How to Configure Your Computer to Download Mail from Murkworks.Net
This part of the site is for the assistance of those who have accounts at Murkworks, and find themselves in need of a clue or two. This page has been made in response to a few recent FAQ's we've been having come in from users, as well as a new place for old help data that's been floating around the site.
If you can't find your old files from before our system was hacked in July of 2004, you're probably looking on newmoon instead of lodestone. All users who have had their accounts reinstated since the hack have had their old files restored on lodestone, which is now our web server instead of our main server. Your password on lodestone, if you were a prior user, should be the same as your password on newmoon. Contact Anna if you need help.
We occasionally get reports from people who say that they're trying to log into lodestone, that they're using the right address (lodestone.murkworks.net), and that they're also using a secure client. What usually happens is that these folks get a login prompt, and when they try to login, their expected password does not work.
The problem has been that lodestone changed IP addresses after the July 2004 hack--and that it was also a registered nameserver, so a lot of sites out there did not pick up on the change of IP address, because they were pulling lodestone's cached IP address out of their own records rather than getting its new one from us. So this has caused people to actually try to connect to the old IP address when they try to log in to lodestone.murkworks.net.
If your machine thinks lodestone is still pointing at its old IP address, what will actually happen is that you'll log into door, not lodestone, because the old IP maps to door now. And most of our users don't have accounts on door. So this is why logins will fail.
What you can do about this if this happens to you is to use the 'nslookup' command to figure out what IP address your machine thinks lodestone is going to. If you're using Unix/Linux or MacOS or a Windows command prompt, you can do this by typing 'nslookup lodestone.murkworks.net'. If you see the IP address 209.20.199.102, that's the old address, and it's wrong.
If that is in fact what you see, you should use the current and correct IP address instead, which is 209.20.199.11. You can ssh in to lodestone using the IP rather than the name if you need to. And if this does happen to you, it's a problem with your ISP, not something we can fix. Sorry.
Generally, if one of the Murkworks net admins knows you and can vouch for you, we'll be happy to give you an account. Within reason. Our caveats are:
Since we are a Linux server, we can only allow eight characters or less in our account names. Linux does allow for setting up longer aliases to point at account names, but the actual account name must be eight characters or less. So suppose (for example) that you want the email account 'invaderzim'. That's over the eight character limit--so if you wanted to use that as your email address at Murkworks, you would need to use a shorter version of that (perhaps 'invader' or 'zim') to get under the eight-character limit. That would be the name you would use to actually log in to the account. We could then set up an alias 'invaderzim' by which people could actually email you, but if you wanted to download your email, you would still need to set up your email client to log in to the actual account name, not the alias.
Short answer: you don't. We don't run telnet.
Long answer: If you want to come in by remote to get to your shell account on our system, you're going to have to use a secure client to do it. Your options are:
There are probably other clients around, but these are the ones we know about. If you don't like either of these options, try Googling for "ssh + client" and see what you get. Be sure to find a client that talks the SSH2 protocol, because we've turned off SSH1 on our system, too.
See previous commentary re: telnet. For the same reason we turned off telnet (i.e., it's not secure), we turned off FTP, too. So for those of you who want to be able to upload files onto your web space on the Murk, you will need a secure client to do it. Here are some options:
And again, there are probably other clients around, but these are the ones we know anything about. Check google for "secure + ftp + client", or something along those lines, if you'd like to find one more to your tastes. If you have a link to a good secure file transfer client, hand it to us and we'll put it up here.
Right now we have exactly one publically available Counter script on lodestone, and that is Count 2.5. Count is a fairly popular script that's in wide use across the web; it generates a graphical representation of the counts to your web page and can also display times, dates, and countdowns. You can invoke it with a line that looks like this:
<img src=/cgi-bin/wwwcount.cgi?df=filename.dat>
... where "filename.dat" is the name of a data file which has been created to store the number of hits to the page. Right now this counter is set up such that these data files, which have their own location on the system, must be created by someone with admin access. If you don't have such access and you need a counter data file created, bug Anna.
Many other arguments in addition to "df" can be fed to this counter. For further details, check out the full documentation on the Count homepage.
We currently have two ways to generate galleries for people's graphics or photos. One of these is Galrey, and which generates some nice but fairly basic gallery pages. Here are the shortest form instructions for using Galrey to make a gallery with thumbnails:
(Do include the period on the end there. That means 'copy the file to my current location' in Linux.')
We have also installed Gallery, which is both fancier and much better documented, and driven by PHP. Go check out its web page for further details.
How to Configure Your Computer to Download Mail from Murkworks.Net
In your mail client of choice, tell it you want to set up a POP account and specify mail.murkworks.net as both your incoming and outgoing mail server. Feed it your account name and password. That should be enough to make it go.