Friday, August 26, 2005

New Additions

I've been slacking a little in keeping to all up to date on recent additions to the premium service. But I've got a little time today so here's a quick run down of a few new additions to PUBLIC IP Premium.

IPP2P: User requested. The zoneCD can block file sharing protocols per class. IPP2P will block Internet access for eDonkey, eMule, Kademlia, KaZaA, FastTrack, Gnutella, Direct Connect, BitTorrent, AppleJuice, WinMX, SoulSeek, Ares, and AresLite. See http://www.ipp2p.org/

One Time Reg: User requested. You can [try to] restrict users to registering only one username. This is done by using the MAC address of the user's wireless client to confirm that he/she has not already registered. If you require validation and the user fails to validate his account he WILL be given a second chance to register with a good email account.

Registration Filters: User Requested. A registration filter is a regular expression that will be applied to a username upon successful self registration. It is recommended to only use this feature when you require a validated email address for a username. "Pending" accounts are in a special class or validation period until approved or validated. In other words, a user classified as Trusted by a filter rule will not be in the Trusted class until validated.

If the expression is a match, then the user will be classified as defined by the filter rule. If the username does not match any regular expression then that user will be put in your default class. For example, maybe you setup a school and your default class is Protected, but you want to allow the students to have Liberated access. You could add ^.*@school\.com$ to the Liberated Filter and students will be classified as Liberated users. Or maybe you don't trust free email users... You could have your default class set to Liberated, but ^.*@(hotmailmsngmailyahoododgeit)/.com$ (this piece of shit blog keeps stripping my pipes out from between email domains) get thrown in the Protected class.

DHCPd Configuration: I have finally added the ability to configure dhcpd yourself. If you don't know already Eth1's IP and subnet mask can also be re-defined in Zone Control. In my personal setup I am using 10.10.1.1 as the gateway IP, 255.255.252.0 as the subnet mask. DHCPd is configured to use subnet 10.10.0.0, Start IP of 10.10.1.10, and a stop IP of 10.10.3.250. This gives me about 750 IP addresses for clients.

Import users: Three options are available to import users into the system. 1.) Import from the free system. 2.) Upload a CSV file. 3.) SMTP (email attachment) To setup an email address for imports, you need to supply a valid email address with a choice of subject for the email. This combination will act as a kind of username and password. Aside from only accepting emails into the system from this address, the import program will send the results of your import to this email address. As added (needed) security, you will also be required to import a GnuPG public key for your email address.

SpotCheck: Spot check has been around. For those that don't know, Spotcheck has an RSS feed and a flash object in zone control that provides gateway statistics such as active sessions, registered users, uptime, load, etc.. Spotcheck also emails you upon system failure and recovery. Well now you can email Spotcheck. You can send an email to spotcheck@publicip.com with you zone's username as the subject and get an auto-response with your zone stats.


I think that's it. If I think of something else I'll post it.

PUBLIC IP Support Techs Wanted

I think I might be done. Kinda scary saying it out loud, but I'm feeling it. The only thing left is the support system, which I am setting up this weekend. Any of you helpful types that are active in the forum should contact me if you would like to help support Premium users. In return you will get free premium service. In the future who knows where this will lead... maybe to a little cash payout as well. We'll need to work out details on exactly what is expected of you, and what is expected from me.

Shoot an email to me for more info on become a Public IP Support Tech.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

OpenSSL 0.9.8 Ruined My Day

Everything seemed to go pretty smooth last night....

I had to re-compile apache 1.3.33 last night. I figured i would upgrade to the latest and greatest OpenSSL while i was in the compiling mood. Baaaadddd idea. I am not sure why but 0.9.8 hosed mod_ssl. It kinda worked.... It worked almost perfect for firefox, but IE always came up with broken images, or the stylesheet missing when using https.

Anyway went to 0.9.7g, re-re-compiled apache, and mod_ssl and it seemed to clear things up. Now maybe i can get something done... and you can too.

Monday, August 15, 2005

HA Tested and working !

Sometimes bad news can be good news too... The premium system took a hit about a half an hour ago and i lost the master server and one of the auth servers to unknown causes (still looking at the problem). But even a half an hour after these two servers are down i still see 17 gateways online and 8 users :) So it might suck that www.publicip.com is down, but atleast the servers and DBs that support the end-users are still chugging away... Nice to know that the high availability is working as expected.


OK, the servers are back up :)

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Premium Service Language Translations

http://www.publicip.com/lang/

I included directions in the index.
I'll give $10 account credit for each full translation.

Monday, August 08, 2005

Language Translations

I am working on getting the translation file together for the new system... I should have it done today. I'll just post a link to the file with instructions when it's ready.

Premium Services Are Live!

Still beta, but the new system will be administered and updated as if it was in full production mode... no "willy-nilly" updates, or unannounced downtime. Changes will go through Quality Assurance (QA) before being pushed to the authservers. BTW- Anybody can QA. From your Zone's homepage in the "Common Links" menu, click "Restart or Reboot..." and select QA from the WiFiDog droplist. This will restart WiFiDog with it pointing at the Master server. This is only recommended when working with me on a bug or feature request! QA can be up and down.

The new system should be very stable.

I removed the htaccess from document root on www.publicip.com.

You can still use the BETA99 coupon until September 1.

I have uploaded a new iso to sourceforge with a bugfix or two.... zoneCD_1.1-4 You can also grab it here http://www.publicip.org/mirror/dists/beta/

Keep the feedback coming, and be sure to let me know if something doesn't work the way you think it should.