polarhome ...old NEWS
2019.07.30 aix ssh problem has been solved
2019.07.28 polarhome web server was down - it is still too hot in the server room.
2019.02.23 solaris is down - and it seems it will be for a while until a new SPARC based architecture is found. The server is damaged, but the disks are OK.
2019.02.12 polarhome was powered of without eletricity for three days. Some wires burned down as a result of running 13A current on a 10A equipment. This has been fixed now - but some servers are still down and partially damaged.
2018.11.02 polarhome was down few hours because of the power problems in the whole area. Servers and services are slowly restored.
2018.10.21 irix and the IA64 servers that cannot cope with the summer heat are online again.
2018.04.13 freebsd is upgraded to still supported 10.4-RELEASE. Every attempt to upgrade to 11.1-RELEASE failed.
2018.04.10 freebsd will be unstable for a short while. An attept to upgrade to the recent release failed and the whole system got corrupted. An older backup is restored, but the upgrade is about to be performed.
2018.02.09 polarhome servers with x86 architecture are being migrated from an AMD to an Intel hypervisor. This seemly easy migration causes troubles and some of the servers are down for some shorter time. It is expected that in about 24 hours all servers will be online again.
2017.10.09 polarhome servers were not reachable because polarhome has still problem with the core switch. The Cisco Catalyst WS-C2960G-48TC-L died again.
2017.08.27 aix server disk problems are resolved for now.
2017.06.20 polarhome has still problem with the core switch. The Cisco Catalyst WS-C2960G-48TC-L died again. It was replaced with an Nortel/Avaya ERS 5510-48T. It took one day to realize that polarhome does not have a licence for IPv6 forwarding on the Avaya switch. In order to bring back the IPv6 need to use Cisco again - and waiting for the next glitch :(
2017.06.04 polarhome web server and the hosts were not reachable for few hours. This is how long the new Cisco Catalyst WS-C2960G-48TC-L could survive in polarhome's server environment. One more time such a crash and I'll change it with something else. Shame on Cisco.
2017.04.29 polarhome network backbone is upgraded to Mikrotik CCR1009-7G-1C-1S+, TP-LINK TL-SG2424, Cisco Catalyst WS-C2960G-48TC-L. The routers/swithes are second hand, close to end of support date products - but still much better than earlier. The old Mikrotik RB450G, that served well for many years is now in the museum.
2017.04.15 polarhome hypervisor's power supply is replaced and the servers: redhat, vax, alpha, tru64 etc. are functional again.
2017.04.14 polarhome servers redhat, vax, alpha, tru64 etc. are down. A power supply died in one of the hypervisors. It will be replaced ASAP - however Easter holidays make this simple task more complicated.
2017.04.05 polarhome servers were not reachable. The main uplink was down for two days. Is is good or bad - but we have found a rare bug in the ComHem router (made by Sagem) that supposed to handle 500Mbps data transfer. It messes up the whole network configuration when in bridge mode.
2016.11.01 polarhome mail server incoming mail issues are fixed.
2016.10.30 polarhome servers were down. Not all but many, and I haven't had time to bring them back. They suffered mostly hardware problems, but were also missing some care and maintenance. I am back. The project that consumed all my time (and far beyond) is delivered and I am looking forward to have 8h working days that would allow open source and polarhome engagement. The servers are up and running again... and now, I plan to read all several thousand mail from the support inbox that have been ignored until now. My apologies for the very slow response.
2016.04.26 hpux has IPv6 access. Thanks to snowy who kindly provided the required patches.
2016.04.24 polarhome servers were down few hours while I worked with the eletricity around the house. This will happen again next weekend. Expected downtime is no more than 2-3 hours.
2016.03.05 polarhome was closed down for few days because of an abuse incident - for spamming this time. Hope it is worth it whoever caused this. (but I'll search the servers, I'll find you and you'll be kicked out)
2016.02.23 polarhome internet connection started to work on the expected time.
2016.02.19 polarhome got an update that there is a huge interference in the line in the area and because this is not a business center but a residence area, it is not highly prioritized. ETA is 23/2 Tuesday 10am CET
2016.02.16 polarhome is not reachable. The ComHem internet service provider has a major issue in the whole area. No ETA yet
2015.12.06 debian-ppc is open to the public.
2015.12.06 debian is updated to release 8 (jessie). php and cgi scripting fixed
2015.11.24 polarhome servers are in a rather bad shape. We reached the 10A power level and the fuse cannot take more. This requires some distribution and reorganization of the servers.
2015.10.06 polarhome was down several hours. The whole area was without eletricity. There is no more information yet.
2015.09.30 polarhome mail does not work after the MailScanner upgrade. We are working on the issue.
2015.09.08 polarhome was down several hours. There was a shortcut among the wires that blew the fuse.
2015.09.07 IA64 servers are online again as the weather got colder.
2015.08.08 polarhome outgoing mail problems are solved.
2015.06.24 polarhome is stuggling with outgoing mail. Just the mail towards the IPv6 servers goes through. The solution is on the way but it takes a while to get ISPs react during the high vacation season in Sweden.
2015.05.13 polarhome web server will be down from time to time. Migrating to new hardware and upgrading the OS. Also one vitrual host server will be upgraded therefore some of the servers will be unreachable. Until Monday should all servers be online again.
2015.04.20 polarhome old server racks are changed to a much higher HP ones, that would provide better ventilation. The servers are moved over but the cable wiring is not finished yet, therefore many servers are not online... but will be in a day or two. Please note, that the mail does not work properly, therefore ask questions in the forum or on the Facebook page
2014.01.31 hpux-ia64 is open for public access - running HP-UX 11.31 with enabled IPv6 services.
2014.01.21 polarhome accepts Bitcoin payments and donations. Read more at sponsors page.
2014.01.18 host information is updated and now in real time - or with small latency presents polarhome hosts' hardware and services related information - among them the available compilers that many developers asked for. More about at Info/Statistics page.
2014.01.14 solaris server is migrated from the old SUN Ultra 5 to much faster SUN Fire V210. This is a new Solaris 10 installation, because the old disk is somewhat damaged. The backups are restored.
2014.01.13 Oracle Solaris Studio is upgraded to version 12.3 on solaris, solaris-x86 and openindiana.
2014.01.06 DECnet connection is established between OpenVMS hosts alpha, vax, ia64 and Ubuntu linux.
2014.01.09 solaris-x86 is open for the public. It is an Oracle/Solaris 11 running on an x86-64 hardware.
2014.01.06 DECnet connection is established between alpha, vax, ia64 and ubuntu.
2014.01.06 php is enabled for users on Redhat, Hurd, Debian and Ubuntu - to start with. Also phpMyAdmin is installed on the web server's root for easy database administration. Exatly like few years ago, just much safer.
2014.01.05 hurd is online again. The downtime was caused by a release upgrade that could not resolve some library dependencies causing the whole system to be inaccessible. The server is re-installed and the backups are restored.
2014.01.05 forum users that are newly created along with the shell accounts did not have right forum permissions - this problem is fixed now.
2014.01.05 minix is online again. The downtime was caused by a release upgrade that messed up the passwords. The server is re-installed and the backups are restored.
2013.12.22 polarhome needed to lower entropy in the server room. Unused KVM and servers were removed and most of the cables rewired. Some of the servers did not smoothly survived - they will be back online soon.
2013.12.19 polarhome web server was down several days. The kernel crashed causing troubles with mail and DNS services too. A simple restart would help, but there was nobody on site who would push the button. The shell servers were online and worked well.
2013.12.10 forum is open again with stronger constraints - hopefully it will not be flooded like earlier.
2013.12.09 MirOS, Hurd both servers crashed after an unsuccessful updrade - will be back soon.
2013.12.04 ia64 an Itanium server running OpenVMS 8.4 is open for the public.
2013.11.27 hpux mysql and web server problems are fixed.
2013.11.26 polarhome web server was down few hours. It was too cold in the storage room :(
2013.10.23 hpux pop3s and imaps problems are fixed.
2013.10.22 polarhome web server was down few hours in the afternoon. The power supply died.
2013.09.12 polarhome servers were unreachable several hours, because the ISP changed the IP and the system has not configured over automatically.
2013.09.10 During the past 13 years many user asked for a dedicated server, forwarded domains, root shell access to the server for administartion training purpose - that polarhome could not meet. Now polarhome opens a new chapter in its operation with root access services.
2013.06.09 polarhome servers (at least some of them) were down for few hours, while the hardware was updated and shuffled around in the racks in order to improve ventilation. The work will continue during the next days - some downtime can be expected.
2013.02.14 irix is up and running again, thanks to Mettler Roland, from Japan, who donated a SGI Origin 300.
2013.01.30 polarhome servers suffered whole night from the power outage that happened in the late afternoon.
2012.12.20 raspberrypi is open for the public - for all those who want to build an application on ARM architecture.
2012.12.18 polarhome servers: redhat, scosysv and aix had a minor problem with account creation - this issue is fixed now.
2012.11.29 aix (5.1) server is migrated to the AIX7 (7.1). The only difference is that everything that has been valid for aix.polarhome.com, now is valid for aix7.polarhome.com too - including e-mail, access, IP addresses, direct ports, etc. Basically, with one account you get two identities. Old aix server will be reachable for a while as aix5 with ipv4 within the polarhome domain or by ipv6 directly.
2012.10.14 redhat is online again
2012.10.11 redhat has been root hacked last week. The server is reinstalled and upgraded. The backups are restored, but I need some more time to set it in production.
2012.09.24 hpux account creation problem is solved. Soon the old hpux hardware will be replaced with a newer 64-bit server.
2012.09.10 solaris server struggles with hard disk problems. It have to be replaced and re-installed. Please, do not rely on polarhome backups and keep your valuable files on a safe locations.
2012.07.26 aix7 is open for public use. This server is a beauty of IBM RS/6000 9114-275 running 64-bit AIX 7.1. As the old AIX (5.1) slowly dies all users until now are migrated to the new server AIX7. The old server is still online and available for shell requests as well for the mail delivery.
2012.07.18 vax is online again. If you have access problems, please let me know.
2012.07.11 vax home partition is wrtlck-ed. The almost 20y old disk slowly dies and it is very hard to find them. The host will be migrated soon to a newer hardware.
2012.04.29 irix died. It crashed and does not boot at all. It might be either RAM or disk problem - but it will be down for a while :(
2012.03.05 polarhome will be unstable during Easter. Seems, it is time to do some open source coding and to fix burning polarhome problems.
2012.03.26 aix server is rather instable nowadays. From time to time it hangs. There is a prepared AIX 7 box for migration.
2012.02.14 polarhome mail server's delivery problems are solved - and all queued mail is delivered with ca one day delay (hope it hasn't ruined somebody's valentine day)
2012.02.13 polarhome web server issue is fixed.
2012.01.03 minix is open for public. This is very much a development environment. It has just ssh access and a, not very much compatible with the rest of the Unix world, gcc compiler that came with the instrallation. Be prepared for huge porting effort if you want to build someting by your own. Enjoy.
2011.12.30 dragonfly HAMMER file system out of space issue is fixed.
2011.11.17 polarhome is still running on a slower backup line.
2011.11.16 polarhomeis under DoS attack therefore the main up-link was disconnected from the router that could not cope with that bandwidth. Hopefully, in the morning the ISP can help us out.
2011.11.05 hurd server is open for public use. polarhome joins the GNU/Hurd community and opens a server for porting and development. The system is under active development, therfore it is very unstable and reboots often occur.
2011.11.02 polarhome's webmail (Horde) migrates to a new, more powerful H4 version. The migration is painful and I am afraid that calendar and address book data can be damaged, therefore please extract all valuable data before the weekend. webmail
2011.11.01 polarhome was running few hours on a very slow line, because the ISP closed down polarhome n uplink because an URL Injection attack abuse report.
2011.10.21 polarhome achieved "Sage" - the highest level in Hurricane Electric IPv6 Certification test.
