Category: computer

whut

Websites and sshd not working properly, don’t know how I got this far. Seems like a port block, presumably from the ISP. Let’s see if this posts.

EDIT: almost certainly from the ISP side due to intermittent access without changing anything from my end, wonder if they’re cutting off access to inbound ports for residential customers now. I can reach the VPSs just fine from the LAN so my local servers appear to be running normally. Also tried changing some of the listening ports to what should be “residential ISP safe” values and reconfigured the hardware firewall and still have issues.

EDIT 2019-10-26: Working better now, perhaps resolved? Wonder what was going on with the ISP then, eh.

Matrix ][ Trance Mix

This tune. First found it on a CD of free .mp3 files that came with a spindle of, IIRC, Memorex CDR discs sometime in 2000.

This was one of the first legitimate .mp3 tunes (as opposed to downloading from e.g. Napster) that I actually listened to, used to have it in my “computer stuff” playlist so it would pop up when I’d be programming or something. I don’t usually like electronica so this tune is not something I’d normally find appealing but the part of this tune starting at 1:46 reminded me of a good friend I’ll never see again.

So I had this tune on the CD and it was laying around for years but somehow got lost at some point. Then the memory of the tune existing got lost. Occasionally I’d remember something vague about it but not enough to find it again so it became something of an intermittent white whale of mine. That is until sometime late last year when I happened upon some old .mp3 files that I thought had gone missing and painstakingly went through them until I found my whale.

So here it is, Matrix ][ Trance Mix by The Cynic Project

Snow day

Today is a snow day.

Did some shoveling, got a good workout, according to the Fitbit I got 36 minutes of cardio doing so. Not too shabby! Also did some more work on dialing in some server stuff. Finally sat down and started to tinker with some regexes to get a certain something working better, don’t think I have to mention what it is exactly… But I’ll need to wait and see if any bots come by this site with a certain …intention. Yes.

Pambulon Heights Donut Club Internet HQ Inaccessible Yesterday

I’d like to formally apologize to my two regular readers, Googlebot and bingbot, for the internet outage that made the Pambulon Heights Donut Club HQ inaccessible for about 6 hours yesterday.

According to /var/log/nginx/access.log the last hit to the http/s server from an external IP address before the outage was:
[20/Nov/2018:12:07:41 -0600]
and the next hit was:
[20/Nov/2018:18:16:10 -0600]

According to /var/log/auth.log the last hit to sshd from an external IP address was:
Nov 20 12:09:15 REDACTED sshd[31648]: Disconnected from authenticating user root 122.xxx.xxx.164 port 47684 [preauth]
and the next hit was:
Nov 20 18:10:13 REDACTED sshd[638]: Received disconnect from 118.xxx.xxx.142 port 56936:11: [preauth]

The cause of the outage was due to a road crew severing a fiber-optic line that provides internet service to the Pambulon Heights Donut Club HQ and the greater Dakotaloaf region.

SPAM

Got my first two spam comments on this blog at about 20:40 last night. Both posted ostensibly from Moldova. Apparently word about the Pambulon Heights Donut Club is getting around!

Both SPAM messages are as follows:

In order to make things clear to you, let me define first what is
SEO. Like this require a mind game and knowledge to see various
factors to do on page Optimization. Now a day the demand of content writer become high. https://[REDACTED/]

Margene********@[ALSO REDACTED]

Спасибо большое мои други!

Spasibo bolshoye moi drugi

Head Shaved

Shaved the head. That’s another thing done today.

Forgot to set the character set and collation on the new SQL databases so had to go back and fix that. Also changed the root password. So the database issues are now apparently solved, have to wait and see if any problems pop up though I suspect not.

Artist and copyright status of this image is unknown

I also did some management on my personal password database and got it synced with my phone so that’s another thing done.

Getting “*organeziezd”.

Now having an issue with DVD Decrypter read errors. Have to check the disc in a moment. Actually… NOW!

