If you didn’t know, this has been a tumultuous week for clients of Westhost, my internet service provider. Their Primary data center is located in Utah and they share that space with a sister brand VPS.net. The datacenter is a Tier IV center managed by Consonus. Saturday afternoon there was a yearly fire equipment/alarm/suppression system test. The third party technician failed to follow procedures and one actuator remained on the output system for the gas that is designed to suppress fires in the building. When the system was re-armed there was a sudden release of the gaseous fire suppressant. At that same moment hundreds of hard drives died. Now, Inergen is what was used and the gases themselves shouldn’t be a problem. In this case, and judging from what I’ve read, the problem was with the sudden and intense change in air pressure caused by the release. That point is somewhat moot though, the end result is hundreds of dead and damaged hard drives.
Tag: hosting
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Experiencing some turbulence
I knew for some time that a server upgrade at my hosting provider was coming – they were essentially upgrading the underlaying software. (New versions of apache/php/etc. the entire system.) The original time was postponed and I breathed a little sigh of relief because I host somewhere in the order of 7 domains here. Well, this morning it happened and things mostly worked, some of the lesser importance domains were affected although. It took some .htaccess editing and php.ini editing to get everything working. (somehow php.ini had a bit of text that had “word wrapped” and was causing problems.) Also, .htaccess rules were causing the server to offer .html files for download instead of displaying them. All seems to be in order now. Back to regular schedule.
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Site hosting tons of email addresses
A little over a year ago I was doing a web search for my email address (something that’s worth doing from time to time.) I ran across my name in a text file hosted at a domain called…..
http://www.freestuffengine.com/ There is a different site active at that domain now (although I don’t know if it’s owned by the same group, it may be….) Anyway, there were VERY large text files with (according to the file name) a million addresses. And YES… mine was in there.my address was in a file called…. nima_1million_1of2.txt
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Being cautious with web links
Once upon a time the bad payload of a malicious email was it’s attachment, that still happens, but in many cases the links are the real lure – like a worm dangled in the water in front of a hungry fish…. the links though hide a danger on the other side…. the hook in our analogy. Brian Krebs writes about a utility called linkscanner that scans a given link to see if it’s hosting up malware. It’s from a place called Exploit Prevention Labs. I don’t know that I’d trust it completely as a safety net, but it might be worthwhile as another level in the defences.
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Multihead PC
More than once I’ve wished for a second (or third) set of keyboard/mouse/video for my main desktop. Linux is a true multiuser operating system which means that it’s capable of hosting multiple graphical logins at the same time. For MOST things, a single, modern CPU is more than adequate to deal with this (memory is usually the limitation, but 1 GB ought to be enough.) So, I think all of this was prompted by a blurb about hubster which looks like it’s just a VGA-usb adapter. The company that makes it though bill it as a thin client of sorts. So, they’re essentially thinking thin-client over usb as opposed to thin-client over ethernet…
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Google search for malware accessible to all…
The metasploit project is now hosting a malware search that uses Google. It essentially uses a binary google search technique that was referenced last week to find malicious files hosted on the web. Of course, this will be partly limited by Google’s indexing which recently has not been quite as thorough as before, but… all you have to do is search by a virus name and find matches. I can see where this is useful for research. What I DON’T understand is why Google doesn’t integrate scanning of content into the googlebot indexing. It would take a lot of processor power. Well…. I think Google would come close to having enough to take a stab at this. I think they should AT LEAST…
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Windows Vista Beta 2 download torrent
After spending about 5 days using wget to resume the download of the vista beta 2 .iso file (which is a bit over 3 GB). I finally gave up seeing as how that 5 days had netted me about 2-3 MB of data. As I started looking around online, I found that Chris Pirillo had got a site up vistatorrent.com where he is hosting a tracker for a bittorrent download of the vista iso. Of course, Microsoft recommends that you order the dvd and wait, but Chris has provided md5sum information so you can check your download. I’m up to 25% done now *(I discovered the torrent about 24 hours ago, although last night I didn’t download.) I let it download part of the afternoon and then remembered to restart this morning. So, it’s making pretty quick progress.
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The Google Problem, or why I’m starting to use MSN and Yahoo more.
This weekend has been a bit of an introspective for me on why google is still the primary search engine I use. I know, I’ve been a big “fan(?)” of google for quite some time, I’ve obviously incorporated many of their products into my pages and used Google for 99% of my web searching. In recent months though, I’ve certainly had frustrations from the “site owner” side of the Google relationship. My North Carolina Genealogy site had traditionally been hosted as a subdirectory of averyjparker.com and had always enjoyed the lions share of traffic, so when I gave it it’s own domain, I did a 404 page not found for those following outdated links and I added an automatic 5 second redirect to the northcarolinagenealogy.net page. I soon learned that was a mistake, as the site vanished from Google around the first of December.
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Search rankings and “where you stand”
Search engine rankings are one of the concepts that I think is vaguely understood. It’s amazing to me how a subtle change in a series of search terms (or quoting a pair of words) can so drastically alter the results. Let’s say you’re searching for discount shoes, there’s a difference between a search for discount shoes and “discount shoes”… Of course, if you’re hosting your own site…. it’s awfully nice to be able to get an idea of where you turn up in the search results for given terms. The biggest problem is…. most search engines give a chance for you to see if pages on your site are found with the terms, but that doesn’t tell where in the rankings you compare to other sites. The hard way of course, is to type in your search term and go from page to page until you finally encounter your site. This can be painfully tedious though.
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WMF Exploit Unofficial patch additional download locations
The unofficial WMF exploit patch now has multiple locations to download from. They’ve apparently run into some bandwidth problems at the main site. Sunbeltblog has an alternate download location, Sans is hosting a download here (direct download link)