Lifelesspeople.com :: News
State of the L2P: 2008 in review and a look forward
I have seen many on the forum concerned about the direction that L2P is taking. I feel it is time for a review of some of the behind the scenes activities that have been taking place to give everyone a peak behind the curtain.
Website Security:
Over the last 4 months the L2P security system has undergone some massive upgrades and changes to help handle more sophisticated attacks against websites hosted on our service. This work is largely behind the scenes due to the highly technical nature of it and also due to the sensitive nature of the work.
April has brought more changes during our usability enhancements which are designed to attempt to solve common errors in popular scripts such as a sudden HTTP error code when attempting to post to a forum. This project has fixed as many as 70 common errors and has vasty improved the usability situation.
Note: Work is ongoing. See the post "500, 501, 401, 406, or other HTTP error messages via Apache" in the announcements forum if you see an error in a common script that you think might be related to the security system.
Email and Spam:
As some of you are aware the spam blocking software on Asgard is a production prototype designed with new techniques that will eventually be incorporated into configurations used on production webservers. The work in this area helps keep email inboxes on Asgard virtually free of spam and also allows us to see new ways the techniques effect email sent from legitimate senders.
In March this system was rebuilt using a new whitelisting implementation designed to balance the aggressive nature of the spam blocking on Asgard while still blocking the majority of spam sent to the system. The success of this is still being judged, but early data suggests it is highly successful at preventing a large amount of false positives.
Capacity and Resources:
L2P houses many websites of all sizes ranging from very small websites that only see a few visitors per month to extremely large websites that require their own dedicated environments. These websites will cost us different amounts to host, but the service is offered at the same monetary cost of $0.00. This has lead to some problems as sites outgrow certain systems and are forced onto new systems. We are in a constant battle to find new resources to host these websites without causing existing websites to suffer as a result.
This problem resulted in the Socceram.net website to appear down as the forum overloaded the environment it was hosted on. We worked with suppliers to attempt to find a cost effective solution that would allow us to continue to provide the same service to Socceram.net that other websites we host enjoy every day, but this was difficult due to the resources needed and the funds available to purchase the resources.
Note: Procedures have been put into place to avoid the situation happening again. We want to ensure that the same situation is not repeated in the future.
To the future:
Some have expressed conern over the future of L2P and what may happen. I can only say that the future is never certain for any service like ours. There are simply too many variables to calculate for me to say for certain that L2P will be here in 5 years. It is a credit to the community and volunteers that L2P has been here as long as it has. We have been operating under the Lifelesspeople.com domain since December of 2001 and are looking at seeing the December of 2008 when most free webhosting providers only exist for periods of time measured in months.
L2P is an example of what can be accomplished with the support of a loyal community and a group of volunteers willing to work towards a common goal. I am proud of what L2P is and I believe that 2008 will be one of our best years yet.
L2P's second push into Web 2.0
You can now find the official L2P Twitter Page at:
http://www.twitter.com/L2P
This page is used for updates that do not need a major announcement here on the forum and will also be used to keep everyone up to date in the event of a major outage.
The Google Group proved to be a bit too cumbersome due to the way it was setup so it is no longer an official point of contact.
Forum change to bbcode
Due to a potential security risk associated with remotely hosted images, the img bbcode has been disabled on the forum until a suitable security method is determined for securing this potential security hole.
500, 501, 401, 406, or other HTTP error messages via Apache
These messages may be caused by recent upgrades to the security system. During the last 4 weeks of active testing there was no indication that any scripts would be adversely effected, but it seems a few requests are causing errors.
To submit a ticket about these the following minimum information is required:
1) IP address that caused the error message to appear.
2) The exact URL that generated the request.
3) A very detailed description of the contents of the HTTP POST request. This would include anything submitted in forms on the page that you suspect might have caused the error.
Note: A ticket without this minimum information is useless because it is nearly impossible to track down the exact log entry about the error message you saw without it.
Second note: Include more information in the ticket if you feel it will be useful. The more information the easier it might be to debug.
World Community Grid - Updated 2/28/2008
You're all invited to join the unofficial Lifeless People World Community Grid team at:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid......461R6QXHN1
Note: Remember that Lifelesspeople.com is not affiliated with the World Community Grid and the team is not an official project of Lifelesspeople.com.
Edit: Updated link to the existing team that was created in 2005. Thanks to AK-87 for mentioning it.
Asgard Upgrade Details
On January 17th 2008 and February 2nd 2008 a series of major upgrades were put in place that have been in the works for quite some time.
These upgrades have allowed us to upgrade to software versions that are much newer and more capable than those we were running before.
The system is now powered by Apache 2.0 with many new modules and features as well as additional security.
Over the next few months the documentation on the website in the Knowledge Base and at the Helpdesk will need to be updated to reflect the recent changes. If you have any questions just post in the Support Questions forum and we'll try to answer you as soon as we can.
Additional Notes:
1) HTTP POST requests are now filtered by additional filters to help protect the system from robotic spam requests. These have been able to lower the overall system load average by up to 50% during the busiest times of the day.
The filters will block certain phrases related that are commonly used in comment spam related to medical or gambling. These patterns should not show up in normal posts so there should be no problems from using these.
The secondary filtering is now done via RBL lookups whenever an HTTP POST request is sent to the system to a form that might be a target for comment spam.
The RBLs used (at the moment) are:
list.dsbl.org
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
dnsbl.njabl.org
These are lists of "Bad IPs" and Open Proxies. The lists should not block general browsers and have proved to be very very effective at blocking comment spam.
If you have any questions just post in the Support Questions forum.
Asgard Upgrades February 2nd 2008 starting at 1:00AM EST
These upgrades will be set to fix certain errors with Apache and update software necessary for system operations.
The upgrades are expected to take 5 - 6 hours and may take Apache offline.
Thank you for your understanding.
Asgard Upgrades January 17th 2008 starting at 1:00AM EST
We will be installing a series of updates tonight starting at 1:00AM EST (in the USA). The upgrades will take approximately 4 hours to complete and various system services may be offline during this time. Please avoid putting in support requests or posting about outages as these are expected.
Thank you for your patience.
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!
L2P 2007 and Vision of 2008
The post that was made here made me think a bit about the path this service has taken and where we are going in 2008.
We've been Lifelesspeople.com for nearly 6 years now and we're just about to enter the 9th year of providing services. That is a long history to look back on and it is almost unheard of in any type of webhosting service.
The question has come up before, but I will answer it again. Is Lifelesspeople.com preparing to close down?
The short answer is no.
The longer answer is that Lifelesspeople.com is big. This type of service is typically run by a small team of people who work together to provide core services to the customer base.
It takes time to bring everything up to date and work out all the small bugs that can pop up from time to time. cPanel 11 presented a unique challenge due to the large amount of changes at every level of cPanel software. I have been working to integrate and recode software for cPanel 11 and it has taken awhile.
2008 will be a big year with a number of big upgrade projects on the back burner. Yes, this does include phpBB3.
We will be changing in 2008, but only for the better. We don't plan on going anywhere anytime soon.
