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PCLinux OS disappears

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PCLOS

IT SEEMS THAT in the midst of writing our bit about installing Linux, the OS we suggested, PCLinuxOS, was choking, and may have been breathing its last gasps.

The main site is down, updates are no longer working, and my flame-box is full. It took quite a bit of searching, but I finally found several sites that are the dying throes of this, one of the best little distros going.

One reader noted that if this distro was such a Good Thing(tm), why was the main site down? Why have the updates stopped?

Now the information gets sketchy. Updates were hosted at Ibiblio, but have stopped. The PCLinuxOS folks first reported it was a hardware problem with their servers and everything would be back in a moment or three.

Full Story.

yikes

Texstar said that ibiblio was suffering from some hardware failure previously but all he said yesterday was that "it crashed." Their site is offline due to continuous ddos attacks last week that resulted in their hosting company suspending the account. Tex's exact phrasing is, "due to excessive usage mainly too many connections to the mysql database." Then examining the logs found that ddos attacks and repeated attempts to hack into the site administrative account were found.

Regular distro updates were put on the back burner so that developers could concentrate on the new release that was possibly just days before release until this latest development.

Off the record PCLOS teammembers suspect this is more than random hacking in that it might be personal. Perhaps someone is trying to sabotage their progress and/or growing popularity.

In addition, Texstar has been quite ill since returning from his vacation. We were beginning to become quite concerned. But he is now feeling much better and expects a full recovery.

At this time Tex and team are a bit discouraged but are not defeated. PCLOS is not gone. They are working on resolving these issues and will prevail.

PCLinuxOS Is Alive And Well

There is now a link to a temporary Forum site that Texstar and the Ripper Gang have set up, as well as explanations for the outage at this page: http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php This distro is alive and well and growing, perhaps too rapidly, in popularity.

It seems that the Ibibilo problem is not directly connected but is an unfortunate coincidence.

Let's all just be patient and not spread silly rumors anytime a glitch like this occurs.

re: pclos alive

thanks for the update. Guess I went to bed too early last night. Big Grin

That Inquirer article sounded a bit harsh but reading the temp forum almost explains. I don't know who that person was that was conversing with him, but I'm fairly sure he's not a representative from PCLOS. So the Inquirer author should have checked his sources before publishing as fact. He obviously saw the redirect page before publishing as well. I guess getting hits are more important than publishing the truth.

Umm....

Can anybody say "Oops"? Thx, I knew you could.

A site being taken offline is about the worse possible thing that could happen. Any site that has a reasonable number of visitors on a regular basis should have redundancy built in for events just like this. Frankly I'm surprised that the main site was hosted on a single server/single account and could fall so easily victim of an attack like this.

Perhaps this will be an eye-opener for the rest of us to make sure we build in redundancy for our applications in the future.

NOTE: I realize the attack was not the site admin's fault, but I do blame him for not being adequately prepared.

re: Umm....

Yeah, too bad Tex doesn't have millions behind his efforts.

srlinuxx, I'll be updating

srlinuxx,

I'll be updating this post on mypclinuxos.com with information on the happenings of PCLinuxOS as time goes on. Could you post this on your newswire?

http://www.mypclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=38&Itemid=1

Insert_Ending_Here

What makes PCLinuxOS such a good distro?

What makes PCLinuxOS such a good distro is the fact that it's very tightly focussed on usability around a small team of developers and testers. There are no corporate targets, nothing goes out until it's ready.

The only backers are its users from donations. No spacemen or other millionaires here. If PCLinuxOS was in the position where it could afford the sort of online presence its quality justifies, you'd have to question whether the suits and bean-counters would take over and make it more like all the others.

I don't suppose for a moment that Texstar ever felt he would end up with a Top-Five distro on his hands.

What does appear to be happenning is that the community is coming to its aid, offers of help and donations are arriving.

Don't be surprised if PCLinuxOS comes out of this with a sounder footing, without compromising what it is. Maybe a load of extra publicity, too!

