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Post by EXO on May 22, 2020 16:31:51 GMT 8
22 May 2020 - We have transferred Domain Hosting away from GoDaddy to Amazon Web Services. The reason is the cost, GoDaddy charging nearly double the price of AWS. We will also be directing traffic through Cloudflare. I tried this once before, but ran into some uploading issues. I think that these issues can be resolved over the next few days. GoDaddy are remaining as website host for the moment, but we are looking for a cheaper service that can cope with ftp updating of the website. FTP is an old technology, and not everyone continues to support hosting using it.
Our Domains are now registered through Amazon Route 53.
Hopefully, these reorganizations will result in the images missing from the Forum being restored.
I couldn't have done this without significant help, but he insists I not name him.
I also want to give further thanks to our sponsors, Oozlefinch for corregidor.org, Richard King for concretebattleship.org, Steve Foster for 503prct.org. Sponsorships are sought for battleofmanila.org abdrockforce.org.
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Post by EXO on May 23, 2020 12:27:39 GMT 8
23 May 2020Today Corregidor Historic Society moved house, and attained https status. Https stands for Hyper text Transfer Protocol Secure. It is the protocol where encrypted HTTP data is transferred over a secure connection. ... So, HTTPS does encryption of data between a client and a server, which protects against eavesdropping, forging of information and tampering of data. Its immediate importance, and the prime reason we have done it, is that our Forum, hosted at Corregidor Proboards, will now load our images because they will arrive via a HTTPS server. Visiting our websites is now done by using the . For example, we are now corregidor.org, 503prct.org etcetera. We have also arranged a legacy arrangement of sorts, whereby if your links, or your lapse of memory still cause you to visit our old http:// address, an automatic redirection will send you to the https:// address. Https:// will also result in an improvement of our search ranking. On the technical downside, using https:// for a web request will always be slower than using http://. In particular, it will have significantly greater latency, because of the number of extra "handshake" packets that are necessary before the first byte of payload data is encoded and sent to the server. This latency maybe noticeable on the first request to an https:// domain; after that first request, your browser will reuse the connection and cache the SSL session to allow quick resumption of the communication.
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Post by chadhill on May 24, 2020 0:41:42 GMT 8
Great job, EXO! I've done a random sampling of various threads, and all of the affected images appear to be intact. I did not notice a significant difference in downloading time.
I've copied a number of the major threads on to a thumb drive for preservation, including "Malinta Hill" and "The Loss of the SS Corregidor". What made this effort particularly sweet is that Photobucket, for some reason, has decided (temporarily, I'm sure) to remove the watermarks from the images they host. Thus, the threads which I copied have all images intact!
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Post by EXO on May 24, 2020 7:39:11 GMT 8
 Running a website is like being
an invisible man in a dark room,
with no eyes, on a Ferris wheel.
Thanks Chad for keeping an eye on this - and also for raising the issue of how we might ensure the noteworthy threads are not lost. I think the answer to issue is a mix of HOW and WHERE. The normal issue is to get the bugs out of the system, wherein the system represents knowledge, and the bugs represent my ignorance of the technicalities. I propose that the FIELD NOTES feature might be be a solution. The portal is at corregidor.org/fieldnotes/index.htm - it contains a number of noteworthy articles, almost every one of which is the result of great work by John Moffitt. There's already two pages of the Malinta Tunnel, which gives an idea of the way I have formatted the content. I really should pull my finger out and create an article built around all the posts which reference the sinking of the SS Corregidor. It is a tragedy of greater proportions than the RMS Titanic, certainly more controversial, yet hardly known. It's a classic example of how the first casualty of war is truth. I do want to raise this possibility. FIELD_NOTES is a stand alone sub-web, and as such I can share my password access so we can create pages, store images and shift files via the host service. If you acquire Expression Web 4, which is free from Microsoft, we can work out a way to allow full file storage. This is for CHS503 senior people, you know quite well who you are. Yes, Microsoft have niftily made EW4 available free. The files you sent to me are still uploaded and hosted on our CHS503 storage system, at the same address as I indicated to you when we set the storage up. In that way, so long as the website storage is maintained (ie the fees for the Corregidor Historic Society paid), then the files can be accessed. There's been talk about a 10 year sponsorship, but presently that's all it is, talk. The arrangements this week involved discontinuing GoDaddy as the Domain Registrar, and replacing them with Amazon's Route 53. Presently GoDaddy remains the provider of the storage, and this will continue at US$13.99 per month. The reason for keeping the storage at GoDaddy is because they presently maintain a server which is capable of being uploaded using the ftp protocol. FTP is an old protocol, and Expression Web 4 uses it. Not all hosts maintain backwards compatibility with FTP protocol and Expression Web 4. So there's still a way to go. So there's a long way to go yet. |
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Post by EXO on Jun 5, 2020 11:24:58 GMT 8
Nothing special, I just noticed some dates of files I was working on. |
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Post by Registrar on Oct 4, 2020 9:16:35 GMT 8
