DISARRAY

Tonight, I am nearly certain who ever is in control of my (former) e-mail and web server is using it to gain access to various online accounts of mine. For example, I can no longer access my Monster.ca account. Who ever this person is, they are using the password reset function to get passwords e-mailed to my account. From there, they reset the password to whatever they want and thereby locking my out. The situation has gotten serious.

I am, however, confident no other important accounts are linked to my erwintang.com address. I am somewhat worried though about the number of files that I have on my server. This is no doubt this person has read my resume already. That contains my address and phone number. I am trying to remember what other files I may have left on the server which might comprise my identity. I do not believe any banking information is on my site.

Frustratingly, the server admin has been impossible to contact in France. I was forced to call the network operations centre and pleaded with the guy on duty to bring down my server so that no more e-mails would come into the hands of this hacker. He has temporarily brought down the server until he can get confirmation from Stephen in France. Oh by the way, apparently, he's away for three weeks. Perfect timing.

I have moved swiftly on other fronts as well. Just minutes ago, I bought a year's worth of hosting from GoDaddy.com. I have changed the DNS records for my domain. Starting in about 8 hours, servers will begin to redirect traffic going to erwintang.com to my new host. In one week, all traffic will resolve to my new server. Hopefully by the time you read this, typing in www.erwintang.com will lead you to a stand-in page.

It will take some time to get everything up and running at the new place but I think this was perhaps a step I should have taken a long time ago.

My fingers are crossed.

ROUGHING IT

You know when you get locked out of your house and you have to take the clothes on your back and live out of a cheap motel room for a couple days while you figure out what happened to real home? Yeah, well your're reading the Internet equivalent right now.

If you stand outside my place, you can see my site is still up and nothing has been altered (that I know of) in any way. I just can't get into it. I also have to assume my e-mail is all still there and that I'm still getting messages. By the way, none of you have gotten any e-mails from me since Friday have you? If you did, that wasn't me.

So Stephen, my server administrator is still in France as I understand it. I made contact with him on Friday where he told me he'd reset my password by Saturday morning my time. I tried logging in all day Saturday and today with no success. I tried text messaging him Saturday night but he has not responded. I will call him again on Monday morning.

What I do know is that this situation will not continue indefinitely. Stephen must return from his vacation sometime in the future. Even if he decides to never return from France, however, I still hold the key to my site. Despite whatever is going on right now, I am still in control of the settings which direct what server my visitors go to when you type in www.erwintang.com. Currently, it'll point you to that held-together-by-duct-tape-but-also-hijacked server located somewhere in the bowels of Harbour Centre in downtown Vancouver. It would take me just hours though to point my visitors to a different hosting server, oooh say with GoDaddy.com, the world's #1 rated web host. Yes, it would be a bit of a hassle to change web hosts but I gotta do what I gotta do.

So that's where I'm at with regard to this whole debacle. For those with web sites and your own domain, never take it for granted the services you now enjoy.

HELPLESS

Still no word from France. I am still locked out from my e-mail and web site. I feel a bit helpless. What happened to my server?