I will be away from home for the next week and a bit. I’m flying to Las Vegas in a few hours to attend a work-related technical conference. That ends next Friday, at which point Irene is flying down to join me and we’ll spend a long weekend seeing the sights in Vegas.

I will have Internet access, but I doubt I’ll be making any updates or blog postings while I’m away- I expect to be pretty busy. Rest easy, though: I’ll be back in ten days, refreshed and ready to post- hopefully you’ll all survive without your Uber Geek fix

You may noticed that some odd changes here during the past day or so. This is part of a long term plan I’ve had to tidy up and “rethink” the structure of the site.

The plan is to have easily accessible links to posts specific to each category as part of the main site navigation. The categories I’ve selected are:

• Gear: Computers, video, hardware and general gadgetry
• Games: computer and console titles, both reviews and general discussion
• Girls: women that geeks who like women will like… I have work to do here, but expect to see Number 6, Seven of Nine, and others showing up here
• Geek Miscellany: Science, advanced technology, and related topics that don’t fit in any particular category
• Rants: My occasional (usually over the top) opinions on things like politics, the news, and other stuff
• Life: what is happening in my immediate vicinity- family, around the house, and the like
• Critters: News and information about the animals that share our domicile
• Site News: posts like this one that talk about this blog

Each of these choices will lead you to a page that gives a brief description of the category and contains only matching posts. Once I get things working the way I want, the main or “Home” page will only list brief summaries of each post. At the moment, the categories are more or less in place, but some of the site navigation features aren’t working quite right yet. I expect to have the main details ironed out in the next couple of days, so bear with me.

I discovered a problem with my blog when I posted my rant about my Cisco RV016 earlier today. After all my network shuffling around, the website was loading very, very slowly. The Wordpress blog was taking several minutes to render, whereas the other blogs on the server were behaving normally.

I tried a great many things, including running database recovery diagnostics and upgrading my Wordpress version, before finally figuring out the cause. My network changes resulting in my server no longer having correct DNS settings: you could find it, but it couldn’t find the rest of the internet. I suspect the page generation delay was happening because of the Google Adsense stuff on the site, which wants to talk to Google… but I’m just speculating.

In any case, the problem appears to be solved now… five hours after I discovered it. I’m going to add this to the list of things I will blame on my Cisco RV016 router/switch…

UPDATE: I have uncovered and repaired more problems, but these ones I can’t blame on my much maligned Cisco RV016

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve updated to the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), the software that makes this blog work, and also updated half a dozen of the plugins on my site. In *theory*, none of the changes should be noticeable to anyone visiting here.

However… I’m doing this rather quickly, and undoubtedly something is broken now. If you notice any problems… well, feel free to complain to the management

One of the objectives of my web server upgrade was to end up with a Linux/PHP/mySQL configuration that would work with Gallery 2. All of the photos on my site have been managed via Gallery for years now… unfortunately, so long in fact that the version of Gallery I’ve been using is three years out of date.

Not any more: I was finally able to successfully upgrade to Gallery version 2 tonight. The process was reasonably smooth: a couple of hiccups slowed things down

• I lost all of the long descriptive text I’d written for some photos the first time I imported: I redid the whole process, and using the tools Gallery provides in their migration plugin I redirected my lengthy “titles” into the new description field. Downside: all of the photos now have the default generated titles provided by the old Gallery: things like “aaa” and “aab”. Not a big deal, I guess
• once the migration succeeded I had a bit of trouble getting links to the old Gallery to “redirect” to the new Gallery. I fixed the problem by creating an empty ../albums directory in the G2 home directory and placing the appropriate .htaccess rewrite rules within

Everything appears to be more or less working: you can see the new gallery at http://gallery.kgadams.net. Excuse the default appearance: I’ll get that fixed up once I know a bit more about what the options are. Next on my list is getting the random photo block on this page working again, then I’ll attempt to embed Gallery as a page on this site.

