Problems June -- and a new host

    Post subject: Update - June 13
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[list] 
Our web hosting company was sold in April. 
The new owners tried to stop "spam" attacks on their servers by 
setting eveybody's email to ":fail" . This caused two weeks of mail to be 
rejected. They finally corrected this with a more complex way to access e-mail. 

During this period, the Institute Forum was vandalized. Recovery of the Forum from
backups resulted in a security violation. 
After almost a month of trying, we put up a new Forum. 

It took 6-days to get an answer to an FTP Virus that may have been the why that our
 Forum was vandalized. 
The answer was : it is not a virus, it just has the behavior of one. 

Early in June all the email account-names of the members of the Institute were erased. 
Each of us thought that questions were going to another. We lost another week of e-mail. 

The Institute will move to a new ISP in the near future. 
There should be no change in what you see. It just will work properly.[/list]

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Posted: 22 Jun 2005 06:26 am
      We have moved to a new web-host.
      Everything appears to be working correctly.
      If you find any problems, please let us know.
      [url]http://www..basic-english.org/instutute.html[/url][/list]

     Thank you for waiting during this time of many troubles.
     Jim
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    Problems September -- and with a new host

        Our forum was hacked again. It was not targeted at only us, many websites on this new host were attacked. While trying to restore the forum, the restore function simply restored the corrupted file. On contacting customer support, one gets the feeling one is in a Capital One commercial where the answer is "No!" to every question. Four rounds of email resulted in:
    • Ralph wouldn't restore our database.
    • John directed me to "their support", that is, to a 3rd party vendor for support.
    • DreamHost Customer Support Team suggest their "extensive KBase"
    • Brian said "you can completely remove the installation"
        After two unsucessful recoveries from "hacking" in three months, after paying in advance for two years of service from two different hosts, after spending two months trying to recover the first and in selecting a new host and moving all files, and on spending two days on the second, I was not about two pay for a third host this year. There were more useful things to do for Basic English than play the fool to web hosts ; we deleted all reference to the Institute offering a forum.   Maybe we will try again, someday. Maybe in two years with a third host. Maybe with Yahoo! Maybe refer you to another Basic English forum. Maybe start a selective-emails format and call it a forum -- that you are reading now.
        Volunteers for running a forum will be appreciated. It is a useful method for people to work together. We have two unused Basic English domain names that are now only pointing to dotOrg.
    Unanswered problems -- for those interested in gory details..
    • Forum's "User Ban" does not appear to be working. It seems to be hacked such that to ban one feature un-bans previous on other lines. The previous names are fixed in un-ban and cannot be deleted. Thus each ban, un-bans one or more previous. How do I delete these and other bogus members?
    • A restore to 00:00 Saturday September 17 will be okay.
    • If updating phpBB software my responsibility, how do I do it?
    • Any advice on the issue of blocking (further hacker) attacks is welcomed.
    • I hope the 2-day delay in response is not representative.
    • There are 18 choices to download from phpbb. Which should I be using?
    • The update does not execute. the messge is * ShellExecute return 31"
    • What should php files be associated with?
    • One-click install responded with "Could not connect to Data Base"
    • I cannot delete and start over because there are hidden files in /cache.
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