Well, I've done it. The serving duties are now performed by the G5. Note that I'm serving off of Tiger the day before it was released. The G5 Mich bough on Wednesday shipped with it even though it wasn't to be released until Friday. This is a nice computer, yo. Oh, and I've taken some steps towards killing some of the spam in the comments, so we're going to turn comments back on and see what happens.
Since I keep getting blogspammed, I've turned comments off. But I like comments. So commments for the post below are on, but only for that post.
In the last month, I have been HEAVILY blogspammed. Due to this, I have turned off comments for my blog. For now, if you want to make a comment to a blog entry, email it to me and I will manually add it. The old comments that I could save are still viewable.
If anyone knows a good way to prevent blogspam with Blosxom, let me know
I have been blog spammed! Many, many comments have been added with comercial advertisements in them. There's also a fair bit of surrealist poetry. I'll porbably post some of it if I remember. I think I've got it all cleaned up now. I'm worried, though, because they were all added to the writeback data files yesterday but the real data files ceased to be in the location the spam ended up several months ago. I am very confused.
A week and 2 days ago, my AC went out. Again. For the third time this year, the fifth time overall. Management finally decided to give me a new condensor/compressor unit. I thought this would be a good thing. It really wasn't. It meant I spent a week and 2 days totally without AC. Now, think back over the last 9 days and remember the weather. Ick. I had to sleep on the couch some. When it gets humid, my heart rate and blood pressure rise dangerously, so I couldn't sleep on the top floor. This is also why I had to come home from Kentucky early. Sorry if I offened anyone, but I was starting to ahve trouble staying alive and it was making me cranky. I wanted to leave before I snapped at someone and pissed people off. I slept for most of the ride home and then for the next 14 hours. Anyway. As rough of a time as I was having, my server was also greatly stressed. The CPU was running HOT. Hotter than I've ever seen it, and I've run it without the heat sink on (don't ask). I had a thermal monitoring program running the whole time, with a script running to shutdown -h now the computer if it reached 55C.
The new AC arrived today, thank god. Once I had cooled off, I took a look at the historic graph of CPU temp that had accumulated. It cracked my ass up. The time scale in the first image is 7 days. You can see that when I tried to do a video import, I almost killed the computer. Then, you can see the day/night cycles as the temperature in the room rose and fell with the sun. Finally, you can see a crash in the temperature when the new AC arrives and starts working.
The second image only contains six hours. You can see a very clear downward trend when the AC starts to function and then a cyclical pattern as the house reaches its target temperature and begins to cycle the AC on and off. Finally, you can see the spike in temperature as I finally feel safe using the computer again.
OK, it's computer education time again. Please read it anyway.
Spam is a problem most people have to deal with because other people are assholes. One of the ways admins have chosen to deal with this is a concept called blacklists. Blacklists are a list of servers on the internet known to send spam. The mailserver will refuse to accept mail from any server on the blacklist. Effectively, the server drops off the face of the earth. All email, spam and letters from grandma, is rejected if it comes from a server on the blacklist. Originally, the idea was employed on a company by company basis with each admin developing their own blacklist. Since lazier is better, someone eventually got the idea to collect all the blacklists into one big list and then let admins around the world download it so that the local admins didn't have to work as hard. In doing this, the local admins gave up control to a set of people they did not know and over whom they have no authority. This, too, worked ok at first. The problem was the spammers caught on and decided to change server addresses faster than the uber-blacklist could keep up. In response to this advance in the arms race the blacklist maintainers began to block classes of addresses. Ooofff, we need a short summary of classes here. When you type in a server name the computer doesn't care about the words it resolves it into an IP address. There's a little bit about that in this previous blog entry. The IP address is four three-digit numbers (if there's leading zeros you can pop them i.e. 065 is 65) in the form 111.222.333.444 For instance, as of this writing the IP of this blog's server was 65.31.10.28 A class is a range of IP addresses. There are three classes of IP addresses that differ in how many addresses they cover. A Class-C is the smallest, it just varies last number of the IP address. So all numbers, for instance, from 192.168.8.0 to 192.168.8.255 (extra points to anyone not Aaron or Owen who knows why it's 0-255). Another way we can write that is 192.168.8.* because the * character means "everything that could go here". A Class-B holds a much bigger number of addresses because the last 2 numbers in the IP address change. In other words a Class-B might be 172.16.*.* Finally, a Class-A is the biggest of all. It holds A LOT of addresses because all but the first number can vary. Or, in our little notation, 10.*.*.* Ok, back to the main point. As spammers got smarter, the began to jump addresses faster than the uber-blacklist could be updated and passed out to mailservers all over the world. So the blacklisters started blocking entire classes of addresses. Let's say a spammer was bouncing around in the Class-C 111.222.333.* so on any given day he could be 111.222.333.444 or 111.222.333.456 or whatever. The entire Class-C gets blacklisted this means the spammer plus 254 other servers are now blacklisted. In response to this spammers started bouncing around Class-Bs which means to blacklist a spammer, you block him and 65,533 other servers. We've now reached the point of blacklisting Class-As which kill 8,257,284 servers at a stroke. Now, obviously, if you blacklist a Class, you're refusing communication from WAY more normal users than spammers. The people who run the uber-blacklists and those that use them will tell you that by hurting innocent bystanders (a.k.a civilians), you put more pressure on the service providers who's networks the spammers (a.k.a. the enemy) ride on to get rid of the spammers. It means that hundreds of thousands of people get denied the ability to communicate to silence a few spammers. In essence, grandma's email becomes collateral damage.
