We made several changes today. Most of them are "Under the Hood" and you shouldn't see any difference since we tested the changes out pretty heavily on a devel box. Several odd little bugs have popped up tho, and we're squashing them as quickly as we can. Send your bug reports to pater@slashdot.org. The only noticable change you should see is some structural changes to the user settings pages: it was getting pretty unwieldly so we split it apart to make it easier to deal with.

Back on the scene with a new installment, we talk about the Atlanta Linux Showcase, the horrific loss of Hemos' and Nate's house, and the various addictions that plague our productivity. This agonizingly special episode can be downloaded from TheSync.

So just as proof that life doens't stop when you go to a conference, Hemos got email this morning from nate informing him that his house burned down ^[?] last night. Now some rooms are missing and there is extensive smoke and water damage. Now the geek compound is 25% smaller. On the plus side, both Nate and hemos are safe and insured. Update: 10/16 11:05 by H : And to make matters worse, Chris DiBona threw my cell phone in a bucket of water. On accident. But it's pretty ironic.

As with YRO, Apache and BSD are areas that we get many submissions for, but have to choose carefully from for stories that might appear on the homepage. When you have to pick a dozen, that Apache story (while totally relevant) may not make the grade against something of more general interest. Thats why we're happy to announce the new Apache Section manned by Jim Jagielski. As a core member of the Apache Group, I think he's more than qualified. The BSD Section (which actually started on monday 'cuz we had some timely stories that needed to up) is manned by Nik Clayton is a BSD developer and coordinator for the FreeBSD Documentation Project. If you have stories relevant to these new subjects, feel free to submit them to The submissions Form and flag them for the appropriate section.

After a hiatus, the geeks have returned with yet another installment. Topics covered include NASA'a Maglev technology, made-to-order children, and the geeks' undying love and affection for yours truly. It's a good one, and you can pick it up at The Sync.

cjs writes "In Robert Cringley's latest Pulpit he talks about the news media's inability to deal well with technology stories, and in particular states that he feels the approach that Jane's took is `an interesting idea, but ultimately flawed'." Update from RM: Salon also had something to say about Jane's & Slashdot.

Well, we're back in action, this time from an Iron Lung. Special guest Chris DiBona sits in with us, and we discuss everything from Corel's Linux Distribution to Cyberwar. This excruciatingly special episode can be found at The Sync.

Well, we usually shy away from projects like this, but the concept that the BBC has is both intelligent and interesting. They are doing a series about electronic communities called Digitribes and would like to do a show (1 of 6) about Slashdot. Click below for more information about the documentary and how you can help. They are looking especially for readers from the United Kingdom, but would like to hear from people worldwide as well.

Now that the new hardware is in place, I'm happy to announce the first new section on Slashdot: Your Rights Online [YRO] is a place where we can go into greater depth on the issues surrounding freedoms and liberties on the Net, and really in the world at large. So much happens in this area that the Slashdot Homepage just doesn't have enough room to host it all, so while YRO will appear on Slashdot when I think its relevant to everyone, it will largely stand alone. Read on to learn more about the section.

saurus asks: "A fellow *nix person says I probably get scanned everyday. I say, "No way -- I'd know!" Uhm, actually, if I sat on my box all day running sniffit+netstat+iptraf I might. Could you share a low maintenance monitoring [Open Source] solution ? How would it fare against stealth probes? "

As the dust is settling around my recent coding frenzy, here is a bunch of updates to the system:I've added a field for users to store their Public Keys on their User Info page. The M2 page is now linked into the system (if you have access anyway). The Comments on the M2 page also link the story that the comment is attached to (and please read the notes on the page: duplicate comments are not a bug!). I removed the sig from Logged in AC previews (it only affected previews, but it was scaring people). Both the FAQ and the Moderation Guidelines have been updated. And the grand Slashbox Poo-Bah CowboyNeal reports that AuctionBeagle, Security Focus, TheNextLevel, Gnotices, and WomenGamers are the latest additions to the SlashBoxes. Enjoy.

