29 Aug 08 ALA Store Server
The store server is back up! The server suffered a catastrophic operating system failure on the afternoon of Thursday, August 28, 2008. Recovery required a full system rebuild on Friday, August 29, 2008.
Special thanks go to Tim Smith, Eric Weidl (our estore consultant), and our valued partners at Valcom for all of their hard work and dedication.
29 Aug 08 Website Updates
All of ALA is working hard to get everything ready on the new website. We’re still a couple of weeks away from “flipping the switch,” but you can see the progress at http://ala.org/preview. For updates on the progress as we near the launch, we’ve started a new page at http://itts.ala.org/update/current-website-progress/, which will be the official place to find the latest status report. The list of 10 key performance objectives are listed there at the moment, and we’ll start updating progress on them after Labor Day.
We’re just as excited as you are to be so close to the big event!
28 Aug 08 Status of the ALA Store Server
We are experiencing problems with the ALA Store server. The site is currently down and we are working on it. We’ll let you know when the service has been restored.
Thank you for your patience.
19 Aug 08 Attack on ALA Web Servers
Yesterday, our Collage web servers began to show signs of another injection attack. The attack was similar to the last one, where the attack attempted to use our website to push visitors a known attack website in China. If successful, the attack would execute malicious java script to download more hostile software to the visitor’s PC. This represents a newer form of attack, attempting to use a trusted source (in this case ALA), to refer web visitors to a hostile site. We have identified a number of other external websites that were attacked by the same method.
We have located the malicious code that the attack inserted into some of our forms databases, and have removed it. We have also added more rules to our filtering system on our two outward-facing Collage web servers to prevent this attack from occurring again. If you experience any odd behavior related to online forms, please send a report to helpdesk@ala.org with as much detail as you can provide.
We will keep you updated by email and the ITTS Update blog as events require.
13 Aug 08 Dreamhost Server Performance Hit
The server on our shared hosting account at Dreamhost is encountering an extremely heavy load. Blogs, wikis, and classes housed on the account may encounter slowness. I have reported the problem, and am monitoring the server’s performance, which appears to be gradually improving. Please contact me any time you run into major problems using the external hosting account, as this data is vital in terms of long range planning for our off site resources.
Matt Ivaliotes – ITTS
04 Aug 08 2008 Annual Conference WAC Meeting Notes
The notes from the 2008 Annual Website Advisory Committee meeting are now available (PDF, 171KB). If you have questions, please post them in the comments so that we can answer them for everyone. Thanks!
