Yesterday (October, 26, 2006) I found that the nameservers for my blog (ns0.xname.org, ns1.xname.org) are not responding.
Today the following message appeared on xname.org:

XName currently DOWN

XName is temporarily closed since 08:00PM CEST yesterday evening. We were experiencing the largest DDoS we ever had on both ns0 and ns1 IP addresses, forcing our upstream providers to cut off XName servers in order to preserve their other customers.

We’re working hard in order to have at least one DNS server answering ASAP, and we already negotiated with a premium transit provider to host one of our DNS servers shortly.

Currently my blog is back online, available by its name, and not by IP.

But I am looking for other free NS-record hosting servers (xname-like). I would appreciate if people comment with their experience on managing this problem. I temporarily allowed comments for anyone without registering (but with moderation).

Meanwhile there are two places for Russian speaking folks to register secondary DNS: ns2.trifle.net, secondary.net.ua. Soon I’ll register secondaries there, leaving primary on xname, which was a stable service up until yesterday’s DDoS attack they had.

update:

Update: Sat. 28. 12:00 – ns0 is up and running, serving all zones correctly

update 2:

Update: Mon. 30. 18:00 CEST – ns1 is up and running, reachable from Association Kazar’s network peers (ns1 IP is still blacklisted on upstream transits backbones)

update 3:
xame.org is back online, fully functional.

update 4:
See the List of free DNS services.
I’m staying with xname, though did add a couple of secondaries for better fault protection.

update 5:
See the comments to this post for new technical information about the DDoS attack, including IP addresses of the attackers and some packet statistics. Thanks Boris for the new information.

new attack. On the 14th of January, 2007, I got the following letter from XName team:

DDoS attack on both DNS servers
Our both DNS servers IPs – ns0.xname.org and ns1.xname.org – are under heavy DDoS since 5PM CEST today.
Consequently, both of them are unreachable – except very intermittently.
We’re working with our transit providers to solve this ASAP.

Next day (2007-01-15), XName was up and running:

Resuming normal operations
Since 2AM CEST both ns0 and ns1 were answering correctly – many thanx to
our transit providers for their help on this issue.

the total outage of our service was 7 hours…

one more attack on the 1st of October 2007 (started on the 30th of September):

both ns0 and ns1 DNS servers are under DDoS attack since 10PM (gmt+2) yesterday (September, 30th), ns0 is unreachable since 6AM this morning (October, 1st: total saturation of our uplink).
ns1 is fine but was off 3 hours today (October, 1st), between 2PM and 5PM.

I wonder what kind of a mentally sick person would attack the free service…

For any further X-Name attack updates and history, please refer to the comments below.

Probably a month ago I came across this forum thread (which, in turn, references original article), where the idea of using a country flag on the web-site to represent one of the site’s language versions is discussed in terms of ‘stupidity’ and ‘insult’. Fortunately, in the forum thread, there are also sound comments, which do show the inconsistency of the idea that flags must not be used as language shortcuts.

Adding my five cents, I should note the following:
Read the rest of this entry »

In this post: some caching-related HTTP request and response headers discussed.

Modern websites are “dynamic” by nature – content you get depends on a number of variables and conditions. The simplest example – being a “guest” or a “registered” user of some forum; in both cases you get content generated by the same script/program, but it differs because of your “registered” state.

Another example – web-photogallery. By design, it is wise to always keep the original photo (the largest and presumably of the highest quality). When gallery visitor’s browser requests any smaller version of the photo – we can dynamically resize (often downsize) the original and feed the resulting photo to the browser. This scheme works OK until your gallery gets more and more visitors – CPU load climbs up and increases wait time when accessing your gallery. Evidently, caching is needed.
Read the rest of this entry »

When you search something on the Internet, it is always convenient to have your search terms highlighted in every page you find. Often you need to use “Cached page” to see your terms – which is not quite convenient and comfortable.

Did you think about the convenience of those of your visitors who came to your blog from, say, Google? If not – it is the time to. With the Seacrh Hilite WP plugin you can highlight search terms in your page, if your visitor comes from Google, Yahoo, Lycos or Baidu, or even your own blog’s search.

This plugin is installed and activated as usual.

I’d recommend to: go to Options > Search Hilite, set the “take CSS Style from my Stylesheet” checkbox, cut the sample CSS code from the box just below the checkbox, and paste it into your theme’s style.css file (without the lines “< style type='text/css' >” at the beginning and “< /style >” at the end). This decreases generated HTML page size, and is a proper way to handle styles.

Update:
Another tip is to edit the wp-content/plugins/search-hilite/search-hilite.php file and add the following line at the and of the file, just after other similar add_filter lines:

This will enable highlighting in the post titles, not only content. However, is the search term to be highlighted occurs within the “title” of a link, it’s display will be broken. I contacted plugin author, asking what can be done about it. As soon as there is an answer – I’ll add it here.

This might be the simplest thing to do in your blog – put the post title in front of the blog name. And the plugin to do so is simple – but still appreciated for the effort. Get it and enjoy.

P.S. If you read the WP Codex, especially the paragraph on reversing page title display – please see the comments at “optimal title” home for explanations why the plugin is better.

If you ever need to add AdSense units to your Gallery2 installation, and find no module for this – try following the text below. I compiled it from several sources (primary menalto.com Gallery2 forum), and did everything written here myself here.

Primary source of information was this post, but I recommend that you follow instructions here.

To add AdSense to your Gallery2 sidebar (when using the Matrix theme as a sample): Read the rest of this entry »

I do not know why, but I’m getting this error from time to time in my gallery… It seems to behave like a measure of entropy
To fix it when “entropy broke loose” the first time, I did some searching and found the solution in different topics of the official gallery2 forum. The text below was prepared based on forum searches and the official gallery2 FAQ.

If you get ERROR_STORAGE_FAILURE from your Gallery2 installation, when adding new photos or creating albums, then most probably there is a problem in a mysql database with the g2_SequenceId table.
Read the rest of this entry »