Category: Geekery

Here goes nothing

Thanks to a post in rich text, I’ve discovered a pretty cool little plug-in that should cross post all my posts here over to my fake blog on LiveJournal. Even better, another plugin puts a comment link on the bottom of my fake blog that directs back there so I don’t have to check there and here for comments.

In other blog news, I installed Akismet which supposedly works with SpamKarma2 to further reduce the spam problem. But for some strange reason it seems to be double counting the spam. I wrote down what my SpamKarma “spams killed” count was when I started, and since then the Akismet count has been increasing at almost, but not quite, double the rate the SpamKarma2 count has been. The SpamKarma2 count delta also agrees with the number of spams I see in the review and clean-out pages that both SpamKarma2 and Akismet present. Very weird.

Speaking of blog spam, another thing I’ve noticed recently are trackbacks where some site has copied my entire blog post and surrounded it with advertising. I don’t know what they’re playing at, but every time I see one I mark it as spam and delete the trackback. I notice that other bloggers, David Megginson for instance, don’t delete them. They probably should – I can’t see these things as anything other than an attempt to confuse search engines into directing people to their site instead of yours. It’s hard to draw the line between these trackback spammers and a legitimate “Planet” site that puts your RSS feed on a page with other blogs of a similar interest group – for instance I know my blog appears on “Planet LUGOR” and “Planet Linode”, the first because I’m a member of LUGOR and the second because I’m a former customer of Linode’s virtual private servers. It’s hard to draw the line, but I know the difference when I see it and I do draw the line.

Open letter to Earthlink

Mail from my list server (list.xcski.com, ip 74.202.84.134) to [your customer] is getting bounced with the message:


<[your customer]>: host domain-relay.mspring.net[198.185.2.85] said: 550 Dynamic IPs/open relays blocked. Contact <openrelay@abuse.earthlink.net>. (in reply to MAIL FROM command)

And when I try to email the address that it says to contact, I get a further bounce:

<openrelay@abuse.earthlink.net>: host madm-corleone.atl.sa.earthlink.net[207.69.200.218] said: 550 Unknown local part openrelay in <openrelay@abuse.earthlink.net> (in reply to RCPT TO command)

First of all, I’m not an open relay. Never have been, never will be. And unlike you, when I have an error message say “Contact:”, I make sure the email address actually exists. Can you bozos please fix your open relay check, and fix your bounce messages?

How do you teach HTML to a blogger?

There is a really interesting blog called “Strange Maps” that I syndicate on my RSS aggregator page. Unfortunately, while the content of the page is intelligent and interesting, the author evidently knows fuck all about the web. Recently, all his entries have been formatted using <h1> tags, then with <span style=…> tags to set the fonts back to something more reasonable. Since my aggregator strips formatting tags like <span> so it can impose its own format, this leads to some ugly results on my page. Another time, he made his entire post in red. When I try to explain what he’s doing wrong, he doesn’t seem to understand. I suspect he must be composing his posts in Word or something worse (if there is anything worse than Word) and pasting them into WordPress.

How can I get through to him to stop doing this?

It wasn’t me after all

As I suspected, it turns out my two 30-45 minute periods of being unable to reach my colo box weren’t my fault. It’s even possible some of the stutters I was having this weekend weren’t my fault. I just got an email from the company I rent my rack space from saying that Time Warner, the people who own the datacenter the rack is in, needs to make an “emergency software update” to fix their recent connectivity issues.

I may be off the air for some time overnight. They claim “up to 45 minutes of loss of network connectivity”, but I’ve done enough upgrades to know that means it will either take 45 seconds, or 5 hours.

I needed that like I needed a hole in my head

As I was reading my email this morning, I noticed that 3 or 4 trackback spams had gotten through SpamKarma2, all from an IP in the UAE. I went to the SpamKarma2 page and found that as well as the 3 or 4 that had gotten through, there were also a few hundred that hadn’t gotten through. I took care of that, and was reading the rest of my email when 3 more got through SpamKarma2. All still from this IP in the UAE. Ok, this calls for bigger guns than SK2. I went to the terminal window that was tailing my logs from the colo box, all ready to “iptables” this IP out of my hair, when suddenly my terminal window stopped responding. So did my other terminal window on the dom0 of the colo box. So did all my web sites. So did my mailing lists.

I went off to work wondering if this was just a DDOS and it would come back up when they got bored of me, or if the box was truly locked up and would need a power cycle. If it was locked, I was seriously considering throwing in the towel on colo, because obviously I can’t keep the sort of uptime I demand. Even Linode was better than this, and they were getting hit by DDOSes all the time. The only thing I didn’t like about the Linode was the piss-poor amount of memory I got – 128Mb versus the 1000Mb I have on my domU.

On my way to work, I got an email from Vicki saying my blog was back up, and at the next traffic light I was able to verify that some of my other web sites were still running. Looks like I weathered the storm.