Daley Ponderings

I had the privilege of installing VMWare 1.0.5 on a brand new 2.6.25 kernel.  I downloaded the 2.6.XX patch for vmware 1.0.4, applied the one change from asm to linux in vcpuset.h.  That had worked for me before when using 1.0.5 on a 2.6.24 kernel, but today I downloaded a 2.6.25 kernel for someone and of course, someone changed something slightly, causing the vmware module (vmnet) to no longer compile.  Fortunately for me, a small bit of hacking fixed it, and now I can go to bed. (More)

After a slightly hectic day yesterday, when I noticed some strange behavior on one of my servers, we released a new version of LifeType.  While I am not impressed that the bug existed in the first place, I think it is pretty neat that a development fixed was released within 4 hours of the bug being discovered, and an official release within 36 hours.  The last time we had a security issue, we released the fix in less than 24 hours, but it is harder on a Sunday.

The security issue itself wasn't all that interesting - we were checking a blacklist in a case-sensitive manner, and so filename.PHP was incorrectly allowed to be uploaded, and filename.php was correctly blocked. (More)

I am sure this will excite many of our normal readers, but I have finally (after four years) switched my laptop to Linux.  Now that I am using it everyday, it is much nicer to be in this environment, instead of having putty windows all over the place.  Perhaps if I had a better window manager for windows, I would have been alright, but anyway...

I have a Sony PCG-V505DC2 for those search engines to help other folks trying to figure out any issues with installing Linux, and Debian specifically.

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When a customer says that he has a smaller project than the one I just did, don't pay attention, and think about the quote, rather than simply estimating the time as less than the previous project.

Yesterday, I did a project for a friend (one who let me have better access than average to the real estate listings) and it took an hour and a half and was 107 lines of code.  He wanted to pay for that one, but I thought it was a fair exchange for getting the real estate listing access.

Today, I did a "smaller" project, that was 367 lines of code, and it took 3.5 hours. Hrm.

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I don't know if it is only relevant to Allegheny County or if it is more universal, but a friend asked me to write a parcel id (parcel/block/lot) parser to help him out in his real estate searches.  It was kind of a fun project (3 hours) and it was neat to see how well it worked out in the end.

It takes stuff on the right, and turns it into the stuff on the left:

0318-C-00080-0000-00 <= 318 C 080
0387-S-00002-0000-00 <= 387-S-2  387-M-148
0160-K-00013-0000-00 <= 0160-K-00013-0000-00
0124-P-00095-000A-00 <= 0124-p-00095-000a-00
1213-F-00377-0000-00 <= 1213F00377
0180-B-00041-0000-00 <= 0180-B-00041-0000-00
0495-F-00201-0000-00 <= Lot & Block 495-F-201
0009-S-00305-0000-00 <= 9-S-305
0309-D-00100-0000-00 <= 0309D00100000000

Code follows below: (More)

Our photo album wouldn't publish on this last update, and it took quite a while to figure out what the problem was. (More)

I found what I would call a bug in resolvconf today, though probably most people don't run a VPN server like I wanted to, so no one ever noticed before. (More)

I have been getting a bunch of spam through my contact form over the last couple of days, so I thought I would check out what they are trying to do.  The domain's contact information is protected by privacyprotect.org, so we can't know who they are, though I filled out a form showing them their customer is a spammer, we'll see if they actually do give me the contact information or not. (More)

pure-ftpd isn't designed to work with TCP wrappers, which is unfortunate, because then I can't simply add an ip address to /etc/hosts.deny to block the hackers when they guess passwords.  But, since the hackers have tried to login to my servers thirty thousand times this month, and occasionally get good usernames, and theoretically might guess a right password eventually, I needed to figure out a solution. (More)

I have been having lots of fun (that's the bad kind of fun, not the good kind) configuring Asterisk for my new IT job.  It has been a pretty big pain getting it to work correctly with a couple different VOIP providers as well as the landlines.

I had a good day today, figuring both how to get Teliax to forward the calls to our landline (since I can't seem to register the connection with Teliax, via SIP or IAX), as well as I figured out the problem with outbound calls using the verizon line.  It turns out my theory was correct, that Asterisk was dialing too fast and not waiting for the dialtone, so Verizon wasn't getting the first digit (sometimes).  But, adding a half second wait before dialing did the trick. (More)

For those of you who have gotten an "You entered an invalid URL" message when leaving a comment, no I didn't set out to ban you from commenting - it is that you didn't put an "http://" in front of your URL.  Due to some security bugs, the input checking code was tightened up a couple months ago, and part of that changed how the URLs were parsed.  After months of procrastinating, I finally got around to working on the problem - and it took all of five minutes to add a new type of filter that checks the URL prior to validation and prepends an "http://" to the beginning if you forget.

So, those of you who thought I didn't want to hear from you, comment away... 

One of the LifeType users reported a security problem in the RSS parser that allowed any file on your system to be read.  ick.

Oscar has fixed it and 1.1.6 will be released tomorrow.

Everyone on my server has been upgraded already and it probably isn't too critical for them, at least in the case of retrieving their mysql password, which was the reported problem, since mysql doesn't allow remote access, so it would have to be a customer of mine.  Though I suppose since any file could have been read, it is possible that some other file could have been opened.

Actually, I just checked the server logs, and no attempts were made to get any files that had a ".." in them, so everyone should be alright. 

I usually end up forgetting how to do this, so here are my instructions of how to keep Usermin, an administration tool I use for my Lime Daley customers, up-to-date with the developers' changes. (More)

Hi newtech1. This is how it works. I previously bookmarked the "bookmarklet" on the new post page, and then while viewing your post, I went to my bookmarks and chose the javascript bookmark, which opened up the new post page, with the below already in the "text" window.

... (Original Post)

I added "Jonathan" and "Noah" to the banned topics on the sidebar, since it is more interesting if those words that occur quite often, and therefore were the overwhelming large words, and everything else was small. Now you can see a more interesting variety of things we post about.