All Drupal sites have been upgraded to 5.x. Drupal 4.x has been retired on the server and will no longer be used.

As most of the useful contributed modules for 4.x have been updated this should not cause a problem.

Drupal 6.x is still in pre-release but I think it will be well into 2008 before it is in use here.

Several sites have now been upgraded to Drupal 5.1. If you encounter any problems or questions as a result of this upgrade, please contact me.

At this moment, only Lost Nomads, CASG and Rampancy are still running Drupal 4.7.

All sites that were previously running 4.7, 4.6 or 4.5 have been upgraded to 5.1.

Drupal 4.5 and 4.6 have been retired and removed from the server. These versions do not have theme or module development ongoing and are therefore not considered supported.

The spam filtering software in use for Synfibers IT clients, Spamassassin, has been upgraded to version 3.1.

This version is currently configured not to delete any messages, but to rewrite the subject of spam messages by adding the letters "[SPAM]" to the beginning, as well as to add special headers to the message, which may be use in setting up mail filtering rules on your own email client. An example of such headers is the following:

X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.0 (2005-09-13) on synfibers.com
X-Spam-Level: ****
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=4.9 required=3.5 tests=HTML_EXTRA_CLOSE,
HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG,INVALID_MSGID,MIME_HTML_ONLY,
MSGID_FROM_MTA_HEADER autolearn=no version=3.1.0

If you find that too much junk mail is being missed by the system, or that legitimate mail is being mistakenly labelled SPAM, or have a list of e-mail addresses that you want never to be labelled SPAM, please let me know and I can adjust the system's settings specifically for your account.

Synfibers IT Consulting specializes in installing and modifying dynamic, web-based content management systems for a variety of purposes, such as:

• Online news outlets
• Interactive community applications
• Corporate intranets
• Membership organization applications

All content is stored in a relational database, allowing application interfaces to be modified and extended over time without the need to reformat data.

All content is stored in 8 bit Unicode (UTF-8) for compatibility with most non-Asian languages and most modern browsers.

All systems use a modular approach to coding that allows for specific interface widgets and data manipulation functions to be customized for each particular application.

A small glitch while trying to set up a mailing list last week ended up having an unexpected conseequence: after everything was fixed, the good people at Verio Tech Support installed a new version of SpamAssassin (2.63) to replace the previous custom installation of 2.55. By all accounts this version was easier to install and is definitely working much better than the previous one.

Using SpamAssassin's tags to help your email client filter mail is done the same way as before, so no settings changes on your part should be required.

Earlier this week, I began migrating all of the sites hosted by Synfibers that were using the PHP-based CMS called Drupal from version 4.2 (and one site that was hosted on a modified 4.0 installation) to the latest and greatest edition, 4.3.2.

For the most part, the process was pretty painless. Unlike some previous upgrades, there were very few times I had to manually alter a site's database to get the new code tree to work, and most of the time these were mentioned explicitly by the upgrade script. The first day I did one site, and let it sit overnight. When everything seemed to be fine, I did five more sites the next day.

That's when everything seemed to slow down to a crawl, about every fifteen minutes or so. I thought it was the scheduled cron job that updates the database with XML newsfeeds and so on; I figured some of the newsfeed URLs were bad or had malformed XML, so I started weeding out the feeds, removing sites that had invalid XML or sites that didn't seem to have active newsfeeds anymore.

Then Verio tech support emails me, warning of dangerously high CPU usage in some Apache webserver threads, and suggests that it might be due to Googlebot. I thought at first it was again the cron jobs and that he just wasn't familiar with my usage of Drupal and the need for these cron scripts to be run frequently. However, as it turns out he did, and he had already dismissed the cron jobs as a potential cause because the times when they ran didn't seem to match up with the times when these high-CPU-usage Apache processes were spawning.

So that meant that either the search bots were the culprit, or somebody was DDOSing Synfibers. That seemed unlikely, so I started changing some things. I used robots.txt to exclude cron.php from their view, figuring that perhaps the bots were hitting that page and causing multiple cron script instances, which might bog things down. I took a look at top on the server and noticed some Apache processes going as high as 95% CPU utilization, in effect bringing the server to its knees.

The following missive was received this morning from Yahoo. Yahoo has been blocking mail from Synfibers for more than two months now following abuse of one of our proxy servers by spammers. Unlike many other blacklists, Yahoo does not re-test open relays for at least 60 days, which is why the problem was not resolved before now:

Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

We have retested the IP address you submitted and it appears that the open proxy/relay situation with this IP has been resolved. We have now removed the block from our servers for this IP address and will begin accepting connections again within the next day or so.

The SpamAssassin mail filter is also functioning once again.

Some users may still experience email being blocked from certain servers, but within the next day this should end.

The configuration that got our server put on some blackhole lists (lists that ISPs use to block incoming email, assuming it is junk mail) and also caused email to be inaccessible for part of the last day or so has now been fixed. The only remaining obstacle is that the SpamAssassin spam filter does not appear to be working. It should be fixed soon.

At the moment, Synfibers.com has been removed from the following anti-spam lists:

• AHBL
• SORBS
• ORDB
• DSBL
• OpenRBL
• MSN Hotmail

Some of the updates will take some time to take effect, so you may still receive some mail bounced back to you mentioning these or other lists some time over the next 24 to 48 hours.

While trying to implement a new security feature, an error in configuration was made that allowed some non-Synfibers clients to send junk mail through our server to the Internet. The problem has been corrected now. However, becacuse of this, it is possible that over the next few days you may have difficulty sending mail to certain addresses (IE hotmail).

If this occurs please let me know at dmjossel@synfibers.com and I will do my best to relay any urgent messages that need to go through before this problem is resolved. Thank you.