Techie :: Techno ::: August 2005 Archives
We're currently seeking applicants for a technical support/ sysadmin role. Full details here
I suppose it was inevitable that 419 scams would eventually start using Ireland as a source for their scams:
Continue reading Irish 419 scam.
There are a number of technologies currently being developed to help combat spam, phishing fraud and other email related abuse.
One which has received a considerable amount of attention in recent months is SPF. Another, which may not have attracted quite as much attention, is Yahoo's domain keys.
In both instances the technology is designed to help verify who is authorised to send mail from a particular server, hostname or IP address.
The problem, if you aren't a diehard geek, is actually identifying potential fraud in your email client.
Server-side (at the MTA level) implementation comes in a number of forms, but at the client level (desktop) the number of email clients that actually check for valid SPF records (or domain keys) is thin on the ground.
For Thunderbird you can install Joshua Tauberer's handy little extension which checks both SPF and Yahoo Domain Keys
I'd love to hear of other email clients that support these kind of checks.
I've always been fascinated by spammers. They send millions of emails out in the hope that enough people will be duped into clicking on the link and visiting whichever site they are promoting or buying into whichever service they are selling.
The phishing emails vary in their complexity, but you would have thought that the majority of people would have learnt to be more cautious by now.
Unfortunately that is not always the case.
I still see people offering to send me their credit card details via email.
We still see credit card fraud.
We sometimes see paypal fraud.
How much money the fraudsters are making and how many scams are committed is hard to say, especially as people are unlikely to notice or report small amounts (scam a few thousand people for a euro - it's a lot of money, but I doubt if the victims would notice it immediately)
In the last month I've seen the usual number of credit card scammers, with the hapless victims contacting us in some cases looking for more information. Apart from an IP address (belonging to a major ISP) there isn't that much information that you can provide.
Some time ago I wrote about setting up a local mirror for a DNS blacklist using RBLDNSD and Bind.
Although that works fine and definitely gives a speed up to servers on the network I'd really like to know what is happening ie. how many queries.
Continue reading Graphing RBLDNSD queries using MRTG.
I've been trying to get the new look search.ie online for the last couple of months in my spare time.
However, due to a number of factors, this has been dragged out for an inordinate length of time.
I decided to launch it this afternoon (soft launch :) ) as quite a few people had been emailing me about link submissions.
There are probably bugs and issues, but I can deal with them as they arise
Some people's efforts at SEO are simply annoying.
Spamming people after grabbing email addresses using some badly written bit of software is not the way to win friends online.
Unfortunately some people obviously missed that message:
Hi, I took a look at your site a couple of hours ago... and I want to tell you that I'd really love to trade links with you. I think your site has some really good stuff related to my site's topic of car rental and would be a great resource for my visitors as it deals with some great aspects of car rental that I'd like to give my visitors more information about. In fact, I went ahead and added your site to my Car Rentals i Resource Directory at http://xxxxxx.com/carrentalsinireland Is that OK with you? Can I ask a favor? Will you give me a link back on your site? I'd really appreciate you returning the favor. Thanks and feel free to drop me an email if you'd like to chat more about this. Best wishes, XXXX xxxxx.com info@xxxxx.com P.S. When you do link back, there's some suggested code to use at http://xxxxxx.com/addurl //(Links removed to stop them gaining from this post) Would somebody please explain what the connection between car rentals and hosting is? I can't see it. Any suggestions would be welcome. I am tempted to reply along the lines of: "Dear Muppet If you'd actually visited our site I would have to question your sanity. Love Michele"
If you have the inclination to write your blog from your desktop as opposed to via the web interface then you can. There maybe reasons why you would want to do this, though personally I am so used to using the web interface I can't see too much point.
Continue reading Blogging from your desktop on linux (Ubuntu).
The issue of data retention in Europe has been raising its ugly head with increasing frequency over the last 12 months.
Continue reading Data retention.
Eurid's clarification on resellers came as a shock to many in the industry, but nobody seems overly concerned.
