Web stuff and domesticity
At around 6:45 this morning, my sites hosted on Dreamhost were hacked, for the second time. Nothing major (just some spam links hidden w/ display: none) and I restored backups w/ no problem, but I think it’s definitely time to find a new host. I would’ve done it sooner but was just lazy. I’m thinking of going w/ PowWeb; does anybody else have suggestions?
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On Saturday, we moved our furniture to the house. And when I say “we,” I mean Rusty and his friend Matt. So Saturday night was our first night sleeping at the house. Yay! Except, I woke up Sunday morning feeling like death warmed over. I’m convinced this is due to the air in the house, especially the bedroom. On Twitter, Aspasia suggested that we could be kicking up dust and other crap due to moving. Then Nikki noted that paint takes a long time to “off-gas” (that was a new term to me). I’m betting it’s a combination of the two. I’ve always been very sensitive to air quality, so for me, paint fumes + possible dust != happy.
Low-VOC paint… if only I had known!
Last night we slept w/ a fan in the bedroom and it helped a little, but I still felt crappy – sore throat, kind of dizzy, lethargic. I’ve felt a little better at work today. I knew staying home wasn’t an option, as that would only exacerbate the problem! Tonight we’re going to look for an air purifier and a ceiling fan. And hopefully I won’t have to sleep in the living room for weeks. :P
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While languishing in bed yesterday, around 1:00 I heard a bunch of loud noises from above. In my half-awake state I thought, “Must be the crazy upstairs neighbors again.” Then I realized, “Oh wait, I’m at the house; we don’t have upstairs neighbors.” So I thought, “Maybe there’s a squirrel on the roof.” But the noise didn’t let up, and I thought, “I can’t imagine a squirrel being that loud.” So I sat up in bed and opened the blinds – and holy crap, it was snowing! Big fat flakes that were actually sticking.
WTF?? Where did that come from? It was in the 60s on Saturday!
I got out of bed and took a picture from the living room window, too.
(Side note: I love the house across the street, the one w/ the red car parked in front of it in this picture. It’s just such a perfect little 1950s house.)
A lot of the snow had melted by this morning, but there was still a good bit on the lawn – and ice on the roads. We drove to work very slowly. There are still patches of it around, but it’s mostly gone.
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Despite getting sick, I am VERY happy to be closer to being totally moved into the new house. There’s still some stuff at the apartment – kitchen stuff, clothes, and most notably, Puff and Stuff – but we’ll be moving it over the course of the next few weeks. I’m looking forward to being settled, because right now everything is in flux and I feel very jostled; I can’t find anything, nothing’s organized, etc. But even with the furniture just scattered all around in no logical order, the house already feels more like a home. I’m looking forward to getting everything put in the right spot and just relaxing in our home – not to mention working on the yard. We’ve already seen a ton of birds; once we get more feeders, a bath, and some shrubs w/ berries they like planted, it’ll be a bird paradise.
Site hacked
Yep, my site was hacked. So was my other domain, sotsforum.net. That one is still in its hacked stage as of this writing. I have two service tickets outstanding with Dreamhost, but in the meantime, I found that I fortunately had a generic WordPress installation saved on my work computer, which is how I was able to get my blog back up.
Basically what happened was, someone accessed my FTP account illegally (I have since changed the password) and replaced my index.php files with pages full of ads. In the case of beingamberrhea.com, the site wouldn’t load and instead showed a MySQL error, but viewing the file on the server showed that it had indeed been modified at around 4:00 yesterday afternoon. The same thing happened in the wp-admin directory. I renamed both of the hacked files index_HACKED.php for Dreamhost’s reference, when/if they get to my support tickets (I’m guessing they’re swamped, ’cause this kind of thing happened to other accounts too) and uploaded the correct index.php files from the WordPress folder on my hard drive.
Meanwhile, amber.tangerinecs.com has its own problems; it was also hacked, but I had a full back-up of that as well, so I easily replaced index.php. However, I had inadvertently let the domain expire and had to renew it. :P It was registered w/ GoDaddy instead of Dreamhost, and I was not getting emails about registration. Hopefully all should be well, and Dreamhost still has my MySQL database with my 5 years worth of blog posts in it.
Side thought: I need to find a way to backup a site in its human-readable form, not just as a SQL dump!
Anyway. I don’t know when sotsforum.net will be back up, and I feel bad because I had been taking a pretty hands-off approach with that site lately anyway. But it seemed to be a self-sustaining community. Thank god for my WordPress stuff saved on this computer! I was feeling so weird and violated without my blog. I still feel weird and violated because of the hacking, but at least now my blog loads and I can tell y’all what’s up.
Add to that the fact that I woke up with a headache and stomach ache, and it just has not been a good day so far today!
As for my hosting situation after this… I’m not sure. I’ve been a Dreamhost customer for over 3 years and have been satisfied for the most part, and I know security breaches can happen to anyone despite the best laid plans, but still… I’m considering switching. On the other hand, I don’t know if I want to deal with the hassle of switching hosts. Will laziness win out? I do like Dreamhost’s web panel, and I remember back when I switched sotsforum.net from its previous home at HostReflex, what a pain in my ass that was.
Anyway… just wanted to let everyone know what’s up. Gotta work now. I wasn’t on the computer at all yesterday, so I’ll try to catch up w/ email and blog reading today as time permits (which it might not). On the bright side, Rusty and I had a great time with Figleaf yesterday. Photos from the Atlanta Botanical Garden will be posted tonight.
Update, 3:45 p.m. – Still no word from Dreamhost. It’s a good thing I had a WordPress backup! :P This means sotsforum.net is still a spam page, though. I’m sure Dreamhost is really freaking busy right about now, but damn, it’s been all day.