by Chris Covert Backend Mechanic
Purveyor/Curator of Russian news (Russia Desk)
On August 1st, I will purchase the first six month block for a new server. It will reside with a server provider I have used for more than 20 years. They are absolutely reliable, and this new setup will ensure instances of loss of service will be far less frequent and of less duration.
The new server will be the permanent home of Rantburg.com going forward. It will be hardened and sit atop a network, which helps mitigate DDOS attacks.
It will take about three weeks to set it up. I plan for it to be fully working by September 1st.
By August 8th: Internals installed and tested, including the database
By August 17th: Firewall installed and tested
By August 25th: Tests for all the scripts that mods and regulars use to post articles, including setting up database backups completed.
On August 28: The Rantburg.com name will begin to propagate to the new server. In that time -- using the rantburg.com name -- service will be non existent to spotty. I will have an alternate name set up -- newrantburg.1dogstar.net -- which will ensure continuation of the service until the rantburg.com name is fully propagated.
Fred deserves a lion's share of the credit for keeping Rantburg.com going on his dedicated box with a broadband set up, but as I learned years ago, the quality of service is far less than you should expect on a professionally managed network.
It’s time for a major upgrade, one that, despite its monthly cost, will relieve Fred of the financial burden of maintaining his home service. The new server per month costs a lot less than the current service does.
The server will be a FreeBSD server, a dedicated Unix software suite I have used for many years. The backup server I developed for Rantburg.com - rantburg.1dogstar.net - uses FreeBSD, and the service has been working flawlessly for a year.
But we do require your help. I will invest the first six months of the new service; thereafter net of my costs for the new server, the money will go to Fred.
This time for this bleg, however, all monies go to Fred.
Fred maintains a Paypal account — link on the right side bar. He also has a Zelle account. If you email him and ask real nice, he will give you an address, if you want to send a check.
I tried the PayPal button for the first time instead of mailing a check — I don’t want badanov to be out of pocket after he fronted the cost in addition to doing all that work for free. Such things are very exciting for me. ;-)
#3
How do you follow people on this site?
And how do you post memes and .gifs inline?
There is a button to post photos but it's bugged out. It just sprays a bunch of random text into my comment.
#4
We don’t have a following capability, sorry. But you can ask someone to meet you in the O Club chatroom — which is for everyone, not just whatever officers would be here — and exchange information there, if the other person is willing. Posts there age out and disappear instead of being archived like here in Rantburg proper.
About gifs and things, I don’t know, but tweets have Embed and YouTube has Share.
You can access the o-club here, but be advised between 15 mins. after and 35 mins after , odd hours time Zulu, the server is shut down to update the database (it also is the backup server). Loads of spam also is conveyed there, until a mod clears it out.
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/30/2025 12:06 Comments ||
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#10
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This gibberish test is what happens when I press "foto" instead of the usual dialog box that lets you upload content. Like on every other social media site on the internet.
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/30/2025 12:46 Comments ||
Top||
#13
#12 How do I block other users? Like the jerk who said my comments are random text. I don't demand others be censored, I just don't want to see them.
#14
It just sprays a bunch of random text into my comment.
When I press Foto, I get a file browser window. Maybe you are not pressing the mouse right.
As for I thought those were your comments, I laffed.
I'm just a guest here, but as near as I can tell, the Three Commandments are:
1. Be insightful
2. Be snarky
3. Be both
#15
Rantburg’s code could use a bit of cleaning up, ‘tis true. Something badanov and Fred will look into after the current move is complete. When they’re ready we’ll put out a call for the list, and get it all done at once so that it all dovetails neatly instead of each fix cascading other problems.
At that point we’ll point out limitations deliberately built in to prevent spam and other malicious actors — because of the sandbox we play in, there are bad people out there who would do serious harm if it weren’t for the security precautions Fred has worked to improve upon since the early days of stopping script kiddie DDOS attacks on the Burg. Y’all remember the epically annoying temper tantrums of little JUSTICE from Saudi Arabia?
It occurs to me, Jairong+Scourge+of+the+Gepids2435, that some of your complaints may because you tripped one or some of those safeguards.
