Michael Fleming’s Networked Mind

I was a NANAE (news.admin.net-abuse.email, the Usenet anti-spam frontline) regular back when Sanford Wallace decided - with great fanfare and all manner of self-aggrandisement - to cease email / usenet spamming. $DEITY knows how many cyberpromo-sourced spam messages I  got back in the (pre-DNSBL pre-Bayes pre-anything-but-procmail-filters) day.

Those that thought he’d just lay low for quite a while and keep on spamming were of course dead on the money.  Once a lying, thieving scumbag, always a lying thieving scumbag.

Now this - he’s been banned by court order from MySpace. I’m no fan of Murdoch (I believe News Limited own MySpace now) but a cage-match to the death between the two would be something I’d pay to see.

Enjoy the (lack of) fruits of your dishonesty Spammy…

Sorry to readers / visitors again for another extended outage. This one is again not my doing but this time there’s been a happier ending.

I elected on Friday to churn my ADSL service to Internode (a fairly large ISP here in Australia) as they provide a decent service and I get a discount as a member of the System Administrator’s Guild of Australia.

Their advertised turnaround time was 20 days(!) so I’d put in my intention to close my current DSL service (see previous posts) in 30 days as required by contract. The story of what happened there has already been posted below

This time, I dropped off-air at around 11 (or so Nagios told me) - I actually went home to check the console to see a bunch of CHAP password errors. Opened my ticket with WC and added that I’m offline again, can someone have a look. Of course, they have no idea.

As it turns out, Telstra had switched my line over to the Agile DSLAM used by Internode some time that day - but noone told me, Internode and Webcentral. I only cottoned on when a reboot of my router saw it train using ADSL2+ modulation and a line speed of close to 18Mbps. A call to Internode got me the login details needed, some IP config changes, tickets to update DNS and voila - I’m back baby at a much swifter speed!

So this tale has a happy ending.

I’ve historically been loathe to take on social networking sites, knowing from past experience both as a user and administrator the pitfalls and headaches they can be.

Plus, some people using them are just plain fucking weird and/or gratuitously offensive because they think they’re anonymous (have I got bad news for *you*!).
I prefer to do my networking in 3space (ie the real world for you non-geeks) as the written word tends to be limiting when you want to get an idea / emotion across.

But I’ve relented.

I’m not exactly sure what prompted it, but I’ve signed on for LinkedIn, the nice, polite professional networker’s site and lo, in less than 3 weeks I’ve got 20 connections. Mostly these are old cow-orkers but hey, I’m not knocking it. It’s disgustingly simple to use and for a professional, especially one in technology-related fields beats writing a resume and having some dolt of a headhunter (not) read it.

I’ve also taken on MySpace (see my June 19 post) as I wanted to make a comment on a friend’s profile but can’t without an account.

So far it’s not beaten me yet but it’s interface and general tendency to shove ads down your throat grates a little. I’ll hack on the site when time and patience permit but it’s not a priority as I like my sanity.

On the other hand, it’s refreshingly humbling to be a complete n00b online, as being new to something on the Internet is a feeling I thought I’d forgotten. I’ve not racked up the same number of connections as LinkedIn (lots of spam and bogus friend requests though!) but for what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality[1] - only three friends (that Tom bloke gets around doesn’t he?[2] :-)) but two are the nicest girls I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in Tina and Angie - thanks heaps for the additions, you’ve made my week and I as always wish you well in anything and everything you do.

Next stops: del.icio.us? (I already do Digg and Mugshot)

Oh, and RSVP / Lavalife even though I dread the idea (and I still have only crap shots of myself - which will not help matters.)

*picks up hiking staff and wanders off*

_{[1] Even with the horrible photos in my profile
[2] Yeah, I know he’s the MySpace “guide” - 404 Humour not found there eh?}

It’s Saturday, I’ve got a sore throat and I’m on call. Not particularly happy at the moment but things could be worse.

In pushing out a couple of small updates to the site tonight I remembered that a “bzr merge” will of course set the timestamps on any merged files, so when I synced the changes - pop, updated are all the dates on the pages (as the footer takes the file’s modification time to determine the last change in the page).

As I’d merged my development tree back to the stable one (the website you actually see) on the 5th, there’s now a bunchteen pages which incorrectly think they’ve been updated. Bugger.

I love bazaar as a version control system, especially after experience with CVS and Subversion, but that’s gonna be a pain in the arse. I might put a comparison of my experiences in the tech wiki sometime in the future.

However, my aside has worked well (and the cleanup hasn’t been painful for people) so that’s a good thing. This is also the first post using Drivel (GNOME blog client) so we’ll see how it works.

I also picked up the Zoo Weekly edition with the ever-gorgeous Tina in it. The one page she was on has been scanned and in the gallery if you want a look at it. I’m not much on the magazine (it sits precariously between the wannabe-GQ of Maxim/Ralph and the Playboy-for-Bogans that is Picture / People) but I’ll support a friend anytime.

I’ve put the Litany Against Fear on my Quotes page. For those that don’t know it, it’s from Frank Herbert’s Dune series, used by the Bene Gesserit sisterhood (and Paul Muad’Dib / Leto II) as a means of focusing their minds in times of stress. It’s a handy little mantra, and I may well expound on it’s uses later on…

However, I’ve got a cup of coffee brewing and a DVD to watch, so I’m off.

