Phillbo’s Blog Site

With one of our core geeks aways with glandular fever, I’ve had to commit myself to full time BOFH duties, and a cranky bastard I have been on some days. But I’ve had the opportunity to flex my brain, and I have been wrapped with some of the progress I have been making.

It is not every day you take over a 2nd level ccTLD name space, so that has been a big buzz for me being involved in that, but I am not extremely tired.  Maybe the DNS and I will become good friends, but who knows what the future holds. At this present moment, I am living outside of the matrix, but I am not sure for how long.

Last weekend was splendid. I caught up with aunties, uncle, cousins, more cousins, sister, brother in law, and nephews, and my folks. A true family affair. I had a good time. I still made a promise to look at a computer problem for a friend, and I will endeavor to make another visit to Geelong very soon.  This past week in contrast has been a roller coaster ride, but mainly lacking sleep. I had to crash out today - and catch up on sleep. Working odd hours, and early mornings is now taking its toll.

Working more and more in a system administration role, I find myself in the constant battle of taking on thousands of disturbances in the universe known as the Internet. Which also reminds me, its about time to update some other code too. But back to my story.

Tonight I discovered a bot hammering the BSD server that I am responsible for maintaining. Looking at various ways of blocking traffic with firewalls, Apache conf/htacess files, I decided to go with a PHP option - as the file being abused by this posting spammer was an active PHP script. Placing this code in the header of the PHP script has proven to be most effective, however Google will now get even more traffic. Maybe I should divert the traffic to my blog? *cough cough*

This little bit of code used at the top of my PHP script has been a saving grace, but I am sure I can improve on it once I get some much needed sleep.

// Abuse re-director

//$deny = array("80.86.84.65", "");
$deny = array("80.86.84.65",);
if (in_array ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], $deny)) {
   header("location: http://www.google.com/");
   exit();
}

// end of abuse re-director

Now maybe I should just re-direct it to 127.0.0.1? Once I have tested this theory, I may implement it, but I will definitely need to sleep on it. I hope Google forgive me for referring them unwanted traffic.

But after much consideration, I’ve determined that the person running this script has a default apache page running (their own web server), so now they are making querying themselves. This should buy me time until morning, as I am in desperate need of sleep.

Well after an unexpected but very quick run down to Geelong on Sunday evening, I arrived home at the midnight hour.

Jason our system administrator thought it would be better if he exercised his BOFH attributes, and sent me off to the data centre by myself to install the two servers and a firewall. (How hard could this be really?)

I woke up at 7am, and headed off to North Melbourne with the servers and firewall. The universal rails provided with these new Dell servers could not be adjusted to fit into these cabinets. I moved the brackets, adjusted them, but they could not be fitted. The only way I could make them fit was by punching out these spot welded bolts. Without a good screw driver and a hammer, not a good option. The other option was to file them down, or break them off, and these options were not ideal either, especially as I was already in the data centre. After several hours, I was determined that these rails were never going to fit after trying every possible position amongst different fitting brackets, but if I was wise, I should have worked it out in like 15 minutes. You could say I tried almost every move of the server fitting Kama Sutra - if it does exist. I then had to take the smarter option.

I had to spend more money and “order” a shelf for the cabinet from the data centre. The shelf was also heavier than it looked. In reality, the shelf always remains in the data centre, so I am not sure if If the company will ever get to take the shelf away from the data centre, but it looks like we have purchased it none the less. After dropping one of the brackets/locking brace for the server shelf, which fell through the hole at the base of the cabinet (we had a the bottom of a quarter rack), I managed to fish it out with some long noose pliers and a long screw driver. These spring loaded brackets weren’t secure (as the screws actually tighten them), and they too kept falling out while I was trying to fit the cabinet shelf. The other problem is that the shelf had to be mounted close to the base of the cabinet, to be efficient with space. My hands couldn’t even fit underneath this shelf, yet I managed to screw the screws in the brackets - without any visual aids. After placing the brackets, and slowly leveling the shelf on one side, I fitted two corners, but they didn’t line up at the other end. I was getting very frustrated at this stage. I had to loosen them again, just to move the shelf back in proper alignment. After getting it absolutely perfectly, I finally got the servers and firewall installed on the shelf.