I was quite surprised to

I was quite surprised to read that report. It seems to have been a poor report with little investigation. It appears to have been a case of seeing the site down and jumping to conclusions. If Dr john had been a regular user of the forums he'd have known that there have been downtimes in the last week already. I also object to the term 'dying throes'
I'm only connected to PClinuxOS as a user and forum member. I don't have any inside info but a little snooping around when I saw the site was down and synaptic wasn't working led me to ibiblio and their notice . I didn't even panic as this has happened with other sites. Did anyone think yahoo was gone when it's site had problems?
Thanks to a notice from davecs, members are redirected to the temporary forums where help can be found and the wiki is still up on it's usual site.
I have read some concerns that there have been too many coincidences, especially regarding DDos attacks but I'm not a conspiracy theorist and think it is a coincidence and the PClos forum has become a victim of the OS own popularity. PCLinux hasn't the resources to run a setup that has been mentioned in other comments. We don't have millions behind our distro, just a damned fine dev team and a dedicated user base.

Furthermore if anyone reading this cares to go to ibiblio news site themselves http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/ibiblio-announce/2007-April/000174.html
they will see it isn't just a PCLinuxos problem

Quote:
Hello everyone,

The storage array holding most of our Linux distributions crashed hard.
Rather than spend over $600 to resurrect 5 year-old hardware that is out
of warranty and was beginning to show signs of failing prior to last
night, we will be speeding up our migration of the distributions onto our
new Netapp disks.

Co-incidence?

The increase in traffic started on 5th April, but the site actually went down not long after the earlier Inquirer article which praised the distro. I wonder whether the article provoked more interest when the site was already struggling?

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38799

Not dead!

PCLinuxOS is not dead. I'm not dead just the hosting company was overloaded and affecting other users on the same server. We are looking for a better hosting solution right now and will be back online as soon as we acquire something that can handle the load. The double whammy came from ibiblio.org which hosts the pclinuxos distribution along with about 20 others and their primary file server crashed. We will be back soon. As they say whatever doesn't kill you just makes you stronger. I'm never gonna quit doing PCLinuxOS. I don't care how hard it becomes or how many obstacles we have to face. There is still a lot of fight in this dog.

Woof! There are still those

Woof!

There are still those of us in the community that will stand shoulder to shoulder with you Tex! We're die hard fans and won't back down (as Tom Petty says Smile

Rest assured that we'll do everything we can to keep you afloat!

Insert_Ending_Here

not dead

Texstar wrote:
PCLinuxOS is not dead.

----------- snip -----------------

I'm never gonna quit doing PCLinuxOS. I don't care how hard it becomes or how many obstacles we have to face. There is still a lot of fight in this dog.

Hang on in there Texstar. Just keep on following the path your going, adapting along the way. We all learn and get wiser on the way (or clever) and I know you will, you always do. There are quite a lot of fans routing for you Smile

From a long time supporter, since even before PCLinuxOS.
Yours John Coombes (Melbourne AU)

Happy Days

Wooooofff!

Texstar wrote:
There is still a lot of fight in this dog.

WOOOFF! Never heard a sweeter bark! Tex, the PCLOS community in the Netherlands and Belgium will stick by you every inch. We experienced our own meltdown a month or two ago when our provider closed us down because of excessive traffic and we are also looking for a good mirror.

Just want you and everybody else to know that this is not a one-man show at all! There is a fantastic community that grew around this distro and it will not give up on Tex and the development team any time soon!

NewMikey
Site admin pclinuxos.nl

PCLinuxOS

You can't kill an awesome distro like PCLinuxOS. I have jumped from distro to disto for years and PCLinuxOS is where I'm staying. It was the the one to switch me out of Windoze XP. It simply works and will continue to work with a great community to support it.

rtrj

thats a man tex

don't give it up somebody try broke our favorite distro it's going better no matter how is triyng broke it . go dog? that's no right, lion it's the right one, because like or not like this distro it's for the real people no like others...... start with U or K or X and finish with U

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