You might have wondered why our website got redirected to my personal page beginning Sunday afternoon (CEST) and lasting until Monday morning. To make it short: Fab had another server admin fail. While trying to make our server more secure, I must have messed up Apache’s subdomain redirection somewhere which caused it to route all requests for linuxoutlaws.com to lamerk.org which is located on the same server. I did test the new configuration and could see nothing wrong with it so I happily proceeded to have a BBQ with some friends out in the sun, leaving my iPhone, and with it all connections to the virtual world, at home. I also busted my ankle that night, but that’s a whole ‘nother story…

Something must have happened on the server after I left because shortly after I had tested the setup and went outside, people began having problems with the site. I have no clue as to what changed, maybe I just didn’t test everything correctly in my hurry to get out into the sun. In any case, the site and with it the RSS feeds were offline. If you were using gPodder as your podcast client, you might have experienced something else: In a weird twist, gPodder decided to put some “Tiger Records” stuff in our feeds and tried to subsequently download 600+ MB of files. Apparently this is a “feature” of the program; if it does not find one of your subscribed RSS feeds on the provided URL, it crawls that site and all embedded links looking for something that looks like RSS with rich media enclosures. If it finds anything, it helpfully uses that as the new podcast feed. Quite a handy feature that means you can just pop linuxoutlaws.com in the new subscription field and get one of our feeds auto-magically but it also messed with my brain royally when I woke up Monday morning (slightly hangovered) and started gPodder to check if some new podcasts were out for me to listen to. As it were, the “spam” in our feed made me believe our server had been hacked. The fact that nobody, including Dan, hadn’t been able to reach me until then just complicated matters.

Long story short: I have checked the server thoroughly (just in case) and am quite confident that we have not been hacked but that everything was due to me being an idiot. I have also since repaired the subdomain problem and all of the site (including the forums) should be in 100% working order again. If you are using gPodder (a fantastic podcatcher, by the way) and you still have weird stuff in our feed, please re-subscribe and everything should be cleared up. You can also manually remove the non-LO entries from the list. I am really sorry for any inconvenience or frustration this might have caused and I am also very thankful to the great people in our forums, #linuxoutlaws on Freenode and our identi.ca group for their help in figuring this out. Also thanks to everyone who emailed telling us the site was broke, we got a lot of those as well.

And so we prove once again that the life of an outlaw is everything, but it ain’t boring…