So after stuffing with rails, playing hide and seek with brackets and screws, and fitting the shelf, 3.5 hours ticked by. The actually fitting and testing of the new servers and firewall took 10 minutes. I am happy they worked as planned.

Now if our BOFH System Admin came with me, I am sure the job would have been easily done in half an hour to an hour tops. The moral of the story is, never let the BOFH get away with sleeping in when a job is to be done. The other moral of the story is, I suck as a fitter. I am sure my Dad and sister have much better fitting skills than I do, and both of them are far more practical with their hands. I will know now to be prepared, and to stop flogging a dead horse.

Well tonight, I had the task of prepping new workstations on a network. Easy done you would assume.

I arrive, and no DVD-ROM drives in either workstation, so my Ghost Base DVD installs didn’t work. The Server has Ghost Images of the old workstations that were stolen. But alas, Ghost could not recognise these new fandangled network cards. Also noticing the new systems came with a new external hard disk, I tried the imporbable. I copied the images across to the portable hard disk, launch a Ghost floppy, and restored a system specific image to the workstation. Well what surprised me the most was that Windows booted up without the slighest hiccup. I had to uninstall some old hardware drivers, and install drivers for the new hardware, but it surprisingly worked. Hopefully the DVD drives will arrive by Friday, so I can do a cleaner install from the master Ghost images.

It was something that I was never expecting, but somehow it managed to work.  Perseverance looks like it won the golden hand tonight. The only sad thing is, I missed out on getting to my tennis club. You can’t win them all.

After much procrastination, I’ve finally moved my blog to Wordpress.

bBlog was good, functional, and worked well, but I got hammered by spam on track backs. So comment spam wasn’t the problem, and installing “captcha” didn’t resolve the issue. The base code of bBlog hadn’t been updated in years, and hacked up scripts worked only sometimes. I had also hacked my blog code so much that even implementing other user’s code was a challenge in itself. I have modified my comment viewer to allow deletions of 5000 messages, and boy did it time out.

I’ve also decided I shall get a Flickr account, as there is no way I can publish gigabytes of photos on my server. Well I could, but it would take up valuable disk space. I still need to put up photos of my overseas travels, so I shall get working on that straight away. Well maybe after I check out the other features of Wordpress.

Well this week has been one of the busiest on record for me. But it has a nice ring to it still.

Last week I was on the hacker hunt, and got some nice firewall rules in place protecting the Windows production server.

Two nights ago, one of our unsecured UNIX boxes got a hammering by a now known person running a torrent server and distributing porn — this flooded our local network, and it was duly unplugged. I Booted into the server from console, and reset root password, to find out who it was.

I am not at liberty to say anything more, as criminal charges look likely.

But none the less. I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for my Pilot’s license and ASIC security pass. I applied for both, however without my license, I cannot fly solo.

I rang up CASA. I begged ‘em for my license. They sent me a certified photocopy, and now I need to visit a doctor for a medical, and get down to the airport for my final briefing, and go for a test run, and then take the plane up myself. It is only a matter of days.

I will now need to find time to study my GFPT. I have a few international flights on the agenda, I may study whilst flying

Also apologies to Vanuatu’s guitar string mega-breaker, I know its your surround system, but you choose to remain anonymous on my blog at your request.

I’ve finally found a little time to hack the bBlog code that operates my blog. Spam has been running rampant. I’ve been getting over 600 track back submissions a day — all spam.

This makes it impossible to find real comments amongst the trackback comments. I have altered the way I moderate and view comments, and now I can go for the mass delete.

