Adventures in Anti-Spam...

I FINALLY figured it out... It looks lingering files from an older version of Blacklist were conflicting with the newer ones... Once I wiped the entire system of everything Blacklist and started over, BAM! Everything was working. I just got finished deleting the 5000+ spam comments in the system. I'm getting comment emails again. Seems to be back to normal... If you posted over the last couple of days and your comment has not popped up, I probably deleted it by accident. Sorry. :( online filme, die aktuellen kinofilme.

The good news is that MT-Blacklist is up and kicking. Comments are being blocked. Emails about comment notifications (and comment blocks) are coming in... Looks like the amount of spam that was hitting the site before was crippling the email capability. Killed the spam, email returned. ;)

Now just to take down all the moderation features and I should be back to the way I was Pre-MT3. ::glee::

Well son of a...

And like clockwork, they try again today...

Jan 4 10:02:35 voyager PAM_unix[1832]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> root for ssh service
Jan 4 10:02:37 voyager sshd[1832]: Failed password for root from 81.191.97.214 port 56947 ssh2
Jan 4 10:02:41 voyager PAM_unix[1834]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> root for ssh service
Jan 4 10:02:43 voyager sshd[1834]: Failed password for root from 81.191.97.214 port 57068 ssh2
Jan 4 10:02:47 voyager PAM_unix[1836]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> root for ssh service
Jan 4 10:02:49 voyager sshd[1836]: Failed password for root from 81.191.97.214 port 57214 ssh2

I wish I had found out this was happening earlier... ::starts to write an email daemon::

Now THIS is funny...

Hehe... Someone at Mirco$oft (not necessarily Micro$oft itself) used warez'd programs to make some of the audio files in Windows Media Player. What's funny is that you can see for yourself.

Open notepad in Windows.
Select open and goto your Windows Directory.
Open Help.
Open Tours.
Open WindowsMediaPlayer.
Open Audio.
Open Wav.
Select any of those files.
Give notepad a second to open it and scroll all the way to the bottom.

See that "SoundForge 4.5" and "Deepz0ne". Yeah, hacked version of Soundforge by cracker Deepz0ne. Way to go MS for checking your code and business practices.

Original story here.

As the first comment on that story says, "Do what we say, not what we do". Way to go Micro$oft!!! HA! Sooooo true!!!

Crap...

OK. Things are going well... I'm getting "500 Internal Server Errors" everywhere... Permissions are set. Newline problems corrected. Things just seem to die or not work. But then they do work. But then they don't work. Literally. I put a cgi file in the root of this website. Runs fine in the shell. Ran it on a browser through Apache, it worked. Copied it to a folder and executed again in a browser, it didn't work. Copied it back. It didn't work. ??? Extracted a fresh copy in the folder where it didn't work before, it worked. WTF!!! Its the same damn code!!! And what errors are listed in my logs??? The wonderfully helpful "Premature end of headers" error which I am told is a catch all for perl when it has a brain fart... >:(

I'm not liking this. Want to know what I'm doing to fix the most of errors I was getting??? I'm extracting the files again... ?!?!?!? Yeah. For every file after trying for a couple of hours to figure out what is going on, and do the above many many many many time, I just extract an original file and things automagically fix themselves. WTF would that do??? Beats the hell out of me... I even put everything in a new directory and repeated all of the above again. And again... ... And again.

Maybe its time to pursue another blog software... MT used to be so simple, easy, and very robust. Now it's flashy, has plugins galore, and does not work... :\ Anyone have any suggestions that does not involve moving my blog to Blogger or LJ???

Slooow week...

This week has just chugged along... Every day has been really slow, but on the other hand, I haven't stopped moving. I've actually managed to finish moving into my office. 3 month's isnt that bad is it? ;) I beat the main campaign on Neverwinter Nights. I managed to get my hands on my copy of Doom3 but I haven't installed it b/c I really want to wait to play it until I get my new system up and running (2-3 months away). I've also started working on Jay's g/f's new computer. All in all, everything has been so slow while I'm doing it, but I guess it went by fast when I'm looking back...

Design notes... I managed to write my own PHP login script with MySQL in the background for info grabbing and checking. I'm actually kind of excited b/c while it took my awhile to do, I was able to do it with all my own code and only minimal help from others on PHP. Hopefully the website its going to sit on will go as smoothly as this login script did...

Apache Response Time...

I've got a lot of entries in my .htaccess file. Does anyone know how much processing goes on with Apache and if a huge .htaccess file will slow down a website???

One of Four...