2011.10.10 polarhome account creation issue with "invalid security code" is corrected. It is possible to create new accounts again.
2011.10.08 polarhome web server is up again. It took two weeks for ddrescue tool to save the databases and uniqe pages from the damaged disk (300G partition with more than 7k error blocks).
2011.09.23 polarhome web server is down. The rest of the polarhome functional normally. The hard disk in the web server crashed and we needed to face the terrifying fact that even the backup files were corrupted and unusable. I will try to send continues updates to http://www.facebook.com/polarhome.
2011.09.21 ultrix is back after almost 7 years downtime. Polarhome also provides a mirror of Ultrix install media and tools.
2011.09.06 polarhome was running few hours on a very slow line - the latency was over 1500 ms. The ISP applied this measure because of an abuse report against polarhome.com
2011.08.31 miros host is open for public. It is a secure, easy to use, very fast BSD like operating system from the MirOS project.
2011.08.18 openindiana - an open source, free to use, but robust enterprise operating system, based on illumos and OpenSolaris - is open for polarhome users with both GCC and SUN Studio compilers.
2011.08.18 centos host is open for public.
2011.08.15 polarhome mail and web server was down during Sunday. I was off site and the server BIOS became corrupted. The rest of the polarhome realm was operational.
2011.08.12 dragonfly host is open for public use. DragonFly BSD is a very nice BSD-like operating system. Read more at dragonflybsd.org
2011.08.11 suse host is successfully migrated from USA to Sweden to a new hardware running openSUSE. dillona keeps the host admin rights and duties.
2011.08.05 qnx host is online again. (TODO: finger, imap/pop3)
2011.07.27 scosysv host - an SCO OpenServer is open for public use.
2011.07.27 unixware host is open for public use.
2011.07.21 polarhome servers that have been recently upgraded the user file quota is raised to default 200M. If you need more, please send a mail to support@polarhome.com
2011.07.21 freebsd is successfully upgraded to release 8.2 and moved to a new 64bit hardware. TODO: webserver (PHP is not allowed yet), automatic mysql accout creation does not work.
2011.07.21 polarhome allows imaps access (as many users asked for) to most of the hosts on port xx9 or on standard 993 for all hosts that have IPv6. Read more in portforwarding guide.
2011.07.21 debian is successfully upgraded to release 6.0 and moved to a new 64bit hardware. TODO: webserver (PHP is not allowd yet)
2011.07.20 netbsd is successfully upgraded to release 5.1 and moved to a new hardware. TODO: webserver
2011.07.19 polarhome IPv6 connection and configuration is improved
2011.07.19 openbsd is successfully upgraded to release 3.9 and moved to a new hardware. TODO: webserver
2011.07.19 ubuntu is migrated to a 64bit hardware and upgraded to 10.04.3 LTS (lucid) TODO: webserver
2011.07.07 redhat is successfully upgraded to Fedora release 15 (Lovelock)
2011.07.05 polarhome's UPS battery gave up cutting off the power for half of the site, including the main switch and most of the servers. All servers are online again.
2011.06.22 polarhome hosts are not reachable, most probably because of the main switch malfunction. As I am offsite for a while, it will take some time to fix. I am sorry :(
2011.05.20 polarhome purchased SCO OpenServer and UnixWare licences. Soon these hosts will be online as well.
2011.05.12 polarhome uplink was closed by the ISP (ComHem) again because of the same abuse issue. On phpBB installations BBCode needs to be disabled.
2011.04.28 polarhome uplink was closed by the ISP (ComHem) for few hours because of remote e107 BBCode Arbitrary PHP Code Execution. All users that use phpBB and Joomla need to upgrade to the latest patch and maintain their installation otherwise user pages will be simply closed down.
2011.04.22 polarhome's problem with receiving mail is solved.
2011.04.13 network should work like earlier (if you still have problem please let me know at support@polarhome.com ) - except IPv6 that still does pass through the router.
2011.04.11 network DNS resolution is corrected, but still redhat and debian web servers do not respond correctly.
2011.04.05 polarhome is online again with a mikrotik router gateway. This solves lot of network related problems regarding IPv6, ftp access, monitoring, traffic shaping, load balancing and control in general. Unfortunately, there are some problems with mail ... but in the next days it will be fine tuned.
2011.04.05 network Tonight there will be performed a major reconfiguration of the polarhome's network architecture. Most probably the web server and the mail will not for some time.
2011.03.31 polarhome In the next, hopefully short period it is planned that polarhome.com does a real redesign and face lift as the old hardware do not cope any more with the everyday development tasks. As the planned network and host related changes are fundamental, it may happen, that for some period even the web server will not be reachable. polarhome admins will use facebook page to post updates and the work progress.
2011.02.28 qnx is offline. The disk died. There is an usable backup, but it will take some time before I find time to install a new system.
2011.02.10 polarhome was not reachable for few hours. My daughter's dog, Bella, chewed a part the main ISP's uplink cable while she was alone at home. I'll talk to my daughter to have an eye on her cocker all the time.
2011.02.10 aix has been very unstable since the UPS died. I'll try to find a new power supply.
2011.02.07 polarhome server hardware have been shuffled around the hosts providing better performance for redhat, ubuntu and debian (and soon for *BSD boxes as well)
2011.01.17 polarhome is testing a new, about three times faster uplink. This test may have some unexpected side effects too.
2011.01.16 aix is very unstable since the UPS crash. Seems, after few years uptime this unexpected power outage damaged the file system.
2011.01.09 redhat, hpux, aix, ubuntu and freebsd are online again. APC Back-UPS 1500 refused to deliver the power in hope that I will change the battery faster, causing almost a week downtime :(
2011.01.03 redhat, hpux, aix, ubuntu and freebsd are offline. I am off site until Sunday, therefore, I do not have more information so far. Most likely one of the UPSes gave up after so many years working in hot and cold. I am sorry. :(
2010.12.30 hpux is online again. Read more
2010.12.22 hpux died. The system disk does not respond any more. I'll try to make a new installain, but it will take some time :(
2010.10.11 polarhome survived the gateway upgrade (except the Forum) and there are still some network related tasks planned. They will be fixed in 2-3 days.
2010.10.10 polarhome a major network upgrade is planned for today. There might be some problems with host access, web page etc.
2010.10.08 webmail login issue with redhat/fedora host is solved
2010.09.02 aix account creation problem is solved and the last some 20 accounts are finally created.
2010.08.17 polarhome is running on a slow uplink again. This Telia's ADSL is not a success story. It is fast as long it works, but it is not reliable at all. From time-to time does not work with ADSL2+ modems that support Annex M and it starts to renegotiate every minute the uplink.
2010.08.09 polarhome had problems for almost 2 days as the main switch was damaged by the storm during the weekend. The switch is repared.
2010.07.08 polarhome testing new routers that are able to handle QoS and line redundancy
2010.07.07 polarhome network has benn reconfigured allowing freedom for inserting routers between the (old) gateway and the ADSL modems. The main ISP line is still unstable, but with new configuration it works well. It will be much better when we get back the real bandwidth.
2010.07.01 polarhome was not reachable for few days. The name service got corrupted while I was abroad and the system was not reachable for me either :(
2010.06.23 polarhome gateway died again with kernel panic. Seems the sendmail process crashes the kernel memory. The porcess is stopped in hope that it will provide more stability in next days - but the side effect is that polarhome.com mail does not work :( - will find a permanent solution latest in July.
2010.06.22 polarhome was again dow and the neighbor helped again... it is all hanging on him until 1st of July
2010.06.19 polarhome servers were not reachable for almost a day. A main switch, that connets the gateway with the rest of the server park, stopped working. As I am abroad, we all can thank my kind neighbor, who resetted the switch and conneted the backend servers again.
2010.06.14 polarhome gateway run out of memory - the whole site was not reachable for few hours. Seems there is a program with memory leak hanging around.
2010.06.13 redhat/fedora is back. The yum upgrade crashed because of some older dependencies since FC4. The install DVD never recognized offered an upgrade, thefore I was forced to do a new install and restore from the backup. If there is something missing please let me know support@polarhome.com
2010.06.09 openbsd is online again on a better hardware - no virtualization this time.
2010.06.07 redhat/fedora is in very inconsistent state: some libraries are missing and therefore some services does not run. This is caused by the yum upgrade from fc11->fc13. It will be fixed tonight with an upgrade DVD.
2010.05.28 polarhome main uplik is still unstable. After lot of inverstigation I have found that the problem is in the ADSL2/2+Annex M protocol. When it is disabled the uplik runs stable. I just need to convince the customer support about this :)
2010.05.26 polarhome was not reachable for few hours. For, so far unknown reasons, the gateway's WAN MAC address has not been accepted for DHCP address renewal. Changing the WAN interface solved the problem, however the old NIC works perfect. UPDATE: I have succeeded to talk to ISP's customer support after 44 minutes waiting and they could not provide any explanation why this happened.
2010.05.23 ubuntu is upgraded to 10.04 LTS (lucid)
2010.05.22 openbsd is down. The power supply fan died. It will be soon back, hopefully on virtual server environment.
2010.04.17 debian is online.
2010.04.15 debian is down (update). It is a lilo problem, but more serious. The kernel needs to be reinstalled. (I am getting tired of debian issues. Sometimes I start to understand why people use commercial unix. hahaha just kidding, but I really do not have time for this now. It will be fixed probably during the weekend)
2010.04.14 debian is down again after an ordinary kernel upgrade. Seems the upgrade did not handle lilo correctly. Hopefully will be up already tonight (just I need to reach the console)
2010.04.13 irix account creation is ON again. There is still problem with automatic MySQL accounts, but this will be fixed soon.
2010.03.24 debian mail works again.
2010.02.19 debian is online again. Unfortunately, in the server room is still -10C. Hope, that the server will survive until nordic spring comes.
2010.02.12 debian server offline again. This time it is a hard disk failure and the disk with root partition needs to be replaced. The /home etc are OK. Honestly, I do not know when can I get some time to do this.
2010.02.09 irix is online again with a newer and more reliable hardware - an purple Indigo2
2010.02.08 debian server is online again. It is not reinstalled, just "cleaned" as I haven't had time for doing more this time. Please, have some respect to other users too and do not abuse polarhome servers.
2010.02.06 polarhome problem with resolving internal IP addresses is solved.
2010.02.05 polarhome ISP change is finalized. polarhome runs now on a much faster uplink line and IPv6 works again. Please, do not abuse the services, because polarhome may loose this line too (like the UVTC one last summer)
2010.02.01 polarhome is testing the new uplink (that would be able to provide up to three times faster connection). During this configuration tests the link may break from time to time - most often during late nights (CET)
2010.01.26 debian is halted and will be down for a while (I am very busy nowadays). It has been hacked again and now it waits for full reinstall and reconfiguration.
2010.01.20 polarhome is testing a new uplink capability, load balancing etc... there might be some minor problems with the line
2010.01.15 polarhome is running on the backup line since July 2009. It is a slow line and it is very hard to find an ISP that does not have closed ports. I was working long months aboad without having time to take care about polarhome. But now the ADSL modem is changed, optimized few services and ordered a new main line in order to improve performance. Hope it helps to provide a better service.
2009.12.18 polarhome was not reachable for more than a day. Most probably some of the backbone network equipment came into inconsistent state because of the weather conditions (and I work abroad and can not act)
2009.12.02 polarhome was not reachable few hours because of network problems.
2009.10.03 polarhome forum is upgraded. It is not yet integrated with polarhome's account creation as earlier, but we can live without this feature for now. The whole website will move to come CMS soon.
2009.09.25 debian got a rootkit. It is offline during clean up.
2009.09.14 polarhome gateway is under maintenance. Hopefully there will not be any problem.
2009.08.14 polarhome is still struggling with dynamic IP address changes. Hopefully now it is really fixed.
2009.08.10 redhat after all troubles is up and running Fedora release 11 (Leonidas)
2009.08.07 redhat is offline. Failed upgrade to Fedora 11 and the whole server is in inconsistent state. Will be fixed, hopefully, during Sunday.
