The site was never shut down intentionally. Wulf Howl was hosted for free by a provider called Centarra, as a friend of mine (who is otherkin) owned the company. Several months ago, said friend is no-longer in charge of Centarra but my account continues to work. I assumed that I would be contacted and told to pay for hosting service, which would not have been a problem at all. Instead, MANY months after the company has changed hands, I attempt to access Wulf Howl and it is down. After I am unable to access the server it is hosted on via SSH, I login to Centarra's administration panel and find that the Virtual Private Server that Wulf Howl was hosted on, as well as the DNS records were removed from my account. I immediately opened a support ticket with Centarra, and I never received a response. I do not believe it was a 'malicious attack' on Wulf Howl, but rather the unprofessional action of a money-hungry company.
With regards to the backup, I wrote a shell script in late 2011 which dumps the MySQL database to a file, and sends it along with all the files involved with the site to a secure backup service called TarSnap as well as sends me an email with the log of the backup. The key stored on Wulf Howl's server was valid for encrypting the backups and authenticating to TarSnap and was NOT valid for decryption, deletion, or otherwise reading any backup. I will admit fault here, since I never needed to restore from a backup, when it was all said and done, I had NO IDEA what I had done with the decryption key. This was a spectacular failure on my part, and I sincerely apologize to the community for the data loss. I have been going through all my USB keys and online accounts, and should I find the old database, I will upload an archive version of Wulf Howl accessible to former members.
The experience was very frustrating for me, especially since Wulf Howl was my online home and the only community I felt truly happy in. I have taken measures to ensure this type of thing will never happen again in the future, including:
Automating my backup processes. An encrypted backup will be automatically generated daily sent sent to cloud storage.
Backing up my decryption keys. Both myself and Alynna have the backup decryption key stored in multiple locations both online and on physical media.
Increasing server-side security with a host-based and network-based intrusion detection system, and utilizing various other measures to detect and prevent breaches.
Testing backups weekly. Each week, I will decrypt the latest backup on my local machine to ensure file and data integrity, and that the keys are working.
While I sincerely believe it was our hosting company that deleted our VPS, I am not taking any chances for the future - hence the increased security. Obviously, I no longer use Centarra.
In response to allegations by various individuals:
1. I do not stalk and harass others. As all site operators do, I reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Individuals that have personally baited and harassed me are definitely included in this. It is a new year and I am trying to start off fresh, so all bans have not carried over to Kinmunity.
2. The downtime was beyond my control, although I DO take full responsibility for losing access to the backup key and it will not happen again.
Regarding the speculation that I started the site over intentionally in order to have new staff, please understand that a restart of the site would not have been necessary for me to restructure the staff team. As most theories of malice proposed in this thread are, that is a bit ridiculous.
If anyone else has any more questions about this matter, please remember that it's better to hear it from the horse's mouth rather than listen to the flies. I can ALWAYS be reached via email.
The social networking profiles of mine went down for an unrelated reason that I would rather not discuss publicly, and it is the same reason my domain registration information is partially hidden. I would be happy to explain to anyone interested via email.
While my conduct outside of Wulf Howl was at times very childish, I am working to improve myself. I cannot ask you all to forgive me - I can only change my actions and hope you see such. Thank you for allowing me to explain, and please email me if you have specific questions.
REGARDING THE DOMAINS:
- I will be keeping wulfhowl.com registered. There is an individual who has the domain on back order and has stated that the intends to redirect it to a shock site. This will not be happening. Wulf Howl's domain and sub domains will redirect to Kinmunity until further notice. In addition, I use
shiro@wulfhowl.com as my email address for many services.
- I will be allowing the HowlNet.org domain to expire. If anyone has a good faith use for it, I will give it away (contact me!)
- I will be giving therianthropy.info away to anyone who has a good-faith usage for it (contact me!)
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