Continue reading Revisiting .EU.
Colm MacCárthaigh posted details of the latest upgrade to the Heanet FTP server earlier today.
If you are interested in high-spec servers then this may interest you:
ftp.heanet.ie now comprises over 12 Terabytes of storage, 32 Gigabytes of RAM and a new 136 Gigabyte RAID-0 caching layer for popular content. We hope that this level of storage will unperin an effective service, meeting current and future requirements. ftp.heanet.ie's network connectivity has also been significantly upgraded and there are changes which may of interest; ftp.heanet.ie serves content over FTP, HTTP and RSYNC and is available over IPv4 and IPv6. Clients should correctly resolve the IP version supported; however, the ftp.ipv4.heanet.ie and ftp.ipv6.heanet.ie records facilitate manual specification of the IP version to be used. For some time now ftp.heanet.ie has tagged all outgoing traffic with a differential services code-point (DSCP) IP header value of 0x08 which is the conventional value assigned to "Less than Best Effort" (LBE). This means that even with a minimal IP Quality of Service (QoS) configuration on your network it is possible to de-prioritise traffic from ftp.heanet.ie. This also enables HEAnet and GÉANT to ensure that ftp.heanet.ie traffic does not contend with customer traffic. ftp.heanet.ie now supports Jumboframes of up to 9000 bytes in size Traditionally ethernet and general internal traffic is restricted to sending frames of 1500 bytes in size. A file 1 Megabyte in size took about 750 sent packets to download. With Jumboframes, this can now be achieved in fewer than 120 packets. This can represent a major speed increase, and we've been able to download entire DVD ISO's in 9 seconds in testing with jumboframes enabled. HEAnet currently extends jumboframe connectivity to the GEANT network. ftp.heanet.ie now sports 4 Gigabit/sec of load-balanced out-bound connectivity, and 2 Gigabit/sec of resilient in-bound connectivity. This connectivity is in place in order to cope with future peak demands and is not intended for immediate use, so rate-limits at 1.5 Gigabit/sec are currently in-place. Further to this, we are committed to ensuring no contention with other general internet or customer traffic through the use of QoS configurations. We have also taken the opportunity of the migration to revise and renew the content of the mirror. Over three years of usage, some files have become corrupted due to local and remote problems. We rely on user reports of such errors and always try to rectify them as quickly on possible, however now we are in a position to do more; We have re-synced from scratch many of our popular items. For example, we have re-synced the entire RedHat tree (some 256Gb of content) and manually verified its contents. We have also checked some 50,000 Debian packages and re-synced approximately 100 from our Debian archive. We now have the CPU and spare I/O capacity to start automated checksum verification for as much of our content as we are in a position to verify, and are putting this system in place.Via ILUG Further details on the heanet site
Tom:"Blog posts for sale II":http://www.tomrafteryit.net/blog-posts-for-sale-ii/ seems to have picked up on one word that I used in my earlier post and is ignoring the rest of what I was saying. I mentioned the word "bribe" and he seems to have misinterpreted me entirely:
So what Michele is saying is that bribery for a review is alright but bribery for a positive review is not. While Michele’s is definitely an interesting perspective it is certainly not one that I would subscribe to.If that was true then none of the reviews in any magazine or newspaper would be honest. Maybe I'm missing something? Bernie:"Bernie(writes for The Examiner and other newspapers)":http://www.tomrafteryit.net/blog-posts-for-sale-ii/#comment-1388 raises an interesting point, however, about being sent tech gadgets on a regular basis. I would still contend that being given a "toy" in return for a review is not a bad thing. If you only reviewed the things you bought you would either review a very limited number of items or bankrupt yourself. I get sent some IT products that vendors feel could "benefit" our business. In some cases I have to pay for them, whereas in others I don't. Should I feel guilty if someone is trying to win our business or favour? I don't think so. Book publishers, for example, regularly send literary editors hundreds of Euros worth of books in the hope that they will be mentioned. It would be impossible for any publication no matter its scope to review every single book that it is sent. Should they return the books to the publishers? Should they feel guilty if they give a book a bad review? If you are given press passes to a concert where the face value of the tickets is over 100 Euro are you obliged to give a good review? Of course the person you are asking to review the product should be qualified to review it. Tom, for example, is a Mac user. I am not. It would make sense to ask Tom to review a new Mac gadget. It would be rather illogical to ask me to do so.
