yunix.net

So two things have happened in the last month that I did not realise.

Firstly, I didn't notice the fact that my hosting provider for us.yunix.net hadn't been sending me invoices - they've been generating them, but just not telling me about them. I half assume this was an oversight on their part as much as mine, but in February they must have realised this, and shut down the host without warning.

Secondly, I did get an invoice for another host which looks after DNS for yunix.net. Because real life has been a little busy of late, I missed those emails and that host did also delete the VM without ensuring that I was aware of imminent termination. Coupled with a previous server rebuild where I must have forgotten to reconfigure my secondary DNS server and replication, this left yunix.net with no working DNS servers so the site went dark.

The second issue became apparent to me, I paid the bill, but because they had already deleted the server I had to start from scratch. It actually wasn't until after I had done this, that I realised the shell host was also gone, so in the space of a couple of weeks, nearly everything was wiped out.

Sorry folks, but yunix has not received any donations in a long time, so if you had a shell and lost data, I do not have any sympathy for that reason.

If someone has the knowledge and ability (and most importantly time) to link Blesta or a free/open source billing system to a shell host, then I would be willing to re-open yunix to anyone willing to pay a very small amount on a regular basis. Like, somewhere in the region of $1 per month, maybe $10 per year. If you can go without a couple of cups of coffee type amount.

Well, it was a fun couple of weeks. The hosting provider conveniently neglected to send me an invoice and payment reminders for renewals of the webserver, and graciously gave me 45 minutes to pay up before deleting the VPS.

Needless to say, everything was lost and the closest backup I have dates back to 2013. So, welcome to 2013 everybody!

Anyone who signed up after Feb 2013 will need to re-register, and in order to do that, you'll need to jump on IRC to get a registration code. Just jump onto Freenode/#yunix

Well, the first casualty of the new web server has been discovered: Hotmail.

Apparently the idiotic folks at Microsoft have determined that the server's new IP is in a huge range that was at some point used for spamming, and hence forevermore this range shall be blocked.

Please heed this advice: Do not sign up to yunix with a hotmail account. It will be deleted because the server cannot send mail to hotmail accounts.

I might do something about it later, but right now I'm happy enough to tell Hotmail to go shaft themselves for their pig headed draconian administration.

For those of you that have noticed the recent downtime, it is thanks to BlueMileCloud announcing on the 6th January that they were ceasing all hosting and would be terminating the server on which yunix.net runs on the 11th January.

Let's just say I'm a bit pissed, but the website is now running on a brand new server in Chicago.

And of course, just another reminder because I can - don't forget that yunix costs money to run - even hosting the website. All donations are most appreciated as this is not a commercial venture, and no profit is sought.

Some times, people just need to slow down and wait. Is it really that hard?

Things have been busy for me for the last little while. There's been pressure from work and family, absences due to holidays and time out, and yet, I'm still seeing the same things. Is patience really that hard a thing to handle?

It'll take me some time to play catch-up on any requests, but don't forget this is a free service, so it's not high on my list of priorities. If you're looking for the code, then for the love of God, sit still and WAIT. It's not that hard and you'll have much more success than a fool who stays in channel for only a few minutes.

Well, some bright spark has decided to ignore the terms of service and use yunix in a denial of service attack. This is very annoying because the hosting company is not stupid, they did what they needed to do which was shut down the host, which impacts EVERYONE. I don't appreciate being lied to and I don't appreciate my generosity being abused.

YUNIX MUST NOT BE USED FOR ANY PURPOSE THAT MAY BE CONSIDERED AN ATTACK.

If this happens again I may simply remove everyone's access. You are a fool if you think the hosting company and I will simply sit back and let you waste resources. I don't care what issues you may have and with who, all I ask is that you ABIDE BY THE RULES.

Grow up, people.

Well, No-one has complained about the intrusive advertising Chitika has been putting on the site, but I've had enough of them generating exactly zero revenue, and as such I've removed them.

As always, if you are at all interested in supporting yunix, please disable your ad blockers on yunix.net, and consider making a donation.

The time has come to give the shell server a reboot again! New kernels have been released (along with a new release of SL6), and I figure it's time to kick things over.

Reboot will be at approximately Midnight GMT, which by my calculations is just under 11 hours from now.

Yunix reached another milestone overnight. The 400th user registered for an account on the website.

Whilst early on there were a significant number of bot registrations (accounts that were subsequently deleted), the majority of the accounts remaining do appear to be valid users.

I wonder what the next milestone should be? Donation target perhaps? We might be waiting a while. On that note, don't forget to *disable* your ad-blocking software or plugins for yunix.net!

The yunix shell server has hit a new milestone - 50 users!

