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Post by EXO on Mar 21, 2020 12:22:30 GMT 8
Those few who are following our site on a long term basis may have noticed the degradation of the way the site is linking between domains, and internally. Lately, we've seen images which appear on the website not appearing on this forum, even though the files and the links are both valid. We've also seen Photobucket kill linking again to these forums. We've all been suffering links involving rockforce.org which are operating in the US, but not here in OZ, where they result in Error 500 Codes. Similarly, image files are not appearing, their disappearance being entirely unexplained. Just about everything which can go wrong has gone wrong. And then there's the issue of malware. Today I had a l-o-n-g (over an hour not including waiting time) call on Tech Support at GoDaddy. They (it took three techs to get a grip on the issue) tell me that my domains are resolving to the intended publication pages in USA even though, here in OZ, I am not seeing the same results. Another tech told me that Corregidor.org site has a lot of php files they consider malware. (This may be because GoDaddy gets hacked on a fairly regular basis, and that each *.php file contains a line of gobbledegoo malware code.) I do not recall ever creating *.php files, as my knowledge ends at *.htm and *.html, so I told him to "kill the malware." He says he has. The effect it might have, well, I don't know. GoDaddy says that I am currently hosted on an old platform (a Linux providing a windows framing) which is approaching end of life, and need to migrate to a new platform Linux (exact name undescribed) platform. They say that they will soon (a month or more) be sending an email to the old platform customers (presumably includes me) about migration to the new platform. Says it should be easy. (They all say that!) All this technical stuff takes a toll on me. I'm beat and faded. I am not a Web Administrator. I wouldn't know a web config file if it kicked me in the jewels. The progress of technology has become one big lie to me. What I see is that the big technology companies are complicating things so much, small, hobby (amateur) sites like ours are dying. |
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Post by Karl Welteke on Mar 22, 2020 1:26:22 GMT 8
I feel for you and us. But don’t get so much discouraged yet and kill the site.
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Post by EXO on Mar 22, 2020 7:27:38 GMT 8
Oh, "killing the site" never crossed my mind. I am concerned that it is suffering the "death of a thousand cuts" torture - some cuts which are beyond my skill to fix. The 503d PRCT Association of WWII, which is closing down because of the passing of their membership, value the site to the extent that they want to fund it through the next ten years. This scares me, actually. The site is what it is simply because I worked on it a day at a time. Looking forward that far is something I can't cope with. What also got to me was that GoDaddy told me that the corregidor.org site has suffered a malware attack which had placed extra lines of code throughout the *.php files. Now, I didn't even know that we HAVE *.php files. I googled to learn more about this, and discovered there's a whole industry involved in creating malware so that hosting companies can sell malware protection starting at 25 bucks a month. That is more than the cost of hosting, which runs around $20 per month. Can't you just see the boardroom scene where the CEO says that the hosting has become so competitive it's driving the prices down and isn't earning us enough, and some vile young fellow says "Well, we could fund a few malware writers to attack us, plausible deniability and so on, and that way we can open up another stream of income." For the moment, it's just an issue of trying to keep the website operating as it was intended to operate. We have some brilliant discussions on this forum, discussions that inform and educate - two which spring to mind are the "SS Corregidor" thread, and the "Malinta Tunnel" thread. I'd like it if people would copy their favorite threads, and set them up as a word document, and maybe I can post them in a series like I created for John Moffitt's FIELD NOTES, which is one of the best features we offer about exploring/rediscovering Corregidor. The permalink address is corregidor.org/fieldnotes/index.htm and I urge people to have a look at them again. Maybe if a few of you might start a copy/paste to word format for other threads from the forum that are of permanent interest, we can breathe a little life into them. For the last few years, I have been using Expression Web. It was based on "Front Page", which was bundled with some Microsoft software. They ceased to support it and replaced it with Expression Web, which cost bucks to acquire in those days. Expression Web too has reached end of life and isn't supported any more, and can be had from Microsoft for free as one of their legacy programs. Yes, free. I still use it, largely because i have no f**king idea what the new program for working websites is these days. This forum/bulletin board does have a lot of deadwood members, too. They sign on, and we never hear from them again. I suppose they think they are supporting us somehow, but they're not. They're not burdensome, I suppose. Our Facebook page has about three thousand members, and most of them are people who just join and disappear. Facebook isn't all that bad, really, because presently we are able to place an image hosted on FB into this forum, though eventually I expect that FB will kill that. It comes back to the fact that being a "website administrator" isn't what I signed up for. There's lots of things in life like that, I suppose. |
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Post by EXO on Apr 7, 2020 17:10:57 GMT 8
ProBoards' forums are presently transitioning to HTTPS instead of HTTP. This affects us in a MAJOR way. It is, proboards have told me, the reason why images from corregidor.org, 503prct.org, rockforce.org, battleofmanila.org and concretebattleship.org now appear 'broken' and do not show. None of our sites presently support HTTPS.