2009.07.25 polarhome dynamic IP address change on the backup line cause troubles. This will be solved soon.
2009.07.22 polarhome was not reachable for some 12 hours. Because one user who without any respect used a polarhome server for attacking remote hosts, polarhome's main ISP closed the line and broke the contract. ISP does not want polarhome as a cutomer any more. polarhome is running on the backup line.
2009.07.04 debian is up. I made an attempt to migrate to a vmware virtual box, but the performance was extremely poor. I decided to use the old hardware (with new power supply) until we find a better virtualization solution.
2009.07.02 debian is up again. The power supply fan stopped that caused the box to overheat.
2009.06.30 debian is down. Seems there is agan too warm in the server room and the debian is the most sensitive :( Will be up latest on Friday.
2009.06.01 debian died again. An extra fan + opening the box helped to bring it up again. The sommar just started and this AMD based box already protests against the heat.I am afraid that this can be worse later.
2009.05.31 debian is up again after almost a day downtime. Seems there was too warm in the server room and a shutdown was triggered.
2009.05.14 OpenVMS licences have been renewed on time this year - thanks to Mike Rechtman's very useful licence monitoring script.
2009.05.06 polarhome servers were cut off the gateway for few hours, most probably, because of some power fluctuation the main switch did not respond.
2009.04.14 polarhome shell/template registrations are open again on hosts that are not under migration.
2009.04.07 polarhome servers are one by one migrated to a virtual environment to achieve better resource usage, flexibility and new features. Therefore some server may be offline from time to time in the near future.
2009.04.07 polarhome inner servers are reachable, but the front page is still not usable. We will try to migrate to a better, more modern and user friendly CMS as the new hardware easily supports heavy content.
2009.04.06 polarhome we are now on the right hardware... ready to restore the backup. The plan is that mail and the forwarding to the inner servers will start tomorrow.
2009.04.05 polarhome gateway disk crashed, therefore it needs to be reinstalled and in the same time it will move to the new and faster hardware. It may take few days until everyting is restored.
2009.03.19 suse server (hosted remotely from USA) was down for a while. "This issue will hopefully be fully resolved by the end of next week with a new battery backup and a new video card" says dillona, the suse admin.
2009.02.12 polarhome servers: openstep, irix, qnx and mandriva are shut down. Please read more about in the forum
2009.01.25 polarhome web server was down few hours.
2009.01.04 polarhome servers will be unreachable today from time to time because of network maintenance - upgrading the internal backbone to gigabit.
2008.12.17 tru64 was down few hours. The box was overheated for some reason.
2008.12.10 polarhome servers were down for shorter period because of power failure in the whole area that was lasting longer than the UPSes did :(
2008.12.03 ubuntu is upgraded to release 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) - as this is not a smooth upgrade there might be some outstanding issues left. Please post them to the forum.
2008.12.02 redhat public eggdrop is upgraded to version 1.6.20
2008.12.01 redhat is upgraded to Fedora release 10 (Cambridge)
2008.11.21 polarhome some functions like new user creation, forum etc were out of order for few hours because the database engine died.
2008.11.19 polarhome was down 15 minutes for maintenance - running out of disk space.
2008.11.07 debian refused all mail since last pkg update. The problem is fixed now.
2008.10.29 polarhome is under DoS attack. No harm, except that everything is very slow.
2008.10.15 polarhome has power problems, therfore hosts irix, netbsd, vax and openbsd will be down until Friday evening.
2008.09.26 debian is down for maintenance - will be back later today.
2008.09.15 redhat is fully functional again.
2008.09.08 polarhome hosts are in full operation again - except redhat/fedora that has still some services disabled.
2008.09.03 polarhome hosts are disconnected until we find what traffic triggers closing the uplink from ISP's side. Also, I am personally interested to find that nerd who caused that 100,000 innocent polarhome users can not reach their services. root@polarhome.com.
2008.09.03 polarhome's uplink will be very unstabile during next days (while running on the backup line)
2008.09.02 polarhome was down few hours. The main uplink is down because some polarhome user abused irc for malitious activity. polarhome runs on a backup line.
2008.08.31 polarhome was not reachable from time to time. Uplink is in the very bad shape. I'll contact the ISP.
2008.08.31 redhat was few hours down. It was simply hanging. The issue needs more investigation.
2008.08.26 polarhome was not reachable for few hours. For some reason we got about 60% package loss.
2008.07.16 polarhome web server was down. The problem is caused by apache web server that does not clean up it's semaphores in some cases.
2008.07.16 irix is down.
2008.07.07 debian the fan on the power supply died. The power supply is replaced and the box is online again.
2008.07.01 mandriva is online again.
2008.06.30 debian corrupt libraries that caused gcc error are replaced.
2008.06.29 mandriva is offline - the hard disk died. It will take few days to replace the disk and restore.
2008.06.29 redhat is upgraded to Fedora release 9 (Sulphur)
2008.06.29 NX server is installed on redhat, ubuntu, solaris and mandriva for testing purpose. Everybody with valid shell has access through ssh port (double check the port-forwarded ssh ports) and you will need an nxclient as well. NOTE: this is a 2 user free server. Please, TERMINATE you session when you are done. More in the forum.
2008.06.26 polarhome web server died for some strange reason - regardless, now it is up again.
2008.06.15 webmail (horde) is upgraded and enabled again.
2008.06.14 webmail (horde) is disabled because of serious security reasons. The bug is fixed and it will be enabled in about a week.
2008.05.12 redhat was instable for few days after perl update. There were problems with executing perl CGIs that in some special cases caused system hanging.
2008.05.10 vax is online again. Special thanks to Anders Sundqvist (Stockholm, Sweden) for provided support.
2008.05.07 vax is still down. The problem is more serious and seems it is hardware related as well. Server can be down for a while.
2008.05.06 solaris is upgraded to the lates patches. It required few reboots - as usually :(
2008.05.03 vax is down. The system disk died. Hopefuly it will be back soon (read: in few days).
2008.05.03 irix is migrating to new, reasonably faster hardware - the migration should be transparent for the users.
2008.04.22 irix is down. It will be up again around 5PM CET.
2008.04.16 redhat is down. There is again problem with the file system. The disk should be changed - hopefully it will be back soon - in few hours.
2008.04.06 polarhome identd response issue is solved. Earlier, some hosts like debian, had problems with user ident response masquerading.
2008.04.04 redhat was down few hours. The /home partition gave up for some reason. A file system check helped this time - but please make backup copies of your own home content.
2008.04.02 polarhome is under DoS attack. Read more in the forum.
2008.03.20 ipv6 tunnel is up again.
2008.03.10 polarhome was not reachable few hours today. DNS needed to be renewed in order to solve ISP ban related access problems from polarhome hosts.
2008.02.26 redhat the web server problem is corrected - an upgrade caused that the http service did not restart afterwards.
2008.01.16 hpux is up again. The server was instable during past days.
2007.12.18 polarhome testing routing table - the line might be down several times for few minutes during the night.
2007.12.12 solaris server is upgraded to the latest patch level. This required several reboots :(.
2007.12.05 mandriva is restored from the old, DenisF's backup and account creation is opened again. Old accounts are still valid. All mandriva users can use both old mandrake and new mandriva hostnames in the mail and other access. Web services are not fully functional yet.
2007.12.05 redhat server is upgraded to Fedora 8.
2007.11.28 polarhome after few hours downtime we are back to old stable kernel. Kernel developers are informed. I am sorry for caused inconvenience.
2007.11.28 polarhome were testing new kernel that was meant to correct the crashing bug - seem kernel developers failed this time. It will be one more crash during the day in order to produce debug logs.
2007.11.13 polarhome will be unstabe in the next few days - but in controled way - in order to reproduce enough logs for Linux kernel developers.
2007.11.11 polarhome I feel myself obligated to write an explanation what has happened with polarhome during last week... read more.
2007.11.08 ubuntu is online again - but gate is still untable.
2007.11.06 ubuntu is down. ubuntu borrowed hardware to run gate on it. It is better to have one host down then the whole polarhome. Hopefully, in few days it will be online again.
2007.11.05 polarhome is getting more stable. Seems not the hard disk freezes but the problem is in the linux kernel that core dumps when triggered with innocent network traffic. The kernel is updated, the network cards changed - will see the result.
2007.11.05 polarhome this is the very first autumn for gate's new hardware and as the temperature fall but the humidity is still high the hard disks simply stop. Hopefuly, I will find a solution for this hardware during the next days - but be prepared that polarhome will not be reachable from time to time (for the periods that may last few hours sometimes)
2007.11.04 SPAM If spam is reported that originates from polarhome, ISP simply closes down the lines and the whole polarhome is down for days. DO NOT SPAM FROM POLARHOME!
2007.10.31 polarhome one of the UPS-es gave up - seems it's getting cold in the server room :(
2007.10.31 ubuntu is upgraded to 7.10. Enjoy.
2007.10.11 ubuntu is upgraded to 7.04. Enjoy.
2007.10.10 redhat server had had some trobles with /home partition, where is getting full slowly.
2007.10.09 polarhome servers are UPS protected again.
2007.09.29 polarhome half polarhome were down during Saturday. One UPS gave up during "usuall autom power instability". The UPS is repaced, but even the replaced UPS did not pass the test - means we should be prepared for further problems on servers: openbsd, netbsd, irix, vax and alpha.
2007.09.03 vax is down. Seems the system disk crashed. It will be repared ASAP.
2007.08.28 polarhome Horde webmail is in function again. New webmail policy is in use, therefore, if you have problems with webmail during *normal* use, please let me know.
2007.08.15 polarhome is running on a backup line. ISP closed the main uplink, because of some selfish, retard jerk who abused Horde webmail again to send out thousands of spam. Horde Webmail is disabled for a while.
2007.08.05 redhat server is very unstable. It is caused by some resource failure. It will take ca two weeks to make it stable.
2007.08.01 polarhome has changed IP address few times. During the morning the modem lost the ADSL line (and polarhome switched to backup line), but the ISP could not find any error. After few hours the line started to work "for some reason" :). From now on it should be stable again (polarhome switched back to fix IP)
2007.07.30 polarhome was not reachable from 2AM-8AM CET. ISP changed the ADSL network configuration and the modem needed to be restarted in order to download the new setup. The ISP did not send out a warning regarding this maintenance change.
2007.07.22 polarhome was down for few hours during the afternoon (CET) because of the maintenance on the polarhome gateway's electric network.
2007.07.19 redhat was down few hours. It was an attempt to make Fedora 7 kernel working with current installation. FC6 and F7 kernel do not recognise the disks on the same way and label usage is inconsistent in F7 kernel. :(
2007.07.16 alpha is online again. The backup cache died on the CPU daughter board. It was possible with a jumper to force the box to work, but we should be prepared for further hardware errors. Seems alpha's DEC AS800 reaches its lifetime's border :(
2007.07.14 redhat server is upgraded to Fedora 7. The upgrade went OK, but the box can not boot any more. The box will be back again during Sunday.
2007.07.13 forum is functional again. the problem was caused bya an experiment last night.
2007.07.06 debian is online. The root partition was damaged for some reason.
2007.06.28 debian crashed. It will take at least a week to repare.
2007.06.25 alpha is again down. It will take at least a week to repare.
2007.06.21 ubuntu is open for public.
2007.06.19 ipv6 routing is corrected. IPv6 tunnel is up again.
2007.06.10 polarhome's IP has changed again - we are still on PPPoE backup line :(
2007.06.09 alpha is up again. The fan is repared but not replaced. It was simply not possible to find a new fan that works in AS800, during this downtime period.
2007.06.08 polarhome is running on a backup line. ISP closed the main uplink, because of some selfish, retard jerk who abused Horde webmail to send out few hundred lottery spam.
2007.05.29 alpha is down - as well as solaris and hpux. I was forced to take apart half of the rack in order to take out the CPU fan from rack mounted DEC AS800 (alpha). Hopefuly, tonight the servers will be again online.
