I have recently compiled statistics on the total downloads of Linux Outlaws show files up to Episode 100 from all available data collected up until July 9 on Libsyn, the Archives and the main server (although there are some missing records between Episodes 9 and 34 that I still need to investigate). In the spirit of a truly open podcast production, I want to share this data with you now. The end result is a total download number of 423,906 downloads in the roughly 22 months since September 12, 2007. Pretty amazing, huh?

If you want to see the nitty-gritty details, you can download the complete ODF spreadsheet and check it out. Also, for all those people who think we shouldn’t be publishing a MP3 file, it might be interesting to see that Ogg Vorbis only makes up 21% of our total downloads. As much as I like Free formats, I think the data speaks for itself.

I am truely stoked about the direction the show is heading, it looks like we are going from strength to strength and I hope we will continue to pick up new listeners and keep entertaining the regulars as well. On that note, if you have any ideas how the podcast can improve, get in touch — we are always welcoming any feedback we receive. And if you are not on board yet, what are you waiting for? It’s loads of fun, even if you aren’t an hardcore Linux geek. Trust me.

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…

Tonight, shortly after 02:00 CET, a process on our server stalled out the CPU and shot down the machine. I only noticed it this afternoon via text message from Dan, who was alerted by some helpful souls on identi.ca. I promptly rebooted the server, but I am sorry to have only realised the problem that late. I was pretty busy at work and never even thought about checking my servers all day. I appologise wholeheartedly for any inconvenience this might have caused, especially with the delivery of the podcast files.

It seems like something went wrong with our Laconica installation (which is also hosted on the machine in question) shortly before the server died, or so my log files would indicate. At least the latest errors are from that process. I will investigate this issue further and keep you posted. It seems like Laconica both caused this issue and kind of helped to solve it at the same time. How very Zen.