One of the great things about blogs is that you can link to other people's sites and make reference to your sources.
Continue reading Annotating your posts.
Iraq's new government has been authorised to manage its TLD by ICANN
Continue reading Iraq gets its domains back.
Continue reading Usability?.
Running a website off a CMS (content management system) makes a lot of sense, especially if you want to maintain uniformity and allow publishing of new content with ease.
There are, however, a huge number of CMS solutions to choose from.
How can you make the right decision?
Continue reading Choosing a CMS.
I constantly experiment with plugins and hacks for wordpress.
Sometimes they bring extra functionality. Other times they reduce this blog's usability.
Continue reading Wordpress experiments.
Comment spam can be a pain.
Email spam renders email unusable.
Being able to block both easily would be the "Holy Grail" for many bloggers.
Continue reading Stopping the spammers in their tracks.
Ubuntu's "Music Player" is Rhythmbox and does not come with mp3 support by default. I noticed this when I tried to load all my mp3s into it :)
Rectifying this situation is very simple:
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-plugins
Problem solved - thank you Google
Getting hit by /. is a dream for many geeks. Fame!
But how would your server cope if it was running off a DSL line on old hardware?
Brandon Harper got slashdotted a couple of months ago and lived to tell the tale!
(via)
Anybody who reads this blog knows that I'm ever so slightly opposed to spam, spammers and their ilk.
Talking to Irish SMEs on a regular basis you realise fairly quickly that email is more than just a business tool.
Continue reading Irish Spam - ignorance is bliss …..
Quantifying the size of the hosting business, be it on a national, European or international scale, is something that fascinates people in the business and its observers.
Continue reading Quantifying the hosting business.
RTE is to offer a high-quality video stream to broadband users in the 32 counties.
Continue reading RTE to offer high-quality streaming video.
Being able to track your web statistics is important for commercial sites. For personal sites it may not be as important, but it still nice to know where people are coming from and what they are looking for.
There are a number of open source log analysers that work with Apache, however my preferred choice is Awstats.
Continue reading Configuring Awstats with Apache 2 on Ubuntu.
I mentioned recently that the Netvisionaries had been launched officially.
It transpires that the Golden Spiders intend to run their "awards" on the same evening.
Although I would like to think that the Irish 'net industry is vibrant I would be either naive or foolish to think that you could run two award ceremonies on the same night.
Then again the Golden Spiders aren't exactly in the same league as the IIA awards.
Whereas the IIA awards are open, transparent and democratic you would have to be forgiven for thinking that the Golden Spiders were some kind of dinosaur that the great freeze forgot.
I already posted last year on the merits, or lack thereof, associated with some of these awards.
However, whether they hold any merit or not, how can they possibly gain from running their award ceremony on the same night as the Netvisionary ones?
Take it from a pure business perspective.
Both awards rely on their sponsors to make the event viable. Last year the Golden Spiders were unable to find sponsors for all award categories until shortly before the event.
The Net Visionaries, on the other hand, had already secured sponsors for most of the categories prior to the press launch.
In terms of quality, which is quite subjective in some areas, the entrants in the two awards last year were at two different extremes of the quality spectrum.
NetVisionaries awarded innovative entrepeneurs such as Aodhan Cullen who runs Statcounter, which is probably the most popular free stat service on the web at present. The fact that it is actually Irish owned and run is probably ignored by a lot of its users, but it is and should be lauded by the Irish 'net community.
So who stands to gain from this kind of move?
