Just a quick note, as previously noted, our SSL certificates were due to expire. Due to various headaches involving issues changing our DNS records, and my personal unavailability, we were unable to renew our certificates in time. Right now, soylentnews.org is running on a LetsEncrypt certificate that was issued after quite a bit of pain. We're still trying to fix the fundamental issues that prevented us from being issued a two year Gandi certificate. Currently, I'm unable to resolve this issue more in-depth, but I've granted access to TheMightyBuzzard to be able help handle the necessary issues that caused the downtime. I will try to get a full writeup of the situation, but for the time being, the main site is up. Secondary services remain down due to the same renewal issues.
Apologies for any inconvenience,
NCommander
Related Stories
This is a followup to: SoylentNews Site Certificates Expiring... We ARE Working on It, But... [Updated]
and: Site Services Restored
Certs (Not Just a Breath Mint):
Thanks to the efforts of The Mighty Buzzard and NCommander we now have valid certs, issued by LetsEncrypt installed on all of our servers. Except that the IRC server needs to be bounced to make its cert active on the backup daemon, all should now be in effect. As in our original story, you can check our certificate status with these links:
https://crt.sh/?q=soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=sylnt.us
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25sylnt.us
Developers:
The past few days have brought into focus a situation that has been building for several months: We really only have a single person who is working on developing features for the site, The Mighty Buzzard. As with any large and on-going undertaking, this burden is taking its toll. I try to help out as I can, but as I am the primary QA/Test guy who is much better at the user-facing things than what all happens "under the covers", my abilities and assistance are limited. If you have any spare time and would like to lend a hand (and every bit helps), please reply in the comments or contact The Might Buzzard directly on IRC.
Community:
I recall in the early days of this site when things would fall over several times a day. That has largely become a thing of the past... to the point where it is unusual for any issues to appear on the site and the support services we maintain (email, wiki, IRC, etc.) The baseline code on which this site was founded (open-sourced, out-of-date, back-level, and non-functional) was not promising, but the staff managed to bludgeon it into shape and we now have a solid foundation. That it continues to run as smoothly as it has is a testament to our SysOps folk who toil largely in the background and just keep things working... as well as the continued care-and-feeding that TMB so generously provides. To all of you, please accept my heartfelt thanks and appreciation!
Some numbers: we are approaching the 23,000th story posted; have recently passed 700,000 comments submitted; have had over 3,300 journal articles posted; and are on the cusp of having our 120th Poll!
Though all numbers are approximate and unofficial, it appears we surpassed our funding goal for the first half of the year ($3,000) with a net subscription tally of just over $3,250! I'll leave it to our treasurer to collate and post the official numbers. I'll leave the "Funding Goal" side bar as is for a week or so to commemorate this accomplishment. Do note that subscriptions are still being accepted and will count towards the second half of the year's funding needs.
Folding@Home: Not all of you may be aware, but our soylentnews team for Folding@Home is currently at 240th place... in the world! It started with a single story posted to this site. Just over four years ago, we were at 230,319th place! If you have any spare computes you would like to contribute, especially GPU-based, we'd love to have you sign up! Just reply in the comments and I'm sure someone will get back to you.
Whenever I write one of these stories, I always fear I'll have omitted someone or something important. Please accept my humble apologies if I have done so as there is no intent to slight any contributor.
To the community, I offer my thanks for your contributions to the site as well as your patience and understanding during the challenges of the past few days. Contributions are not just financial (though we wouldn't be here without them -- Thank You!), but also submitting stories and comments, and moderating comments, too! The community continues to impress me with your wide-ranging knowledge and expertise; I have learned much from the exchanges in the story comments!
Lastly, please keep janrinok (our Editor-in-Chief) in your thoughts and wishes while he undergoes a medical procedure and attendant recovery period. Best of luck JR!
--martyb
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:43AM (12 children)
The VT100 theme is broke. Too bad, the VT100 theme is my favorite.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:48AM (11 children)
Theme looks the same as always for me. Plus the browser is saying the site has a valid certificate now.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:08AM (10 children)
Strange. VT220 works, VT100 is get on white for me. Using CyanogenMod now, will try on a desktop.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:34AM
VT100 (green on black) works for me as usual.