Each (and every) of our sites would require an SSL Certification, which involves significant cost.
It also requires someone who knows what he's doing. That's not me any more.
Is there anyone out there who knows anything about this?
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Post by chadhill on Apr 7, 2020 23:36:15 GMT 8
I'm very sorry to hear about this, EXO. Unfortunately, it's well above my one-finger tying abilities and way, way above my I.T. expertise.
One small bit of good news, though. The images for the threads "The Loss of the SS Corregidor" and "Malinta Hill" are back up.
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Post by EXO on Apr 8, 2020 11:24:38 GMT 8
In desperation, I went and put a "desperation plea" on the proboards support forum. I followed a lead it gave me to Cloudflare, which in turn explained some stuff I never understood, and said that if I replaced the GoDaddy Nameservers with Cloudflare nameservers, I could utilise their SSL Certification. So I followed blindly their instructions and changed the corregidor.org servers.
I have no idea what this means, or what I have done.
I have no idea if this confers any SSL status on corregidor.org itself, though it might route images destined for display on our proboards.corregidor site through a SSL certified route.
Chad, perhaps this is why your checking on the images on the "The Loss of the SS Corregidor", "Malinta Hill" and other threads indicates they are intact again. /b]
Cloudflare has since sent me an email which says that its services confer Full encryption end to end, using a self-signed certificate on the server. This is not a Full Strict, they point out, which requires a trusted CA or Cloudflare Origin CA certificate on the server. (Presumably this is the big bucks product which establishes HTTPS, though HTF would I know!)
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Post by EXO on Apr 10, 2020 11:21:58 GMT 8
I suspect I am in a classic example of going where I shouldn’t.
If you've been following me so far, none of the images from my websites were appearing on the bulletin board, because the bulletin board now requires all images to come from a https server with a SSL Certificate. My websites are hosted at GODADDY, on uncertified servers.
The bulletin board sent me to Cloudflare.com , which offered a server with an SSL certificate at no charge (as I am not a commercial customer), so I changed to use the Cloudflare servers.
Two things happened because of this:
(a) The bulletin board immediately came back to life, showing all the missing images.
(b) My Microsoft Expression Web 4, which I use to maintain ALL my websites hosted at Godaddy, gives me the following error message: “Can’t connect to ‘corregidor.org’. Check the server name and proxy settings. If the settings are correct, the server may be temporarily unavailable.”
I am trying now to roll back to the way it was last week, when GoDaddy provided the nameservers.
Presently, I seem stuck in an either/or position - Presently, nothing is working, and I am LOCKED out of maintaining ALL my websites. It's not even an EITHER/OR situation any more.
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Post by EXO on Apr 10, 2020 18:21:54 GMT 8
My son has had me go to the command.com prompt, and enter "ipconfig/flushdns".
He explains that the command flushes the contents from my PC’s local cache. "They typically have a cache expiry or TTL/Time To Live of 8 hours. So even if you change the DNS settings for Corregidor.org in the GoDaddy control panel, your PC will continue to use the cached DNS record."
"Hence, that flush DNS command will force your PC to re fetch the DNS record for Corregidor.org instead of using the cached record."
The GoDaddy support had no idea. They had me flush the browser cache.
I can , now at least, maintain the website.
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Post by chadhill on Apr 10, 2020 21:04:38 GMT 8
Sons are great, aren't they? I've had so much help from my son with my little PC issues; don't know how I could have made it without him. Cannot imagine the difficulties associated with running multiple websites, EXO. Hang in there. My hat is off to you!
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Post by cbuehler on Apr 13, 2020 23:31:42 GMT 8
Unfortunately this is all Greek to me and wish there were something constructive I could offer. I believe all our hats are off to EXO in this struggle!
CB
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