Our apologies for the sporadic hours of downtime from the 27th to 30th of March. We’ve taken some corrective measures by converting what looked like a problematic filesystem to a more broadly used one. We’ve been back up consistently for over a week, but we’ll keep watching to see how things go.
We finally made the transition from our first hosted machine to our second. If anything seems to have shifted during the move, let us know and we’ll try to set it back in place for you. There are some nifty new features that make our lives easier, though enumerating them would read like a splash of alphabet soup.
Thanks for playing.
Our apologies for service downtime, we have some machine issues to diagnose and repair. More as it comes.
Follow-up edit: The problems have been resolved, the major issue being a run-away log that got too big and wouldn’t go away. We’ll make sure that particular problem doesn’t occur again.
It’s been a little more than a year since we started collecting our traffic statistics. For your viewing pleasure, the last year in gigabytes transferred (on a logarithmic scale to tone down spikes): a grand total of 337.63GB, not counting a smattering of hours here and there where our statistics weren’t being gathered for one reason or another. That’s around a quarter of our allocated bandwidth for the year, and, as you can see, our outbound traffic is growing at what could be construed as an exponential rate (linear on a log scale plot, etc.).
Spikes in the incoming traffic are people moving in, so to speak. The major spike in outbound traffic is our first attempt to grab a static shot of backups. The rest is… just you all getting more popular.
Some underused features on darkclan.net:
Web statistics: If you run a website off of our server, we process your web traffic statistics every hour to give you a comprehensive view of your site’s visitors. You’ll need a certificate to view your own statistics; there’s a complete list in our notes section in case you forget where to go (certificate also required).
Versioning: Want to keep your data safe from your self-induced catastrophes? Use versioning and keep a record of how your information changes over time, sort of like saving your game and having a place to come back to in the event of accidental deletion, etc. Also good for running backups. A fuller article on just versioning is coming soon.
To be edited… stay tuned.
There are a couple things going on at darkclan.net that affect mail delivery to you. The more you know, etc.
Mail delivered to addresses hosted by us goes through a number of steps. First, the delivering host is checked against our firewall. The firewall, in a general sense, keeps portions of the Internet known to be spammer friendly from reaching us. The firewall also temporarily blocks out IP addresses of computers that appeared to attempt a break-in within the recent past.
The IP address is then compared to our mailer’s more specific list of IP addresses that have sent us viruses in the last Sunday to Sunday timeframe, and a more permanent set of pathological spammers and virus senders we’ve picked up on over time. The IP addresses are used only for this purpose. Any mail up to this point from blocked computers is wholly rejected; the only records are in our logs.
Mail then moves on to a virus scanning phase using ClamAV. Since we started using it, I’ve seen it make about five mistakes on legitimate mail. All mail recognized to be a virus is quarantined for us to either verify its illegitimacy or rectify the situation. All of the quarantined mail is archived for future research.
After this point, mail delivery depends on your particular domain. It may go straight to your account (or your forwarding address), or it may pass through a spam detection phase. We use SpamAssassin, a learning program that scores each piece of mail on how much it looks like spam. Individual configuration can either discard or quarantine marked spam; we tend towards keeping it all, too, since SpamAssassin’s recognition isn’t perfect.
If ever you think you’re not getting mail you want to receive, please let us know.
The domain tealdeer.net is registered at DirectNIC.com, which is located in New Orleans, and appears to be entirely offline for now. In the meantime, you can use these alternate addresses for Kawika’s blog and photos.
Most other domains hosted by us are registered at GANDI.net, which is located in Paris. Barring any major French disasters, these domains should be unaffected.
Edit 9/6: DirectNIC has actually been pretty valiant in keeping their servers online in the midst of it all. Domain name problems appear to have been intermittent and temporary. Things seem to be functioning fine now.
Certificates allow us to verify that you are browsing darkclan.net. We had a rather arcane process before involving logging in and running strange commands. That’s changed. From now on, you can do all your certificate management through our site, starting at the new certificate request page.
With a certificate, you’ll be able to see your web site statistics, read and contribute to our documentation, read archived mail, and maybe other things in the future. Come get yours now.
There was a misconfiguration in our colo provider’s DNS settings that may have resulted in mail from you being dropped by your intended recipient’s mail system. Most systems will return a warning message to you if they drop your mail due to a DNS problem.
The settings have been fixed and should remain so, but please let us know through our issue tracker if something unexpected happens.
This is described in part in our system notes; please make sure to check there for any further updates and information. You will need a certificate to view it, an issue we’ll address in this space in the near future.
We allow only one method of general file transfer on our system called secure copy, or scp. It is based on a secure login program called secure shell, ssh. Using scp means no one can capture your password and no one can tell what you’re transferring because communications are encrypted.
To use scp, you’ll need a program that understands it. If you’re a Windows user, look into WinSCP. If you’re a Mac OS X user, see Fugu. If you’re neither, you probably know what scp is already. The Windows and Mac programs allow you to do drag-and-drop style transferring after you’ve successfully logged in.
The parameters you’ll need to initiate an scp session (or sftp, as Fugu calls it) are the hostname, port, username, password, and directory.
Hostname: darkclan.net
Username: whatever username you requested
Port: leave blank, the default will work
Directory: leave blank, the default will work
Password: also something you should know
And that should be it. Have fun, and let us know if there’s something we can add to this article.