Recently, the entirety of our websites disappeared, and instead of the landing pages, there was a message from an unidentified party to ring a telephone number. I rang the number and found it was GoDaddy. Rather than be on the hold on an international line, I rang their Australian help line. The websites had all been working without problems for a matter of months, I explained. So what could it be? My immediate thought was whether I had paid their account. "No, all your accounts are in credit and your credit card is good." So therefore there was a technical issue which had occurred to dislocate every domain, preventing them from pointing to the place where corregidor.org (and its children) are hosted. "So I will put you through to Tech Support." After some hours of technical support across two days, GoDaddy finally got things partially working again. I had to enlist the assistance of my son, an IT professional. He determined, after some investigation, that GoDaddy had moved the server on which the site was hosted, and had not correctly updated the links broken by the change of servers. In the course of our discussions, he told me that there was a very thin line of competence/incompetence within technical support circles. One one side, there is honest incompetence (tech people can't know everything) and on the other side of the line, well, we have bullshit artists and liars. He had concluded that GoDaddy knew that they had stuffed up my sites, and had concealed it. (If you don't admit there is a problem, then the blame isn't yours, is it?) Moving House (again) So he decided that, in all the circumstances, we should move house to AWS (Amazon Web Service). One third of the internetis on AWS and it is very standardised. The peculiarities of AWS are well known and documented: this is different to webhosts like GoDaddy where problems are difficult to troubleshoot and require support assistance. We would place our six domains with AWS CloudFront. We would do a bulk data transfer from GoDaddy to the AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) and hold the data there. He then acquainted me with the AWS utility command structure. The website was transferred overnight - all 15GB of it. It was like looking at Formula 1! Talk about fast!! We are still using CloudFlare to protect the websites. It provides encryption (HTTPS) and DDoS (distributed denial of service) protection. There is still a lot to do. I have been using Expression Web for years, and want to stay with it, but it is old technology. We are continuing to work on a solution that enables the FTP upload from Expression Web. For now, I have been told to use the AWS sync commands about which I know nothing. Can't be too hard, can it? Quick! Memorize this map, there will be a pop quiz after! So minor updates may be a bit thin on the ground for a while. And you guys think having a website is easy, heh? |
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Post by EXO on Jan 6, 2021 8:04:36 GMT 8
MAINTAINING THE CORREGIDOR HISTORIC SOCIETY'S WEBSITEWe use Cloudflare, an American web infrastructure and website security company, providing content delivery network services, DDoS mitigation, Internet security, and distributed domain name server services. Cloudflare's services sit between you and the Amazon S3 Hosting Services, acting as a reverse proxy for websites. Cloudflare establishes the "s" in the "https://", which means that our site is secure. People like Google downgrade searches for websites which are not certified secure. Cloudflare provides that certification. Our site does NOT use cookies, and nor does it track you. We only know you via your feedback at this forum. Our unpaid Forum membership is currently in excess of 500 - though I will be deleting a number of "deadwood" members who have never made posts in their first six months of membership. We have over 3,000 members on Facebook, though the number of people who paste any items there is less than a dozen. Heck, it's less than six! As with most organizations, there is a tiny group of scholars who "haul most of the wood." During December 2020, Cloudflare aggregated data from seven of our Sites and served 26.34 GB of data, and mitigated 778 firewall events. Our traffic analysis indicates that the top traffic locations are: • United States: 368,502 • Germany: 27,652 • Philippines: 21,115 • Netherlands: 12,355 • Other: 85,546 Let me take this opportunity to thank my colleagues/sponsors, Roger Davis, Richard King and Steven Foster.
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Post by EXO on Jan 21, 2021 8:49:22 GMT 8
 We found "Daddy." He's agreed to sponsor the acquisition of a FlippingBook Publisher Licence. Our regulars will know what it means. For me, a shitload of work. |
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Post by EXO on Feb 7, 2021 10:30:24 GMT 8
If you're a regular reader of that group of websites which collectively I refer to as "The Website" you may have noticed that I have been updating the articles which became obsolete when Adobe ceased to support its Flash Technology. The updates are courtesy of a good sponsor, LTC AND MRS. RWW (R), E/2/503/173 69-70, who donated the new technology FlippingBook program to display the 2d Battalion 503d PIR Vietnam Newsletters in an animated book style. The new technology allows not only a search facility within the documents, it allows the original *pdf file to be downloaded. An example of the updating, referred to in the image above, is the Annotated Edition I did of the S-3 Journal completed on Corregidor. That part of the site involving the 2/503d Vietnam Newsletter got the first update treatment, and as early February came upon us, I started updating the features contained in the Battle of Manila . Org (February is the 76th anniversary of the battle.) I have started updating a few of the Rock Force . Org features as well. No doubt, there are many more to go. The features which I have been updating have been those which came most readily to my mind, generally the most recent ones, and I am sure that there are a lot of others which have slipped my mind. That's the reason for this post. There's several years of features which I created using the old technology, and I just can't recall them all. If you are reading "The Website" and you come upon a *pdf article which I haven't updated into the FlippingBook technology, for goodness' sake, write and send me the dead link! Lets at least try to get back into sharp focus. |
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Post by Karl Welteke on Feb 8, 2021 6:25:24 GMT 8
Paul, thank you for all your great work. They ought to give you a award for that.
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