
newzbot: changelog 18 Aug 2005
11 Apr 2005
17 Oct 2004
12..17 May 2004
26 Apr 2004
12 Apr 2004
2 Apr 2004
8 Feb 2004
2 Dec 2003
15 Apr 2003
12 Apr 2003
12 Jan 2003
6 Jan 2003
6 Oct 2002
4 Sep 2002
3 Sep 2002
22 Aug 2002
4 Aug 2002
3 Aug 2002
23 June 2002
2 June 2002
4 May 2002
29 Apr 2002
XOVER & record it
in a table. Modified the search engine
to display this information in the form of "days of news" (days
of news archived per-group per-server) and "last post" (how
long ago this server had a posting to the searched-for group.)
This will make the search bot much slower, but will hopefully provide
useful information.
4 Mar 2002
I fear the reaction of my government, fear waking up to learn that we've just turned the whole of Afganistan into smoked glass. I fear the slow coagulation of this into a holy war; the "good Christian nation" v. the "evil heathen Muslim towel-heads". Now is not a good time to be different-looking in America.
I hope clearer heads will prevail. I hope for targeted justice, not blanket vengance.
) for news servers that
support NNTP over SSL (SNEWS)
1 April 2001
30 March 2001
29 March 2001
28 March 2001
14 Nov 2000: Addressed a problem that was causing an (unintentional) denial-of-service in the searcher cgi (nph-dbif.cgi). Used the very cool mod_throttle_access to accomplish this. Hopefully this kind of thing will be built-in to Apache 2.0!
20 Sep 2000: I revamped the way the nntp scanner works. It's now scalable to any Unix machine on my LAN, and a bit more fault tolerant, too. Before, the nntp-scan process ran on one machine ('kadath', also the database server.) If I had to reboot kadath, the scan would be interrupted and I'd have to start from scratch. Now, the nntp-scan process can run on multiple machines (my laptop, for instance, and a Sparc IPX that's otherwise sitting around idle), and if the scanning process dies or is aborted, the host(s) it was working on are put back in the scanning queue and will be tried again later. It's kinda cool.
I suppose the next step would be to have other people do scanning for me and then send valid servers to me, so all I do is load them in the database .. hmm..
27 April 2000: I spent a day or so creating a feedback page (for those of you who remember the old one, I think you'll like this one better.) It's about 300 lines of PHP and the threading is probably buggy as hell, but if you have something to say, feel free to post up.
11 April 2000, 00:30 PDT: It's ba-aack..
My stuff survived the move northward, and I have a faster DSL connection to boot. Whoo hoo! Quite an experience to move from a heavily saturated 33.6kb modem to a DSL connection!
I've made more changes to the back end -- putting the web server on a dedicated, faster box, for one -- so if you notice any dead links or other problems, please let me know. All http://www.jammed.com/~newzbot links should forward automatically to the new domain, www.newzbot.com. New scans should begin any day now . . .
7 Feb 2000: I redesigned the database schema to make it much more efficient. This means searches will be faster and shouldn't time out occasionally (SQL DELETEs can be a killer on a poorly designed database!)
Some things have disappeared, like the article count for the largest group. This will be coming back in a few weeks, along with some other things.
Also, I've noticed that many people have been complaining that the site is slow. Well, that's because my connection to the Internet is a 33.6 modem. Believe me, it sucks waay more for me than for you -- I telecommute off of this thing! But I'm relcoating in the end of March -- which means the site will be down for a few weeks -- but when it comes back up, it should be on a dramatically faster DSL line (the majority of which will be payed for by ad revenue! thanks for clicking on those banners, guys!). So just a little more patience, please.
I've also fixed the hardware problems (bad swap drive.. ooga). uptime should stay at 100% after I re-assemble my db server.
12 Dec 1999: Been having some painfully serious hardware problems lately, so the scans won't be (haven't been) updating regularly & the search database will be spontaneously unavailable. Sorry.
29 Nov 1999: Gobble gobble. Before I left for a thanksgiving vacation, I discovered & fixed a bug that essentially resulted in no new hosts getting scanned. It's fixed now.