No, its not another incredibly hot Borg. But if it was, you'd click anyway right? ;)

Scriptoid.com

Everyone who has been here awhile knows that I've had to write a lot of custom scripts to get this place looking like it is. From user tracking to hit counters to stat generation to bot blocking to whatever. You also know that I've said that at some time I'd want to release all the code so other people can go along with what I've done. Well now I have. Scritpoid.com is where I can show off my PHP l33tne55 *cough* noob-ness *cough* so others can use and abuse what I've done.

Check it out. I'd like to know what you guys think. Whether or not you use the plentiful 2 scripts that are actually up there now... ;)

Pushed to finish...

You know how you keep a project on the backburner only to really, really, work on it when someone says something or does something to it??? Well, I can't say I've kicked myself enough for not keeping up my photoblog (no new pics in more than 3 months). That being said, getting 86 emails in two minutes saying that I had 86 new comments on my photoblog really pushed me. (Yeah, the ones that say"I love your site" or "How intuitive" or "Your design is great" only to be linked to porn, drug, and casino websites.)

So...

New design. New backend (the new MT, which I can use now that they've changed the license restrictions). Same pictures. MUCH smaller interface and footprint. EVEN LESS functionality. No comments, just my pictures and a way to get ahold of me if you like them.

What!?!?! Me do something simple??? Yeah, go figure. Look for yourself.

The big bonus was that I was able to figure out how to use MT for such a simple design instead of having to write my own PHP scripts to do it.

My only other goal with the site is to get more pictures up (instead of reposting them like I am doing slowly right now) and to get a syndication going on this blog. Sort of like a latest picture part of the sidebar...

Bot Repository...

Does anyone know of a place that publically lists IP addresses that are running bots to spam various websites across the web???

My block list is growing and I can't believe that I am the only one being targetted by these spammers... I've alerady written scripts to automatically block them, now I'm moving towards a pre-emptive approach to keep them from getting to my site(s) before they even know it exists...

Need your help!

Everyone and myself are getting those damned 500 Internal Server Errors when they try and post something to one of my entries. As far as I can tell, the only reason for those errors is because of the size of this blog. The usual fix is to just press the back button and try again.

Well, I wrote a custom error page that will be displayed instead of those plain 500 ISE pages. It should automatically (and immediately) go back one page for you... Unfortunately, it uses javascipt to do this so if anyone is having problems (IE: endless loops or something), please email me so I can either remove the page or modify it.

Thanks from the UnknownGeek.

Think I finally got him...

I think I finally un-did the damage by that spammer. It ended up bring a pretty easy fix, much better than what I had written to fix it myself.

First of all, with the help of all those other sites that were being spammed, I just .htaccess'd his a$$ and now he can't even view the site. How do I know? There is exactly one access denied error in my logs every day. ;)

Second, because I was still getting some of those porn sites listed in my referrals, I modified the script itself. It's a little more messy in terms of the script having to do more, but it is straight forward and right to the point. Since in the script itself it checks to see the the current referrer is the same as the last one on the same host, I just added line to see if the current referrer was one of those porn sites. If it was, nothing happens. So the traffic (legitimate or not) still hits the site and is recorded in my logs (which I can see but the public can't), but not in the referrer script (and subsequently on the referrer page). That was really important to me because the last thing I needed was tons of porn popup ads on my computer at work. ;)

Oh and David, there you go. You wanted to know how I did it when I finished. ;)

Datage...

Thanks to a little hack, the reflog now has dates and times...

But, unfortunately, I think I'm gonna have to modify the parsing script now... :\ But hey, I gotta keep busy right? ;)

Hehehe...

The new script seems to have worked. Not like it wouldn't, I just didn't want to have to boil down and write a program like that...

But what are ya gonna do? As long as it's doing the work for me, I don't care. ;)

::deep breath, followed by exhale:: I love brute force hacking. =)

No luck...

No luck on the scripts... I know IP addy blocking is working because I've been able to block myself from seeing the site, and from following a link to it. Even the referrer scripts are blocked...

I think I'm just going to have to break down and hard code a script that will check over the referrer log and erase lines with certain keywords on them (IE: All those damned websites)...

I know that will at least work...

Summer Classes...

On a completely different topic, it looks like I am going to be doing a hefty amount of coding over the summer for the Independent Study that I am taking my college...

I'll be designing a web-based tutorial on TCP/IP with Java applets to better explain the topics in each section of the tutorial. So not only do I get to expand on the Java I already know and apply it to applets, I get to teach myself the core of TCP/IP (something I've wanted to learn for a LONG time because of my interest in networking and firewalls) and how it is used in software interfacing and obviously the Internet.

If all goes well, the teacher would acutally use this tutorial in one of his graduate level courses. Imagine that, an undergraduate writing a manual for graduate students to use. How kewl is that!!! =)