2007.05.23 alpha is down. There is some problem with the power supply and fans. It might take few days to repare.
2007.05.19 debian is upgraded and fully functional again. Postponed accounts are created.
2007.05.17 debian is about to be upgraded to version 4.0r0, alias Etch. Server is not fully functional and new user creations are also postponed.
2007.05.14 openstep is online again. It is still not available for account registrations, but coming...
2007.05.09 debian user creation has sometimes problem with account password submit. If there are such debian users that can log on to the forum but can not read their mail neither to log in into the usermin interface, please send a mail to support@polarhome.com
2007.05.02 polarhome - seems something happened with shellsearch.com and acky.net because they start to ask password from referers. The links are removed.
2007.04.29 aix still hangs on BIST - from time to time reboot is needed - until we solve this problem somehow.
2007.04.29 redhat web server is up again.
2007.04.29 polarhome web server was dow for 4 hours. After weekly logrotate it did not restart automatically. Case is under investigation.
2007.04.18 polarhome was not reachable by domain name few hours. no-ip.com account expired and needed to be renew.
2007.04.17 openstep has been sold - it will take few days until the box will be online again.
2007.04.15 maillists that were corrupted (4 of 227) are now corrected.
2007.03.26 polarhome IPv6 tunnel is reestablished and traffic is OK again.
2007.03.18 polarhome gateway is restored and web interface allowed again.
2007.03.13 polarhome gateway server's main partition got corrupted for some unknown reason. More than half of the partition was damaged after fsck and lot of files were mising. Now it runs on a backup, therefore, the connection to polarhome will be instable in the next few days.
2007.03.09 aix down again. It has some hardware problem - probably the hard disk again.
2007.02.16 solaris has been rebooted several times yesterday and today. This was needed to apply important security updates. The box is stable again.
2007.02.15 polarhome user disk quota is raised to 100M on all hosts - please note: no backup is made on user home directories. DO NOT KEEP important information on polarhome servers.
2007.02.13 aix is online again. It is a fresh 5.1 install on a dual CPU RS/6000. User quaotas are raised to 100M.
2007.02.01 aix is still down - will wait a one more week for a resolution.
2007.01.29 netbsd new accounts had password problems. Just last ten users were affected.
2007.01.21 redhat users had trouble to access their web space with /~ (:793/~ worked well). There was a problem with the configuration during preparation for virtual hosting.
2007.01.19 solaris is down for maintenance - applying single user mode security patches - will be back later today
2007.01.14 power is very unstable because of snow storm. The old UPS (that crashed two weeks ago) is again on place, but as we saw, is will soon shut down, even if there is a line power. If you have an UPS to borrow or sell for good price, please let me know - root.
2007.01.14 polarhome's gateway died again with kernel panic because of via-rhine driver that can not handle interrupts with SMP. The network card will be replaced soon. - half hour later: it is replaced.
2007.01.10 polarhome was not reachable almost whole day. Probably because of the storm the gateway lost the uplink and could not recover without human interaction.
2007.01.06 polarhome's gateway is upgraded. Nothing works, but will soon - I hope.
2007.01.02 aix still has not recovered. It will take some time.
2007.01.01 polarhome's main UPS crashed. Therefore from now on, polarhome runs without UPS. Hmmmm "good start" - hope the rest of the year will be better.
2006.12.31 web server and gateway is about to move to a much better hardware - but because of OS upgrade, it is not 100% functional. I will continue tomorrow (with hangover) - happy new year :)
2006.12.30 polarhome hosts are very old, retired servers. Hosts: redhat, debian and freebsd got somewhat better hardware. It is still not high end - but in fact, all of them dubbled CPU speed and got some extra memory.
2006.12.20 web server databases will be down for some time ( 15-30 minutes) in order to upgrade the database engine and perform some maintenance, that haven't been done during past 5-6 years.
2006.11.17 redhat server is upgraded to Fedora Core release 6. Upgrade went smooth and easy with yum. During upgrade new sharable objects are deployed, therefore some user applications might need to be rebuilt.
2006.11.08 solaris permission problem around sending mail with local clients is solved.
2006.11.05 polarhome gateway migration has been started (but not finished yet). Servers: alpha, openstep, solaris and hpux were shut down for few minutes for hardware maintenance (hoover makes miracles :) and relocation within the rack.
2006.11.02 gate is moved from -8C to "warmer" environment. Hope, this will help hard drive to survive until weekend when it will be replaced with the new one.
2006.11.01 polarhome's uplink is very unstable from about 3PM CET - probably because of snowstorm.
2006.10.31 polarhome was down for 2-3 days. The gate's - gateway and firewall server's - hard disk is damaged. This must be fixed permanently in the nearest future.
2006.10.23 suse could be down for a few days. Power was cut off during a kernel update. dillona - suse server's admin deals with this issue.
2006.10.18 boot disk collection is online again, because users asked for it. It will be online as long it does not disturbe polarhome's normal operation.
2006.10.16 polarhome was not reachable two times for ca 30 minutes during the afternoon. More information will be published after the investigation.
2006.10.05 solaris is migrated to new(er) hardware and upgraded to Solaris 10. Please, allow few days until all services are configured properly.
2006.09.15 cobol compiler is made available for Linux (debian) users, thanks to Volker Englisch (Germany). Until now, just OpenVMS users had the possibility to build Cobol applications.
2006.09.10 polarhome was down for few minutes. A network card is replaced in the gateway server in order to solve backup line problems.
2006.09.06 aix is online again. It took a while until the old, crashed aix box has been moved to a much faster dual CPU box and upgraded to AIX 5.1. Requested accounts are created and account creation should work like on every other polarhome box from now.
2006.08.22 polarhome is not reachable from time to time. ISP has problem with delivering ADSL services (guess) because of weather situation.
2006.07.24 irix is online again. The server room's temperature is too high for irix and hard disk stops. I have made now an attempt to move the box to colder place. If this does not help, the server will get a new hard disk in September. Meanwhile, if anybody have a spare O2 ready for bin - please consider donate it to polarhome. Thanks.
2006.07.13 IPv6 tunnel and services are up and running again.
2006.07.12 freebsd access/password mistery is solved. Usermin could not handle password changes because of Authen::PAM module. So just those users have had access problems that used Usermin to change their password.
2006.07.11 freebsd problem is corrected. About ten users got an account expired flag that disabled their accounts. I could not find any reason why nor any pattern betwen these "chosen" users. Sorry for caused inconvenience.
2006.07.10 freebsd users might have their account corrupted. If you are a freebsd shell user and can not log in while the webmail still works - please let me know. support.
2006.07.08 polarhome moving to new ISP is finalized. During last eight days uplink was very instable - polarhome apologizes for caused inconvenience.
2006.06.30 polarhome was down about 8 hours. We are in ISP changing phase and running on backup line right now. Some services might not work but by the end of W27 the line should be normal again with new IP address.
2006.06.19 aix will be down for a while. HDD died. A newer, dual CPU, RS/6000 that runs AIX 5.1 is already prepared. Hope, it will be possible to recover something from the old disk.
2006.06.18 hosts debian, vax and openstep are online again.
2006.06.18 polarhome had a 5-10 minutes power cut, but it was enough long for UPS to give up. Hosts vax, aix, openstep and debian did not recover. As soon they are up it will be announced here.
2006.06.14 freebsd is online again.
2006.06.11 freebsd is down for maintenance.
2006.05.18 IPv6 works again. polarhome's IPv6 ISP (tunnel broker) is Hurricane Electric (San Jose, CA, USA).
2006.05.13 redhat server's Usermin configuration has been corrected.
2006.05.11 polarhome was unreachable few hours because of power outage. There is a fuse problem around gateway server.
2006.05.11 alpha server is online again. The real reason for crash is unknown. Probably it was a memory chip problem - however the simple hoover solved the problem for now. Please, back up your important files - do not trust polarhome backups.
2006.05.10 alpha server died. Seems, it is a hardware error. More info to come later.
2006.04.19 tru64 is online again. It took ages to recover this box. If something does not work, please let me know support@polarhome.com
2006.04.19 mail was down during the night. MailScanner latest beta release was corrupted.
2006.04.16 irix users are strongly encouraged to keep backups of their home directories. System disk crashed. It is recovered this time. User quotas raised from 20M to 50M. PHP mail and socket restrictions are removed.
2006.04.11 suse users should be on the lookout for programs having problems. /var particion crashed.
2006.04.09 redhat problems with wget and curl domainname resolv - that appered after FC5 upgrade - got resolved. The problem is caused by the malformed /etc/nsswitch.conf file delivered by FC5.
2006.04.08 polarhome web server had been defaced by a1ts (S0l4r1s). polarhome thanks this good lession and learned forever that it is more important to spend time on software update then user support, service functionality and new server introduction. Even if job was professionally done - I do not think that Mr. a1ts will be awarded a medal for hacking polarhome.
2006.03.30 freebsd had a security hole that is caused by incompatility of account creation with new FreeBSD release - giving shell access to every new registered user. The hole was discovered after it had been abused by flooding and remote attacks.
2006.03.29 redhat has been upgraded to Fedora Core 5. There were problems with http and ssh services during the day.
2006.03.18 openbsd upgraded to version 3.8. User quotas raised from 20M to 50M. PHP mail restrictions are removed. IMAP/POP3 with SSL implemented (like on other servers)
2006.03.16 webmail might have problems. In order to fulfill the newest IMP product requirements polarhome needs to modify IMAP server daemons on almost every host.
2006.03.14 suse HDDs are having problems and users should be expecting downtimes.
2006.03.12 debian's HDD crashed. Seems -17 C was too cold :) - disk is recovered and server is up again.
2006.03.08 solaris user quotas raised from 20M to 50M. PHP mail restrictions are removed. Migration to new hardware has not finished jet... comming soon.
2006.03.06 solaris is under upgrade process. Moving to Solaris 10 on an Ultra 5. Should be finished during the week.
2006.02.25 tru64 is down. During an attempt to mount an old Ultrix UFS root partition, osf bootstrap code got rewritten. It might take few days until box will be back again.
2006.01.23 tru64 user quotas raised from 20M to 50M. PHP mail restrictions are removed.
2006.01.18 freebsd is upgraded to version 6.0, user quotas raised from 20M to 50M. PHP mail restrictions are removed. (It will take a day or two until all services will work properly)
2006.01.17 openvms boxes - vax and alpha user quotas raised from 30k to 90k blocks.
2006.01.17 aix user quotas raised from 20M to 50M. PHP mail restrictions are removed.
2006.01.12 debian user quotas raised from 20M to 50M. PHP mail restrictions are removed.
2006.01.12 redhat is up again. Upgraded to Fedora Core 4, user quotas raised from 20M to 50M. PHP mail restrictions are removed.
2006.01.11 upgrade is being performed - as described in TODO list. Some of the servers (redhat, freebsd, openbsd, tru64) might be not accessable.
2005.12.30 polarhome gateway server's chassis blowed the fuse three times. It took few hours to repare the problem.
2005.12.17 polarhome was not reachable from time to time today. gateway server environment temperature fell under HDD operational temperature causing server to HALT several times during the day. New 25W bulb in the chassis fixed the problem.
2005.11.27 freebsd is under maintenance - upgrading to 6.0. It will be unstable during next few days. (upgrade has not been done)
2005.11.05 polarhome mail does not work properly. ISP closed outgoing port 25. We were able to resolve the situation in few days - without losing mail... but still waiting for permanent solution.
2005.11.03 SUSE is open for public. This host is a remote member of polarhome.com hosted by very young and gifted Dillon Amburgey (Pikeville KY, USA)
2005.10.27 MobileMail has been finaly implemented. polarhome users on every host can read/send mail with handheld devices and mobile phones. Bookmark URL: www.polarhome.com/horde/
2005.10.26 former FTP account's webspace IS NOT DELETED. It is preserved under offline directory. Users can download their content by following the FAQ. FTP users had three months to either upgrade to shell and continue using polarhome as earlier or fall back to template/mail level. This had been announced in good time.
