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 …