Tyler
From ByteWiki
Tyler is the ByteClub server. Purchased with the funds provided by the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies with the goal to promote additional development options for those 'geeks' among the many courses.
Contents |
History
Much of the history has been lost due to the lack of keeping a wiki of it, so it begins 17/12/2005
2004
Julyish
Tyler goes on-line
Original web site written by Andrew Coathup.
- MediaWiki chosen as our wiki engine.
- phpBB chosen as our forum engine.
- Simple PHP Blog chosen as our blogging engine. The choice of SimplePHPblog was driven by the fact that it was so simple. We felt that choosing a feature poor blog engine might encourage the ByteClub members to rise to the occasion and write their own killer blog app. The project was started, but failed to get very far.
2005
(Some time)
What did we do with Tyler? I'm trying to remember.
A key failure of ours from the start of Tyler's life was not considering how user registration and authentication were to be handled. After we had chosen the core apps for the site, we realised that each app had it's own user registration and authentication routines. While the ByteClub members seemed happy to have to login seperatley to the various apps, there remained a maintinance issue in regards to setting up accounts.
We investigated the use of a content managment system to replace all the seperate apps. First we looked at Drupal, but it didn't seem to meet our needs. Specifically, we found that the ByteClub members were making heavy use of the blogs, and Drupals solution to blogging seemed inadequate.
Next we looked at Xaraya. It was still in a pre 1.0 state (I forget the exact version number). Xaraya seemed like it was a better solution, but before we got a chance to test it properly, it was hacked via an XMLRPC exploit. Once bitten, twice shy. We dropped Xaraya like a hot potato.
2005
December
7 Dec 2005,at about 4 am, Tyler was hacked most foul :( Some nefarious script kiddies exploited a bug in the blog software (Simple PHP Blog allowed file uploads to the "images" folder. This could include php script file which could then be run with web host permissions.) and uploaded some very nice bits of PHP coding which enabled them to turn some of our blog directories into spam relays and hosted a phishing scam. We knew something was up pretty quickly, but ITS (the Swinburne network police) were even faster and pulled the plug on poor Tyler. So for nearly a week, he sat, dejected, in the back room waiting to be patched.
- by Lucien, as posted on the front page of www.byteclub.net
The script which was uploaded to Tyler seems to have originalted from Russia since the ccteam.ru name is all over the thing. But who uploaded it? Probably just some script kiddies who downloaded it from Russia.
2006
April
The blogs are back! After a long, slow, hot summer (painfull too), we have put some functionality back into the system. Still to be completed in an external authentication module. Once that's done, we shoudl be able to automate the new user registration, then we can put the "I want to join ByteClub" button back up.
In the mean time, Clinton has been putting some blogs back online. Wordpress has an "import RSS" function, so we can import our old blog posts. But this doesn't bring back the comments other users have posted. Perhaps an enterprising monkey will fix this soon? See the sphpblog to wordpress wiki page or contact Clinton for details.