2005.10.25 polarhome new policy's implementation has been started. In next few days all ftp account's webspace will be denied. Users can download they web content through Usermin (detaild description in FAQ) . This policy modification was needed in order to protect polarhome from users that use their ftp accounts for phishing, spoofing, distribute warez, running pirate forums and other malicious activity. More about in policy.
2005.10.20 mindterm is today probably the most widely spread client that implements the SSH1 and SSH2 protocols written in pure Java. AppGate Network Security AB (Göteborg, Sweden) sponsors Mindterm site licence for polarhome.com. More at admin page.
2005.09.30 usermin on all hosts has been upgraded to stable and bugfixed version - 1.160. Special thanks to Matej Bukovinski (Slovenia), who provided a very fast and good looking theme designed for polarhome. Usermin is accessable through admin page.
2005.09.30 openvms account creation is enabled again on polarhome's OpenVMS systems - vax and alpha.
2005.09.30 policy There is one month left before polarhome's ftp accouts will be converted to template accounts without ftp access. Template users will have access to their files, but user web space will not be available any more. Current ftp users can choose to either upgrade to shell or will be automatically downgraded to template level after 31st of October. This policy modification was needed in order to protect polarhome from users that use their ftp accounts for phishing, spoofing, distribute warez, running pirate forums and other malitious activity. Read more in user policy
2005.09.06 polarhome was not reachable for two hours - I've been forced to power off the gate in order to perform some el. installation around.
2005.08.31 bootdisk archive is online again. William Hughes (Australia) and WyldFire Tech have made this possible.
2005.08.06 webmail problem with account separation (between different hosts) is solved.
2005.08.04 mail problems are corrected. It took some time to realize that bredbandsbolaget has closed outbound port 25. Seems, it was just a "mistake" that it worked until now. Anyhow, from now, outbound mail travel through dynamic line - unfortunately, without valid hostname that may cause that some paranoid mail servers do not accept mail from polarhome.
2005.08.01 polarhome has new user policy. ftp accounts are (will be) revoked and just template and shell accounts exist. This policy modification was needed in order to protect polarhome from users that use their ftp accounts for phishing, spoofing, distribute warez, running pirate forums and other malitious activity. ftp users can continue to use polarhome until 2005.10.31. After that date ftp access will be denied. Read more.
2005.07.28 polarhome ISP opened the line again (after 5 days). Main line is up, means we run on fix IP and IPv6 works again. Please, do not abuse polarhome's hospitality. We do not support abusive and mailitious activity and do cooperate with legal authorities by giving out all available information including access IPs, log files etc.
2005.07.26 debian upgraded to 3.1 (Sarge). Minor problems may occur.
2005.07.24 upgrade debian, freebsd and redhat/fedora is under maintenance (upgrading to newer versions according to TODO list). Hopefully, ready in 1-2 days.
2005.07.24 polarhome user creation is globally disabled until we find a way to protect polarhome from users that use their ftp accounts for phishing, spoofing, distribute warez and other malitious activity. We waited two months for stable connection with fix IP that some "users" scrude up in two weeks. This can not be tollerated. You can send you opinion or constructive idea to root@polarhome.com or discuss on the forum.
2005.07.22 polarhome is again abused. ISP disconnected polarhome without any warning (as they usually do). In few days I will get detailed information about abuse and hopefully the line back, until that we are running on backup line.
2005.07.21 IRC i-lines are constant polarhome problem. Now plarhome users may suggest what IRC networks should be ask to open i-lines for polarhome.com. Please note: it does not mean that polarhome will get that i-line at the end - this is particular network's decision. more.
2005.07.15 polarhome took back his DNS service and now IPv6 is running again. Soon IRC i-lines will be restored as well - thanks to fix IP address.
2005.07.14 polarhome changed back to fix IP address tonight. It has not been planned to do it right now, but PPPoE ISP changes IP that caused that polarhome was not reachable few hours during the night.
2005.07.11 fedora runs with very high load that sometimes make problem during MySQL account creation. Affected users should send a mail to support@polarhome.com.
2005.07.6 netbsd server was not reachable for a week or so. It was up and running - just the tcpip stub died for some reason. Accounts, that are requested during this period, are created now.
2005.06.12 fedora It was a black sabbath for fedora - still problems with /var partition but the situation gets closer to the solution. New users haven't got database passwords. Affected users should send a mail to support@polarhome.com.
2005.06.09 fedora server's /var partiton is also damaged. For some reason it got full (or at least kernel thought that it is full). Welcome mail and MySQL database password have not been sent out to new users and existing users' mail has been delayed. Problem is fixed for now.
2005.05.31 fedora is up and running. RedHat 9 was upgraded to Fedora Core 3. redhat users may use @fedora.polarhome.com e-mail address as well. Server is far from "ready" but at least basic functions are working. BTW lost Seagate Barracuda is replaced with a Samsung drive that suppose to be more immune on temerature changes.
2005.05.30 redhat /home partition is in very bad shape. 98% of data is restored, but there are still tasks to do. I esimate that server will be online again before Wednesday - but do not bet on that - because there might be included a migration to Fedora as well.
2005.05.27 redhat disk that holds home partitions is damaged. It will be, most probably, replaced during the weekend. Until that the server is either dow or very instable.
2005.05.20 redhat was down few hours. Seems, the hard drive got too warm and stopped.
2005.05.17 e-mail spam filter configuration was modified yesterday - in order to provide better spam filtering. Unfortunately, this caused that some non spam mail were marked as spam and deleted. Configuration is restored and spam sensitivity is on earlier, lower, safer but also acceptable level.
2005.05.15 polarhome IP address has changed again. It is an annoying but normal behaviour of PPPoE lines. Hopefully from June we'll be able to use a fix IP again.
2005.05.03 OpenBSD MySQL process had a strange behaviour. Restarting the process corrected earlier authentication problems.
2005.04.25 redhat quotas are re-created. Quotas were that badly corrupted that kernel just simply stopped during the weekend.
2005.04.19 polarhome is reachable again, but there are still services that are not available. It is really pain in the a** to run such site with PPPoE - but it is better than nothing until somebody donate a leased line (or arrives new ADSL uplink with fix IP address)
2005.04.13 uplink is closed again. Now for ever. (a gentleman from Salvador spread viruses through his home page). For that abuse whole polarhome.com lost one of the ADLS uplinks and fix IP address, therefore services are not available. It will take weeks until we manage a new uplink with fix IP address.
2005.04.13 polarhome services were not reachable from the Internet during the night. I tested load balancing through two uplinks. It works well from inside, but seems there are some routing problems with NAT-ed packets from outside. Old configuration is restored and now everything works as earlier. I apologize for caused inconvenience.
2005.04.05 DoS attack against web server from ogre.cdmon.com and 195.128.235.45 - whole polarhome was very slow during the night.
2005.03.23 polarhome line was again cut off... a romanian "user" spoofed ebay login screen on his homepage. SongNetworks warned polarhome that it was the last abuse incident from polarhome - next time they will break the contract.
2005.03.12 problems may occure during next few days. It will be performed some uplink/network configuration tests in order to improve bandwidth.
2005.03.09 pictures I have taken some pictures for two reasons. First: new images about polarhome hardware were not published for almost two years. Second: gate's hardware that polarhome started public operation with is finally retired. It ran redhat (99-01), freebsd (01-03), netbsd (03-05). More.
2005.03.02 -26C during the night was too cold for gate's HDD. Server rebooted every 5-10 minutes between 2 and 8 AM. Seems the 25W lamp in the chassis is not enough to warm up the server on these temperatures. APC UPS and D-Link switches work perfect.
2005.03.01 Tru64 server is open for public. She's a real pearl among all polarhome hosts.
2005.02.24 power problems seems to be solved for a while. Whole polarhome.com is UPS protected. Shame that I can announce this just after 5 years public service, but better late than never.
2005.02.17 new WebMail application is installed at polarhome, that provides lot of nice functionality - but in the same time it is much slower than old PHPOP based one. Please, vote which one should we use in the future. See more.
2005.02.16 adsl line was cut of by mistake. For some reason an old abuse was reported and UVTC's and Song Network's abuse group first cut the line and asked later for explanation (and never checked the report validity) - it took whole day to explain - and it could be much worse. Read more under date 2004.11.25 in old news
2005.02.15 adsl line is down - no further information yet.
2005.02.14 snowstorm caused some electricity instability, that kicked out half polarhome (that are not UPS protected). Servers (debian, vax) will be back after 6PM CET - Happy Valentin :)
2005.02.09 debian server was dow more than a day. Power supply unit died.
2005.02.08 mandrake server is about to close for few years. Read more.
2005.01.30 qnx server is open for public. Hardware is donated by Måns Nedlich (Solna, Sweden)
2005.01.25 irix is finally open. Hardware is donated by Walter Belgers (Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
2005.01.22 redhat: ftp did not work for accounts created last few days. UID passed 16 bit (64k) limit and wu-ftpd does not support that. vsftpd provided fast solution to the problem.
2005.01.21 spam ...again too much spam passed throught polarhome's mail gateway. That is a clear indication that we have to update the filter software. It is done - now polarhome should be more spam free. Read more.
2005.01.18 netbsd: is back with version 2.0 and a bit better hardware.
2005.01.15 redhat: was very unstable last weeks. HDDs stopped from time to time. Problem was caused by damaged cooler. New cooler should improve redhat's uptime.
2005.01.09 hurricane: passed through Sweden last night, that caused tremendous damages in communication. polarhome was cut of the Internet almost whole day.
2005.01.07 aix: server is finally back. New hardware, new installation. I apologize that "recovery" went so slow.
2005.01.06 redhat: hangs from time to time... working on the problem.
2005.01.02 openbsd: is back with version 3.6. Recovery wasn't an easy task. Earlier version 3.0 is not supported any more - more over, these versions are binary not compatible. Therefore, users need to recompile their programs in order to achieve earlier functionality.
2004.12.27 redhat: server was down yesterday - corrupted quotas killed the server. I was offsite one week and could not act immediatelly. It will take few days to repare/recreate the quotas damaged last month during power outage.
2004.12.27 solaris: MySQL's vital idexes were corrupt, therefore server was down for a while. MySQL accounts created during this period are not valid, please request a new one at mysql@polarhome.com
2004.11.29 power: UPS became singe point of failure of polarhome servers... and as it is referenced in Murphey's Law, polarhome's Deltec 1000VA PowerRite Pro II UPS did not survive the night. It reseted every few minutes. Even Vattenfall is more stable then our UPS ;(
2004.11.28 power: this Sunday was a disaster. Every half hour power has gone for a second. This is perfectly enough to kill the servers. I decided to connect old, loud, 110V UPSes that are available. By now (7PM CET) 70% of polarhome is protected. Hope this helps a bit. The winter just started (and we have already lost a KVM, one switch port and the OpenBSD server).
2004.11.25 polarhome: is online again (5PM CET). ISP (Universal Telecom) disconected whole polarhome because a redhat user, codoc used a pirate VBulletin software on his home page. User is deleted. Line is opened. polarhome has not and never will support any illegal activity. You can send your opinion to opinion@polarhome.com. More to read.
2004.11.24 polarhome: was no reachable from 2PM CET.
2004.11.23 polarhome: during the night(around 2AM CET) there were some serious power disturbancies created by a snowstorm. Half of polarhome servers did not survive - as far I can see the KVM is permanently damaged also redhat, hpux, openbsd servers did not boot. They will be possibly fixed during aftrenoon.
2004.11.22 polarhome: gateway needs a bit higher room temperature. The problem is solved with a 25W light bulb in the box :)
2004.11.21 polarhome: was not reachable between 11PM-9AM CET. gate halted. Seems, the root partition got damaged (from low temperature I guess)
2004.11.09 polarhome: was not reachable between 5AM-5PM CET. ISP had some problem that affected whole Stockholm area.
