Techie :: Techno ::: March 2007 Archives

I've spent the last few hours in ICANN meetings where the topic of discussion has been the future of WHOIS. It's a very hot topic, though I do get the distinct feeling that:

• ICANN meetings involve a lot more discussion than decision-making
• A non-American viewpoint is not overly welcome

What ICANN are trying to decide is how to deal with WHOIS data. They want to remove a lot of the detail from the whois, but they seem to have placed far too much emphasis on US legislation. They seem to have ignored the EU data privacy concerns. You can read the document being discussed here

The first session of the day was discussing new gTLDs and IDN. Some of the salient points that came out of the session is that the decision making process is long and complicated. IDN - promote internet usage among non-English speakers (among other things) New gTLDs - avoiding issues - reserved names. An interesting discussion was held about the reserved names and other criteria.

I've been using a Microsoft Natural keyboard for the last couple of years both at home and in the office. The time has come for me to replace the keyboard at home, as it's beginning to have issues with certain keys etc., So what kind of keyboard should I get? I've looked at some of the really cool projector style ones, but they're totally impractical. I've got quite large hands and hate small keyboards I don't mind noisy keys, but the quieter the better

Over the last few months we've all been hearing about the PlayStation 3. First there was expectation, but then that turned to disappointment as the European launch was postponed until March. So with the launch only a few days away what do you think? Have you booked yours? Do you even care? Personally I won't be buying one, as I don't like consoles, though I know a lot of people who are going to jump at the chance, but the price is more than a little offputting. At over 600 euro a pop it would have to be truly impressive!

I only spotted this today, but it's still open for another few days, so get on there! Dell Linux Survey It would be great if Dell offered people the option of choosing a linux distro preinstalled on desktops and laptops. I'm getting rather tired of having to reformat them and others are wasting a lot of time trying to get refunds for an OS they have no intention of using.

As I mentioned yesterday, I was having some "interesting" issues getting Ubuntu to play nice with my new graphics card (GeForce 7900GS). You can get a full spec of the card on the Nvidia site. It's a pretty powerful card: Graphics Bus Technology PCI Express Memory 256MB Memory Interface 256-bit Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 42.2 Fill Rate (Billion pixels/sec) 9 Vertices/Second 822.5 Million Pixels per clock (peak) 20 RAMDACs (MHz) 400 While it will work without the extra power cable plugged in the nVidia control centre will give you a warning as soon as you boot into Windows. Under Ubuntu the opposite is the case. If you try to install Ubuntu with the card's power cable plugged in you will end up bashing your head against your keyboard (at least I did!), as the installer doesn't have the correct drivers to handle it. Solution - unplug the power lead. Install Ubuntu as normal. Once you've done that you can pop over to Alberto Milone's site and grab the .deb that you need. Run the following command as root (use sudo if you're that way inclined): dpkg -i envy_0.9.1-0ubuntu3_all.deb It will probably whine about a load of dependencies being missing - ignore that for the moment. You can then run: apt-get install -f Which basically tells it to download any required packages and install the .deb Once installed you'll find that you've now got a new icon under Application > System Tools Run "envy" and you will be prompted for your admin password. You can then choose how you want to install it. I went with the autoinstall. Once the autoinstall is run it may prompt you to reboot your PC. Don't. Shutdown your PC completely. Once it is safely shutdown plug the graphics card power cable back into the PC and restart. If X still crashes on boot, then unplug the power again. Boot into recovery mode, login as root (if you have it enabled) and then run: dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg If you don't have root enabled simply run the command as: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg The driver you need is "nvidia". Follow the reconfiguration wizard all the way through and remember to set the screen resolutions you want to use. Use the spacebar to select them. Shut down the PC again and plug the power cable back into the graphics card. It should boot properly and X should work This worked for me and I'm currently running at 1280*1024 (I may up that - just need to check what the monitor will support). Your mileage may vary and I may have left out a stage - I wasn't documenting this as I was doing it.

