Website update.

[Keith Clements]

As part of an extensive update of the website, the forum has just been updated to the LATEST VERSION. I have also tuned the system so we hopefully do not get any search unavailability. Please let me know if you do have issues.

These extensive updates have taken place about every 5 years in the 25 year history of the website. Since each of the components of the platform software evolve in their individual revision cycles, eventually a refresh, rather than a maintenance update, is required.

There has been a bottom up approach to the update. The latest version of the operating system DEBIAN 12 was installed , although last month this was superseded by DEBIAN 13, so when that settles down another update will take place. On top of this was put the sympl installation and management system for websites, mail and, most importantly, security.

The security was further enhanced with some advanced intrusion detection and blacklisting software. This is very aggressive and you might find you are locked out when you travel abroad or even use another computer or connect via another IP address. This is because the system uses blacklists created not only by itself but by thousands of others around the world that report attacks on their systems. You might inadvertently be allocated or use an IP address that has been blacklisted at sometime in the past.

If this does happen then either try to connect elsewhere or somehow contact me and I should be able to whitelist you if you provide me with your IP address. This blacklist system has been in operation for some years on JowettTalk and I have fallen foul of it during my travels.

To give you some idea of the problem facing all servers currently, my server's logs show about 10000 probes per day. These probes are mainly from automated bots trying to find weaknesses in the website defences. Almost all those are now blocked because I have blacklisted over half the countries in the world plus another 500000+ IP addresses from those countries that I do allow initial access.

If an IP is not already blacklisted, it is then checked against the latest blacklist information. If it gets through the blacklist stage, the request it is making is then scanned and rejected, if it is not considered a valid request. Repeated attempts are logged and then the user is blacklisted. Unfortunately, this too may cause you to get locked out if you are trying to get to a web page that is not there. Please inform me if this happens to you and tell me your IP address and the page you were trying to get to.