Month: October 2004

A big down …

One of the downs I guess I neglected to mention last entry is when your connection goes down, or the power goes down … I had the worst Internet day of my life yesterday … I got home from an excellent Saturday night at Bootleggers, probably around 5AM or so … The PA was loud and the band sounded awesome … Incredibly full sound packed with a punch that I haven’t heard much at Bootleggers … I think that’s cause I really haven’t ever turned it up that loud there cause I never have been allowed to … New owners, new attitude … There was a wet T-shirt contest in between the 2nd and 3rd sets, and by the time they wrapped that up, Octane didn’t start playing until 1:45 … They played until 2:10 … Breakin the law, breakin the law … Did I say it was loud? Awesome …

But I digress, so I do my normal channel flipping cause I fall asleep to the TV all the time … The TV drowns out my tinitus … So I get engrossed in this movie with Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley about some chick that lost her house and ol’ Ben moved in … That ends, and the screen shows that The Man Without a Face is coming on next … So, I have to watch that … It’s a great movie … Should buy the DVD … So the credits are rolling, and poof, the power goes out, for like a second … Damn, first thing that shoots through my mind is the computers and how I haven’t had a power loss for over a year and a half or more …

This fries the power supply in the main Windows Server, the domain controller … I am very tired now … I didn’t expect to last through two movies and then have a power outage requiring my attention … So I am going to send the wife up to CompUSA to purchase a power supply … I remember looking at the clock to see if they were open, and as I recall they were, so maybe this was around 9:30? Heck, I have logs … hang on a sec … Okay, here’s the story … The power dropped at 9:20AM … I could tell she wasn’t too excited about this, so I figured I would molest another machine and go buy replacements later … (I have another machine allocated to Windows that needs a power supply as well, so I should pick up 3 or 4 of them) … So I replace the power supply, and bring up the Windows server at 10:02 … I am poking around on there, and boom! 10:11 the power goes out again … It’s out this time for about 30 minutes …

Once I get everything synched back up again, I can’t bring up my own web site, I can’t bring up any other site except for the ICUHost.Net site … So I figure this is some sort of DNS issue since the only zone in my local Active Directory enabled DNS is the ICUHost.Net domain … I see activity through the firewall that millions of HTTP hits have gone through, so I know things are working okay from the outside, I just can’t get around … I put my FreeBSD name server as a secondary in the Windows configuration and sies started coming up for me … So, okay, I have some sort of internal DNS issue, but I don’t necessarily know why, so I figure I will leave it until later … Everything seems to be working for the people outside, and that’s all that matters … We were having people over for the 3 year old’s birthday, and I hadn’t gotten any sleep yet … The wife called and delayed the invites another hour to allow for this … When she came to me and said people were there, I mosied to another sleeping location and got another hour basically …

I came down and checked out the machines … I logged into all the others that I hadn’t logged into yet … I brought up the game servers and their streaming log file applications that produced the web displays and log capturing for stats … Just brought up more things that are normally running that I didn’t fire up earlier cause I wanted sleep … So back upstairs to the house fulla people celebrating the little guy’s birthday …

Then the phone rings and the wife answers it and it’s a reseller who cain’t FTP … I do preliminary help, and nothing is resolved so I stick him on hold and head down the steps to the dungeon I call home … I browse around and I can’t figure out why he can’t FTP … The service is running, I see his connection with netstat … It’s just not making sense to me … While he’s on the phone, he has company show up, so we both decide that I will look at it later and get back to him when I think I know what’s going on with this issue … No one else had called, so I wasn’t entirely sure if it was all on my end … I supposed it was though … So I go back upstairs … The wife also informs me that someone overflowed the toilet … as I noticed this when the top of the kitchen stairs were wet … Sheesh …

As I am sitting there with this going through my mind, I start to think that maybe I never saved the router config when I applied ACLs to it, and maybe that when the power went out it cycled an old configuration that had these problems in it … and that was probably also the reason that I was having internal/external surfing issues … Those were the symptoms I had had when I initially started trying to lock out the baddies working on the router ACLs … So at the optimum time I head back downstairs to apply this theory … I find the files I was using to go through these changes, and I find the most recent ACL text file that I have and I apply that to the router … I go over to the syslog and I see in it that the Serial Interface changed state to down, and I saw that the Internet activity LED that is normally pretty much solid is off … and I’m thinking that the Serial Interface never was taken down when I went in to configure the router … Weird … So I hop back over to HyperTerminal and exit from the router … Still no Internet light … Hmmm … so I go around to the other side and check out the CSU/DSU lights and sure enough there is that little amber guy staring at me … “AL” … Alarm … My connection is down … No! Not what I think it is …