I have a nice legal copy of Windows XP Pro. Unfortunately it predates any of the service packs, so when I went to install my new PC I ran into an interesting issue. The intel motherboard I'm using is from Intel® 946 Express Chipset Family. Of course it comes with all the drivers required on CD. Unfortunately Intel work on the basis that whoever is installing XP will be using a new disk. I'm not. I keep moving the install from PC to PC. I think it's installed on the 3rd or 4th set of hardware since I first got it. I'm probably not alone. Normally I'd download any extra drivers that I need, but the one driver that you need is required for the LAN card to work ie. no driver == no net connection. (Of course this isn't an issue under Ubuntu where it all just works out of the box (apart from the graphics card, but that's a different story)) Solution? Grab the required file from someone else's pc and drop it onto the desktop (as it's required for USB to work properly a USB key won't work - I tried) The file, which is tiny by the way, is called usbehci.sys and you can read all about the MS patches / updates in their knowledgebase And for those of you who don't feel like wasting aeons looking for the damn thing you can download it here

I've just installed this PC and have run into some interesting issues with the graphics drivers. Which nvidia drivers should I be using? If I try "nvidia" and change the resolution settings X crashs completely, so I'm stuck with a really low resolution which is making me miserable :( Any suggestions?

What OSS software do you recommend for windows, apart from the obvious ones like Firefox and Thunderbird. Are there any other essential tools that you use on a regular basis? I've started a thread on this over here

Years ago when I got my first server I remember installing some scripts to check its integrity and warn me about attacks. I was amazed and quite frightened by the number of SSH attempts. I soon learnt, however, that this was quite normal. It maybe worrying, but it's normal. Put a server on a public IP and people will try to crack it. There's no avoiding that. Well, there is, but it's a bit impractical to disconnect a web server from the internet :) So what can you do? One of the solutions is to use iptables to block the IPs of failed login attempts. If someone (or something) makes more than X connection attempts from a particular IP then you block it. Of course that's easy if you can program. I can't! Luckily I don't have to, as there are solutions like the rather excellent Fail2Ban available:

Fail2ban scans log files like /var/log/pwdfail or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans IP that makes too many password failures. It updates firewall rules to reject the IP address.

So not only can you block SSH attacks, you can also use it to defend yourself from other bruteforce attempts. There are debian / Ubuntu versions available, so all you need to do (as root) is run: apt-get install fail2ban This will install the daemon and its basic config, which is to silently block SSH attacks. You can easily customise the configuration by editing /etc/fail2ban.conf The developers have left nice clear comments in the file, so even I was able to make the necessary changes, including whitelisting my own IPs ie. you don't want to lock yourself out just because you've forgotten your login details. There's also a nice writeup here which goes into some depth about the various options available.

RedHat have released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. From what I've heard and seen this could be a really exciting release, as they have placed a lot of emphasis on virtualisation Of course Centos has already started work on a 5.* release, with a beta currently available. I'll be interested to see what kind of things people can do with this new shiny toy :)

Every time I install Ubuntu I end up struggling with changing the default editor to use vi or vim. If only I'd found this page before! So simple! All you have to do is run (as root): update-alternatives --config editor

If you are using Firestats it is recommended that you upgrade ASAP

Last weekend I must have been bored or simply crazy, as I bought several domains and complete websites. The main acquisition was this discussion forum which took my fancy partially because it had a reasonably good domain name, a nice enough custom skin and vbseo preinstalled (saving me on license costs). Moving it from the previous host to one of my servers didn't take that much work, though I have come to hate cpanel backups with a passion! While they do a good job of maintaining the important files they also include a lot of junk that isn't much use on a vanilla server (ie. one without any form of control panel). I'm a lot happier using scp, rsync and vim :) I also finished getting the last of the important content off palermo. Niall was heading up to the data centres this afternoon, so he was good enough to move my "baby" into its new home in Interxion. It's been reinstalled with the latest release of Ubuntu (I owe that man pints!) and is currently sitting there doing very little.. that will change!

As I work for a hosting company that monitors a LOT of network traffic data it's only natural that my own DSL line is being "watched" (it makes talking to our ISP a lot more interesting!) If you look at the screenshot below you will see a very big difference in the connection from around lunchtime today: So what changed? The only thing that changed was the firmware on the Linksys WRT54G. Nothing else has changed in my setup. I'm not complaining, but the difference is startling. If only I had known :)

As I mentioned before, I have been using a number of different linux firmware versions on my LinkSys WRT54G. For the last few weeks I was using SveaSoft's firmware, as the previous firmware had caused me headaches. The Sveasoft solution worked quite well, but I had some crazy routing issues which left me rather confused. It was as if certain blocks of the internet simply ceased to exist! In any case I decided to dump SveaSoft for OpenWRT. The routing issues seem to have vanished and I can visit sites that were "banned" again!! Hopefully the connection issues will also have been resolved, though I won't know for sure for a few hours.

