Category: Geekery

“Fun” with eBay

A couple of weeks ago, somebody posted to one of the rec.aviation newsgroups that he’d seen a Garmin GNS 530 on eBay going for $1000. Since we’re paying about $8,000 for the one we’re putting in our Dakota, it seemed too good to be true.

Examining the auction, it was too good to be true. It turns out it was so obviously a fraud that there was no way it could possibly be legit.

  • The seller requested that you email him before you bid (a sure sign that they want to sell it off eBay to avoid eBay’s minimal fraud protections.
  • The seller claimed to have 5 of them, and was willing to sell them for $1000 each (which is strange, because only one was up for auction, and had a minimum bid of $100 with no reserve, so how could he be sure of the price?)
  • All the seller’s other auctions were for high end electronic items, always with the same flags – always 5 of them, always stating a firm price, and always an admonition to contact him before bidding.

    I jumped through eBay’s stupid hoops to report the guy, and a few hours later, his auctions were all gone. And a few hours after that, they were back under another seller id. So I reported that one as well. Because I was also currently scanning eBay to see if I can get a deal on a new handheld GPS, I’ve been going back daily searching with a few of the fraud flags, and find the same auctions back again and again and again. I must have reported 15 of these things in the last week. Strangely enough, the sellers always seemed to have good feedback. And then I discovered why – every now and then the auctions will have, in the seller’s part of the html (as opposed to the bits that eBay controls) a “click here to see my other auctions” which takes you to a non-eBay address, but which requires you to log in with your eBay account and password!

    Now I’m really annoyed. Ebay is very fast at removing these auctions once you report them (although since it takes you about 5 screens to get to the part where you can report it, I can see getting tired of reporting these things pretty shortly). But why can’t they take some basic precautions before accepting a listing? For instance, the email address for these fraudulent listings hasn’t changed in a while. Why don’t they just block any account that tries to put in a listing with a mailto:XXXXXX@aol.com (I’ve redacted the actual address because I don’t want to appear in google searches for that address)? Or if the listing has an href tag, have the eBay software go to that link and see if it has eBay graphics either linked or embedded in it? Or if it has a form with a password type field, hold it up to some manual scrutiny? Some of these things would be easy for the scammers to bypass, but they’re not bypassing it now.

The bane of my existance

One of the worst tasks I’ve had at this job is working on the automatic upgrader. I hate doing it, because it’s not so much “programming” as it’s “cobbling together a bunch of system administration stuff”. I got it working as well as I can, but there are some various flakey problems in the way RedHat/CentOS works, as well as some dodgy Dell hardware, that I can’t make it work 100% of the time. I’ve written about it before. I get called in whenever something fails to try and forensically engineer what went wrong. Today’s fuckup was very similar to the one in that linked article – somebody started the upgrade before they went home at night, and somebody else came in in the morning and started it again. That left some things half installed and half upgraded, and some of the “cp” machines decided that they were being “plex built” (built from scratch in the manufacturing area) rather than upgraded, so they all made themselves into FRU (field replacement units) and shut down. Of course it took me nearly an hour to figure out what the idiots had done and how to fix it. And the upshot is that because these machines are now “bare” and physically powered down, somebody has to go out to the site and set them up. Oh, did I mention that the fuckup also caused all copies of the saved configuration for the entire site to be lost?

If I ran Kodak…

(Disclaimer: I’m working at Kodak, but not with anything to do with Picture Kiosks. I’m not privy to any discussion of new technology or upcoming enhancements to the Kiosks.)

If I ran Kodak, I’d connect all those Picture Kiosks up to the internet with cheap DSL. Then, after you’d uploaded your pictures to OFoto (sorry – “Easy Share Gallery”, I think), you could say “Print this picture to the nearest Kiosk”, and it would tell you where the Kiosk was (and give the option to choose a different Kiosk if that one wasn’t good for you) and give you a PIN. You’d go to that Kiosk and enter your PIN, and out would come the pictures you’d sent to it. Much handier than having them mailed to you, or having to go to certain participating stores.

Is it time for a new server yet?

I’ve had my Linux server for several years now. I don’t remember exactly when I got it, but according to the time stamps on the picture gallery from when I did it, it’s been about 2.5 years since I improved the cooling with monster copper heat sinks (1 pound on each CPU). In my experience, a heavily used server like this isn’t good for more than about 3 years before it starts getting flakey. But so far it’s been solid as a rock. Since improving the cooling (and stopping running SETI@Home, unfortunately), I can’t think of a single time when it froze up or rebooted spontaneously.

So I’m thinking that although I don’t need to rush out and buy a replacement, I should at least start thinking of what to replace it with. And here’s the problem – computers have become way more powerful and fast since then. This computer was pretty fast for its day, and I could easily get CPUs that run 3 or more times the speed, but so what? There is nothing I do on this computer that stresses the CPUs in any meaningful way. Normally my load average is down around 0.01. So what would I want out of a replacement? “Bottom of the rung” CPUs, but really fast networking and disk? Something small and quiet like a Shuttle? Something maybe not top flight speed-wise, but really well built by a company that knows how to make reliable hardware like a Sun or IBM or an Apple G5?

One thing I really like about this computer, though, is the fact that it’s dual CPU. It seems to me that if one process runs away the other CPU keeps it pretty responsive until the process finishes or I figure out what’s wrong. For instance, yesterday I noticed the system getting pretty slow. “uptime” showed the load average up over 15, and “top” showed a process owned by the apache user called “oops” taking a bunch of time. One quick “/etc/init.d/httpd restart” later, and things were back to normal.

If I were to replace or improve this computer, I can only think of a few things I’d like to do:

  1. More RAM. 1Gb seemed like plenty when I got it, but since upgrading to Fedora Core 4 from Fedora Core 3, SpamAssassin seems to take WAY more memory so when I start up X and start doing stuff on the console (not very often) it actually starts dipping into swap.
  2. SATA. Right now IDE drives are wonderful and cheap, but it looks like the future is SATA.
  3. RAID. If I’m going SATA, I’d like to get a real RAID. I don’t know why, but it seems that most of the talk in the SATA world about RAID is RAID 0+1 (striping + mirroring), but I was really impressed the first time I saw a RAID 5 setup and the owner of it just yanked a drive out of the array and slapped another one in, and the application didn’t even hiccup while the RAID controller went about its business rebuilding the new drive.
  4. LVM. I like the fact that LVM can do a “transaction snapshot” almost like a database transaction, so you can backup a consistent view of the system instead of trying to copy an image of a system that’s changing while you copy it. I haven’t read if this is possible, but it seems to me that you’d be able to stop all the services that are most likely to have problems with consistency (postgres, mysql and innd for instance), start your backup snapshot, and then start those processes again, so the services would only be down for a few seconds rather than however many hours your backup took.
  5. Dual processors. Like I said, I consider that one of the best features of this current machine. Any replacement would also have to have them.

It’s like the worst of the worst

When you’ve worked all weekend, Mondays are the double suck. First of all, you’ve got all the Monday dragginess, like filling out timesheets and morning meetings. And then on top of it you’ve got the accumulated tiredness that you normally feel on Friday, but worse. Plus, on Friday you’ve got that boost from the thought that it’s soon going to be the weekend. For me, it isn’t soon going to be the weekend, and I’ll probably end up having to work some next weekend as well, so a real weekend is at least 5 and possibly 12 days away. At least I’ve got Great Big Sea to look forward to.