Yes, the toilet juice ran down through the floor and was all over the T1 connection box … drips of water hanging from the bottom … I probably turned red … I was livid … There was everybody upstairs, and with the problems I had already had today, my T1 is screwed up cause someone used too much toilet tissue … 2 floors away! I pick up the intercom and get the wife’s attention … She doesn’t pick up, and I’m not about to broadcast my concerns to all those present … So I hung up and called the home phone, she answered and said she heard me, and I said slowly through my teeth, “Bring me the hair dryer” … She says, “you’re kidding” like she knows why … After a wait much longer than I expected, I became more .. uhm .. upset I guess … So she finally shows up, and I simply don’t say a word, plug in the hair dryer and point it at the device that I have no knowledge of … For one thing, it’s locked … I can’t get into it … So I blow hot air into the vents thinking that maybe something will dry out and miraculously I will have an Internet connection again … After 5 or 10 minutes of this, and no result, I give up and call for service …

The guy takes my number down, etc … asks me when I am available at this number, etc and I’m like 24 hours a day … and asking what hours are tomorrow etc, and I’m like … ‘This is the location, we’re here now and through the night, we will be here for the guy whenever the guy shows up’ … So I think I conveyed my desire to have ASAP service … Especially after I expressed my concern that someone wouldn’t be out tonight to fix this … That was probably the clue, and he said he would call and see what could be done and get back to me … So, nothing else I could do, I went upstairs waiting for the phone to ring … I had to leave for the Tango to go to work in a short while … I told the wife that when the phone rang her answers were “yes” and “anytime, right now is good” … I was just sitting there at the dinig room table clutching my coffee mug ever so tightly … My father came over and asked me questions and stuff … But he didn’t know what was up with the thing, etc (he’s not a computer genius like myself) so I snapped “I don’t really wanna talk about this right now” and he walked away … I felt bad, but it was the truth … So I figured I would just go to work … After all, there was alcohol there …

The wife called at 10:30 and said that the technician will come out when the sun comes up, whenever that is … They prefer to work during the light hours … I thought that was completely odd … When I got home she said that Savvis had called around 3AM and said the guy would be here at 8AM … He didn’t show til about 8:40 (the bastard) … It was fixed in about 20 minutes … Down for about 12 hours …

Of course at this point I already know that anyone who hosts through me is already searching for a new host … I mean, I would, so I can’t blame anyone for feeling that way … For me, I don’t sweat the downtime … I don’t think anything is that important … I am dissatisfied at the response time … I will certainly be looking into that further … I pay a huge chunk of change per month … I think the service should reflect that … I don’t charge people a lot that host through me though, and I give no limitations on anyone except for disk space … I sent a way less stuffed shirt email to everyone who hosts through me and so far the response has been good … On the other hand, besides demanding that my host remain available 24/7 with backups out the B-hind, I can appreciate that before this outage (that was explained in graphic detail) that there was an uptmie of over a year … What did someone actually miss? Email delayed, another offensive guest book entry? It’s like what my wife and I did one power outage … We played cards … We don’t ever play cards … but then again, she doesn’t read email … But cards, not even for clothes or anything … Strip Gin is a thing of the past … We’re grandparents now, you know … I just hope people understand what went down … How and why, and that 12 hours is nothing compared to the 19, 680 some odd hours before that since June 28, 2002 …

Ups and Downs

There are ups and downs to the Internet … One of the major downs is the people who wish to inflict grief on those unsuspecting persons who innocently go about their business on the ‘net … They surf the web, and they send/receive email … But there are those that send out malicious emails containing viruses or simply junk email to fill their email box … Then there are those that are up on all the latest exploits and derive some sort of gratification searching the ‘net for those vulnerable and using that vulnerability to inflict their grief, however lame it may be … In some cases, the people inflicting the grief don’t even see the results … This I truly don’t understand … What’s the pay-off?

