Several weeks ago the KDE Dot News server was compromised. After a prolonged and painful downtime, we're pleased to announce that KDE-Forum.org and KDE Wiki are now back and functioning. KDE-Forum.org is now in the capable hands of Christian Kienle of QtForum.org who gracefully offered to take over after the former admin decided to pursue other interests. I'd like to thank both these two as well as David Legg, Lukas Masek, Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, our sponsor Pierre-Emmanual Muller of CafeWiki, and the KDE Security Team for helping in bringing back these services.

You may have noticed that your beloved KDE news site experienced availability problems during the last two weeks. The reason for the outage was a scheduled server movement followed by some unscheduled problems. We hope to have everything under control again and would like to thank
Pierre-Emmanuel Muller of
leVillage for hosting dot.kde.org and for helping us out with the recent problems.

I'm pleased to announce that the dot-stories and dot-headlines mailing lists are finally back online. For those of you who don't know, dot-stories is the list to be on if you wish to receive the latest KDE Dot News in your inbox, and dot-headlines is the list you should subscribe to if you wish to receive the headlines only.

We're pleased to note that KDE-Forum.org is now back online after a rocky start. A big thanks goes out to Pierre-Emmanuel Muller and Cyberbrain who are now hosting this site, and of course to zenok, fan of KDE and creator of KDE-Forum.org for web-based KDE-related discussions. Please note that Cyberbrain is also the host of KDE Dot News as well as several other less obvious KDE services and has been single-handedly responsible for virtually trouble free operation and peace of mind since June 2002. Other KDE-related web forums available are: KDE-Forum.de for German speakers and the KDE-France forums for French speakers. In other good news, Frank reports that the terrific and invaluable KDE-Look.org site has found new sponsorship from Lindows.com -- a big thanks goes out to Kevin Carmony, President and CEO of Lindows.com, as well as to everyone else who offered to help the site. The KDE community should feel proud to have so many friends and willing sponsors.

After struggling for three weeks with a series of hardware anomalies (traced
after much effort to a bad bit in a memory module) and
a taxing OS / software upgrade (as well as with some time-consuming but
unrelated issues), APPS.KDE.com,
www.KDE.com,
LISTS.KDE.com (which among other
things provides the dot's mailing lists),
PROMO.KDE.org and
www.KDELeague.org are finally
back online.
Service on the KDE.com sites may be spotty in the coming week as some kinks
in the OS and various software upgrades are worked out, but the most important
things appear to be working smoothly already.
Please contribute any
recent releases of KDE or Qt software to the Appsy database
to ensure it remains comprehensive, and please be patient while
application updates proceed in first-in, first-out
order. If you find areas of any of the sites that do not yet work as expected, please
let me know.

Several recent unfortunate incidents, including a security breach,
have meant that a number of KDE web sites such as printing.kde.org, edu.kde.org, enterprise.kde.org,
and worldwide.kde.org, have
been forced to move to a new host. Previously these were hosted by
Bernhard "Bero" Rosenkraenzer on his server,
with bandwidth provided by Red Hat Germany. We would like to express
our gratitude to Bero for all the time and effort he put into
administering the server to allow the hosting, and to Red Hat for
for supplying the bandwidth.

We have recently switched our entire Bug
Tracking System to Bugzilla. Unlike the old system, Bugzilla is based on MySQL and
thus enables advanced search
functions and offers many other features such as email notification and voting. However, for access to the more advanced features and for bug and comment submission, users will need an account. Fortunately, the href="http://bugs.kde.org/wizard.cgi">bug wizard will automatically create an account when used for the first time. All existing bugs from the old system have been migrated to the new system thanks to the efforts of Stephan Kulow.

In the past, the KDE infrastructure has several times suffered from extended downtime of our websites and mailinglists. That was due to the fact that master.kde.org ailed from old and failing hardware. Forget the past, and welcome our new master: ktown.kde.org!

By popular demand, we are answering some of the most frequently asked questions at the dot. Read the following FAQ if you are interested in understanding how the dot operates, how best to contribute articles, and how to help improve the dot in general. Nothing is really set in stone here. The FAQ will be updated as required and as per your comments, and may eventually be moved to a different final location. With your help, KDE Dot News can hopefully improve and serve your needs better in the future.

We run into the best of luck at KDE Dot News. This time the air-conditioner in our server room died, resulting in a temperature of 52 degrees Celcius and a core meltdown. Since we had also been suffering from limited bandwidth for a while now -- since the week of the KDE3 release when we managed to kill our host's pipe -- we decided to take this opportunity to move to a new hosting solution. Happily, we were awash with wonderful offers for help and support of all kinds from the community. It was an extremely tough call but we finally settled for a generous offer from CEO Guillaume Esnault, Robert Royer and Pierre-Emmanuel Muller (also involved with the KDE French translation team) of Cyberbrain for professional ISP hosting in a securised datacenter, including a dedicated Compaq ML 330 Proliant (as not seen in Star Trek) directly connected to two 9Gb black fibers (open bandwidth use), full support, backups, and 24/24 monitoring. A word of warning though: Expect some minor downtime as we further upgrade the hardware over the coming days. On the bright side, once we are settled, we will be able to support other KDE sites and services on this baby. Read on to see why we should be proud of this community. Update: 06/21 14:31:22 CEST by N: The upgrade has been successfully completed. Say 'bonjour' to all of 640 MB of RAM and a new 36 GB SCSI harddrive! Thank you, Cyberbrain team.