A couple of days ago I came across a post on Ken's blog about the new Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann website. It seems that it's now being talked about in other places. I'm not a designer, so I won't get into the entire debacle about whether Irish designers are "good enough", though you won't find me using non-Irish designers anytime soon... What does rile me however are a couple of other things about the new site:

1. It's not hosted in Ireland
2. The .ie and .com are aliased not redirects, so it's splitting on the search results

Point 1 is directly related to point 2 from an SEO perspective. From a business perspective I think it is deplorable that a state funded organisation would choose to host their online presence outside this country: blacknight@siracusa:~$ geoiplookup www.comhaltas.com GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States Irish tax payers money funds organisations like Comhaltas and the GAA (who obviously don't think Ireland is good enough for them either) Back in the 1990s I would have understood why companies and organisations chose to host their websites outside Ireland. My first few sites were hosted in the USA in the late 1990s simply because there was so little choice available in the Irish market, and what was available was expensive and lacking in features (ie. no php, mysql or anything else). It's 2007. Hosting in Ireland has come a very long way, with most of the larger Irish hosting providers actually running their own networks etc., Just take a look at the membership list of INEX these days!

Anyone who works with me learns very quickly that I am a coffee addict. I can go for hours without a cigarette, but if I can't get decent coffee I get quite upset.
While discussing how much people were paying for clicks recently a new service, HitTail, was mentioned by one of the regulars.
So, as my curiosity was piqued I signed up for an account last night. Then another. And another. And another. Anyone notice a pattern emerging? :)

So what is Hit Tail?

According to themselves:

HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site. It's that simple.

They forgot to mention that it's highly addictive!
Signing up for an account only takes a couple of seconds, after which you are presented with the single line of Javascript you need to add to your site. You need to make sure that it loads on every single page view, so if you're using a template system of some kind adding it to the footer would make sense. Once logged in you are presented with the following screen:

Over time each section is populated with the search queries so that you can easily see what is driving traffic to your site.
What makes it interesting is that it doesn't bore you with unnecessary details.
You get keywords / phrases and you can easily see which search engines are driving them to your site.
Forget about all the other details. If you want those look at something else.
The documentation on their site explains this very clearly!
This is an area that so many other log analysis services / software fall down on.
Instead of using plain English they get caught up in confusing jargon.
If I wanted to read jargon without actually learning how something worked I'd read "man" pages from the command line - thanks!

So what can I say about Hit Tail...

On the plus side:

It's really cool! Though it's so damned addictive that I can easily while away several hours just exploring what weird queries people are using to end up on sites I manage. So far I've learnt that people are arriving on this site while searching for some really obscure things, while others were looking for more mainstream topics that I hadn't realised that I ranked well for.

On the negative side:

The UI isn't that great. It's functional, but some of the colours contrast badly rendering some sections almost impossible to view. A prime example of this is the delete button:
 

Light pink on a yellow background?
Was the designer on crack?
Was there even a designer?
The other thing that is maddening is that you have to signup for a new account for each site you want to track.
While a single account may suit someone with only one site this tool is not really aimed at them.
It's going to prove a lot more useful / popular with online marketers who manage multiple sites and campaigns.
And we all have enough usernames and passwords to remember already, thank you very much!
Most of the issues related to the UI could be fixed quite easily. There are plenty of very talented people out there who would be able to help them get it "right", because it's the kind of thing that can make the difference between a success and a failure.

 Although the service is currently in "beta" (maybe as a fashion statement, who knows?) it seems to work well and there is some mention of a premium service. If the pricing on the premium service isn't crazy I'd probably pay for it, though I'd have to actually act on its suggestions etc., for that to be worth my while.

I love reading marketing material. Sometimes you learn something new. Sometimes you giggle. Sometimes you giggle so much you fall off your chair. According Amas' latest report:

Almost two-thirds of businesses, or 64%, had websites in 2006, a rise of four percentage points on the previous year.