2004.11.08 forum: is under maintenance - migrating to phpBB engine.
2004.11.07 debian: ran out of memory. Server is rebooted and it is in operation again.
2004.10.26 webmail: polarhome POP3 mail's web interface refused to send out mail. Problem is fixed and again is possible to read, answer and send mail through the web inteface. It is not as fancy and beautiful as hotmail and yahoo, but it is simple, functional and does the job.
2004.10.23 spam: polarhome was respected because of clear antispam policy, but in the last time spam filter did not work as it should. This problem is corrected now. Read more.
2004.08.04 abuse: polarhome.com was disconnected from the Internet because of abuse against ebay. User is discovered and available material is handeled over to legal authorities.
2004.07.27 power cut: whole polarhome.com was without power for few minutes tonight around 5AM CET. UPSes would help but they are not in operation because they are too old and extremely loud.
2004.07.22 redhat: disk quotas are recreated.
2004.07.20 mandrake: server is online again and it is ran by Denis Faktorovitch (Hadera, Israel)
2004.07.19 debian: server crashed again. Process quotas should be fixed.
2004.07.17 irix: Walter Belgers (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) kindly donated an SGI Indy, that will soon become irix.polarhome.com
2004.07.12 redhat: server crashed for some reason. remaining problems will be fixed during the wekend
2004.06.23 debian: server was down for one week. It died for some reason while I was on holiday and there was nobody with console access that could solve the problem.
2004.05.31 OpenVMS: licences expired, therefore boxes were not accesable last days.
2004.05.27 ftp service: stopped working for NATed hosts in active mode for some reason. Users MUST use passive mode ftp in order to access their files.
2004.05.24 vax,hpux: boxes are stable again. Specual thanks to Anders Sundqvist (Stockholm, Sweden) for VAX manuals and competent help.
2004.05.23 vax: server is down for upgrade and maintenance. It might take few days.
2004.05.17 hpux: moved from 800 to 700 class server. Now it got place in the rack. Old 800 server will be sold in order to upgrade other servers. Please, allow few days until all services are set up properly.
2004.05.09 redhat: server is online again. Accounts are cleaned up a bit, quotas recreated, got a new cooler and HDDs are relocated to achieve better cooling.
2004.05.05 redhat: server is down for maintenance. Unused accounts will be deleted. Hopefully, it will be back before Sunday.
2004.04.27 IRC-SE: polarhome got I-line from IRCNet (IRC-SE), but polarhome needs to follow the rules: only one connection per ident and no bots. read more
2004.04.15 redhat: server crashed again. :(
2004.04.08 gate: there was made one more attempt to fix damaged hard drive and improve work environment for gateway server. Thanks to Robin Fagerlund (Stockholm, Sweden) server got a special case that suppose to catch condense water.
2004.04.06 button contest: has been won by eyjo. read more
2004.04.03 polarhome: there is still problem with gate's main HDD (an IBM deskstar). I do not have any "in stock" therefore the final solution will wait until Monday... this is all what I can do (Luke 14:5)
2004.04.02 gateway: server died. Seems HDD condensed drops during the night. There is a good backup - but recovery requires some time.
2004.04.01 redhat: crashed 3 days ago. Accounts requested in last three days are created with delay and might have problem with MySQL account password. If password does not work or mail did not arrive, please send an email to support@polarhome.com
2004.03.22 freebsd: PHP engine access restrictions are corrected. Please evaluate and send comments to support@polarhome.com
2004.03.19 SYN-flood attack against polarhome.com services.
2004.03.19 button contest: voting starts today - 4 days later than scheduled - because of DNS problems. Vote here.
2004.03.14 ISP polarhome changed ISP and from now uses IP address 81.216.198.11. It might take 24h for DNS servers to update/refresh the DNS record. Until that polarhome.com will be reachable just with IP address.
2004.03.04 virus: potentially harmful virus is being spread via email spoof attacks. These emails appear to be from official polarhome.com sources as staff, management etc. DO NOT OPEN THEM. polarhome does not send out such mail. Read more.
2004.02.29 freebsd: server is upgraded to 5.2.1. It runs new SCHED_ULE kernel scheduler.
2004.02.25 power cut: there was a not planned, half hour power cut again. Actually, polarhome will get a new neighbour and workers disconnected the whole neighbourhood witout any notice. The building is planned to be finished during March. There is not much to do against.
2004.02.24 DoS attack: there was a primitive but effective DoS attack against polarhome between 8 and 17 CET from centrum4.sci.muni.cz
2004.02.09 power cut: there was a not planned, few hours power cut during work hours. solaris, redhat and openbsd hosts' file system was badly damaged. It took few hours until corrupted file systems were repared.
2004.02.17 contest: "hosted by polarhome" button contest is open. More.
2004.02.09 freebsd: server is online again. Requested accounts are created.
2004.02.06 freebsd: server got a new motherboard and CPU - and now upgrading to 5.2. Unfortunately upgrade is not as smooth as one can expect (I wonder if FreeBSD team tested at all) therefore server will be back just on Monday - anyhow users' data, passwords and databases are safe.
2004.02.03 freebsd: were down few hours - got a new disk and prepared for new motherbord and 5.2 upgrade.
2004.02.02 mailman: polarhome mailing list server is upgraded - among other new features it supports multiple languages.
2004.02.01 hpux: ssh, sftp and scp problem is fixed. hpux users too, can use ssh with X11 forwarding.
2004.01.30 redhat: reparing corrupted quota files - ftp, http and mail services will not respond for few hours.
2004.01.29 MySQL: automatic account creation had a bug. NetBSD users haven't got their MySQL account details, and OpenBSD, Solaris, HP-UX and AIX users got MySQL accounts even if they haven't asked for. The bug is corrected.
2004.01.21 redhat: server was down few hours. Hardware is upgraded.
2004.01.20 network: polarhome has network problems, from time to time. During these periods, uplink has ca 70% package loss that can be resolved just with cold reset of the DSL modem. ISP promised deeper investigation.
2004.01.19 oidentd: polarhome IRC users asked for correct ident response. Finally it is here. oidentd is installed on all systems (except OpenVMS and HP-UX) in masquarade/proxy mode.
2004.01.18 PHP: disabled functions might be enabled for registered/shell users. There will be two weeks test period on Solaris and FreeBSD. Read more.
2003.12.25 freebsd: host is up again. Because of old BIOS, hardware upgrade is not possible right now. Problem solved with quick and dirty rm -rf *.log command :).
2003.12.23 server upgrade: in the next stage, FreeBSD and OpenBSD servers will be upgraded. Servers might not be visible from time to time during next next few days.
2003.12.22 solaris: host is up and running with "new" hardware. Accounts that had been requested during upgrade period are created.
2003.12.09 redhat: hard disk upgraded, user creation enabled.
2003.12.08 redhat: ran out of user space. Old HDD will be replaced during the night.
2003.12.04 solaris: server will be down few days. Upgrading hardware.
2003.12.03 hpux: User creation had some problems in last weeks. Problem is fixed, requested accounts are created.
2003.11.13 polarhome: account creation is enabled again - input forms are improved with visual security code.
2003.11.11 polarhome: User creation is rewritten and it needs just few more days testing. Please be patient.
2003.10.31 FreeBSD: all, ca 100 accounts are created that had been waiting last days. There might be some problem with MySQL account password. If it does not work send a mail to mysql@polarhome.com
2003.10.31 polarhome: User creation temporary disabled on all servers. Submission form has to be rewritten, because there are some users that autogenerated the accounts. It would not be a problem if it would be on purpose, but one user from seed.net.tw generated hundreds of accounts on freebsd, that overloaded the host and damaged the system.
2003.10.30 mea culpa: port forwarding did not work for 7 hours this morning. I played with iptables last night and forgot to restore original "polarhome" values before I went to bed. I apologize for caused inconvenience.
2003.10.21 whois: list of whois servers is updated with new top level domains. More...
2003.10.20 forum: automatic user creation is ported to Invision Board. It means that new users may request default forum username (username_hostname) during ftp account creation - it works exacty as worked with old forum engine.
2003.10.19 OpenVMS: thanks to ledudu's idea on OpenVMS sytems (vax and alpha) is implemented an elegant solution in order to enable user's web space. It have been running web server on vax and alpha, but just few users had enough competence to set up their home page. From now all new users will get their OpenVMS account with working home page. Older users may follow instructions.
2003.09.24 debian: server will not be reachable until Monday.
2003.09.19 hackers: seems it was not clear until now: polarhome does not support malitious hacker activity, but it is allowed to talk about it. However, it is NOT allowed to store such files, scripts, viruses etc on polarhome realm servers. These account will be simply removed.
2003.08.19 polarhome: slotcounter and other hit counting applications/account will be removed from polarhome exactly as mp3 and other media distribure accounts.
2003.09.17 AIX: server is down. There is some problem with network after mirroring solution.
2003.08.29 Forum: is upgraded. Matej Bukovinski (Slovenia), the forum admin, made a great job with converting whole Forum to another, better engine. Thanks.
2003.08.29 AIX: server is back in "production" with robust StorageWorks disks that replaced old HP disks. Thanks to AIX gurus from Norsk Tipping (Hamar, Norway) the boot partition is saved as well.
2003.08.27 Petition: polarhome is with The European Open Source community. More to read here
2003.08.27 WAP: polarhome tested some WAP services. It happened sometimes that main web server sent strange response. Tests took one day.
2003.08.27 Virus: as every mail server on the internet, polarhome's mail server was overloaded during last last week because of "virus invasion". Overloaded but not closed as most corporate servers, though it processed ten thousands of so called W32/Sobig.F@mm e-mail virus. And non of the polarhome mail accounts have got that, nor any other virus thanks to, often criticised, centralised mail delivery architecture. polarhome will try to keep this anti-spam anti-virus policy.
2003.08.19 RedHat: all MySQL requests have been proceeded and reply sent to username@redhat.polarhome.com e-mail addresses. Q:What happened with MySQL account creation, when it worked perfect earlier? A:Server is overloaded and mail refused to deliver mail that caused to run out of space quota.
2003.08.25 RedHat: some users that requested MySQL database on redhat server, during last two weeks, have not got their account information mailed to their polarhome e-mail address, although databases are corretly created. These users need to request their account information from mysql@polarhome.com (Please note: one request is enough.)
2003.08.18 polarhome: ADSL modem got crazy. It reduced the bandwidth from 80 KBps to 15 KBps that slowed down the whole polarhome.com on that extent that it was not usable for three days. Modem reset fixed the problem.
2003.07.25 usermin: change password problem is fixed.
2003.07.24 whois: implemented DNS, ping and traceroute in network queries that work both with IPv4 and IPv6
2003.07.23 usermin: web based account administration is implemented on polarhome realm. Dream of FTP users to change password and finger information - came through. Thanks to Jamie Cameron's excellent program: usermin. To access usermin on each polarhome server use Admin item from the menu.
2003.07.18 polarhome: gate recovery, after HDD crash, is finished. There were implemented some improvements, but it does not make reality nicer. What's lost, it's lost forever. polarhome learned the lesson.
2003.07.18 polarhome: www.ip6.polarhome.com is upgraded and POP mail has been tunned up
2003.07.17 AIX server was not so stable last days. Ventilator in external HDD rack stoped working and overheated the old IBM SCSI disk with /home partition. Disk surface temperature was 51C. New ventilator fixed the problem.
2003.07.16 Spam: more than 90% of spam is recognised and deleted on polarhome's mail gateway as well as almost 100% viruses are removed from incoming mail.
2003.07.16 IPv6 network is up again with all IPv6 vhosts.
2003.07.15 gate: account databases had been recovered and new user creation is enabled. From now new users will be automatically inserted into polarhome FORUM too, with username: username_hostname and requested password. Please, note that forum passwords are not dependent of ftp/shell passwords. polarhome use same password just for initialization and later on they can be changed separatelly.