Whilst this is a great achievement and a milestone to celebrate, there is a serious side to this post, and that is that yunix needs the support of those who use it. If every user donated as little as $2 it would most of the way to funding the site for a year, at which point I would be able to look into the possibilities of opening a second server.

So keep it up, and if you can, donate!

Well, I've all but given up on Google. The corporate side of the monster seems to have little or no desire to consider my "appeal" to their automated claims of "illegal" activity in any reasonable time frame. They have however, sent me an address verification letter which I cannot action because I have no access to adsense.

As such, I have removed adsense from the site and am evaluating alternative providers. If anyone has any problems with the ads on the site, you can post accordingly in the forums. As always, please DISABLE any ad-blockers, otherwise consider donating to help keep the server online!

A message to the person who seems to have spent a significant amount of time clicking the ads on the website (continuously): You can consider yourself responsible if yunix.net has to shut down.

This morning, I received an email saying my adsense account has been disabled due to illegal activity. It turns out that some moron spent a butt load of time clicking up almost $50 of click revenue for yunix.net. Of course in doing so, said user has clearly violated the adsense terms and conditions on my behalf, and as such it now looks like 100% of the revenue for yunix may possibly be forfeited.

So, thankyou, whomever you are. I've lodged an appeal, but if the account is not enabled again, I will be left with one less potential way to help yunix break even, and therefore one less reason to keep the site open.

And I'll reiterate, there have been exactly zero donations to this point. That equates to a 100% loss which I cannot afford to sustain indefinitely.

Yunix now has a spot on the website (shells.red-pill.eu).

If you like the service, feel free to click on one of the logos and submit a vote for Yunix!

If there are any other shell-directories that you think yunix should be added to, then by all means feel free to suggest it in the forums.

Sorry for the MC Hammer reference. Go search for "Hammer Time" videos if you don't know what I mean.

The shell host will be going down for a reboot tonight at around midnight tonight, GMT/UTC. That is to say, approximately 12am on Thursday Morning, 28th June.

This will be to switch to the latest released el6 kernel, and ensure recently update binaries are being used. If anyone has any background processes they will of course be terminated, and you'll need to restart them or ensure you have an appropriate crontab entry to start them. Post in the forums if you have any questions!

Well, the number of bots registering on the site in the last week has outnumbered what I consider to be likely humans by around 10 to 1. This is starting to annoy me (growing a zombie userbase does me no favours), so I have implemented a reCAPTCHA on the registration form.

Interestingly enough, I learned today that reCAPTCHA is a service that is used for translating scanned books to text, which I am somewhat impressed with. Despite being a Google service, I'm somewhat happy for them to benefit from this and no doubt grab some more of my statistical information in the process.

I think I'd love to work at Google one day, but I don't think they have any positions going for lazy half assed IRC bludgers, and the amount of knowledge they can piece together about individuals would probably scare me off the internet completely.

Anyhow, let round #2 begin. If you have problems with the reCAPTCHA, look for the #yunix channel on freenode.net and tell me about it!

Unfortunately, due to the sheer number of spam bots registering on the site in order to post utter CRAP in the forums, I've had to restrict posting within the forums. Any registered users can still post comments, but starting new threads is being restricted to those who have signed up for a shell account.

Whilst it might be nice to implement something like Akismet, to date I've received exactly zero donations to support the site, so this equates to approximately zero justification for spending yet more of my own money on something that's unlikely to break even any time soon.

If you have any problems posting comments or otherwise, then mosey on down to #yunix on irc.freenode.net and tell someone about it. There's not a whole lot of activity in channel currently, but ask away and stick around for a response. It's as easy as that.

Thanks to everyone for being patient whilst I sorted out the issues with the website.

Everything should be back online now and working fine. Coincidentally, I have also received an update from the hosting provider for the website saying that their network has been subjected to an increased number of DDoS attacks over the past few weeks, and that they are implelmenting measures to deal with this traffic before it hits their network. So if you notice the website is slow or non-responsive, bear in mind that this might be the cause.

For what it's worth, the shell host is located elsewhere and has remained unaffected. Fingers crossed it stays that way!

If you notice anything missing from the website, please do feel free to let me know. Once you've registered you can post in the forums, or for server/website issues you can find me on IRC. If you've already gotten an account, and would like a package installed on the shell host, you'll need to post in the Desired Features/Packages thread.

Well, I've managed to break drupal already.

It's being a royal pain in the ass, and in my frustration I managed to delete some data that obviously shouldn't have been deleted, so I've had to effectively start again from scratch.

This is obivously going to take a little time, so please be patient. I will of course, provide more updates as they become available.

If your user account doesn't work, then try using the password reset function - the database rebuild probably regenerated the password salts or something stupid like that.

Launch Day is finally here.

There is now a server online for all to use! What you do with this information is up to you.

I suggest you read the content you can see on the website, then go and look for that which you cannot see.