[Alex Pepple]

After weeks of tacking the denial of service and brute force attack on the server, along with the server failing a few times along the way, I'm pleased to announce that I've finally set up an effective firewall that should keep us safe enough. That is, safe until the attackers devise a new scheme of attack!

The additional good news with this resolution is that the Sphere's automated notifications should be working again as expected, and we might even notice a gain in the server speed since most of the bad traffic will simply not make it through and thus the server will be less stressed with useless, spam traffic.

On the down side, it's possible that some good traffic or other valid connections may not get through because of the rather strong firewall I've set up to keep out the determined attackers. So, if you find yourself affected, please drop me a PM and I can add your client connection to the exception list.

Thanks again to everyone for bearing with this recent hacker problems and the resulting downtimes!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Ann Drysdale]

Thank you, Alex.

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks many times over, Alex.