Computers

A couple of weeks ago the drive in my GoFlex home finally died. It had had some filesystem corruption earlier this year, so I pretty much knew it was coming. I replaced the drive, and started making rash decisions. All the stupid factory junk software is disabled, but the big change was that I formatted New Drive with EXT3, since they were using NTFS (on Linux) for some unholy reason that I will probably never understand.

Well, now the drive seems not to sleep, and the drive LED blinks continuously. It doesn't vary at all, so I'm not convinced it's activity related, but there's also no LSOF on the machine, so I'm a tiny bit blind. I think a lot of the issue with Old Drive was that I was writing syslog to it from all my local hardware, which prevented it from ever spinning down. I'd like to prevent that with New Drive by sending all my shit to a Raspberry Pi instead (Raspberry Pi runs extremely well off the USB port from the GoFlex, and it also does a great job of running Privoxy).

I'm looking at ps and netstat -pnat output, and don't see anything which should necessarily be slamming the drive. Meanwhile, I need to go find an ARM lsof binary I can drop on this thing.

csFlickr 10 years ago ago by xrayspx.

Last of the big V8 Interceptors. I had to grab a new Pro before they decided only to sell those insane coffee magnets with no internal drive bays. Last one lasted 7 good years, here's to another computer in 2020.

I'm no longer forwarding cookie thieves to Natalie's site. I had been fussing around trying to make IPTables block all the botnet machines, and when that didn't work, I was just using deny rules in Apache, which sucked, because my include file of blocked hosts was 100,000 or so. That's in addition to the default "Block all of China, India, Eastern Europe" rules I apply. It also sucked because I'm still serving pages and so there were tons of ESTABLISHED, FIN_WAIT1/2, etc. connections, most of which were holding open Apache processes, which was crushing my machine.

The reason IPTables wasn't working turned out to be because of the VPS solution used by 1and1. There is a hard limit of 400 rules on the host, and I can't work around that, so I can't use IPTables with huge blacklists, at least, not that I've figured out.

What I'm doing now though is to use the LimitExcept directive to only allow GET requests in the virtual host which does the rewrites for nataliecurtiss.com. So now those fuckers are all just getting 403's or, in some cases, 500's (don't know why that is).

So yeah that was fun. A case has been opened with SquareSpace, since this attack traffic was all really directed at them. And the only logical thing I can think of is that the attackers are trying to guess session cookies of site admins who aren't explicitly logged out of their site admin tools. This would let the attackers exploit any XSS inherent in code generated by SquareSpace, or use the targeted site to infect more end user machines for this botnet.

Still, it's an awful lot of trouble to go to just to get your hands on Natalie's what, 12 legitimate users per month?

Now I just have a zillion connections in TIME_WAIT, but at least my site seems quick, all my services seem to be working at full speed ahead, and I'm going to stop thinking about this shit for a while. I'm not going to bother figuring out why I can't set tcp_tw_reuse to clean up all those TIME_WAITs.

Update:
The 500's are because I didn't set an auth-type for the user to be able to POST. Well, fuck 'em, they get 500's, since I never want anyone to ever do anything but GET, everything else can DIAF.

I am in the market for a new computer. Apple has left me seriously disappointed with the new Mac Pro, what with its inability to hold many 3.5" SATA drives, and has driven me to the iMac after all this time. Internal storage and the fact that the iMacs of the time (2006) sucked was the main driver for me getting the Pro I have now in the first place. However, time marches on, I have a 32-bit EFI and can't upgrade past Lion, and the install is getting kind of crufty, and so I end up having to bounce the machine every so often, which sucks.

So the new Pro is out, might as well go with a maxed out iMac. I had two questions:

I asked a friend about the CPU thing. His response was "HP will sell you a way better machine for half the price anyway". Was that what I asked? Do I give a fuck what HP sells? Have I not already proven this to be false when I bought this Pro in the first place?

If I roll up in a BMW 535i, is your first reaction going to be "You could have bought a v6 Nissan Altima for half the price and only lost 30hp". No.

I have very specific needs, which Apple meets much better than Microsoft + HP (or whoever), my reasons are not "Because it looks cool" or "Because I am a hipster".

My reasons are:

• I am not an Apple fanboy. I am a Unix fanboy
• Use Cygwin, it's just as good
• No fuck YOU, I don't like rewriting every goddamn little bash script every time I deploy to a different platform, the differences in output between GNU and BSD toolchains are annoying enough, I don't want to deal with MS tools on top of that.
• Don't like Windows? Use Linux!
• If Linux was a serious option, I wouldn't be ditching a perfectly good 4 core 2.66Ghz machine with 16 GB of memory just to get an iMac. Photoshop does not run on Linux. Illustrator does not run on Linux. I run many things on Linux, my wife's primary home machine is not going to be one of them.

• Well dual boot Linux with Windows!!!
• Explain that to my wife, and explain to her how her workflow must change because we're using Windows now because we're cheap.
• Why should I reboot my machine, ever?
• What if I want to quickly get a unix environment outside my work environment for testing, should I remote reboot into Linux? Manually change boot menu options before rebooting? Sounds like a waste of time.
• But GAMES!
• But I don't care about games. Anything I want to play I can either play on my HTPC or in a Windows VM on the Mac.

...And on, and on and on I could go.

I just bought two new Samsung Galaxy S4's and was initially pretty happy with the ability for full device encryption. Since it requires a 6 character alphanumeric password which also must become your unlock-pin, I'm less excited, since "unlocking your phone while driving" effectively becomes "texting while driving" and I don't wanna die.

My main question was how encrypting the device would impact utilization. I tried and failed to find benchmarks for this, so I decided to do my own. The only directory that I can write into, without rooting, seems to be /sdcard/, there is no sdcard in the device, so this is on-board memory. After running my tests, I question whether this folder actually gets encrypted.