
      spasm-ng_0.5-beta.1-1_armhf.deb: 0 downloads
      spasm-ng_0.5-beta.1-1_i386.deb: 0 downloads
      spasm-ng_0.5-beta.1_linux_amd64.tar.gz: 0 downloads
      spasm-ng_0.5-beta.1_linux_armhf.tar.gz: 0 downloads
      spasm-ng_0.5-beta.1_linux_i386.tar.gz: 0 downloads
      spasm32.exe: 1 downloads
      spasm64.exe: 2 downloads

      26
      Server Issues + Reboot - 1/27/2015

      Importance: URGENT
      Author: albert
      Date: Tuesday, January 27th, 2015 at 7:16:47 AM PST
      Blog post: http://withg.org/blog/index.php?post=1422371807

      Server Issues + Reboot
      =======================

      Server Connectivity Issues
      -------------------------
      You may have noticed some network connectivity issues with our
      services, including a laggy shell, downtime for IRC/ZNC, etc.

      We are currently experiencing server connectivity issues due to issues
      on our VPS provider's side of things. So far, we've had problems from
      1/25 - 1/27. We believe that the VPS provider is just experiencing some
      networking issues (including a possible DDoS), so we ask for hopefully
      some patience as we try and ride this one out.

      For reference, this is the amount of downtimes that have occurred:



      Emergency Reboot Performed
      ---------------------------
      In light of significant server downtime, we performed an emergency
      reboot around 2015-01-26 10:31 AM EDT (yesterday morning) to attempt to
      resolve the network issues.

      As a result, your background processes have been terminated during the
      reboot. If you have any background processes, you will need to start
      them back up.

      General services (shell, web server [Nginx/PHP5/NGINX], IRC, ZNC)
      should now be up. If there are any issues with these services, please
      let us know ASAP!

      We're really sorry for the inconvenience any of this may have caused.

      Thanks for flying withgusto! We're just experiencing some turbulence,
      so hold tight!


      27
      Miscellaneous / Re: The Omnimaga Project Revival Team
      « on: January 02, 2015, 01:10:39 pm »
      Since there's not much activity, could I remove the project from OPRT? The code there is getting somewhat stale, and it might be confusing to others who are looking for wxwabbitemu.

      If you guys are still interested, no problem - but just note that I will have to remove and re-fork the repository due to major changes.

      Let me know what you guys think!

      28
      Other Calculators / Re: Clarification about the CodeWalrus thing
      « on: December 31, 2014, 01:10:41 pm »
      Hmm, this looks interesting!

      So here's my perspective on this. I think this is a great idea, and personally I know a few people who I'd band with to make a coding "guild" of sorts.

      However, there's only one thing I'm sort of puzzled about - why SMF/forums? Typically, I (and other "groups/guilds") would be making a blog of sorts to announce any progress or ideas from the group itself. Personally, that's something that I would be aiming for, but other "groups/guilds" that do this include places like Popehat (a group of lawyer folk), CodingHorror (a programming blog), Linux Mint's Dev blog (a development blog for the Linux Mint OS), and even professionally, the NYTimes Open Code Blog (a professional blog about web/backend dev for NYTimes). IMO, a forum isn't necessarily the best platform for a group of sorts.

      If a group desires to interact with the community, often they will seek to find a home in a larger community. A well known example is NSIS (installation framework for Windows), which houses their community in the Winamp forums, since a good portion of their modding/plugin community live there.

      Now, as a counterpoint to what I said before, there are communities that are built around software. Gaming is a big example - big AAA companies like Bethesda Softworks have their own forums dedicated to Skyrim, EA has their own forum, and anybody who has used Steam knows that each game has its own discussion groups, too. Forums definitely work great for soliciting feedback, especially for major companies.

      For me (and the potential group), a blog will simply suffice. Indie game devs, hardware hackers, and even Ndless like using a blog for displaying progress, as well as soliciting feedback and support. If we really need a forum of sorts, I may go with something like Discourse (or even Vanilla Forums), light discussion board software that I've often seen used in many kinds of communities.

      For you guys, maybe a forum will work. The only thing is that with CodingWalrus, I would expect that the forum will only have discussion on the software being developed by CodingWalrus - offtopic/general discussion is unlikely to occur there due to the nature of the site. If that's what you guys want, that's great - and hey, it might become something big!

      Regardless, it's all up to you guys - I've voiced my opinion here. Either way, you guys will have my full support. Less than 6 hours left at the time of writing - good luck with the launch! :)

      29
      Knew that the move wasn't going to happen >:D
      * Sorunome runs
      Oh gee thanks for having faith in me... :p /s

      All jokes aside, I'm disappointed that I couldn't deliver the migration on time (and no surprise, since I'm in school)... but rest assured, the new server DOES exist, and we're working to make this a success!

      This time, we're going to make sure that the migration moves past tooling! :p
      (Last time, it died because it was difficult to make an automated migration tool - this time, we're limiting the tool's scope, and making multiple tools to handle certain cases.)

      See you in 2015! :D (First milestone is January 12th, 2015!)

      30
      Migration Update - DELAYED - 11/23/2014

      Importance: IMPORTANT
      Author: albert
      Date: Sun, November 23rd, 2014 at 12:04:09 PM PST
      Blog post: http://withg.org/blog/index.php?post=1416773049

      Migration Update - Expect Delays!
      ==================================

      Delays...
      ---------
      Apologies, but it looks like we'll have to delay again, due to the admin
      being short on time. This time, however, we want to make sure this
      doesn't become an indefinite delay, so we've planned ahead and allocated
      due dates for each step of the migration process.

      You can check it out here:
      https://trello.com/b/ZmSFCaVE/migration-2014-2015

      This also includes the current status as well.

      MANDATORY FORM
      --------------
      If you haven't already, you MUST fill out the "I'm alive" form ASAP
      http://bit.ly/withgalive

      NOT filling this out can lead your account to be "archived". The
      unarchival process does exist, but it will be a hassle, since you will
      be considered inactive in our system.

      (Essentially, you're filling out a form like the sign-up form to get
      your account back. Your data is still there, but your account just
      doesn't exist.)

      We're not trying to be evil - there's a LOT of users on this server
      that we would consider significantly inactive! Freeing up resources
      allows us to make the migration smoother, and for the resulting server
      to be much faster and lighter!

      So please - help us help YOU - fill it out!

      http://bit.ly/withgalive


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