I have a few other things to check over, but these will have to wait for another day. I’ve unfortunately deleted a few legitimate comments.

Now I better get back to my busy life for the time being. I can’t wait for the Christmas break.

Well yesterday was compounded by issues with our company’s web site intermittently accepting orders. This was severely reducing sales, and consequently sales over the past three days have been very lean indeed. When a business relies on web sites for revenue, this is a major cause for concern. Which gives me another reason to feel even less confident in Microsoft .NET and Microsoft web servers. After looking into this problem and staying up way too late, our CTO and system programmers found the possible cause of the problem, and all seems to be good for the time being.

Unlike last Friday, I had to do a contract job where I had to add two new employees to Windows 2003 Server/Exchange server, and move data from ex-employees to these new user accounts. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem. I had everything moved across in about 30 minutes, but to my horror, it didn’t work. Two hours passed by, checked, re-checked my settings, but no success. I am not an MCSE or MCP for that matter, but surely any geek can work it out, but I started to doubt myself. Searching desperately in Internet forums, someone suggested restarting the Exchange services, and voila, all was good. This could have saved me so much time (well 90 minutes anyway), so based on my own ignorance, I will only bill them for a few hours compared to the total time spent on site. I was there like five hours, but I also had to fix up an issue with their network and printer that was unrelated to the initial task.

Which only goes to show, I’ve had my head in UNIX way too long. The unwritten rule of Microsoft, if it doesn’t work — restart it. I wonder if the MCSE teaches you this?

Now it is inevtiable, BSD will soon rule supreme in my work place. Got my pilot headset in Ebay today too, so I give it its first test run on Thursday. I can’t wait. Circuits here we come.

Well tonight I got to experience TUCOWS, and their badly designed domain name registration system. Their system could not register one single .mobi domain name in over 1 hour and 30 minutes, and still counting. They’re blaming the .mobi registry, but I’ve managed to register a few .mobi domain names through other accreditted .mobi registrars. TUCOWS cannot simply make a connection to the .mobi registry.

Two calls to TUCOWS resulted in lies, arse covering, and TUCOWS blaming the registry. It is apparent to me that their Open SRS system is not capable of supporting a large customer base during a domain name landrush period. TUCOWS are one of the biggest registrars of both gTLDs and ccTLDs, however they have shown their true colours, and I find it very disappointing that they simply lie to their own customers. The company I represent probably gives TUCOWS several hunderd thousands dollars to TUCOWS every year — and they lied to me. If you could feel my anger now, you’d probably rather face a light sabre duel with Darth Vader.

In short, if you have a domain name with TUCOWS, transfer your domain name away. They need to pay their price for the lack of vision.

Well from my usual garble, I’ve been working my arse off.

I’ve been involved in building a registry business, doing press releases, registry accreditations, helping staff with product and development, and squeezing in some support work (and a little training). I’ve worked almost every weekend too, doing jobs left right and centre. I may be busy, but I am loving life.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to have gone flying twice in the last week. I’ve gone up in a Lance Piper aeroplane. It has a 300HP motor, and is capable of exceeding 170knots air speed. I did an orbit around Melbourne CBD today, and I am still buzzing. I can’t wait for my next flight.

I love my new house, and Daniel and Marcus both visited me on the weekend. I have this awful habit of double booking my time, and I really should do something drastic about it.

I need to be more disciplined with my time, and I am making some improvement. I do not however expect the unexpected. One of the hard disk on my Linux box died, and I had to rebuild the RAID array today. It took longer to re-build than expected, however all of my data seems to be there. I am pretty fortunate; all of my hosted web sites seem to function during the re-buld process with minimal performance loss. Well the server load was up a bit, but Linux seems to handle it OK. It was my first experience rebuilding a RAID from an existing filesystem (with current data) on Linux. If I was to do it again, I think I could do it a lot faster, however the re-build time is the biggest killer of all.

Time for sleep, as I have a massive day ahead of me.