hello folks,

We just wanted to send an early Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year
greetings to all Negimaki users. Whether you’re using a .negimaki.com,
.photopians.org, .myg2.org, .delightinhim.org or .photosleeve.org
subdomain URL address - you’re all on the same slow boat.

The number of users hosting more than 10K images on both private &
public Gallery 2 multisites are growing, so we’re planning on yet
another major hardware upgrade sometime in mid-March or late-April
2008 - more details will be posted as we approach that time frame.

At any rate, we thank you for sharing your moments of life with
friends & family through our volunteer-driven Gallery & WordPress web
hosting service. We hope that in the coming months and years, you will
have a deeper understanding and appreciation for free and open-source
software and what it’s all about, and why Negimaki exists.

Happy Holidays to you and your family! Take care and God bless.

regards,

Azor, Abnaire & Steve (resident Negimaki nocturnal cyborgs)

according to http://gallery.menalto.com/gallery_2_and_php5, future versions of Gallery 2 after February 2008 will require PHP 5.2.x (or the most recent version)

this move will put pressure on free and commercial web hosting providers. it’ll will be interesting how it will turn out since other similar large-scale projects like Drupal & phpMyAdmin are also on the same boat.

Negimaki & Photopians.org runs on PHP 5.2.3 (we upgraded to 5.2.x about 6 months ago) so we’re more than ready.

if you’re an existing Negimaki user and have a Facebook profile, you’re invited to join our group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6192483191

SPAM has always been an issue for our users. As a proactive effort to cutdown on the rampant pollution, we randomly monitor Apache logs in real-time and record suspicious trackback & comment POST requests - we run a Google check on the offending IP address to see if any references show up, then check which sites we host have been victimized by it; we also check the site’s corresponding database tables (a requirement for both WordPress and Gallery 2) of any additional traces. A final cross-reference is made at http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ - and then the IP is added to our firewall rulesets. There are exceptions of course, but those are made on our discretion. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be working with our users to install a blanket of honey pots on Negimaki & Photopians.org sites.

Here’s a link to our public statistics.

last Monday, we declared services to be “up and running” after more than two weeks of downtime. Most of our users understood that being a volunteer-driven web hosting service, prolonged downtime was something to be expected, and we thank them for being patient.

Other than blacklisting IP addresses suspected of comment/trackback spam among other things, we’ve been monitoring services more closely than before just to make sure we’re able to address issues before they’re discovered out in the open.

At any rate, it’s good thing to be able to sleep at night without being preoccupied with “did my box died again?” thought.