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WELCOME TO XEPHER.NET FREE HOSTING FOR FREE THINKERS. Xepher.Net is a free web hosting service for providers of creative content. This includes comics, music, stories, artwork, photography, etc. Xepher.Net is entirely supported by donations. No annoying ads and no subscriptions or "premium content" schemes. See the site directory for an overview of sites here. If you enjoy the content, please consider donating. See the donations page for more information. If you're interested in applying for hosting, please visit the information page. LATEST ANNOUNCEMENTS FROM THE FORUMS 2019-02-23: Bounced Servers So the VM host we were currently assigned to at Linode was shared with other servers that were major IO hogs, causing major slowdowns to service here. I've upgraded/downgraded servers, effectively causing us to "bounce" to a new VM host with much lower IO demands, and this should vastly improve performance. So far, I'm getting astoundingly better benchmarks and results. That said, it may be necessary to do this again in the next day or three to explore other profiles. It takes an hour or two each time, so if you find xepher.net down, I ask for your patience. If it's down more than three hours though, something may be wrong, and please feel free to contact me. Try my xepher42 gmail address or any other way you know to contact me. 2018-02-25: PHP upgraded to 7.2 PHP 5.6 is approaching its end of life, and is no longer receiving regular updates from upstream. That means it's time to move on to the next version, which is PHP 7 (6 was experimental and doesn't count.) I've updated the server to PHP 7.2, and if you're using older PHP software, you may notice errors appearing on your site. If you see messages about mysql (specifically mysql_connect being an "undefined function") then there's a temporary workaround you can add. In any PHP file you need to still use the old MySQL functions, you can add this line right at the start of the PHP section (just after the ideally):include_once("mysql-shim.php"); Ideally, if you didn't write the code, you should just update to a newer version that supports php 7 and not use this. But until this, this workaround might help. If you have other problems (or notice errors on any of the main xepher.net pages) please let me know. My own code is using this shim, as it's ANCIENT, and I don't have the patience to rewrite it quite yet. 2018-01-03: Update Your WordPress Installs!

:UPDATE:

Well, it's more than a year later, and a lot of accounts have fallen out of date again. I've disabled these. If your site has a notice that your Wordpress was out of date, email me and I'll unlock it, so that

you can upgrade.

Note that the current version of Wordpress is now 5.1.

:UPDATE:

Just as everyone seems to have finally been updated, Wordpress goes and breaks their auto-update process. https://wordpress.org/news/2018/02/wordpress-4-9-4-maintenance-release/ Everyone (in the world) needs to update manually and then make sure auto-updates are enabled again!

----

Over the New Year we had an account compromised (almost certainly through a MILDLY out of date WordPress install) and it was used to attack other servers, leading to a warning from my VM provider. Going forward, I'm going to be requiring that all WordPress installs be maintained and kept up to date. To enforce this, I've written a scanner that will automatically find and check the version of any WP installs, and it will be emailing me any time someone is out of date. If you have WP on your site, please go update it NOW to at least

version 4.9.1.

As WP is a very popular target, even an install a week out of date can be vulnerable, and so I will be disabling accounts if/when that happens. I've already disabled several, and sent emails of warning to many others. If your account was one that was disabled, email me, and I can release it and allow you to update things. Also, please make sure your offsite contact email is kept up to date so that I can contact you in cases like this. Too many times I have to resort to disabling accounts to get the owners attention, and I'd prefer to

avoid that.

Sorry to have to be so strict about this, but with the potential to leverage this server to attack remote targets, the threat is serious enough that I have no choice. If you have any questions or thoughts though, feel free to ask below, or contact me directly if you prefer. Thank you all for understanding! 2016-03-10: Major Email Changes So, spam hit again, and I'm moving to a new mail server. As such, it required a lot of work to reconfigure from the old system. I think I've got most things back to working, but if you have trouble with email here, please let me know. The most likely remaining problems are related to people with custom email domains hosted here. If you're using your own email client, you need to use SMTP authentication with STARTTLS on port 587 (the "submission" port) to

send mail now.

Also note, as email is what's being weird, please feel free to post here on the forums if you're having problems. EDIT: Your ~/.esmtprc file should look something like this now: identity = user@xepher.net       hostname = mail.xepher.net:587       username = "user"       password = "mypass"       starttls = enabled 2015-09-22: Yesterday's Downtime (2015-09-21) Many services were offline yesterday, between about 8am and 3pm Pacific Daylight Time. Everything should be fixed now. The cause was a filesystem glitch that caused one of the disks to behave like it was out of space, even when it should've had many gigabytes to spare. This prevented MySQL from running properly, which meant eventually DNS went down, and also caused problems for mail delivery (as new messages couldn't be created in home directories.) It should all be fixed now, but if you encounter more problems, please

let me know.

My apologies for the downtime. Powered by Gentoo Linux, Guinness Draught, and Giant Wombats. Contact: adminATxepherDOTnet All code, images, and content in this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.