Sheesh

I needed to setup a new web hosting account for someone today. Sounds easy enough. Of course all of my welcome message templates were stored in Evolution, which wasn't working (none of GNU/Linux was because I am in the process of reorganizing my disk). So, I had to speed up my reorganization, move 30 GB (or so) back onto GNU/Linux — which took forever even over Fast Ethernet, alas my PC doesn't have Gigabit nor does my router — so that I could get to the mail message. It finally just completed, so I can get that account setup before I go to bed.

Finally.

Rendezvous with the Desktop

Last week, Apple's Free Software implementation of Rendezvous for POSIX systems was updated. Despite getting some coverage from the GNU/Linux community, do we continue to face a landscape where distributors ignore this great technology as most of them have in the past? Read my take on Rendezvous and its importance to GNU/Linux on the desktop at OfB.

Fire Internet Explorer Today with Firefox!

Do you feel sorry for your Windows using colleagues and friends that are stuck being bombarded with spyware, adware and worse thanks to Internet Explorer and Outlook Express? I've written a how-to aimed exactly for these kinds of folks that will walk them through the move to Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, including importing data, reinstalling useful plugins and other things that are beyond the scope of what many Windows users will want to figure out without help. You can find it at OfB.biz.

Headache

My server reached the four month mark — 120 days 23 hours, actually — earlier today. Incidentally, cPanel automatically upgraded my exim installation into oblivion earlier today too (during its nightly update cycle). So, I had to panic (first) and then reboot the system to get a “defunct” exim process to finally quit (it wouldn't terminate via the UNIX kill command even with the “dash nine” switch). Fortunately, I did get everything recovered after reading some helpful threads from others running into the same issue over at WebHostingTalk.com.

I also had some problems with FaithTree.com eating up all of my system's CPU cycles, but as it turned out, somehow I had set it to download all of the RSS feeds and weather every minute. It takes probably 5-10 minutes for one update to complete, so that meant it was constantly downloading things multiple times. Ouch. I guess that is why my bandwidth usage was forty-five times higher this month than last month (prior to me migrating FaithTree). I noticed the bandwidth problem today too.

What a day. I think I'll go eat the (formerly warm) dinner I was getting ready to eat two hours ago before things spiraled out of control. Hopefully things will be stable now.

Facing the Beginning of Infinity

I'm learning why symlinks aren't always such a good idea. I use them in my home directory on my GNU/Linux desktop and always thought they were helpful. But they also have made it impossible to use scp easily to get my stuff copied over to my Mac while I switch GNU/Linux distributions. I have a few symlinks that I haven't found yet that must recursively link around to most of my files because my 7 GB home directory took over 14 GB on my Mac and it wasn't done copying. In other words, scp was copying deeper and deeper into the recursive links that go back and forth and everytime it would go into a “deeper version” of directory A, it would find a link to directory B and in directory B it would find A or maybe C which then links back to A. Ad infinitum.

So now, I must go through each directory in search of symlinks that might cause trouble. So much for saving time. I've gotten a lot copied over, but there is still some work to do. Hopefully I'll be running Mandrake Linux 10 or Fedora Core 2 within a few days. I might start off with Fedora and then decide which way to go. We'll see.

A Year of Mac

It dawned on me the other day that I ordered my first modern Mac, the Ruby iMac G3/400, off of eBay one year ago yesterday (June 5). Over the last year I have had the enjoyable pleasure of getting to know another UNIX-like operating system, and I must admit, I've really come to like it.

The Ruby iMac is a neat machine, certainly it was a bargain for $999 in 2000 when it was new, considering that even then it came standard with Firewire, a NIC, 128 megs of ram, a 12 gig hard disk, a slot loading CD drive, Harmon-Kardon built-in speakers, and a 15” CRT monitor. While the eMac offers a much more modern replacement for the old iMac G3, its white case opaque with super larger tray loading DVD drive door just doesn't seem as bold and exciting as the system that is often said to have saved Apple. While design doesn't make a system, it can make it more interesting.

This particular model was a later iMac, sometimes referred to as an iMac DV, although the DV title was dropped by that time (partially, I suspect, since it didn't have a DVD drive). It is referred to unofficially as the Indigo series and officially as the “iMac (Summer 2000).” You can read more about it here.

It's kind of a shame that the colorful computer trend died off. The iMac was really a fun concept and even today the Ruby iMac looks almost more like a piece of modern art than simply a computer.

Memory Card Reader

Well, if you take over 500 pictures on a vacation, it is helpful to have an easy way to transfer them onto your computer. I have a memory card reader built into my HP PSC 2210 printer/copier/scanner, but it is only USB 1.1 and it is hooked up to my GNU/Linux box which (even when I have supermount or automount set up) has always required me to manually mount and unmount each card as root. A big pain!