Just today I received an IRC message that someone had defaced my Counter-Strike web site … I use PHPNuke for that site and there’s obviously been SQL insertion exploits on PHPNuke before, but I had thought that I was all patched up … This did happen once before and I had set out to fix it back then … The thing is, this was probably anywhere from 6 months to a year ago … So there that site sat, vulnerable for all this time until this grief striker happened by … So, I simply upgraded to the latest and greatest version of PHPNuke, and I hope that they have finally fixed this vulnerability in their code …

The point here is that all these people who run automated programs to sniff around the ‘net for open vulnerabilities is simply crazy … It was one thing when I started hosting to know that I had to protect my computers sitting here on the ‘net, but not until I started running software firewalls did I see the volume of the port scans that actually went on … Because I couldn’t afford the nifty ISP Firewall appliances that cost up into the thousands, I stuck with the software firewalls, even though they weren’t for server usage … The Windows ones especially were bad … They would crash the Windows servers every so often … Having DNS on those servers made all sites hosted here inaccessible … So I moved DNS to FreeBSD Servers … SPAM became ridiculous on the 3rd party Windows Mail Servers, so I went to a FreeBSD solution that did SPAM and Virus filtering, and that took care of a lot of SPAM … I was at the point of receiving 200 SPAM messages per day … I would come to my workstation and become literally depressed about it … I finally had to act, and in researching this, I found that again it would have cost in the thousands to do it with the existing Windows Mail Servers …

Back in June and July, I started looking into building a hardware firewall out of a PC and I accomplished this and it has been in place since July … Those that read the ICUHost.Net News will see when I was vague about the connection being unavailable … It was at these times that I was trying to put that PC/Firewall in between the router and the first switch … It again is running FreeBSD in an IPLess configuration … So I didn’t lose any IPs to the box, it simply packet filters … I see millions of blocks … Before that I had activated ACLs on the Cisco router, and that is logged as well … Millions upon millions of malicious queries 24 hours a day … Again, it’s depressing …

So, yeah … I saved a lot of money using FreeBSD to solve a lot of the problems that existed on my Internet … The Firewall, Mail Server and DNS Servers (MS Servers were easily spoofed) … This discussion isn’t about Windows vs. FreeBSD or anything … It is simply the solution that I found that saved me a lot of money, and in the long run has saved me a lot of grief … SPAM, Viruses and exploits have certainly decreased … But this is a peek into the “downs” I am talking about, and even through all this protection that I put in place, some idiot went and exploited my game server’s web site … Oh well … The other annoying thing that seems to be going on is people spamming guestbooks and forums with their get rich quick web sites … TV sites, gambling sites … etc … Such a waste …

The “ups” are simple … You have access to people that you would never have met … I experienced this way back in the BBS days … Conversing with people from all over the country who did the same thing I did … Ran a Public Bulletin Board System … I even wrote utilities that supported this BBS Software (Spitfire) and I had registrations from all over the world … I will never forget when one of the registrations said Guam … Neat! but the ‘net killed the BBS world … I’d say around 1995 or 96 … But we were very inventive until then … I participated in FidoNet which shipped messages all over the world for free … I remember a guy in Germany giving me the advice that I needed to get something to work properly on my DOS based machine … Today with the ‘net, it’s so commonplace …

There are many sites like mine here … I just spew off what’s on my mind … Sometimes I’m vague about what I am talking about cause it will only pertain to people “in the know” who may or may not know what’s going on with me … But those that aren’t “in the know” can still retrieve meaning from it I think … Recently I stopped by the site of Rob Rohe … I have played Counter-Strike with this guy for probably 3 or 4 years, but he finally got a site up and asked people to check it out … sorta … but anyway, here was my peek into this guy I have only known as Augustus for this time … He has written several short stories and poems … Because of this Internet, I was able to be exposed to this quite simply … The pages of an aspiring writer from Illinois …

Not only are there all of these malicious people constantly searching the ‘net for exploits, there are also these “robots” that surf the web and archive data … Data, data and more data … This becomes data for search engines such as Google, Yahoo etc … So now when someone goes to one of these search engines, they may happen on Rob Rohe, or David Pierron because of some of the words used in the text of these postings … Whether it be a thought out story such as Rob’s, or just thoughts as they pour from the fingers such as my posts here … I believe this is an “up” … I believe this is a good thing … I believe that it will bring people together … Which brings me to another point that I always relished …

