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Audioguy was one of the original team who created the existing SoylentNews site. He has stayed with us since that time and has served the community as a sys-admin for over 10 years. It is no exaggeration to say that over the last year or two he has played an almost single-handed role in keeping this site working.
Audioguy has suffered a series of significant personal and medical events over the last 6 months or so. He is now about to commence ophthalmic surgery tomorrow (Wednesday) and is facing other potentially life changing medical issues in the near future. He has, quite understandably and reluctantly, been forced to stand down from his role which was effective from late last week. Unfortunately that has meant that we have lost the ability to correct the current certificates problem. Access to the Linode servers is still controlled by the existing Board and we have experienced additional problems accessing one of our servers by the usual methods. This appears to be common to many staff and has further exacerbated the current problem.
I have written an email to NCommander requesting his assistance in updating the certificates so that the site becomes fully operational again. Your patience is appreciated. What might appear to many in the community to be a relatively minor issue is, behind the scenes, a major blow to the existing team. We have other sys-admins who are ready to pick up the challenge but they do not yet have the necessary access, nor are they yet experienced in managing the beast that that is Slashd.
Returning to audioguy, I am sure that the entire community would wish to join me in thanking him for a decade of support to the site, and to wish him well for the upcoming surgery. He remains one of this community and evidence of his past contributions can be found in numerous bits of code and associated documentation. He has also, for example, been the manager of the technical wiki which has been vital to the support team for all of that period. We are indebted to him.
Good luck for the future, audioguy. Take it easy. Best wishes to you and your family.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Tuesday May 07 2024, @09:55PM (2 children)
That's true. In fact, if you click on the link for IRC, it goes back to soylentnews.org.
Services on sylnt.us -- note that it is the mail server for soylentnews.org:
Starting Nmap 6.40 ( http://nmap.org [nmap.org] ) at 2024-05-07 21:49 UTC
Nmap scan report for mail.soylentnews.org (72.14.184.41)
Host is up (0.11s latency).
Not shown: 927 closed ports, 61 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
80/tcp open http
143/tcp open imap
443/tcp open https
587/tcp open submission
993/tcp open imaps
6666/tcp open irc
6667/tcp open irc
6668/tcp open irc
6669/tcp open irc
7000/tcp open afs3-fileserver
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 2.82 seconds
It does appear to be running some kind of irc.
But I'll come back to my original point: first order of business is to automate the certificate updates. I think some complexity in the current setup comes from using wildcard certificates, instead of individual host certificates and perhaps some judicious use of self-signed certificates might simplify things.
Note that the DNS is also a mess: there are tow MX records, but, when resolved, they both point to the same IP address.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday May 07 2024, @10:44PM
IIRC someone (NCommander?) said they condensed some of the (too) many servers, so some of the DNS / IP stuff might not have been updated (yet).
Also IIRC there is / was a web interface for IRC. Used to be, but I'm not really an IRC person; I can't remember the last time I was on it, likely more than a year ago.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Tuesday May 07 2024, @10:47PM
Seems to be still there: https://irc.staging.soylentnews.org [soylentnews.org]
I don't have time to try it more.