Can you believe it? %*&@^}!#$* Machlink! For those of you who don’t know, Machlink is my ISP. They also host my web page; but not for much longer - I have chosen a web host, just haven’t purchased and migrated yet. They were compromised because, well, in my opinion they don’t know what they are doing. A high school kid broke in and sent an email to all the ISP users telling them exactly how he broke in and how Machlink should fix it. Don’t know if they have fixed it or not. And to think, I was accused of being a security risk because I run a commenting system on my blog that uses PHP scripts! The funny thing is they don’t know who did the hack and don’t know where the hack gained access.
The thing is, they run their web servers on Sun’s Solaris OS. This is a great and secure OS…….if it is set up properly, if it is managed properly, and if it is kept up to date. They are running Solaris v5.8 (it said that in the message the kid sent); the current version is Solaris v9. What’s up with that? If Solaris is too expensive to keep up to date then get Linux. If you have trouble with Linux, get IIS (in my opinion, that would truly be foolish). Geez, get SOMETHING that is up to date! I spend about $40 a month for this service - do you think I’ll get refunded the days that they are down? I think NOT.
It’s been down since the hack and now is slower than before. Any of their services that require authentication were down: web server and email. Yeah, we could still browse the internet, just not any Machlink sites. ICDSoft, here I come. $65 for a year with 333 Mb of web space, 5 subdomains and unlimited email accounts. Hopefully by next weekend I’ll be migrated.