It’s been a long time …
Perfect storm
Last January my laptop took a dive when its cooling fan seized. Months were needed to acquire the part from HP. Mainly because it has to be imported to Switzerland. At the same time we acquired two new hosts that included Windows 7 Home Premium. One of them was to become SG’s new workstation/desktop machine and the other was slated to become my new Web Applications Server (WAS). However, since I use Active Directory, I had to upgrade both to Windows 7 Ultimate. Easier said than done since, I had to get the upgrade packages from the States. That took almost 4 months.
Rewind to May2011. At that time I was informed by Livejournal that my account had been compromised. Y’all may remember my posts on it. At the time I went through a frantic time of changing and resetting passwords. They were based on a misspelling of a rather long word but since I depend on login cookies, it didn’t matter. All the login cookies are on my laptop and I didn’t bother to write down the new passcodes. Further, in Feb2012, my mail server’s motherboard dies. You can probably guess where this is going by now.
No problemo, I thought, I just go to using the other new host for my workstation until I can repair the laptop. The problem is that the new box doesn’t have the login cookies on it and I can no longer remember which misspelling I used for the new passcodes, never having used it more than 6 times, many months before. Yes it’s a secure passcode, too secure. With all my domain mail accounts having gone the way of my old mailserver, I was stuck and could no longer access my websites. This has been the case for over 6 months now. Don’t forget that I’m still maintaining 10K words per week on my novels.
My laptop is now working again and I can once more post
however, lots of lessons have been re-learned. The big one is about complacency. Murphy loves complacency.
Forward ho!
I will be completely redesigning and reworking my network of the next few months. I once more have a mailserver but I am deprecating those addresses. While I can do the anti-spam stuff, I can’t touch Gmail for spam killing. There are still lots of issues but the new house will eliminate many of them. There is a lot to be said for building something as good as you can and then ‘Stop messing with it!?’
One thing though, the Slamlander will be getting his own domain name.
Mirrored from The Slamlander.
You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.
Last January my laptop took a dive when its cooling fan seized. Months were needed to acquire the part from HP. Mainly because it has to be imported to Switzerland. At the same time we acquired two new hosts that included Windows 7 Home Premium. One of them was to become SG’s new workstation/desktop machine and the other was slated to become my new Web Applications Server (WAS). However, since I use Active Directory, I had to upgrade both to Windows 7 Ultimate. Easier said than done since, I had to get the upgrade packages from the States. That took almost 4 months.
Rewind to May2011. At that time I was informed by Livejournal that my account had been compromised. Y’all may remember my posts on it. At the time I went through a frantic time of changing and resetting passwords. They were based on a misspelling of a rather long word but since I depend on login cookies, it didn’t matter. All the login cookies are on my laptop and I didn’t bother to write down the new passcodes. Further, in Feb2012, my mail server’s motherboard dies. You can probably guess where this is going by now.
No problemo, I thought, I just go to using the other new host for my workstation until I can repair the laptop. The problem is that the new box doesn’t have the login cookies on it and I can no longer remember which misspelling I used for the new passcodes, never having used it more than 6 times, many months before. Yes it’s a secure passcode, too secure. With all my domain mail accounts having gone the way of my old mailserver, I was stuck and could no longer access my websites. This has been the case for over 6 months now. Don’t forget that I’m still maintaining 10K words per week on my novels.
My laptop is now working again and I can once more post
however, lots of lessons have been re-learned. The big one is about complacency. Murphy loves complacency.
Forward ho!
I will be completely redesigning and reworking my network of the next few months. I once more have a mailserver but I am deprecating those addresses. While I can do the anti-spam stuff, I can’t touch Gmail for spam killing. There are still lots of issues but the new house will eliminate many of them. There is a lot to be said for building something as good as you can and then ‘Stop messing with it!?’
One thing though, the Slamlander will be getting his own domain name.
Mirrored from The Slamlander.
You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.
All rights are reserved under US copyright law. More detail may be found on my Disclaimers and Rights page.