Various tribulations

[Ben Bullock]

Someone from Russia has been sending endless bad images to kanji.sljfaq.org for a few days, resulting in huge error logs, so I've blocked them.

There has been some kind of problem with qhanzi.com where the system which backs up old input files is not working correctly. I've updated the website's "realm" to see if that helps. I am also working on the data backup software at the moment, Due to the very large numbers of user inputs it takes a long time to process through everything. 

I also updated the other sites' realms so there may have been some problems/downtime at kanji and sljfaq.org.

To add to all this, I had a bad case of influenza over the New Year period, then our cat died, so things have been quite confused here.

[Ben Bullock]

I've been able to identify the problem with the log files from qhanzi, which is that the unix utility tar has acquired some sort of bug after upgrading the OS where it sets the permissions of all the untarred files to 000, so they can't be read. The problem may be fixed by manually changing all the file permissions after each untarring. This started to happen on 15 January 2025. I've been able to work out where the trouble started and I'm now going backwards and sorting out all the old data. This is expected to take some time. 

There were some minor problems due to the update of the realm on kanji which are now fixed.

[Ben Bullock]

The qhanzi log problem was fortunately solved quite rapidly.

Unfortunately the update of kanji.sljfaq.org did something very bad which I don't understand. Everything is completely failing to communicate with the "outside world" at the moment, even the old CGI program. I have tried most of the things which I can do to fix this so I think it's a problem with the web hosts. The following are the URLs where the kanji recogniser should be working.

https://kanji.sljfaq.org/hw-17.cgi

https://kanji.sljfaq.org/ppkanji/

[Ben Bullock]

The site seems to be working now, I don't know what happened since I haven't changed anything except switching the software realm twice.