Today, the entire nation of Spain was blacklisted.
There's a term for using the harm of civilians to influence policy to combat your enemy. It's called terrorism.
Well, it's been more than an hour since I've had electricity, and still no AEP truck in sight. I'm assuming that means I will not outlast the outage. I expect to be going down sometime within the next 30 minutes. See you all when power is restored.
derf'
1. The sound a of a dry, yet still pliable, brain running into a solid concept
I've been fighting with this whole webserver thing for a while, with dramatic results yesterday. UNIX divides, for the purposes of file permissions, the world up into three classes of people. The (u)ser who owns the file, the (g)roup the file is assigned to, and any (o)ther person. To each of these classes or people, you can assign a combination of the three permissions of (w)rite, (r)ead, and e(x)cute. You tell the computer how you'd like this done with cute little statements like ug+rwx (ignore the number method for now). The previous statement would have given the user who owns the file and everyone in his group the ability to read, write, and execute the file. That's just background for the problem I've been having. All of the files for my webserver are supposed to belong to the user www who is a member of group staff. To make things a little more secure, it would be nice if any random user on my system couldn't just root around at will in the webserver, so I set all the files to be ug+rwx o-rwx, which should have allowed the webserver and I to merrily work with the files whilst keeping them safe from the grubby hands of a mere user. Problem was, it locked me out too. Grrr...
Off I go, rooting through the cold and heartless realm of NetInfo. It turns out that even though I'm the owner of the box and an Administrator, am, in fact, not a member of group staff. After serious perusal of man files, I find out how to add myself to staff. Done and done. It didn't make a damn bit of difference. I was still locked out of the files of group staff. WTF, mate?. Three days later, I had an epiphany.
You have to log out and back in for the changes to the NetInfo Database to take effect.
Derf!
Messed up a backup, wiped the drive. Trying to figure out what to do about it. This is sort-of backup from the laptop. Don't expect anything new from me till it's all fixed.
As I'm sure you've noticed, I've made some changes to the blog. To produce what you see now (and the more radical restyling that moves the columns around that you might see next week), I didn't have to change a single character of HTML (or in this case XHTML cause I'm with the standards an shit). All of the styling is done it a separate CSS stylesheet that doesn't influence the code at all. The typeface used is Times New Roman (it was Verdana, btw) set to 1.0em. If you don't like the font size, change it because it's not under my control. Yes, that's right, it's you, not me, that gets to control the size of the text. The rest of the page is designed to not break regardless of what you do to the text size, so have at. To those unfortunates among you who are running Windows, I'm sorry. This is my first layout that looks VASTLY better on MacOS than on Windows. I was not aware before tonight that there is a big difference in the way MacOS and Windows handle fonts, but there is. The colors are also coming out much muddier on Windows. I have no idea why. Finally, IE draws a fugly looking border around the boxes, whereas Mozilla is doing a nice, clean, double line. Oh, even more finally, MacIE is a bitch and doesn't collapse horizontal margins, so the few of you running MacIE might see some boxes on top of each other. Get a different browser.
At this point, I'm soliciting comments about the styling. Do you like it more or less than the old, gray way? Is there anything you'd like me to change? Anything you'd like to see? Let me know!