29 Oct 1999: Urp. I'm having some disk problems & the group
list database got corrupted. I'm rebuilding it now.. but searches
will fail until the database is fully rebuilt.
It works again now. :-)
21 May 1999: the new search engine wasn't working with certain browsers. It turned out I was screwing up the HTTP headers. It should work now for everyone, but, as usual, if you have a problem, e-mail me.
I've also added news:// links to the groupname in the search engine, for your convenience.
15 May 1999: Well, it looks like the new search engine is online. Please let me know if you have any problems with it. I'll be adding more features to it as time goes by.
9 May 1999: I've been working with mySQL and the very useful DBI perl module lately. I'm in the process redoing most of back-end stuff to use SQL instead of flat files & GDBM. The results so far have been very promising. It will take me a while to redo the search engine to speak SQL, but I think it will be worth it. (Think of a query like "show me all servers in Australia that have more than 700 articles in the group 'alt.fan.beer.fosters' that have been in the database longer than three weeks and two days." That's the power of SQL. It's quite cool. Why didn't I do this sooner?)
Anyway, check this space for developments. The old engine will probably languish until I can get the new one up.. hopefully sometime in the next two weeks (I'm very busy at work.)
1 May 1999: OK, things are settled. A new scan should be up by sometime next week. Sorry for the delays / downtime ..
20 April 1999: I changed apartments again -- it will be a few days before I get myself settled. The lists may not be updated with their usual frequency.
20 Feb 1999: Grr. Everything was broked. It's fixed now :)
17 Feb 1999: Finally upgraded my two x86 machines from RedHat 4.2 to 5.1, as well as taking my Sparc 1 from Solaris 2.3 to 2.6. Now it's time to play with neat things like php3 and SQL.
Eventually, the site will be database-driven, which should make the search engine more useful (show the date the host was checked, if it allows posting, etc, etc, etc.) I'm also toying with the idea of letting people visit a page where they will be 'cookied' -- after which they will be able to view all the new servers since their last visit. Useful for those repeat visitors :-)
If I'm able to make enough money with my ad revenue, I will upgrade my network connection. This means a faster experience for you guys -- as well as potentially offering NNTP feeds -- so click on those banners!
12 Jan 1999: I had a bug! Can you believe it? It's true. I had a bug. Servers that were known to be bad were being published in the list. That ain't right. It's all better now.
3 Jan 1999: Search engine repaired. I gotta overhaul this thing sometime soon..
1 Jan 1999: Happy new year! The search engine is busted. I'm fixing it now. So much for "fully automated" ...
22 Dec 1998: added advertising to hopefully offset some of the costs of providing service. Click on those banners!
20 Dec 1998: resistance's motherboard failed. I moved the scanner to a different machine, "kadath".
5 Dec 1998: I duct-taped resistance back to working order -- it's now diskless & boots up via NFS. Updated lists are being published, but the search engine is busted. Grr. GDBM w/ NFS gets twitchy sometimes. I'm also going to remove the "feature-free newsreader" link. It's far too slow to be of any use. Those that rely on it can still use it if you've bookmarked it.
28 Nov 1998: Wow, dealing with fraud sure is annoying.
24 Nov 1998: OK, kids, expect delays. I've been pretty busy at work and haven't had a chance to fix the HD in resistance. No ETR at this point. Watch this space for news.
19 Nov 1998: Yikes. I've been busy, and haven't been able to address the recent problems with the scan. These are twofold:
two, 'resistance' has a bad hard drive. It's caused all sorts of problems for the past month and I'm going to swap it out this weekend. (anyone want to donate a decent IDE drive? :-)
9 November 1998: OK, I know the scan hasn't run for a while. I'm breaking things, but they'll make things work better in the end. (I hope..)
1 November 1998: I just got back from vacation & brought resistance back online. A scan is running. Rejoice!
28 October 1998: The local power company, PG&E, shut off power Monday morning and is shutting the power off again Friday morning. Since resistance doesn't yet have a UPS, the scan can't run. Sorry. Wait another week or so :-) I should be getting an additional UPS soon, so power failures won't affect the scanner.
$Id: changelog.php,v 1.42 2005/08/19 04:45:15 jwa Exp $
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