UPDATE: I have the random photo plugin working again: the pictures are appearing properly in the right navigation bar of this site. You should also now see a “Gallery” link above (I’ll likely rename this to “Photos” or something later). Click on that and you’ll see the whole gallery. Currently there are some serious problems with formatting of that page- the fonts are unreadably small, for example. I think I have a handle on how to get that fixed, but I won’t get to it until later. I also may do a re-import of all the photos: the “descriptive text” problem I noted above bugs me, and there is another approach to the problem I will try

I still haven’t completely restored the Gallery here on my ol’ website. The Gallery itself is still here, and still works fine, but the code that puts a little random picture here on the blog isn’t working quite right so I’ve left it turned off for now. My intent is to upgrade the gallery software itself before I re-activate that plugin. It is only a couple of hours of work, but I’ve been distracted this week. I’ve also been researching a few nice new features of the updated Gallery that I want to incorporate into this blog- we’ll see how that works out.

I’m off to the Casino shortly to see my Mom and sister, and then I have a bit of office work to do… so it is unlikely that the Gallery update will get done today. Mostly, though, I didn’t want any of my regular visitors (all three of you ) to think that I’d forgotten.

I seem to have reversed the forces of entropy! The new server is basically operational, and this blog is now being served by fresh, clean hardware. I’ll post something detailing the innards of the new box this upcoming weekend.

Interesting gotchas from the install

• always pay close attention to disk space when migrating / backing up old servers: I spent several hours trying to fix a problem that was nothing more than my old server running out of disk
• Linux drivers still have problems with network autonegotiate: Or maybe it’s Cisco/Linksys with the problem? For about a decade now, twisted pair Ethernet hubs and NICs have often failed horribly when trying to agree on 100 versus 10 Mbps, and particularly on full versus half duplex. I noticed my file transfers between my two Linux boxes were very slow (on the order of 60 KB/s). I checked my Cisco hub status monitor and, surprise of surprises, both Linux boxes had negotiated themselves a half duplex connection. I changed their configuration to forced 100 Mb/s full duplex, and suddenly I was getting upwards of 6 MB/s of encrypted transfer
• Linux GUI software is sometimes better than the command line: Examples include:
• • installing OS packages/software components- in the GUI, you get a nice list showing what you have installed already and can search component descriptions visually
  • sftp: the command line sftp must use horrible default settings- I was barely able to get to 1 MB/s using it between two computers on a 100 Mbps LAN (the maximum on a 100 Mbps network would be around 9-10 MB/s); the GUI based FileZilla, on the other hand, happily pushed bits at about 6 MB/s
  • USB file system mounts: plug a drive in to the computer, and the GUI autodetects it and pops up to tell you it is mounting it and it just works: basically, just like Windows and OSX

  I am leaving the GUI (KDE) running on this box; now if I could only get the remote desktop (tightvnc) to work without corrupting the keyboard input, I’d be set

• sometimes it is best to give up: One of the things that didn’t work quite right was my install of vncserver/tightvnc. This software allows me to remotely connect to my Linux box with a graphical interface: I use it around the house (not over the Internet) when I’d rather not go and sit in front of the server. Unfortunately, the current install with Mandriva only works until you try to actually use it: at that point, you encounter two problems
• • the vnc session fails with a fatal “fixed font not found” error. I fixed this by installing the XFS package, but it took me several hours to figure out
  • at this point I was able to open a session and see it on my other computer. Unfortunately, anything I typed came out garbled: E.G.: typing “l” would seemingly send an “r” character

  I banged my head against the wall for hours trying to get this fixed, then read this post. Apparently, this “bad character mapping with Mandriva’s tightvnc implementation” problem has existed for months…

• Avhai/ZeroConf/Bonjour are cool: I decided to set up the new server so I could get at its filesystems using my Mac. to that end, I configured Avhai. To get this to work, I followed some guides referred to by this guy. The short story: install and config netatalk, then install (if necessary: it was already installed in my Mandriva build) Avhai for the afp service you just added. Avahi and its friends are really just advertisers: they aren’t “services” in and of themselves, but the let other machines on your network know what is available. For the record, my file share services are blocked by my firewall: sorry Once complete, the services offered by my Linux box show up on the Mac: file shares, terminal services, and potentially other things. I also noticed that the network performance of AFP seems better than SMB. Note that this is purely a seat-of-the-pants observation

There will likely be a few more brief outages over the next couple of weeks as I finish up installing things and tuning the configuration a bit.

