USAL log

USAL going down as power situation here is iffy.
We’ll be back up in the morning if the power is on.

No power since 2011-08-28 07:00 EDT. We’ll be back when the power resumes.

USAL back up as of Wednesday evening.

USAL is back up. I don’t think any of you missed it as there are no active games.

Anyway, the power went out long enough to reset my IP, but some glitch prevented ddclient from updating it when the power was restored. It’s all good now!

On another note, I’ve opened up the judge to Gmail and Googlemail again. I’ll shut it down though if cheating via that route returns.

There may be a few outages going forward, but the bulk of them are past. The game CHILMARK is still waiting for some players!

Over the next week or so, I need access to a windows machine, since the box that runs USAL has my only valid windows license, it will be down for a few hours at a time.
There are currently no active games, and new game creation has been suspended.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
Alan

Norfolk County is under a tornado warning.
USAL shut down until it passes.

I just want to clarify some issues related to password security on usal.info and on the USAL judge. Game passwords are stored on the USAL game server in plain text. The Judgekeeper can see these plain text passwords. While I don’t think I’d do anything evil with them, please do not use (reuse) passwords. If you use the usal.info email form, your password will be stored on the server logs as the data is passed using http GET commands. While this is less secure, the password is used to secure a game, not your bank account. Please don’t use the same password for both. All of that said, I do periodically scan for people using “password” or the game name for their games, and I force them to change it.

Overall, the njudge system and USAL particularly were not designed to be high security environments. Passwords are meant to make it inconvenient for players to cheat. If I find cheaters (either on my own volition or based on report), I will blacklist them from USAL and publish the information to other judgekeepers.

Please comment if you think I should be doing something differently here. If it will require significant effort, I’ll likely decline, but I am open to easy changes that can be implemented without too much fuss.

I solved the problem. Exim TLS is unhappy when pointed to a CNAME rather than an A record. Thus telling the local server to use “usal.info” as the smarthost works, but using “mail.usal.info” fails.

Somehow the authentication to my webhost isn’t working correctly and after about an hour of sending mail just fine, it now thinks I’m a spammer.  Back to Verizon for the time being.

Verizon is throttling mail so some messages were being delayed, typically broadcasts and all the stuff that gets published when a game finishes. I’ve switched to using the mail server at my web hosting company. Please let me know if this seems to be an issue.

The alternative is to queue all outgoing mail and send every few minutes through a single session rather than as the mail comes off of the game.