2003.07.11 gate www.polarhome.com is online again. It is possible to us all polarhome servers as earlier, but new user creation and some other services will be enabled just next week. Five months mailing list and forum history is lost :(
2003.07.09 gate: The newest tape backup is five months old. It means that www.polarhome.com lost last five months development. The worst damage had been caused on FORUM and the mailing lists history. The rest can be restored by time.
2003.07.06 gate Main HDD in gate.polarhome.com died. It contined the whole www.polarhome.com plus five months backup from all member server. Server will be recovered, but there are some damages that can not be repared.
2003.02.08 HP-UX: hpux.polarhome.com is open for public. She is a nice and powerfull HP 9000 800/H50 server... and just after a week playing with, she became my favorite host and princess of polarhome.com. Enjoy.
2003.02.06 Ultrix: in order to improve host uptime, it has been decided to move the only remote polarhome member host into the real. It means that hardware hosted so far by Kevin Read (Regensburg, Gremany) will move to Stockholm next week. Naturally, box will be down during this period.
2003.02.06 NetBSD: new hardware is almost ready. Migration starts NOW, therefore, please do not upload or do something valuable, because all changes will be lost.
2003.02.05 FreeBSD: migration to new hardware and upgrade to 5.0-RELEASE is more or less finished.
2003.02.04 NetBSD: will get old FreeBSD-s box. It means that NetBSD moves from VAX to i386 architecture, but it also means that it will be faster and it will be capable to run MySQL database, but in the same time users have to recompile their applications.
2003.02.04 FreeBSD: server got a better hardware and upgraded to v5.0. Upgrade went well even if it was the most not reccomemded upgrade: 4-STABLE -> 5.0 binary upgrade without full backup. BUT it looks very nice and fast so far. It could take few days until all services will be tested and configured for public usage.
2003.01.30 NetBSD: box was in a bit inconsistent state during last week... It had a pleasure to enjoy an VAXstation 4000-90 hardware, but it had been decided to move it back to hardware, that ran earlier, an MicroVAX 3100-20, because the VAX station was traded in for an HP HP50 that runs HP-UX 11, that will be soon HP-UX box in polarhome realm. I apologise from all NetBSD users, but interest of community über alles.
2003.01.29 Bootdisk: Seems polarhome collection of bootdisks became more popular than polarhome can appreciate with current bandwidth. Link had been temporarily removed until we find a solution. If somebody has fast uplink and wants to host polarhome's bootdisk collection, please contact root@polarhome.com
2003.01.28 AIX: Finally AIX server is open for public. It has apache web server, MySQL database, mail and all other standard "polarhome features". Unfortunately there are no man pages installed, but Michael Grunditz (Uppsala, Sweden) will fix it soon.
2003.01.24 NetBSD: server had been upgraded to version 1.6 last night, but there are some problems with network configuration, that will be fixed during weekend. During this period server in unreachable.
2003.01.20 FreeBSD: polarhome has FreeBSD 5.0, but we wait for hardware upgrade. As soon I manage some better box, FreeBSD server will be upgraded. This is first in the pipe.
2003.01.20 ISP: polarhome.com changed ISP. Now we're running on 5 times higher speed and with fix IP address. It might happen that polarhome will keep old Telia's connection as well, for security, stability and vhost reasons - but it is not decided yet. During DNS servers refresh period polarhome.com was not reachable by domain name. More to read at [Polarhome] list.
2003.01.17 Redhat: server died because of "out of memory" moreover gate was overloaded and could not handle more connections, this caused that polarhome hosts were not reachable few hours.
2003.01.13 Policy About 40 account had been deleted but just 3-4 real users are affected. Thanks to these polish guys max filesize is limited to 5M from now. Please note, polarhome is not created to be file server for malitious or X rated content. polarhome does not have nor bandwith nor other resources for this. These accounts will be deleted without any warning.
2003.01.07 Mail: Telia re-opened port 25 and mail is again woking directly - without redirection. I would like to thank Lars Hammarstrand (Stockholm, Sweden) who helped polahome to survive these two months.
2003.01.05 Cold: Because of very cold weather some of polarhome servers stoped working. Outside temperature was about -27 C and in server room was -10 C. First Debian and AIX servers that haven't got place in the rack stoped and later on even NetBSD and RedHat gave up. Problem is temporarily solved, and polarhome desperately waits for Swedish spring.
2003.01.01 AIX: Olle Hansson and Björn Leksell (Orsa, Sweden) generously donated an IBM RS/6000 box with lot of other IBM hardware and preinstalled AIX 4.3.3... hopefuly, it will be soon online as aix - polarhome member host.
2002.12.04 Fax number: changed area code. polarhome's new fax number is: +1 772 325 8221. Please note that this is an eFax number located in USA, therefore you should not add any Swedish area codes as +46 8 etc. it will come to right destination in Sweden anyway.
2002.11.27 RedHat: for some reason one process occupied all operative memory of the server. I will come back with more information after some investigation. Server was rebooted several times during the day and some services were unreachable few hours on redhat server. :(
2002.11.22 MySQL password: Few user complained that auto generated MySQL passwords are very complicate and there is no way to change them with ftp account rights (shell users could use mysqladmin). From now on, users can use phpMyAdmin to change their MySQL passwords.
2002.11.20 RedHat: finally, server had been upgraded to 8.0 level. There are still some minor problems, that should be fixed in next few days. Hopefuly, next week FreeBSD goes to 5.0
2002.11.12 Debian: server got a new disk for home directories. Quota problem fixed and now there are plenty of space for upload and new users. Default quota is 20M for home and 5M for database and unread mail.
2002.11.06 Incoming mail problem: Thanks to Lars Hammarstrand's (Stockholm, Sweden) fast and generous help, polarhome.com users can continue to receive e-mail on usual way. It is a temporary solution until Telia open SMTP port or polarhome finds some other solution. Please note, that polarhome users that used mail.polarhome.com as SMTP server, have to change default port to 26. mail.polarhome.com is not an open relay SMTP server - it requires POP3/IMAP authentication before SMTP access - as earlier. There are no changes inside of polarhome realm.
2002.11.05 Incoming mail problem: polarhome.com wrote an open letter to Telia regarding closed SMTP port
2002.11.01 Incoming mail problem: Telia's customer service officialy informed customers that Telia closed port 25 for whole ADSL and cable modem network including Com Hem etc. It is a permanent status. polarhome will try to find some solution to give back mail to about 30.000 polarhome accounts.
2002.11.01 Incoming mail problem: Telia, one of the biggest ISP-s in Sweden, closed port 25 for whole ADSL network. polarhome realm is part of Telia's ADSL network, therefore it is not possible to get mail on @hostname.polarhome.com addresses. There is no official information: is it a permanent situation, test or just some error in Telia's network configuration.
2002.10.24 Solaris: problems with MySQL admin's web interface and with MySQL password creation are fixed.
2002.10.24 DoS attack: it is not a big deal to attack polarhome, because it does not have enough bandwidth even for normal daily use. My message is: polarhome does not and will never support malicious hacker activity. I hope, that you are aware that polarhome users are not guilty, that I deleted your accounts. If you do not share my opinion, then be a man and discuss it with me, personally - if needed physically, but not in this chicken way. root@polarhome.com
2002.10.23 Upgrade: In the next few days some polarhome hosts will be upgraded. RedHat->8.0, FreeBSD->4.7 and OpenVMS/VAX->7.3.
2002.10.21 Debian: debian server is still member of polarhome.com REALM. Now it had been moved behind the gate.polarhome.com. It should improve server uptime and stability, but server lost direct access and own IP address. Read more about migration.
2002.10.08 POP3 mail: there were complains about POP3 mail, that did not allow to send mail with web interface. So... this problem is corrected and polarhome made a first step towards enabling mail() function from PHP scripts for registerd users. This feature is not working jet, but polarhome has a solution... the rest is just time and coding question :)
2002.10.07 Debian: fixed "cannot find -ltcl8.3" Eggdrop compilation problem. System eggdrop upgraded to 1.6.13.
2002.10.07 CVS: from now, polarhome.com mirrors Eggdrop CVS.
2002.10.07 RedHat: kernel upgraded to 2.5.41 as well as system wide eggdrop to 1.6.13
2002.10.05 Solaris: server is back again. It got a new HDD and upgraded to Solaris 9. User quotas has been raised to 20M. Accounts that was buffered in last few days, has been created.
2002.10.03 OpenBSD: server is again up and running. Fixed POP3 and PHP problems.
2002.10.02 Solaris: server is down for upgrade... new HDD and upgrading to Solaris 9. It will take few days until it will be again open for public.
2002.10.01 OpenBSD: system has been upgraded to 3.1 level. There are still some problems with PHP, otherwise system works nice. BTW it got a new HDD therefore user quotas raised from 10M to 20M.
2002.09.19 "polarhome logo" contest got a winner.
2002.09.11 Redhat: server became a port-forwarded host behind the gate with same range of internet accesable ports, from other side other servers got access from Internet that had not been the situation earlier. Read more at port-forward page
2002.09.11 Redhat: server will be closed for remote access from now for few days. It will move back to ext2 file system because of performance and system stability problems.
2002.09.09 Redhat: server had been devided from gate.plarhome.com. gateway from now is a nice transparent router, but it will take a while until all services work again as usual. Problems will be in DNS, mail, http traffic.
2002.09.05 Ultrix: after some longer period downtime server is online again. Registered user accounts are now created and usable.
2002.09.02 Redhat: gate got a new HDD (IBM DeskStar 80G). Server was down (few times) during upgrade. Unfortunately, there is still problem with quotas... :(
2002.09.01 Voting started for "polarhome logo" contest.
2002.08.30 You have two more/last days for submitting application for "polarhome logo" contest. Vote starts 1st of September.
2002.08.09 Redhat: Seems high temeperature permanently damaged the main HDD. Please, keep your valuable files on safer place then polarhome's redhat server. We have some backups, but if HDD dies it would not help much. It will take a while until polarhome can appreciate to buy a new hard disk. Sorry about that.
2002.07.23 Would you like to change the polarhome logo? Read more. Send application to contest@polarhome.com. You can check the list of arrived applications.
2002.07.23 mail: earlier upgraded mailman did not send mail because of python incompatibility. python upgraded to 2.2.1 version and now the mailling list should work as earlier.
2002.07.21 Redhat: main gateway server got HDD coolers, two powerful fans that should ensure that temperature should not be more than 55C. It sounds ridiculous, but server do have such problems with IBM deskstar HDD.
2002.07.19 Debian: after one week, broken DNS record has been resolved. debian.polarhome.com is again visible in polarhome realm.
2002.07.16 All servers were shut down for few minutes because of hardware reconfiguration. polarhome moved from attic to less warm deployment location.
2002.07.12 OpenVMS: users asked quite often: How to create home page at OpenVMS system? You can find the answer at short, step by step HOWTO.
2002.07.02 Improved and globalized realm statistics.
2002.06.28 FreeBSD: server is upgraded to 4.6-RELEASE. It means improved security and PHP 4 and lot of other improvements.
2002.06.25 polarhome had an attack between 1-12 AM CET DST. During that period cron jobs and login was disabled to minimise non necessary traffic. Unfortunately polarhome can not do much against DoS type of attacks :( without proper equipment and help from internet provider.
2002.06.21 Thanks to Kevin Read, I am proud to announce the newest server in polarhome realm: Ultrix - direct access host.
2002.06.17 Because of private, read family reasons I had to leave polarhome without attention in quite inconsistent state. Even if the member hosts were up, the gateway server was down for more than a week... the result from investigation will posted to security and polarhome lists. (more to read)
2002.05.31 Linux/RedHat: shell is enabled again. Seems Linux can not rally cope with lot of mounted/exported NFS files systems... it is much more stabile without NFS. Anyhow test will continue at least next two weeks.
2002.05.25 Linux/RedHat: AKA gate has serious and very strange problems. It might be some hacker attack or HD failure or kernel tuning problem. As a preventive step: shell access had been disabled for ALL users. It is a temporary solution to be able to test and monitor the system. Cron jobs and CGI's will continue to work. Planned duration is 1-3 weeks. On the security list will be published the precise problem. Please, fell free to help, if you have had experience with overloaded Linux systems.