I broke the website earlier today. I think I’ve established the Computing Law of Quantum Superposition. Specifically: a computing system is in all possible states until it is observed, at which point it collapses into a single state. Unfortunately, the single state is always “non-functional”.

In the process of making configuration backups I somehow a) corrupted several database indexes; and b) caused the server to run out of disk space. These two things meant that the server stopped working, which caused me to try a series of completely logical and totally wrong approaches to fixing what was at the time an unknown problem.

I have this blog back up and running, at least. The other websites on this server, including my photo gallery, are temporarily down until I deploy the new server.

My apologies for the disruption!

I run several websites off of my one Linux server sitting here in my house.  I try to keep it reasonably secure: it’s behind a firewall with a limited number of open ports, I try to keep my software somewhat up to date, and I install code to intercept blatant attempts to spam or attack my site.

Unfortunately, I do maintain my server in my spare time, and I don’t put a ton of effort into it.  I realized a couple of years ago that my PHPNuke based sites were vulnerable.  The code itself is full of security holes, and is famous for providing numerous avenues of attack…particularly via SQL injection. 

In the past five years, my site or my server has been compromised several times.  Every incident started with SQL injection via one of my PHPNuke sites.  A few years ago, I migrated my main blog to WordPress, and it has been rock solid ever since…but the other sites are still vulnerable. 

During the worst such occurrence, the attackers actually managed to use this method to install a piece of software that allowed them to launch a terminal session.  From there, they successfully used my server for several days to send spam emails.  It was intriguing to follow their trail 72 hours after the fact and see what they had done.

My server is a lot more secure now than it was in 2003 when that last major attack occurred.  But my system is constantly being probed for vulnerabilities.  The latest intrusion was about two weeks ago- again, via PHPNuke and SQL injection.  I had that vector basically plugged for a couple of years, but apparently an update to PHPNuke unlocked the door just enough to permit a relatively minor intrusion.  This time, the bad guys installed a single pixel iFrame in the footer of one of my websites that attempted to launch a browser trojan impacting the visitor’s machine.  I cleaned it out within 24 hours of it being installed, and re-applied patches to PHPNuke that supposedly close the door once again. 

Since that day, my server has been brought to its knees three times in a row by what, based on the limited information I can gather, appears to be a very crude denial of service attack.  It could just be a coincidence, and I certainly could be reading the evidence incorrectly.  But it does make me wonder: why would someone put any effort into trying to compromise my tiny little server?  What is the point? 

Like the subject for this post says, the Internet is a weird place.

I’ve added a new feature to my blog.  If you look on the right side, you’ll notice a “Now Reading” section.  You can also just click this link to go to the main summary page.

I’m using Rob Miller’s “Now Reading” Wordpress plugin.  I even sent him $20 via Paypal- the plugin works and so far at least does everything I wanted- Thank you, Rob!  The data itself is apparently stored in mySQL, and you can add new fields (key-value pairs) to add more data beyond the basics.

I’ve loaded in 20 or so books that I’ve read in the last year.  This isn’t anything close to the full list of books I’ve read in the last 12 months- instead, I just looked over at the nearest bookshelf (where I keep the most recent ones) and read off the titles I could see.  Since the top shelf it two layers deep, that means even that method is missing quite a few titles.  I think I read probably forty books a year, give or take, with an average of 500 pages.  I’m going to try to keep track of what I’m reading reasonably accurately going forward.  We’ll see how that works out