The 7th Seal has been opened-yes, that's right it's time for the most-weekly Geeks in Space. We talk about Mark Hamill's lack of career, sock Athlons, the new super-palmtops, with almost nary a mention of the Krull Invasion.

Occasionally comments get posted on Slashdot that hurt everyone. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes someone with a bug up their butt decides to make a nuisance of themselves by posting floods of messages into a board. These comments are almost immediately nailed as 'offtopic' or 'flamebait' by the moderators, but at the expense of many points that could have been better used promoting good comments. Its not quite the same as an ICMP flood, but its still very much a denial of service attack. Click below to read more about the problem, and how I'm tryingt to solve it here.

Welcome to the new server guys. We made the switch late last night, and at this point, it appears that most of your DNS servers have caught up. (For those of you who haven't, hang in there, it should sort out before the day is out). We're sorting out the kinks as they show up, but for the most part, besides the DNS not being all here, we're pretty much set. As a minor system note, for those of you running scripts on Slashdot, please be careful. A couple of you are abusing Slashdot by running scripts that load the backend files (and please note that ultramode is deprecated: see the the code page for info on the new xml backends) excessively (2 people are loading the files more than 20 times a minute, when the files only update every half hour or so. I'm gonna ban IPs if you don't chill out! Anyway, hit the link below for some info on the new setup.

Load testing the new boxes is going well: I've actually flushed out a pair of really bizarre bugs. If you're up for more load testing, feel free to visit the new box but let me remind you that we're trying to simulate normal activity- just lots of it, so writing a script that tries to submit the same comment a few thousand times in a few minutes just isn't gonna help (for that matter, just reloading the same page doesn't help either really) And thanks to the guy from 209.80.X.X (I'm sure you know who you are) who must have been running something really smart 'cuz (except for the fact that it was all coming from one IP) it was pulling down like 20 different pages a second! Anyway, the new setup was handling ~3x the usual Slashdot load for awhile there. I wanna try to get to 4x and see how that goes. Then we just gotta change the DNS, and there shall be faster Slashdot for everyone!

As many of you have noticed, Slashdot has been pretty bogged as of late, but the end of that is at hand. The new setup has a dedicated SQL box and 3 load balanced http servers. We've been spending the last few months getting everything ready, and now its time for the final check. I'd like to ask you help testing the load balancing stuff: You can access the new system at this address. Its a slightly out of date mirror of Slashdot, but it should be more than enough for us to determine if the new setup can cleanly handle the load. Thanks for you help: If this all goes well, we'll transition to the new setup in the next few days. (And just in time, Slashdot was kicking out like a thousand pages (pages, not hits) a minute earlier today and stuff was really bogging down)

Rolan was the first one to write with the heads-up about Wired's story about Slashdot-things are in much the same vein as other stories, but give it a gander if you'd like. And stop submitting the story *grin*.

Well, we've done it again. Yes, we 've made another Geeks in Space, this time bringing critical attention to the Krull Invasion force, as well as the possibility of being an Internet addict. Tune in, and make sure you're up to date-because the Krull wait for no one.

Well, we've done it again. Yes, Geeks in Space, Episode 5 has been released. In it, we lament the lack of good news, talk about anti-matter, and the hiring of hacks by companies. You can also become...educated in my long-term plan for the hostile takeover of a certain Redmond-based company.

So without a doubt, the best time for the power supply in your server to die is when you're out of town. Oh, and the line to your boxes at home should die too. And the only machine with a working modem in your hotel room should be an NT box (without ssh installed) and then the connection you dial through should be 19 hops away from anything (routing from San Jose to NY, DC, Boston, and back to Frisco and conveniently losing almost all of the packets) Anyway, we're back up and kinda hobbling now, (thanks to Jesse & Dan and UP Networks for being jonny's-on-the-spot) but I'm trying to fix some stuff as fast as I can. In the meantime, things are gonna be a bit zany, so don't flame me to loud. And don't worry, we've been working for the last month to build a new system with redundancy and stuff so that this won't happen again (knock on wood).