As usual, thanks to all the wonderful volunteers that keep this site going!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:46AM (8 children)
Almost certainly a caching issue.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Sunday July 01 2018, @04:32AM (7 children)
Not sure, just witched back to VT100 and it's working now. Cool.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @04:40AM (6 children)
> witched
So you had to use magic to fix it? :)
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday July 01 2018, @08:09AM
Judging from his comment, I suspect the issue was corrected automagically.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:11PM (4 children)
Never underestimate the utility of voodoo when fixing something technical.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @08:28PM (3 children)
Yep, works like a charm on the economy...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 01 2018, @08:43PM (2 children)
Makes perfect sense, really. I mean the currency is based entirely on magic, so you should be able to magic any of the economy up.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @09:01PM (1 child)
Actually the bedrock of any 'economy' is faith. Magic = "I don't know"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 02 2018, @12:34AM
Well yeah but faith = "I don't know" as well, just with the addendum " but I believe anyway".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:46AM (5 children)
I fell out of bed. Literally. I'm blaming the cat, but I found myself falling to the floor. Picked myself up, went to the bathroom, poured a coffee, and sat down at the desk. Log in, look at the browser, and refresh the page. SSL warning. Couple sips of coffee, and I pull up extensions, to tell HTTPS Everywhere to make an exception for Soylent. Go back to the tab, and refresh - there's your post at the top of the list.
So - did the exception work? I guess I'll never know.
Need moar coffee . . .
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:00AM
I guess we're officially exceptional now then.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:30AM (3 children)
Well... I had to go read that other (/.) site for 2 minutes while you guys figured it out, and my IQ dropped 20 points because of that.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:49AM (2 children)
I still read /. headlines on the crapper (Not the comments though, because why? We took the best of the community with us when we split.). I've already read everything worth reading at my desktop, so...
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday July 01 2018, @11:31AM (1 child)
I had made a few enemies over there too. Probably best not hang around where I wasn't wanted.
I love a good discussion... and a lot of times the other people bring up things I had not considered, and often changing my take on it.
But the flamebait name calling... I do not like stooping to that level unless the discussion concerns Congressmen, RIAA, or Microsoft.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:14PM
Flame wars and name calling are the spice in an otherwise bland discussion. There's room for both intelligence and entertaining jackassery in any discussion worth having.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:10AM
It finally made me look into faketime command. For example:
faketime -f "-2 months" wget https://soylentnews.org/ [soylentnews.org]
Some will say it could also be:
wget --no-check-certificate https://soylentnews.org/ [soylentnews.org]
But if the tool doesn't want to let you override certicates, and it can fall to LD_PRELOAD tricks, faketime is a good solution. Better than changing the clock for everything, which means NTP has to be stopped and file stamps will also "time travel".
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:30AM (5 children)
How do you have so much trouble renewing a certificate, much less a Let's Encrypt one?
I'd be interested in hearing the technical details of what caused this.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 5, Funny) by RS3 on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:52AM (1 child)
It involves the ACME protocol and a pesky roadrunner.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:56AM
Truth [youtube.com].
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:55AM (2 children)
Well, NCommander will have to fill you in on the Gandi cert but what happened with LE was Linode quit pulling soylentnews.org zone updates from boron for some reason while I was figuring out the proper TXT entries to add, so no DNS challenge possibility for a new cert from them. I dunno if it was something I did or something fubar on Linode's end but I'll give it another shot tomorrow to see if we can get a "soylentnews.com,*.soylentnews.com,sylnt.us,*.sylnt.us" cert and just pass it around to all the various boxes that need it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Sunday July 01 2018, @03:01AM (1 child)
Would this help? https://certbot.eff.org/ [eff.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 01 2018, @03:28AM
Not especially but thanks for the link. They're all "no http challenges for wildcard certs" and I'm not automating something that fucks with our nameserver (too much potential for epic breakage), so I'll just be updating it every couple months by hand.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:34AM (2 children)
For whatever reason, I had www.soylentnews.org in my bookmark. That still isn't working. Dropped the www, and everything is working fine now.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 01 2018, @02:57AM
Yeah, we don't use www. Haven't for ages.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @04:12AM
www works on Chrome, but it redirects or drops the www.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday July 01 2018, @05:34AM
at 22:33 PDT https://soylentnews.org [soylentnews.org] still down in Firefox.
Perhaps this is caching problems.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by AlwaysNever on Sunday July 01 2018, @10:00AM (3 children)
I'll blame that Gentoo thing you guys chose to use to run the site.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday July 01 2018, @10:25AM (2 children)
I'll blame Microsoft for buying GitHub.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:16PM
I blame Quebec. That way I get to blame Canada and the French at the same time.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday July 02 2018, @03:43AM
I blame GitHub for selling out to Microsoft.