puzzling.org users

Upgrade complete. Please email root with any problems.

The sites should look the same, but the backend will be a bit different.

SHA1 fingerprint: AC:3D:E7:2C:46:18:B0:5D:92:65:2C:17:C7:07:5B:EC:D0:E0:4B:8C
MD5 fingerprint: 2B:AA:34:BE:E5:2B:31:E4:23:42:2A:4C:E2:D0:ED:04

The certificate is signed with the puzzling.org certificate.

Linode has given us more disk space, which has been allocated to various disks on the system. Check df -h for info.

puzzling.org is now running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Please send us an email if something’s stopped happening, something’s started happening, you’re getting an error message or similar things bug you.

SHA1 fingerprint: 16:7B:C7:D7:64:09:2F:BD:57:A1:4E:43:E0:49:E0:FE:F8:5D:EA:C0

MD5 fingerprint: 2F:E0:E4:01:65:A2:77:61:84:9F:06:50:9D:CD:75:16

The certificate is signed with the puzzling.org certificate.

The puzzling.org server is now running Feisty Fawn.

SHA1 fingerprint: 3C:AF:A4:CD:D9:76:DF:C6:C7:D0:0E:66:CB:01:3C:C3:CB:DD:B3:D5

MD5 fingerprint: 42:0A:69:C3:D4:54:8E:42:44:7D:AD:84:F8:65:53:E3

It occurs to me that I ought to say this really explicitly: there is no guaranteed minimum service on puzzling.org. None of you are paying me to do this, it’s not a business, and therefore I do not guarentee uptime, performance of the server, or responsiveness on my behalf. I mean, I try to provide these things, but if you really need them, you also really need to be paying someone for them.

The old SSL certificate for fuchsia.puzzling.org expired and a new one has been issued with these fingerprints:

• SHA1: 98:F3:81:0D:38:8F:1F:2C:9F:C6:9B:A9:D7:1C:83:FA:C3:C7:17:E3
• MD5: 87:73:99:26:9C:FC:05:0B:C2:3E:B8:F8:1F:3C:0F:A9

This certificate will be presented on SMTP (mail sending) and IMAP and POP (mail receiving) connections. The certificate presented for web connections (the users.puzzling.org certificate) remains the same, as does the signing authority. Both were described in February 2006.

As of June 15 2006. Please email the admins with any system problems

Upgrade from Ubuntu 5.10 to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS will occur on Wednesday 14th June 2006 from 10:30pm Sydney time onwards.

I do not make backups of other users’ data on puzzling.org, with the not-guarenteed exception of WordPress weblogs, which I intermittantly back up. Further, I do not believe that Linode does backups either. While I will take every reasonable precaution not to destroy your data, you should maintain backups of any data that is important to you.

Please note that I want people to self police on this: I won’t be seeking evidence that you’re not following the below, I want to trust people. If any part of the below is not acceptable to you, please talk to me first (perhaps it was misworded or there’s an implication I didn’t consider) and if you really want to host things I won’t allow, I’m happy to forward your email and delegate your domain.

Hosting puzzling.org at Linode requires that I abide by their terms of service and acceptable use policy. Therefore, I require that my users also follow them, and that any violations may result in a temporary suspension of your account and a warning or a permanent suspension if Linode seems to require it of me; and a second violation will result in a permanent suspension. I am willing to consider redirecting your email and delegate your domain name in the event of such a suspension.

In particular:

• do not use puzzling.org servers to send or relay spam (if you’ve done this, I will do everything in my power to pass on the $500 fine that Linode will apply to me);
• do not use puzzling.org to host insecure web programs (if you don’t have a clue what to think about this one, please ask me to audit the software); and
• do not host or transmit any material that is or you suspect might be illegal under either Australian or US law, including but not limited to child pornography and copyright infringing material.

Note that under Australian law, even textual descriptions of minors engaging in sexual acts may be considered child pornography. If you intend to host or transmit anything that even touches on minors and sex, you may be best off seeking legal advice, and I’d appreciate the warning so that I can do likewise. Also recall that since the beginning of January 2006 you should be equally careful publishing material that has anything to do with suicide.

Please respect the privacy of other users on the system and do not attempt to exploit security holes or other lapses to access or change data that your user account shouldn’t be able to access or change. If you discover that something about the system is insecure, you should let me know about it and I’ll be very grateful.

In addition, since I provide hosting to most people and sysadmin services to everyone for free:

• do not host sites from which you intend to make money (this includes things like hosting Google ads); and
• do not host pornography of any kind, because it tends to be incredibly popular, and I don’t want to have to pay the associated bandwidth fees.

Be sensible about the porn thing: the odd naked shot is OK, a bunch of naked shots probably should be password protected so that the masses can’t eat all my bandwidth, shots of sexual acts I’ll consider porn for the purposes of the above.

If you want to host very popular material or make money from your site, you should move to your own paid hosting, not least because they may be able to guarentee a minimum level of service, whereas I can’t and won’t.

Policy applies to: people hosting websites on puzzling.org
Hosting images is now a potentially enormous bandwidth liability. This is thanks to images.google.com, which makes it easy to find third party images, and the <img> HTML tag, which makes it easy to include other people’s images in your own pages. If you have an image at http://example.puzzling.org/hugeimage.jpg, and someone uses the <img> tag below in their page, then your image in its entirety gets included every time someone views the page, and their browser happily runs off to fetch it from the puzzling.org server: