Category: Rant

• If you’re about to start something dangerous (like an aptitude upgrade on your dom0), and you set up an at job to reboot it if it causes the box to lose network connectivity, don’t forget to atrm it if everything is fine afterwards.
• reboot in an at job doesn’t do the right thing – my box was still responding to pings but I couldn’t get to it at all. Next time try shutdown -r now

I tried to install this OpenID Comments for WordPress plugin. My luck with with WordPress plugins is about 50% success, and most of the ones that fail seem to be ones suggested by Jen. Or at least my biggest other failures have been with various plugins that attempted to embed my Gallery, and Jen seemed to have no trouble with hers. (I got it to the point where it was throwing off “duplicate primary key” errors, but no closer.)

This time, it looks like it would go off to LiveJournal, get successfully authenticated, but when it came back instead of putting the comment on the post it was posted to, it was putting it on the same non-existent blog URL as in the “-1 comments” debacle. The “-1 comments” thing was caused because LJXP was sending off the entry to LiveJournal before the comment number plugin knew what postid it was, but I hacked the code of both plugins and made it work. This time I looked for something obvious, but with no luck.

Maybe somebody can suggest an OpenID WordPress plugin that works?

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?

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?

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.