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posted by NCommander on Monday March 10 2014, @11:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the i-am-so-fucking-sick-of-this-drama dept.

Update: 10 March 2014 20:20 UTC. Follow here for the latest.

Update: 10 March 2014 19:10 UTC.

At this point Barrabas reports he is exchanging email with the buyer but refuses to say anything. Until we hear from them, we have to hope for the best but plan for the worst. If this link goes down, please go to the linode site where we will regroup. We will use that link as a fallback if necessary.

Update: 10 March 2014 18:30 UTC.

Barrabas reports in IRC he has received funds for the site and has sold the domain name. The terms of this sale, as well as its buyer, have not been disclosed. We await additional information. If you have information on this, please contact us at admin @ soylentnews . org

Update: 10 March 2014 16:30 UTC.

Due to NCommander's personal involvement with the situation he is recusing himself from negotiations. I (Mattie_p) am currently working with the staff to figure out how to address this incident. We have posted a poll which is available and should show up shortly on the front page.

Original text:

We've been held hostage by John:

Working with NCommander
Am I The Bad Guy

Right now, I can't write a coherent response properly (I'm writing this from a Mac Store right now as some sort of response was necessary). Despite John's offer, we never used the Linode's he purchased for hosting slash, and the two services (forums and wiki) that were hosted on them were migrated. I had hoped that this would have been a private issue between me and John, to be handed by email with a proper agreement, but the site itself is now at risk.

Right now, I'm organizing a response with out staff now, but I won't be home for several hours so MrBluze is currently handling the crisis. He can hand off to mattie_p when he returns, or myself when I have proper net access again. John's offer does not reflect myself or any of the staff here, nor does he have what he says he has. The web server, dev server (fusion forge), and database were always hosted on Linode's on my personal account. John DID have access to the Linode account which was revoked when he left staff, but to my knowledge never had the root password or shell accounts on any of the boxes. That access was revoked. It is possible he has a copy of the database, I do not know for sure. He does not at this moment have access to any of the hardware powering the site. He does however control the DNS register and can possibly yank the site from under us. If that happens, I can send a mass email to every user account to inform them of what happened, and where we are now. We supposedly have until Friday until John drops everything in the trash unless someone pays him $2000 USD. As per the posts, I was willing to pay him, but I had some issue with the expenses as written (my emails are genuine, as is the email I received from John), but I'm currently in Asia, and have no practical way to send him a check until I return to the continental United States on Sunday; I informed John of this on IRC originally.

We're currently in scramble mode to try and organize a new name, and getting migrated as soon as possible. I was serious when I said I was done with the drama but it appears John isn't. I'm personally sorry to have to inflict this on the community, and if you wish to leave us, I shall not blame you in the slightest.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by mechanicjay on Monday March 10 2014, @01:58PM

    From the horses mouth -- since I worked on the varnish config.

    It's completely saving our asses. Apache 1.3 can't handle the load of the site on it's own. Varnish is serving 85% ish requests right of cache. So it's allowing us to protect the fragile apache/perl/slash backend and also run on *MUCH* more modest hardware than we'd be able to other wise....So, remind me, why do we need to dump varnish?

    --
    My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
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  • (Score: 0) by crutchy on Monday March 10 2014, @02:12PM

    by crutchy (179) on Monday March 10 2014, @02:12PM (#13967) Homepage Journal

    [12:05:26]  Just in case: http://li694-22.members.linode.com 
    [12:06:15]  laminatorx unfortunately due to the sheer number of hardcoded shit that won't work if we loose the domain 

    there's no 'soylent' in slashcode or in mysql schema. Can the varnish config be changed easily to suit a new domain? Dunno what other "hardcoded shit" he could be referring to.

    • (Score: 0) by crutchy on Monday March 10 2014, @02:20PM

      by crutchy (179) on Monday March 10 2014, @02:20PM (#13972) Homepage Journal

      Also, if we can't get something working with apache2 how the hell can we call ourselves geeks? Not that anyone else cares, but I'm not gunna waste time fucking around with code that's embedded itself up apache1.3's ass.

    • (Score: 0) by crutchy on Monday March 10 2014, @02:27PM

      by crutchy (179) on Monday March 10 2014, @02:27PM (#13977) Homepage Journal

      Btw the hardcoded shit was from ncommander replying to laminatorx. I prolly should've wrapped the log extract in ecode tags.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by mechanicjay on Monday March 10 2014, @02:34PM

        1) The domain name gets hardcoded in various places in the database, which is why it's kind of a pita.
        2) Varnish doesn't give a crap about the hostheader it receives.
        3) Porting an app from mod_perl1 to mod_perl2 is not an insignificant effort -- one which is being planned for.
        --
        My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
        • (Score: 0) by crutchy on Monday March 10 2014, @02:37PM

          by crutchy (179) on Monday March 10 2014, @02:37PM (#13983) Homepage Journal

          So we can just dump the sql to a file, do a mass find/replace and then restore. Piece of cake.

          • (Score: 0) by crutchy on Monday March 10 2014, @02:40PM

            by crutchy (179) on Monday March 10 2014, @02:40PM (#13984) Homepage Journal

            I'll take a closer look at the schema tomorrow. Hardcoding urls in a db seems really bad; even for an old dinosaur like slash.

            • (Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Monday March 10 2014, @02:43PM

              It's a horrific idea, but so many web apps do it. Even the latest release of wordpress craps hostnames all over the db.
              --
              My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
            • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday March 10 2014, @04:00PM

              by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Monday March 10 2014, @04:00PM (#14043) Homepage
              urls are data more than they are code.

              Therefore they belong in the database more than they belong in the perl.
              --
              Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @04:28PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @04:28PM (#14071)

                They don't belong in either. The base URL belongs in a configuration file. I don't do web development; but that's just common sense.

  • (Score: 1) by Reziac on Tuesday March 11 2014, @03:38AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Tuesday March 11 2014, @03:38AM (#14462) Homepage

    Hey, use tin cans and string if it works :)

    I will say the site performance so far has been uniformly stellar.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.