2002.05.20 Linux/RedHat upgraded to 7.3 level... it might be some problems, please allow few days to set up everything.
2002.05.15 From now accounts on all hosts (except OpenVMS and NetBSD) are created with MySQL access. Account details will be posted to new user`s polarhome e-mail address. Earlier polarhome users still have to send a request.
2002.05.14 Two new hosts in the realm: NetBSD on MicroVAX with port-forward and an another direct access host running Linux/Debian. Debian can help a bit for user who need vhosts... but if users behave as on Linux/RedHat, it will be soon banned too from all IRC networks :(
2002.05.13 Unfortunately, ping disabled on all polarhome systems...
2002.05.10 Community voted: another Linux and it should be Debian. Server has been set up, gate "donated" 256M RAM and it will be hopefully in production next week.
2002.05.07 New policy is available... read more.
2002.05.05 Perl disabled on OpenVMS... because some users use perl just to portscan and attack remote hosts... seems OpenVMS - that was really an open server, needs special registration too as unices :(
2002.05.01 Please, try to use FAQ to find answer to your questions before you contact support.
2002.04.29 Because of un-ethical abuse with step up fee from Romania and Slovenia... the step up fee has been modified to: 10 local currency, but at least the post stamp value per username per server.
2002.04.23 System wide eggdrop had been upgraded to 1.6.10 on Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Solaris. It is at /home/e/eggdrop/
2002.04.22 SMTP/relay problem solved. more...
2002.04.19 polarhome developers needed. more...
2002.04.12 Linux: gateway box has been forkbombed, therefore whole polarhome realm was not accessable for few hours. After inverstigation there will be published more information.
2002.03.19 Linux: Quotas and the whole FS were corrupted, therefore server was down during reparation.
2002.03.11 OpenBSD: ...is finally open. It is some old hardware, that was planned to run QNX but, QNX was not as flexible with old equipment as it was expected, therefore I turned it to OpenBSD. However on demand it is possible to upgrade/change. Enjoy.
2002.03.10 OpenVMS: ssh server installed. It should improve access security in general.
2002.03.06 Some Lithuanian, Romanian and Slovenian users misunderstood the word freedom. This is the last warning: if you continue to use PHP for DoS, flood, SYN and other type of remote attacks, polarhome will be forced to restrict PHP usage for shell/trusted users only (as it happened with CGIs few month ago).
2002.03.03 Linux: MySQL access had reached the maximum connection limit. It has been tuned and from now it should work better (but a bit slower)
2002.02.13 Helsingborg, Sweden based FSData a well known commercial ISP and web-hotel, kindly donated secondary DNS services. It should fix our DNS problems.
2002.02.12 FreeBSD: Processor upgraded with 133MHz Intel Pentium Overdrive. This is the hardware limit of current FreeBSD box. It is not possible to upgrade any more, but on demand we will move FreeBSD to some more powerful machine.
2002.02.08 FreeBSD: quota file was corrupted that made some troubles during logon. It is fixed now.
2002.02.07 Again DoS attacks against polarhome's DNS forwarder. If somebody can provide secondary DNS forwarder services for polarhome.com it would be just great. Meanwhile use 213.66.228.229 IP address for gateway.
2002.02.05 Our Solaris server is open for public.
2002.01.28 OpenVMS box VAX.polarhome.com will soon change hostname to VMS.polarhome.com. Reason: VAX is a Digital hardware that can run several OSes, that will be actually the situation at polarhome (and to be honest I don't think that we could ever manage an Alpha for VMS). Therefore, our VAX can be concidered as our only OpenVMS box, and the hostname should reflect this fact.
2002.01.27 Whole polarhome was down for about 10 hours. It was a power cut - I cut it... by mistake when I played a handyman around the house. Sorry because of inconvenience. I give my best to protect the system from remote attacks, but unfortunately, nobody can protect the system from silly administrator. :(
2002.01.23 polarhome.com was not reachable by name for few hours. polarhome's DNS forwarder had been DoS attacked. However the polarhome realm was alive and usable with IP address.
2002.01.22 polarhome found "some kind of solution" for perl and CGI abuse problem. From now on, CGI is enabled just for trusted (shell) users. All other users (with just ftp account) can not execute CGI scripts. More to read at Security list.
2002.01.22 polarhome had a power cut, and we do not have any UPS, therefore hosts freebsd and vax could not recover. It will be fixed in next few hour.
2002.01.17 OpenVMS server VAX was configured to be more user friendly. Installed PINE mail client, PICO text editor and some GNU programs that can help Unix users to get familiar with OpenVMS.
2002.01.17 Server sms.tele2.dk was mailbombed from polarhome by user "tools" with perl CGI script. Perl has been disabled for all user for now, until we found some secure method to us it. Mr tools you should not be very proud... shame on you.
2002.01.15 Lynx "problem" fixed on VAX. Now it is again possible to browse from OpenVMS box.
2002.01.06 polarhome.com's Linux server was down for 3 days... seems there was some problem with xinetd (it could not fork more processes), but I can not answer the question was it an attack or a bug. But the reason, why the whole polarhome was down for so long time is: that there is one, and only one person behind the whole polarhome realm, and if I travel or I'm somewhere away (because I do not live from polarhome and I have to do my real job as well). So, if meanwhile something happens and system is not reachable, then it is not reachable for me either, until I arrive. In the worst case my girlfriend can press the reset button, but this time she was with me. I am sorry for inconvenience, but as it stated everywhere on the system "polarhome is one home based, non-commercial, enthusiastic project for educative purpose only" and nobody should have commercial service level expectations.
2001.12.18 polarhome.com is under continuos hacker attack. I will give my best to keep system alive, but because of limited equipment (and might be a lack of knowledge as well), it can fall. Please, have some backup of your workspace in case if polarhome backup fails. So far it survived, but it is better to be prepared for the worst case.
2001.12.11 Linux server gate.polarhome.com had been upgraded. Ext3 file system, new kernel and lot of other up to date packages. Now it is on RedHat 7.2 level.
2001.11.27 sendmail routing problems: mail did not work to freebsd.polarhome.com and vax.polarhome.com for few hours.
2001.11.21 On FreeBSD enabled ftp/mail accounts. Planned server upgrade in first weeks of 2002.
2001.11.19 Lynx removed from VAX until we fix the "hanging" problem for non SYSTEM users.
2001.11.16 FreeBSD is open... but because of hardware limitations just for shell users. After upgrade it will have ftp accounts as well.
2001.11.13 Nice day to remember: 10 000 accounts on gate, 1000 accounts on VAX and I got a Swedish driving licence :)
2001.11.12 Installed Perl v5.6.1 at VAX (with modules and perldoc)
2001.11.12 vax.polarhome.com got an WASD http server and VAX users got home page with CGI. Users home page will look as http://www.polarhome.com:703/~username
2001.11.06 Introduced debugging functionality, to help ftp users to manage CGI scripts.
2001.10.26 polarhome.com was down few hours - it was some power cut in the area.
2001.10.16 Account guest@gate has been disabled until ACL implementation - account was heavily abused :-(
2001.10.15 From now PostgreSQL at your service - accounts on request.
2001.10.12 MySQL admin - web administartion interface upgraded. It supports your menu language from now.
2001.10.11 We changed our policy and polarhome.com is not FREE shell provider any more... Please, check the fees.
2001.10.06 In the past few days I've got hundreds of supporting mail. It means that we did succeed to form a society. polarhome have to continue... I'm sure that current philosophy is not acceptable, but there are some ideas that might work. New accounts disabled until next week.
2001.10.03 Declaration is not somebody's hack... it is a confession of disappointed system administrator.
2001.10.02 VAX was unusable for few hours. It was not an attack, just SYSTEM played with security. Sorry about inconvience.
2001.09.26 User's CGI rights has been fixed... From now, CGIs from ~/public_html/cgi-bin/ should run as earlier.
2001.09.23 Because of security hole in apache/PHP (safe_mode was Off) user home pages were temporary disabled.
2001.09.23 HACKED BY rahul-x mailto : root@hackermuda.org. apache rights achieved
2001.09.13 New rule: any type of attack against remote hosts will result immediate ban from polarhome realm. No more warnings any more... there will be no tolerance for decadence.
2001.09.05 Login enabled again... we have to live with these bugs for a while :-( There might be some non expected limitations.
2001.09.04 Seems, somebody enjoy this situation. However, GATE's shell will be closed until we found some solution for PAM limits bug. Other services will continue to operate. Opinions to security@polarhome.com. View security-list archive.
2001.09.03 gate falled because of PAM limits bug. It was the first succesful attack, however it is not counting, because it was destructive.
2001.09.04 Seems, somebody enjoy this situation. However GATE's shell will be closed until we found some soluti on for PAM limits bug. Other services will continue to operate.
2001.09.03 gate falled because of PAM limits bug. It was the first succesful attack, however it is not counting, because it was destructive.
2001.08.31 Server accepts new linux accounts again. Note: IP address changed.
2001.08.30 Server upgrade in the afternoon (CET). New /home 60G, 1G RAM, should be enough for one month.
2001.08.21 Shell is enabled again. 6 users had been kicked out. Few hundred enthusiasts should not have problems because of few rats... this is my personal opinion and if you have something against write it to root@polarhome.com
2001.08.21 Shell will be disabled few hours to filter (and kick) out malicious users from the system. Everybody can hack gate, but there is not allowed to hack other systems from here. There is no tolerance for this kind of activity!
2001.07.24 There are too many users on the system, Please help.
2001.07.04 Finally, gate has been upgraded. It was embarrassing to use, so I decided to upgrade... old hardware will run as a FreeBSD NFS and ftp server... you can found more information under about... please, allow few days to make it stable
2001.07.01 Shell login disabled for few hours...
2001.06.28 gate moved closer to vax (new VAXstation 4000 90A). Soon vax will be open for public use as well - running OpenVMS 7.2
2001.06.26 As we voted: from next week there will be online one VAXstation 4000 90A with OpenVMS 7.2-hobby licence. But, because of these network changes it could be some problems/upgrades with the other hosts as well. For ex: probably gate.polarhome.com will get TUX and IPSec enabled kernel... unfortunately no new hardware before autumn :-(
2001.06.24 Moved to 2.4.x kernel.
2001.06.15 Because of performance problems last 7 user's account had been created just today. Try to log again - it will work. BTW To improve performance on this machine I stopped all unnecessary processes... I'm asking all users to do the same, until some hardware upgrade, otherwise gate.polarhome.com will be unusable.
2001.06.13 Again DOWN - same reason. We have to move to new hardware ...but how?
2001.06.07 Today gate reached it's memory limit. Server was down after 50 days uptime.
2001.05.17 Installed one common eggdrop for public use. More info in config file.
2001.05.15 Introduced mailman as a free mailing list functionality
2001.04.29 Enabled gnut, a Gnutella client as well... enjoy :)
2001.03.17 Enabled ICQ clients
2001.03.06 Added Napster support.
2001.02.26 gate.polarhome.com has been introduced to RedHat Network. Just curious about security?
2001.02.02 Polarhome is educational and not an adult site, however 90% of site traffic has been made by adult material... therefore all web cameras, pictures and films are permanently removed. I can imagine that it will be possible to open another site with collected material, but definitely not related with polarhome/polarfox.com. You can send your opinion to opinion@polarhome.com Thank you for comprehension.
2001.01.23 Removed the biggest part of adult material.
2001.01.12 After 2 months downtime ONLINE again:-) with ADSL line
2000.10.19 Finalised local date/time display and NTP synchronization
2000.10.16 From 1st of November site will be down for a short period (moving and upgrade)
2000.10.10 Weeks 40-41 system was almost down due to cable provider's unprofessional service.
2000.06.01 gate.polarhome.com has been opened for public. Read more.

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