Looks like this particular disc is scratched, gonna try it again. Hope it works this time.

What’s left for today?

*Note: Astute readers will understand the discrepancy between the spelling “organeziezd” in the text part of this post and the spelling “ORGANIZ-IZED” in the picture.

All I wanted was a Pepsi. Just one Pepsi…


I just wanted to accomplish one basic task today. But in order to complete that task I had to do some other task, which revealed yet another necessary task, and so forth and so on. That is how today has been.

Got the nginx and wordpress ssl stuff working reasonably well. There are still a few tweaks I would like to make but things are seemingly stable at the moment. I’ll probably explain the reasoning in a  future post.

Still need to get the database issues with wordpress and my virtual hosts figured out but that should be relatively easy. Mostly just migrating this boioioing.org database to something more site-specific, and then I’ll be as right as dodgers for this after.

And right as I was editing this post I used Mouse Without Borders to connect to my other Windows machine (actually the one hosting this site’s VM at the moment) to start a new DVD in DVD Decrypter, somehow managed to accidentally do something with the CAPS LOCK key when manually naming a VIDEO_TS directory and now the indicator LED on the keyboard won’t show when I’m typing IN CAPS on that machine. I know it’s not a hardware problem with this Corsair K70 LUX because it works fine on this PC.

Once the laptop finishes decrypting this DVD I’ll restart it and see if that fixes it. EDIT: noticed something strange happened with the Synaptics Touchpad driver. Hmm. Yes. I suppose a reboot is in order.

Constantly one more task…

EDIT 2: I’m stupid. Of course when using Mouse Without Borders the CAPS LOCK indicator LED would correspond with the PC that is being used and not necessarily the physical keyboard on which one is typing. I would not have expected that behavior and it even might have been different with a previous version of this utility but this is indeed how it is now. In my case it was the remote PC’s CAPS LOCK indicator LED that was toggling with the CAPS LOCK state, and not the LED on the local K70 when typing into the remote PC. To be fair to myself I have been keeping the laptop lid closed recently so didn’t notice this until opening the lid to check out the touchpad. At least I’m glad I figured it out.

So, what was I doing before this again? Eh, time for a walk.

Здравствуйте!

Zdravstvuyte*

Hello!

Finally starting to get this thing set up us the bomb.

Things to do:

  1. get better wp theme
  2. other things

and that is a **non-exhaustive list of things to do.

It’s been a few years since being active in the *nix world so despite many years of experience with various GNU/Linux systems I’m a bit rusty with the cli stuff. Partly due to forgetting the finer points of shell commands like one-liners with cat, grep, awk and friends, partly due to systemd making almost everything I previously knew about server admin obsolete and partly due to simply being out of the loop.

Had this laptop sitting on my desk for a while not doing much of anything so decided to host some VMs on it and see what happens. Got a nice VPS running at the moment, soon to get a lot nicer. Might even start developing a Linux-from-scratch system again though probably based on Debian rather than Slackware this time around. Nothing against Slackware, I still consider Slack 8.1 the cleanest, best OS of all time but I’ve been spoiled by apt(8) et al.

Looking forward to getting back into this. Fun to have something to tinker with again.

*One may note the transliteration of “й” to “y” here and to “i” elsewhere. Apparently both are valid but google seems to think “zdravstvuyte” is more common than “zdravstvuite”. The more you know!

**If you’re wondering how this list could be “non-exhaustive” when it concludes with the non-terminating catch-all “other things” which, to a rational mind, would seem in-and-of itself exhaustive, note that it does not include “other other things”, etc. ad infinitum. Thank you for your time.

*This one is not actually a footnote, just a wildcard abbrev. for [Li]nux, [U]nix, etc., though I suppose technically not a proper wildcard considering it fails to match the “nux” part of “Linux”. Never noticed that before. Perhaps I should have put *n?x

Actually, I guess it is a footnote now, but it wasn’t intended that way.