http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net A blog from the staff at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:22:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Over the next few days, we will be making major changes to our email forwarding service in order to make sure that we are providing a consistent, high-quality forwarding service that meets our members' expectations. This is something we have wanted to do for awhile, but recent events have ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/11/19/email-forwarding-changes-and-ui-downtime/ As previously announced, we are proceeding with a maintenance window on Friday night between 10pm and 1am Arizona/Pacific time (1am and 4am Eastern, 5am and 8am UTC). The primary purpose of this maintenance window will be to add RAM and CPU power to some of our MySQL servers. Just under ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/10/01/friday-night-maintenance-window-for-mysql/ Some time ago, we announced a beta test of MySQL running on FreeBSD 7 using the experimental ZFS filesystem. We've now concluded that beta test, and I wanted to let you know the results. Here's the executive summary: FreeBSD 7 is, by and large, great for us and we will ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/09/29/mysql-freebsd-7-zfs-beta-update-mysql-upgrades/ It's that time of year again. The leaves start to turn. The nights get a little cooler. And the domain registry operators gratuitously raise their prices, because ICANN apparently sent Homer Simpson to negotiate their contracts. We received notice of the specific effects on us today. Effective ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/09/19/domain-registration-price-increases-september-30th/ We are in the process of renumbering out of our current IP addresses and into a larger block of addresses. The effect of this change will be better routing performance and more room for us to grow and expand our service. In order to minimize disruption, we plan to bring ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/09/11/scheduled-maintenance-ip-renumbering-in-progress/ After a review of our security practices brought on by the recent Debian ssh key security issue (which does not affect our FreeBSD-based service), we've decided to upgrade the strength of our RSA ssh host key from 1024 bits to the same length that we recommend you use, 4096 bits. The ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/05/17/ssh-rsa-host-key-changed/ For most of our production servers, we run FreeBSD 6.3, which is a well-tested, stable, and excellent-performing release. However, the FreeBSD world moves on and FreeBSD 7.0 was released earlier this year. The primary benefit to the new version is supposed to be vastly improved performance, ranging from ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/05/12/experimental-freebsd-7-zfs-mysql-technology-trial/ It's often hard to think about disaster planning. The thing about all disasters is that they're really unlikely, but the consequences of winning the disaster lotto are, well, disastrous. We don't want anything horrible to happen to our service, we don't expect anything horrible to happen, and (for the paranoid ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/05/08/new-offsite-dead-drop-backup-service/ We will need to take some of our internal servers down briefly today: a couple of times for about 10 minutes each between 6pm and 10pm Arizona time (1am and 5am UTC). We are completing the buildout of our new "ultra-redundant power" rack today and will be moving our master database ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/04/14/public-and-member-sites-scheduled-downtime-today/ We received a note from Technorati today about a serious security problem with old versions of WordPress, including the version we were running, that is now being exploited on a widespread scale. We've thus hastily upgraded to WordPress 2.5. That did cause a brief bit of disruption to ... http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/04/08/surprise-wordpress-upgrade/