Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
Thread: classicamiga server downtime today
Harrison 12:48 26th April 2017
Hi everyone,

As you might have noticed the classicamiga server was offline from yesterday to today. This was due to an issue outside of classicamiga itself.

I also host a number of other site for commercial clients on the same server. One of my clients was a school and I developed their website for them. The development website was hosted on this server whilst it was in development and content was completed in collaboration with the school staff. Once completed the site was migrated to their own school server and went live. However the dev version of the site remained on my own server for future reference just in case it was ever needed.

It would seem that someone at their school adding content to the site uploaded some copyright material without permission. I don't know how by the original owner of this content somehow found the fiile still being hosted on this unused dev version of the site and complained to our hosting company about the content. The hosting company contacted me to inform me of the copyright infringement but then completely locked the server, which in effect takes it completely offline as they locked the server account.

After talking to the hosting company this morning I have identified the infringing content and it is quite mad. It would seen that a member of the school attached a PDF to one of their school website pages containing a book reading list. The company whom originally created this reading list are complaining that this list was created by them, and whilst anyone can use this list for their students they are not allowed to host a copy of the list on their own sites.

Would have been nice to have been contacted by the copyright holder directly first. I will be contacting me about this, that is certain!

Currently removing the whole dev site from the server as it isn't needed. Quite annoyed to say the least and I didn't need to waste a whole morning to get the server unlocked to gain access again.
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Harrison 12:56 26th April 2017
What's even more mad is that I just checked the dev site via a browser and as I normally do the whole site is locked out anyway and you have to log into it to even see the site, so I have no idea how this person even found the file they are referring to. Could this be an old google search engine bot link they followed?

Here is all they would see trying to visit the site directly:

northolmes.jpg

BTW, if you look at the current live site for their school that is not the site I created. Once my wife left that school the new governors decided it would be great to waste time completely remaking the site again to look really crap, built using a free web making site, and looking like it was created in Word. The only part I created which they are still using is the site logo.
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Harrison 12:58 26th April 2017
Forgot to say, the server might go offline again as they said they might need to lock it again before the copyright infringing file is confirmed as removed once I inform them. So if it goes down again don't worry, its just them wanting to verify its removal.
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Stephen Coates 14:40 26th April 2017
A ha. I'd wondered where the site has disappeared off to .

That sounds silly that they had to take the whole server down. Couldn't the host just remove the offending file?

Out of curiosity, do you have any screenshots of the old school website vs the new one for us to compare?

- - - Updated - - -

I just looked at the current site, and thought that it overall looked pretty good. When Harrison said it looked like something made in Word I had visions of something much worse.

However, the squiggly underlines in some of the images does look a bit wrong:


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