USAL log

Dip Pouch Openings list

Alan — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:11:40 +0000

For some reason that we haven’t been able to track down, mail from the judge to diplom.org is bouncing. This is causing the openings list to show USAL as down. I’m sending manual responses to it periodically via another mail server to keep it showing as up, but I suspect that this will be an ongoing problem for the near future.

Sorry for any confusion.

Snowtober?

Alan — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 01:31:37 +0000

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

Hurricane Irene

Alan — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 17:47:35 +0000

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

USAL back up as of Wednesday evening.

Outage apology. Gmail.

Alan — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 22:31:34 +0000

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.

Game creation reenabled

Alan — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 21:52:22 +0000

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

Intermittent availability

Alan — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 17:52:26 +0000

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

Tornado Warning

Alan — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:19:40 +0000

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

USAL Security

Alan — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 19:17:48 +0000

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.

Mail back to webhost

Alan — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 21:40:46 +0000

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.

Hmmm… That didn’t work so well

Alan — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 11:04:24 +0000

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.