SoAustin.Net Info

The soaustin.net server suffered complete failure middle of last week.

We've relocated to a brand new server in a brand new data center.

The system was loaded from backups made on Aug. 22. If you made any changes to your web site (or other files or services), you will need to recreate them.

Other than that, everything should be as it was before (maybe just a little bit zippier). Please let us know if you encounter any problems. Send email to: root at soaustin.net

The soaustin secure certificates have been updated. These certificates are renewed annually, and used for secure mail and web communications.

So do not be surprised if your mail or web program issues an alert the next time you try to connect to mail.soaustin.net or secure.soaustin.net. If you tell it that you want to accept the certificate, then the error will go away (until next year).

Our server was out of commission for much of today. We're back and all services are restored.

The outage began about 3:30pm today. At the time the problem was diagnosed as a disk error. I arrived at the data center about 7:30pm this evening to begin repairs. Repairs were completed and the system was back into service about 11:30pm tonight.

So the total downtime was about 8 hours. No information was lost during the outage, and all systems should be working normally now.

Please let us know if you see any problems or have any questions.

Incoming email (to soaustin mailboxes) will now be filtered through SURBL–the "Spam URI Realtime Blocklists." The SURBL lists contain web addresses commonly found in spam emails (like "http://bigboobstory.info/").

Now when you receive email, spamassassin will consult SURBL to see if the email has any spammy web addresses. If so, points will be added to the spam score for the message.

If a messsage gets enough spam points it will be marked *****SPAM***** in the subject. (Not thrown away!) You should be able to configure your mail reading program to filter these marked messages off into a separate "probable spam" folder.

Huzzah! After much waiting, the automatic web stats are running again. The stats will update automatically every morning. This means when you view your web stats, they will be current to the previous day's activity.

Welcome to the new SoAustin user information portal. The information from the (yucky old) site has been loaded into the Help Library. Slowly we'll get that replaced with more...errr...helpful information. For instance, check out the spiffy, detailed instructions on how to setup Outlook Express to work with our mail server.