Long time coming…

Posted on March 29th, 2008 in about, new, sysadmin by They

they.com is now running on new hardware!

There was a happy congruence of tax refund check and Dell having a sale of 45% off servers, so the 8+ year old system (a sun netra t1 with a 900MHz ultrasparc IIi, 1G RAM and an external 30G drive) has been replaced (by a poweredge 2750, with 2 2GHz AMD processors, 8G RAM, and 6 160G drives with hardware RAID). After running for 7 hours, the new system has yet to swap memory to disk!

They have also made the switch from Debian GNU/Linux to Gentoo.

There will still be a few things to work out — for example, they have not decided whether or not to re-export the /docs/ directory (which they don’t think they will do again), and some wordpress upgrading differences have yet to be fully resolved.  Also the installation of gallery2 seems to not want to display .3gp videos, so they need to figure out how to hack that back in again.

For now, though, they are just glad to have made the switch, because they can now re-enable spam filtering on the server, and now have virtual mail delivery (so that there are fewer hackable login accounts).

Oh, and since it doesn’t take over a minute to make a post on wordpress anymore, you can expect more frequent posting!

Here is the new server last weekend, while they copied over the gallery images to save bandwidth:

DSC00826

Wordpress 2.1 upgrade complete

Posted on January 23rd, 2007 in new, sysadmin by They

So, they upgraded to wordpress 2.1 tonight. So far, things seem to be going well.

They had some issues with the widget page and the links list (now called blogroll), but overall things went smoothly.

To solve the widget page issue, they had to hard-code /wp-includes/js/sciptaculous/ into the newest version of widgets.php, but everything else went smoothly.

Oh, and the spell-checking built into the visual editor rocks!

They are converting to wordpress

Posted on March 2nd, 2005 in new, say, sysadmin, trust by They

Since slashcode was, er, stagnating. The packages on debian (even debian-unstable) were ancient, and trying to upgrade caused a major problem with posting.

Wordpress puts out nice valid HTML, uses CSS extensively, has many fantastic plugins, and is much faster and less memory-intense. So far, they like it!

Downside? If you had an account before, it’s gone now. As are stock and zip codes. They aren’t going to be a portal anymore, but don’t worry — your information will not be sold. They still fully respect your privacy!

Another rare but well-done medium

Posted on October 1st, 2002 in new, pop by They

The good folks at San Diego regional jazz band Cool Blue played every Wednesday at the restaurant they were eating in. They bought their album, and imagine that you might like to do so as well. Should they.com get permission, they will post an MP3 or two as impetus.

So much spam news, so little time

Posted on July 17th, 2002 in new, spam, sysadmin by They
  • a new dnsbl, sbbl.they.com, is available for public use. Recommended usage is only as a high score within spamassassin (or similar).
  • Shame on MAPS for screwing and harassing one of their ex-employees. They no longer use MAPS, but instead encourage everyone to investigate using SPEWS, Osirusoft, and to use (and if at all possible, support) SpamCop.
  • quote.com, and by extension, lycos.com are spammers. Their email is no longer welcome here.

They are larger

Posted on December 3rd, 2001 in new by They

They have, as of 30 Nov 2001, increased in size by one.

The new member had to meet approval requirements, which was accomplished within the last few hours.

They were, originally, 5 lb 10 oz heavier.

And yes, it should have made the news, but they made sure that it did not.