But we aren’t ever going to install Mean Girl flourishes here, no matter how popular TikTok and Facebook.
A convicted s—x offender named Suliaman Abdul-Hadi has been arrested in Vancouver, Wash., near Portland, for allegedly grooming and r—ping underage girls in a manner similar to the UK Muslim child groomers.
Court documents state that the 12-year-old victim was brought to a hospital on July 11 for a sexual assault exam. The minor told authorities that a male suspect had purchased alcohol for her and another unidentified 15-year-old girl, and then raped them. This allegedly occurred on more than one occasion, the victim said.
Investigators learned the man was Abdul-Hadi, a level III sex offender who is on GPS monitoring and restricted from being around minors, and launched an investigation.
On July 18, Vancouver police executed a search warrant at Abdul-Hadi's residence located in the 2900 block of NE 143rd Avenue in Vancouver. The defendant attempted to flee the residence but was confronted by a police K9 team and taken into custody. VPD received assistance from an Uncrewed Aircraft System (UAS), detectives from the Children's Justice Center/Elder Justice Center, Digital Evidence Cybercrime Unit (DECU), and the Crime Reduction Unit (CRU).
Court records show that Abdul-Hadi is a repeat criminal sex offender with charges and allegations dating back to 2016, when he was a juvenile. During that year, he was accused of sexually assaulting a male student at St. John's Military School in Kansas. In 2020, Abdul-Hadi was convicted in Washington state of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes and third-degree rape of a child.
On May 6, 2024, Abdul-Hadi pleaded guilty to failing to register as a sex offender and was subsequently sentenced to 30 days in jail, 30 days of work crew, and 12 months of probation, court records show. He failed to inform his parole officer when he moved into his home on 143rd Avenue, resulting in the online sex offender registry not being updated, according to court documents.
This investigation remains ongoing, and detectives believe there may be several other minor victims. Authorities said Abdul-Hadi targets maiden of tender yearss between the ages of 11 and 17.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.[KavkazUzel]
Stavropol resident Rustam Yarbuldyev, who was found by the court to have participated in the attack on the Botlikh region of Dagestan as part of Basayev’s group, was sentenced to 13 years in prison. Another jihadi from the time before Chechnya’s jihadis formally pledged to Al Qaeda, becoming the Caucasus Emirate. At the rate the Spetznaz hunters find thrm and bring them to justice, this could go on for another decade or two.
As the "Caucasian Knot" wrote, in June 2023, the FSB reported the arrest of Rustam Yarbuldyev in Stavropol Krai in connection with the attack on the Botlikh District of Dagestan in 1999. In September 2024, the case went to court.
On August 7, 1999, more than 1,000 armed fighters from Chechnya under the leadership of Shamil Basayev and Jordanian Amir Khattab
…that year they called themselves the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade (IIPB). They apparently peaked — briefly — at 10,000 turbans…
entered the territory of Dagestan. Fighting continued in the republic for more than a month. Only on September 15, 1999, the Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev reported that the territory of Dagestan had been completely liberated, according to the "Kavkazsky Uzel" report " Invasion of Militants in Dagestan (1999)".
The Southern District Military Court has sentenced Stavropol resident Rustam Yarbuldyev in the case of the 1999 attack on military personnel in Dagestan as part of Shamil Basayev's group. He will spend 13 years in a maximum security penal colony, TASS reported today, citing the FSB Directorate for Stavropol Krai.
According to the investigation and the court, "Yarbuldyev, as part of an illegal armed group led by Basayev, participated in an attack on servicemen of the Russian Ministry of Defense in the Botlikh District of the Republic of Dagestan in August 1999," the report says.
Yarbuldyev was found guilty of participating in an armed gang (Part 2 of Article 209 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), armed rebellion (Article 279 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and attempting to kill a serviceman (Article 317 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), Vesti.ru reported.
As follows from the case file on the website of the Southern District Military Court, Yarbuldyev's case was heard from September 2024, 26 hearings took place, and the verdict was announced on July 30.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.