I don’t think I have a picture of myself posted here anywhere … Not that I don’t want to post it or anything, but my fascination with the online world was/is this … Most people don’t know the age of someone nor what they look like, so there is no discrimination … I have seen 15 year olds have intelligent conversations with 50 year olds … and they relate very well … I had the priviledge of knowing this information being I ran the BBS and one of the sign-up questions was your birthday … When you were logged on, this information was displayed at the top of the screen for the duration of your logon … I still think the same thing applies on the ‘net … In any textual exchange, the discriminations that would keep people apart in the physical world don’t exist … While I no longer know the ages of people, I do know that they are vast and that this exchange of information still breaks the age and physical barrier … People tend to shy away from the handicapped in the physical world … Online, there is no boundary … If you type it, they will come … (heh) … Some younger people would probably shy away from someone looking like Albert Einstein playing with change in their pocket and having fun with their unsecured dentures … But online, the theory of relativity comes from the mind, not the appearance …

This message was spawned in my brain from looking at the mail server stats and seeing thousands of queries at a certain time of day, and me thinking to myself why on earth someone would check for mail every minute … Is email that important? Is something going to happen if you don’t receive an email within a 2 minute period? I don’t know? I have my mail client set to check for mail every 10 minutes … I am using POP-SSL so I can see my activity easily on the mail server graphs … I hang low on the graph while the other activity runs wild … I don’t understand the urgency … I also don’t understand why people receive a bunch of messages they don’t even need … Mailing lists, etc … Messages that never get read, or simply the redundancy of sending copies of messages to multiple email accounts … It just doesn’t seem to me that there’s time in the day to sift through all of it as well as enjoy the physical world as it applies to yourself … I looked out a window today … The sky was blue, it looked sunny, but a little chilly today … I thought, it would be nice to go outside and take a look around … See what was going on … But I didn’t … I went back to sleep …

And the last thing on my plate today? I get frustrated when I don’t know the answer to something … Specifically, why I would get an email from someone who I have been hosting a couple years that goes pretty much like this: We have decided to move our domain to another host. Please remove the DNS entry for us and please stop billing of our account in the next billing cycle. Thank you for your services to date. … Actually that is the exact text of the message with the domain name removed … Why this frustrates me? Because I don’t know the “Why?” … Why are they moving? I hadn’t had any communication with these people in months if not years … In other words, everything was fine … It’s not like there were many complaints and this was the result of it … There was no word … good nor bad about this, just this message showing up one fine day in my email box … There were never any questions or communications prior to this message … I don’t know if it’s my nature, but if I were cruising along with something, and something else came up, I would contact the current situation and say something like “Hey! I have been cruising along with you for x amount of time, and this other opportunity came up. This other opportunity has this, this, that and this. What do you think? Is this a good deal, something you could match, or what?” … Least that’s how I would do it …

I really like the fact that I can bring my laptop to The Whiskey Tango and do things from there … I can see that these people who have moved or whatever .. I can see where they have gone … In some cases when I do get inquiries, I can do these things prior to someone changing and settle all their concerns … I also use outside web sites to do my bidding as well … Uninterested parties who have no idea their assistance in me preparing a case for someone … So, I can ping from The Whiskey Tango (which is on a local Comcast Cable connection) and I can ping from all over the country … So I ping my network from the Whiskey Tango and I get a 20ms response … From Socket.Net I get about 40-45ms … (I think Socket.Net is in MO) … Almost all of the time, I seem to get about an 80ms response from the places that these people show me that have these great deals … They’re also usually in TX for whatever reason (computers and connections must be cheap there, especially being that they’re 4 times slower) … Why you would want to host a Philly web site somewhere so far from Philly with a slower response time, etc is beyond me … I just don’t understand it … So, for anyone that happens on this bit of text, and they do hosting with me … Please, ask questions … I am very good at researching other hosting companies and being able to tell you what sort of network they run, etc … I can tell if it’s a colo or an independent network, and I can tell you how their response time compares …

One person switched to someone else because they didn’t understand me … and I guess that sort of defeats my “ask questions” mentality … She said that whenever she asked me a question, although I responded to her, whatever I wrote her was all “gobbledy-gook” (I think that’s in this here bLog somewhere) … I don’t attempt to try to confuse people or belittle them with information that I may know more about … I think that if something isn’t clear then you don’t know what you’re doing, and you should ask more questions … It’s not like I make things up … Whatever I say can be confirmed with any source … It just depends on how honest the people you’re talking to are … I think I am one of the most honest people I know … and I say that from just experiencing exisitng in this physical world, outside the Internet … I learned a long time ago what being dishonest would get you … and this relates to any situation, whether business or personal … Your character speaks volumes … Anyway, I think that should do it for today …