Cool:

Tina Wallmann has won Zoo Weekly’s Beach Girl Comp 2007

Congratulations! I’m not normally a Zoo Weekly reader but I’ll pick up this one (I hope they’re better to you than they were Lara Bingle)

Mercedes Corby is suing Today Tonight

That’s Karma for you. someone has to keep the 6:30 tabloid trash honest, may as well be via the legal system.

Meh:

The April Fool’s Jokes on the web this year. Most of my regular sites didn’t bother or make much of an effort (Google tried too hard with TISP and Google Paper; Fark had a rather poor “we’ve been hacked” image in Demotivator style, Slashdot a reddit.com ratings system ripoff that managed to be even worse than the pink “OMGPONIES” shite they pulled last year) but there was one unexpected site that came up with the goods.

Whirlpool!

A good April Fool’s joke is like good trolling - subtle and believable. Most Australian internet users are well aware of both the Government’s ineptitude towards technology and it’s overwhelming Conservative desire to keep it’s corporate and moralist masters happy. So when the above went up, the resulting response was the expected Howard-bashing - not until later was it revealed it was actually an AF gag. Good job there Simon (you even had me thinking twice)

I may need to lay low for a while :-):

In Fedora-land news I’ve checked in mod_security packages 2.1.0 for Core 6 and Core 5 (they’ve been in Rawhide for a while now)

It’s going to piss some less-attentive folks i’ll wager, so I’m expecting some bug reports and stick from the userbase. But as it also fixes a moderate vulnerability it had to happen (plus 1.9.x isn’t really well supported anymore)

Expect it to hit the mirrors tomorrow.

I also updated GeoIP to 1.4.2, but while fixing one stupid typo in my contributed code (the fetch-geoip-*.pl scripts) left another brown-paper-bag effort in. Perhaps when 1.4.3 comes out…

TODO:

I need to fill out the Wiki (there’s some basic stuff there now, including my mail stats for you to chuckle at). I might move the Code and Anti-Spam stuff in there too.

More pics in the gallery. I’ve managed to keep my Google results in shape by intelligent redirection via mod_rewrite, and someone’s still looking at them. I figure I may as well put something good in there (”More Tina!” say the peanut gallery?)

It’s arrived!

In case you’ve missed the rest of the site, I’ve pushed the staging branch to the world in it’s black and green(ish) glory. It may not to be to all tastes but at least it’s better than the old layout.

It doesn’t validate yet, but I’m working on that. It’s CSS does, but it still looks weird on IE. Then again, that’s Internet Explorer’s rendering for you. If you don’t like it, well, tough shit.

There’s still a little work to do - I’ll probably put the code and anti-spam stuff in the tech wiki I’ve started up (note to self: populate the wiki with Useful Information) . The Gallery is incomplete too (the Buddha Birthday stuff should have got it’s own album. I’m sure I’ve got more pics of Tina and a couple more gag shots.

The servers are now in better shape - the power supply in Qbert has been replaced with a 450W model (that for some reason closes down after a minute if there’s no keyboard attached at boot!?). It’s been great otherwise. The extra exhaust fan has been a benefit too, the box is much cooler.

I also took the opportunity to move some stuff around - the servers, modems/switches and such have primarily been on the same curcuit, something I’ve now rectified as much as possible. No point in stressing the UPS unless it’s necessary

I’ve currently got a new site design in my internal staging environment, so the old 1990’s style of page you’re currently seeing on my site should be … better.

I’ll be making good use of the Gallery2 software I installed previously, as maintaining the images / galleries is a pain in the arse.

I’m also mulling over a new theme for this weblog, in keeping with the new design. You might have seen a couple of attempts, these are the ones most likely to take this design’s place.

I seem to have “fixed” the entropy-drain problem I had after I upgraded qbert to FC5. It took a little time (and some activity, good old find / -type f | wc -l helped get the numbers up) and a nifty little hack from Folkert Van Heusden in “audio-entropyd” (now part of my repository)

As qbert “the newer” is my old desktop machine, it still has a perfectly functional inbuilt soundcard. With the addition of the above software and a cheap microphone, ambient noise can now add to the entropy pool on the server (so when the neighbours play their techno/emo/Peter Allen at full volume it actually does some good)

On the other hand, my attempts to get Netflow data on the LAN were somewhat disasterous. I packaged up Damien Miller’s flowd (for aggregating and reporting flows) and softflowd (for capturing and pushing flows to the collector) as well as a touch-up for fprobe (however it’s in a bad way and I’ll likely not maintain it in future) I just don’t have the patience on a Sunday to dork around with ported software - I think I’ll just get a Cisco router to generate the flow and a decent collector to deal with and report it

In other plans - I’m going to give the site a complete overhaul. I’ve been using the same techniques as I did a few years ago (see here for an example) and I need to get 2.0ified (just kidding, v1.0 is fine) or at least into 2006. Additionally, I’m not on a P233 with a 4G drive anymore

I may also investigate a replacement blog (probably WordPress as I already have it installed) - no offence to Gavin, it’s good software, but something with some more features would be best. Naturally it would need to have a full RSS import module