Wow! Are they talking about the same country I live and work in? Oh wait.. there's an explanatory footer:

Sources: Central Statistics Office: Information Society and Telecommunications 2006, survey of 12,219 companies employing 10 or more

(my emphasis) So what does that mean? Do companies with fewer than 10 staff not count? I doubt if their owners would be overly impressed to find out that they're not actually counted.. Or is it simply a "clever" ploy to make people feel that we're doing so much better online than other countries? A very large proportion of Irish businesses still do not have websites. They *may* have a domain, but all you have to do is take a walk through any Irish town to see how many are still using free hotmail.com (and similar) email addresses. A holding page does not a website make. I don't know, but it sounds like pointless headline grabbing if you ask me. Of course any report that suggests that meta content is as important as theirs does would make me worry.. Everyone else has been saying the opposite for ages ... Maybe they've rehashed a report from a few years ago when it did actually matter as much as they claim. Don't get me wrong, meta content is important, but whereas a few years ago the meta tags, such as "description" and "keywords" were essential that is no longer the case, as so many online marketers were gaming the search engines. In some respects what really bugs me about the report is the way they talk in absolutes, as if their "findings" were "gospel". Press releases can be amusing, but they can also backfire badly when someone examines them a little bit more closely. A recent example of that being Captivate's press release that was covered by ENN, then slated by RedCardinal and ENN's blog! The moral of the story, if there is one, be sure that you can actually lead by example of know what you are talking about before trying to grab a couple of column inches .... Then again, who actually pays any attention to any of these press releases? Are we all producing press releases to keep ourselves happy or simply to provide sales leads for publications' marketing departments? (I always get offered plenty of ad space when we run an ad in a national paper and get plenty of useless sales calls after a press release from people selling to me NOT buying - obviously!)

I use a linksys WRT54G on my home network. It was running the standard Linksys firmware at one point, but I've been running a variety of Linux variants on it over the last few months. This evening, while looking for information on OpenWRT I stumbled across HotSpotSystem.com. While several of the alternative firmwares offer hotspot functionality this is the first one I've come across that offers a builtin revenue stream. I'm not sure how the revenue share works with the commercial offerings from Bitbuzz, Eircom, BT etc., but this alternative does look very appealing. Pity I don't live somewhere where I could actually make use of it :)

Niall gave me a link to this Safe for work, but a little risque :)

I just saw a post about someone looking for the most prolific bloggers (via). The criteria they're using is quite simple:

1. It must be a blog. 2. It must be a legitimate blog...that adds content, any kind, to the blogosphere. 3. There must be 1,000 or more posts at ONE blog, not a total of 1,000 at two, three or more different blogs.

1 - That's easy enough 2 - It depends on your definition of legitimate and possibly your definition of "content". It might have been better if there was some form of quality rating. A lot of blogs, both Irish and international, do not really produce much original content and when they do it's really boring. Yes, yes, yes there are exceptions to that, but in percentage terms they are very small. 3 - 1000 or more posts on one blog. That strikes me as a rather silly restriction. Someone like Darren Rowse is prolific and posts to several blogs regularly. I haven't done an actual post count, but I am probably more prolific in terms of post count than a lot of others if I count the other blogs that I manage. This blog alone has close to 1200 posts! But is quantity the only barometer? It's not the size of the tractor, it's how you plough the field (though the context for that was quite different *cough*)

Mod_rewrite is an incredibly powerful tool and a lot of us would be very lost without it!
 A couple of quick "tricks" using mod_rewrite - partially to help myself find them again in the future:

 Redirecting domain.tld to www.domain.tld
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.tld/$1 [L,R=301]

 This can be put in a .htaccess in the website's root.
It will match any HTTP request that is NOT for www.domain.tld and rewrite it to www.domain.tld

Changing File Extensions

If you have changed file extensions on a site, for example moving all files from being ".htm" to ".php" then this line of code will save you a lot of hassle.
Not only will it help with any inbound links, but also for any internal links that you need to edit, but haven't:

 RewriteRule ^(.*).htm$ $1.php [R=301]

the first file extension in the line is the one you are replacing, while the second is the replacement.

Wordpress is beginning to become a little like phpbb2 - a security nightmare. Last night I got a "heads up" from one of our sysadmins that there was another security release, as the Wordpress download servers had been cracked! Lovely! I upgraded this install as soon as I heard, but of course I forgot to update some permissions etc., which is why it was a wee bit broken until a few minutes ago. Running around patching and upgrading blogs every few days is not my idea of fun. If it was only once every six months it would be one thing, but the number of holes that Wordpress seems to be developing of late may force me to rethink my choice of software in the future. Movable Type is looking more and more attractive every day! Full story here