So, I decided to buy a second card reader, this one for my Mac. I got a Lexar USB “Hi-Speed” (f/k/a USB 2.0) Multi-Card Reader for $30 at CompUSA. It supports pretty much any card presently available, including memory sticks and SD cards. The USB 2.0 functionality should be a big help in getting the photos downloaded at something resembling a decent speed, and it will allow me to place them in a iPhoto album and burn them to DVD without a lot of hassle.

Perhaps I'll give the drive a spin tomorrow.

iLife '04

When iMovie started refusing to import iTMS music a few weeks back (on my Mac), I had a feeling I knew what the matter was. iTunes 4.5 reworks its iTMS access system to break Hymn (f/k/a PlayFair), a program that strips the DRM from iTMS files. As a side effect, it also breaks older versions of the iLife apps, at least as far as their ability to use DRM'ed iTMS music goes. This was a bit disappointing because I had just purchased a ridiculously bad song to stick into a short movie clip for the humorous impact of its “badness.”

The fix is to upgrade to iLife '04 (I purchased my G5 two months before the new iLife came out). While I wasn't particularly happy about the software that came with Panther already being considered obsolete and not worthy of patching, I had been thinking about buying iLife '04 anyway and so I bit the bullet and ordered it (the MSRP is under $50).

Supposedly, iPhoto 4 is faster and can handle 25,000 photos instantaneously, and iMovie is suppose to be faster and leave backup unedited copies of DV footage. The new iMovie also has better compression techniques, if I understand correctly, which should yield results much more on par with Final Cut Express/Pro. Nice! Now, I just need time to try the package out. It arrived Friday and the box is presently sitting on my desk waiting for me to install.

It will be at least Wednesday before I get to that, but I will mention how it goes once I do.

Pastor's Computer Update

A few months ago I wrote about moving my one pastor's computer over to GNU/Linux. I feel kind of bad I never finished the story, so I guess I will now.

I spent probably about 10 hours polishing up Fedora with updates, installing software, installing Windows inside Win4Lin, and so on. Overall, I spent about the same amount of time getting things ready as I do when setting up a fresh copy of Windows XP (because you always have umpteen apps to install, you need to do a bunch of updates, get stuff like Acrobat, AdAware, etc., etc.).

I got the machine back to him at the end of February. It worked, save a problem with his Palm m500. The system simply wouldn't talk to the m500. I was going to go over and look at it, but something cut the grand Linux experiment short. I get a call “Tim, what would be causing the system to do this…” It was a kernel panic. A quick consideration of the error revealed quite clearly what was wrong: the hard drive had failed.

Apparently, it would seem, the hard drive had been working on dying, and probably killed Windows ME as well. It just happened to be “well enough” to allow me to setp GNU/Linux before it failed again. Now, I did have a disk image of my tweaked Fedora configuration, but as long as we were starting over, my pastor decided he'd like to move to Windows XP.

I suspect he would have considered sticking with GNU/Linux if given the time to use it, but unfortunately, only getting to use it for about a week before the system failed prevented him from even getting a little comfortable with it before it was lost.

So, I hauled the system back home, and Dell sent us a new hard disk (and a new CD-RW, since that drive bay was sticking a bit). I then repeated the reinstall process, reinstalling all the applications again, etc., then restoring all of the data again, and finally reimaging the system again.

sigh

So, it wasn't an unsuccessful attempt of GNU/Linux, but unfortunately a big hardware problem ended the experiment all too soon.

Open for Business Back Online, Hack Explained

On April 1, 2004, a single, carefully crafted URL was sent to OfB.biz, returning a set of encrypted strings. The same request was reissued in the midst of thousands of normal requests on April 2 and 7. The requests came from Tehran, Cairo and Sarajevo. Then there was a week of silence. Late on April 13, however, another string of requests came, this time from various ISP's in Tel Aviv.

The strings taken from the previous week were encrypted together to form the administrative access cookie for PHP-Nuke. After forming the cookie, the new requests were used to insert multiple superuser users providing complete access to all of PHP-Nuke's functionality. The accounts were systematically added from different IP addresses over a period of several hours going well into April 14. After creating these superuser accounts and moving the original superuser account to a semi-removable status, the perpetrator then entered the block administrator and placed obfuscated JavaScript code hidden near the JavaScript code for the advertising banners.

The JavaScript code reported back information concerning visitor hits using a unique ID and then forwarded users to a pornographic web site before they knew anything had happened. The attack was complete. The attacker then moved onto other sites, defacing PCLinuxOnline on the same day and Linux and Main on April 15.

Three days later, I have hand checked the nearly 300 articles on Open for Business, cleaned out the JavaScript and successfully brought OfB back online with a number of security patches. However, with this being the second time that the poor design of PHP-Nuke has allowed the site to be attacked, my days using PHP-Nuke are numbered. Assuming that SAFARI eventually is finished (I've been talking about that for how many years now?), I will be moving over to that and escaping this security mess forever.