What a ride it has been, trying to find a reliable provider to use as my cache nodes without breaking the bank. Thankfully, after much research and "stress testing", I have arrived at one provider I can finally give a positive review to, and that's BuyVM/Frantech.

I missed making an article for February! I blame it being the shortest year of the month. Or maybe you can count the maintenance post as an article.

Hello again! Figure I'd get an article out for January. That, and it's been months now since I tried to sign up with the International Watch Foundation (IWF). So, what's going on with them, you may ask? Not a whole lot, and that's the problem.

Couple upgrades I have in the pipe to make things better in various areas of my infrastructure:

(Note: Historical task completion is now over at https://infrablog.lain.la/changelog-history)

(Green is done. Yellow/Orange is in progress. Red is not started. Purple is declined.)

Well, here we are again. Another day, another provider trying to take down my Pomf clone (unsuccessfully). This time, it's from a provider I thought I trusted as reasonable: Ramnode. This article won't be too long - I'll just post links to ticket and responses here, but in short: If you get even so much as ONE abuse report sent to them, that's it. You're out. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200. And don't expect to wiggle your way out of an account termination unless you're me and have a silver tongue and a bit of business acumen.

Nice PR Version:

I am proud to announce that I have registered Lain.la with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as an Electronic Service Provider, allowing me to submit tips to their CyberTipline regarding possible child sexual abuse material (CSAM) uploaded to any of my services. This allows me to take direct action against abuse of my services in this regard, and help put a stop to the distribution of these materials.

Pomf is getting stupidly popular these days. Storage usage is growing exponentially (don't worry I'm not deleting any files), bandwidth is through the roof (250TB a month and counting), and more and more sites are using it as a resilient hosting service for whatever it is they need hosting for. At this rate, we might eclipse Catbox. 

On November 29th, 2021 at 12:51pm EST, The lain.la datacenter (ha.) suffered a total power outage after a brief moment of voltage fluctuations on the main grid. This had been the first time since I started lain.la that a real, extended power outage had occurred, and I got to do a generator cutover and learn many lessons along the way. The incident ended at 1:53pm EST when all systems were restored.

So if you've ever visited my actual homepage (https://lain.la) there was always a big fat UptimeRobot icon at the bottom where you could call me a shitty sysadmin by staring at my uptime stats. UptimeRobot is a pretty cool service and I had been freeloading for the past year on their free version which, admittedly, is VERY good.

So I got pro recently. They had a sale. It was like $5 a month. No brainer. Here's what I got for going pro:

What a cute bird. I hope nothing ever happens to it.