Quinns.net Homepage

Posted by Chris on November 13, 2006 at 9:02 pm.

I've looked at the logs for the past few days and determined that the new spam filter configuration seems to be working well. Therefore, I have dropped the hammer and reduced the quarantine threshold to slightly above the prior ****SPAM**** tagging threshold. Accordingly, users will no longer receive any email the filters identify as spam.

If you notice that you're not receiving expected email, let me know and I can retrieve it from the quarantine and deliver it to your mailbox within 10 days. After ten days, mail in the spam quarantine is automatically deleted. I can also "whitelist" specific sending domains to ensure that mail from those domains is delivered. Let me know if you experience any problems.

Posted by Chris on July 21, 2006 at 11:43 pm.

Jul 21 22:38:53 pilsner syslogd 1.4.1: restart.

So said the mail server when our electrical service was restored after the lights went off as a storm swept through on July 19 at 7:38 pm.

You should soon begin receiving a significant volume of email which has been queued since our UPS detected the outage and powered down the servers on Wednesday.

All services should be back up now.

Posted by Chris on April 27, 2006 at 4:02 pm.

As a result of a nearby building fire (and resulting electricity loss) this morning, the mail server stopped functioning properly. I did not check my email and failed to notice the problem until this afternoon.

During the outage, mail was queued, but not delivered. You should begin receiving all of your mail now. No mail was lost.

Posted by Chris on April 10, 2006 at 12:53 pm.

Following a kernel update a short time ago, our sever briefly wigged out, causing me to halt web, mail and IM services and restart it. The outage lasted only a few moments, and everything should be back up now.

I have upgraded the web server to improve the operation of the photo archives. You may now navigate to http://photos.quinns.net/sorted/ (or surf to photos.quinns.net and click Photo Gallery) and browse the photo archives via thumbnail images, rather than a text-based directory listing. While it's easier and faster to browse the photos this way, the new scripts alter the way the archives operate in a few significant respects.

To improve download speed, the server now provides scaled images, rather than our full-resolution digital camera pictures. If you wish to download an original full-resolution photo (i.e., to print or use as wallpaper), you must either click the Full Size link under the scaled photo image (then right click and select Save As... to save the full-resolution image) or enter the complete URL to the photo in your browser address field. The scaled photos generated by the new software will look very poor if printed. (PC screen resolution is 72 dots per inch. Most color printers print at 600 dpi or more). Use the Full Size link for this purpose. Also, because the new scripts generate the thumbnail images and scaled photos on the fly when a directory is first accessed, you may experience a short delay if you are the first person to view a particular directory in some time.

Note that the new scripts run only if you surf from the http://photos.quinns.net/sorted/ directory. If you manually enter a complete URL for a particular sub-directory (i.e., http://photos.quinns.net/sorted/2006/ you will see the old style text-based listing for that directory.

Finally, because web browsers cache images on your hard drive, you may need to hit your browser's reload button to view the new thumbnail archives for the first time.

After considerable hacking of PHP and stylesheet code, the blog is now up at blog.quinns.net. Going forward, I will post user messages on the main page at www.quinns.net and my irrelevant/irreverent ramblings on the blog. I encourage you to contribute to the blog with posts and comments!

The blog uses WordPress publishing software with a PHP/MySQL back end. WordPress is highly configurable and offers all the usual bells and whistles, such as comments, user registration, RSS feeds, search, archives, trackback, pingback, themes and Ping-O-Matic support.

If any of you are interested in running your own blog (i.e., http://blogs.quinns.net/your_blog_name/), let me know and I'll create the necessary SQL tables and WordPress subdirectory. The software is very easy to use with its default themes. My installation was complicated only because I opted to modify the PHP code and stylesheets to make WordPress mimic the look and feel of the rest of the site.

Our Jabber instant messaging and chat server is back online at jabber.quinns.net. Because we have migrated to a completely new server platform, users will need to recreate their Jabber accounts before using the new server. You may register your account yourself with your Jabber client software. If you're unsure how to do so, email me your requested user name and password and I'll create your account. Unfortunately, you must also recreate your roster after registering your new account.

Note that the server address for group chat/conferences is now conference.jabber.quinns.net.

Information about the Jabber server may be found at http://jabber.quinns.net. Our web-based chat client is at http://chat.quinns.net. Basic step-by-step instructions are posted at http://jabber.quinns.net/newbie.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

We are in the process of migrating web, mail and messaging content from our old servers, lager and ale, to our new server, pilsner. (Yes, we name all of our servers after beer styles. We also run bitter, stout, doppelbock and porter. Sad, but true.)

On a good day, I can devote about an hour to this process. Some menu options may not yet function. This will take some time.

We will periodically update users via email.