DBMS2 should now be trojan-free, the feeds should work too, and so should my email
On New Year’s Eve, I got the impression there might be trojans being served up on monash.com. New Year’s Day, Melissa Bradshaw confirmed that there were indeed trojans on both monash.com and dbms2.com. My web hosting company tracked this problem down into the server OS, and recompiled it last night. The resulting planned outage caused our FeedBlitz-based email feed to include broken links.
The malware appears to have been inserted during a Christmas Eve mailbombing, so I can’t be sure how soon trojans first appeared. What I CAN be sure of is that some of my email was lost forever, and that other mail was sent back with bounce messages.
Needless, to say, this has not been fun. And I am very apologetic to any of you who have been inconvenienced. I’d offer you all a refund — but the blogs are already free. 🙂 So the best I can do is try to have great posts going forward, making it worth your while to keep reading here.
At this point, I am optimistic that the technical problems are behind us. My sites are up. My email is working. I’ll be shocked if the feeds don’t work.
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Monash Research in 2008
DBMS2, obviously, has a parent company — Monash Research. It’s time to fill you all in on some of the exciting things we have going on.
We’ve upgraded our whole line of vendor services, adding attractive new consulting packages, starting the new Monash Research webcast series, and sharpening our white paper services as well. Most important, we enhanced our flagship Monash Advantage executive program, based on how members have actually used it in the inaugural year. Monash Advantage membership now includes significantly more consulting than before. Membership also remains the only way to get access to our Monash Letter analyst reports — such as our blockbuster guide to strategic marketing (coming soon) — and to our webcast and white paper sponsorship opportunities. Over half the companies listed in the sidebar are clients; and at this time of year, more are joining every week.
We also updated our main website at www.monash.com. It’s now even easier to keep up with all our research, or just with our most important news. We added to our already stellar lists of customers and testimonials. We redesigned the users’ guide to our white papers. And of course we updated the descriptions of our services. We even changed our name, for the first time in 17 years, although we’ll continue using “Monash Information Services” for financial dealings only.
Of course, we’re not stopping there. For example, there will be further changes when the Monash Research webcasts start being announced, held, and archived. User-oriented services will continue to be expanded, just as the vendor-oriented ones have been. And we plan to redesign DBMS2 and our other blog sites, some time in early 2008.
I look forward to working with you all over the next year.
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www.monashadvantage.com is down
The Monash Advantage site is down. It should be back up in a few days.
I had been intending to send an email blast to registered site-accessers anyway. Now I’ll do that for sure. If you’re a Monash Advantage member, details and explanations will be in that email.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
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Comments are fine again, and my email should be better too.
The site move went fine, for the most part. Everything’s at the new host. Please comment away.
Even better, my email addresses at dbms2.com and monash.com (both firstnamelastname, and I check them both) are now with different hosts. The chance of a simulataneous outage is much reduced.
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This is not a good time to post a comment on DBMS2
The blog is being moved from one hosting provider to another. Comments made today might get lost in the transition. The weekend won’t be so hot either. After that it should be fine.
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Do you have any trouble subscribing to my integrated feed?
For a couple of months, I’ve been pushing everybody to switch their subscriptions from individual blogs to my integrated feed, because I write about closely related subjects on several different blogs. There are two subscription options, RSS/XML (via Feedburner) and e-mail (via Feedblitz), both of which can be found via this link or this one or, for that matter, on the Monash Information Services home page.
But I just heard today from a customer who was having trouble subscribing via Bloglines. Fortunately, Feedblitz e-mail worked for her just fine. Is anybody else having difficulties too? Please let me know! I really want you to have the full integrated-feed scoop.
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(Crosspost) New ways to read our research!
We’ve finally redesigned the Monash Information Services website. In particular, we’ve created two great new ways to read our research. First, there’s a new, Google-based integrated search engine. (And it really works well, the one glitch being that it brings back feeds and pages interchangeably. Try it out!) Also – and I really encourage you all to subscribe to this — there’s a new integrated research feed.
The reason you should care about these is in both cases the same: Our research is actually spread across multiple sites and feeds. I write about Google both in the Monash Report and on Text Technologies. I write about enterprise text management both on Text Technologies and on DBMS2. I write about computing appliances both on DBMS2 and in the Monash Report. I write about data mining in all three places. And now that there’s an integrated, industry history relevant to any of the other subject areas may find its way onto Software Memories. Your view of my views simply isn’t complete unless you have access to all of those sites.
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Comment spam continues to be ridiculous
As previously noted, this blog is under serious attack from the comment spammers, and there’s a slight chance a legitimate comment will get lost as supposed spam. That said, I know of only one such confirmed incident in all the time I’ve had WordPress-based blogs.
Also, the spam blockers are imperfect, and some vile spam comments do get through until I delete them, commonly the same day. Sorry about that. It’s nothing that you haven’t also seen many times over in your email, I’m sure.
I just checked a few minutes ago, and Akismet intercepted 372 comments since the last time I cleared the buffer, less than a day ago. The top 150 (all I could check) were certainly real spam …
EDIT: 51 more spam cleared out 4 1/2 hours later.
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My blogs stopped working through IE!
EDIT: Now they seem to be working again, with no action on my part and no known software updates through the whole process. Go figure. I do not know WordPress well enough to guess just exactly what had to have been broken and then fixed at my hosting provider to have caused these effects.
As of this writing, my blogs (DBMS2, the Monash Report, Text Technologies, and Software Memories) are all working in Firefox, and the top page of each is working in IE, but the rest of the pages/links are NOT working in IE. (But www.monash.com, a non-Wordpress site on the same host, is still working through IE.) Naturallly, I’m addressing this problem as fast as I can. I imagine the fix will involve some sort of a reinstall and/or theme change, which could alter the blogs’ look-and-feel, maybe not for the better (especially at first). I apologize for the inconvenience!
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Overflowing spam catcher
I use Akismet as a spam-catcher. On the whole it’s good, but it has one annoying deficiency — you can only review the 150 most recent suspected spam. This time around, however, I had 766 suspected spam. If you had a valid comment in the 616 I couldn’t review, I’m sorry. Please be so kind as to resubmit it.
Thanks,
CAM
EDIT: The attack continues. Today I deleted 245 real or imagined spam. A couple of days ago it was 135, all real.
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