Recently, I was working on some DNS tools, including DNS lookup and WHOIS tools. Needing to test the WHOIS tool, I used google.com as a test domain (as I usually do). The WHOIS lookup returned some rather interesting results:

Hostnames like "GOOGLE.COM.IS.HOSTED.ON.PROFITHOSTING.NET", "GOOGLE.COM.PLZ.GIVE.A.PR8.TO.AUDIOTRACKER.NET", GOOGLE.COM.ZOMBIED.AND.HACKED.BY.WWW.WEB-HACK.CO and " GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM" are listed.

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Update 2010-03-28: MySpaceTools.ws is no longer available, due to MySpace blocking my server from accessing it.

Edit: This has been moved to MySpaceTools.ws. Please email errors [-at-] myspacetools.ws for support, do not comment here.

Based on a blog entry I read about backing up your profile, I decided to try and write a script that would grab your entire friend list so you can have a local copy of it. It was kinda hard to do, but I've managed to write a relatively simple script that will grab your entire friends list, and display it on the one page. It does so by grabbing each page in the "View All Friends" section, and essentially merges them all together. What you end up with is one page that contains your entire friends list.

Take a look at [broken link removed] for the script so far. Note that it will currently not work on private profiles (although I'm working on a fix for that). For now, if you have a private profile, you must temporarily set your profile to public in order to export the friends list.

You can easily save the page it generates (via File ? Save As...) and keep it as a local copy of your friends list. Yes, I know how it displays its output is kinda ugly at the moment, but I'm a coder, not a designer 😛

Hope it's useful for someone. 😃

I originally posted this to the MySpace Forums, but thought I should also post it here

Yesterday, I had a hard drive die on me  😦. It was a 160 GB Seagate Barracuda, and was less than a year old. It started with strange error messages late last night. I went to the server, reset it (need to power it off - It wouldn't shutdown cleanly), and now it won't boot. When I try to boot the system, I can hear the drive head hitting against the side of the drive, which makes me think there is a problem internally with the drive...

I'm looking into recovery options, though I think it will be way too expensive for my needs. If it is too expensive, I'll just have to cut my losses and move on. A lot of my development work was on this server (it was my backup PC as well). Whilst I have local copies of stuff, a lot of it is slightly old. It's kinda depressing to have something like this happen, so I'm not really in a good mood at the moment  😦

Update: About two weeks after the hard drive "failed", I tried it again. It was working, but made a strange sound. I quickly copied all the data off of it, and disconnected it. I was able to get a copy of all the most important data. So, it's not so bad... This story has a happy ending 😄

I checked my email inbox this morning, and guess what I found? The firewall (ConfigServer Security and Firewall) on a server I help run blocked a brute-force attack from Nokia:

Time: Tue May 1 02:28:18 2007

IP: 63.97.248.34 (machine34.nokia.com)

Failures: 5 (sshd)

Interval: 135 seconds

Blocked: Yes

Log entries:

May 1 02:28:08 blue sshd[9363]: Failed password for root from ::ffff:63.97.248.34 port 56057 ssh2

May 1 07:28:08 blue sshd[9364]: Failed password for root from ::ffff:63.97.248.34 port 56057 ssh2

May 1 02:28:11 blue sshd[9368]: Failed password for root from ::ffff:63.97.248.34 port 56436 ssh2

May 1 07:28:11 blue sshd[9369]: Failed password for root from ::ffff:63.97.248.34 port 56436 ssh2

May 1 02:28:13 blue sshd[9370]: Failed password for root from ::ffff:63.97.248.34 port 56591 ssh2

Just thought it was funny 😛

(oh yeah, and I will report it to them!)

The next major version of SMF, SMF 2.0, has been announced on the Simple Machines Community Forum. This new version is a significant step forward from SMF 1.1, and has been in development alongside it since December 2005.

Some of the features annouced so far include (quoted from the post linked above):

  • Database abstraction - with support for PostgreSQL and SQLite planned alongside that of MySQL.

  • Automatic installation of packages into themes other than just the default.

  • Email templates to simplify customization of forum emails.

  • Moderation center including post, topic and attachment moderation - to allow approving of user content before it is made public.

  • User warning system.

  • Additional group functionally including group moderators and requestable/free assignable groups.

  • WYSIWYG editor to provide an intuitive user interface to those users not familiar with BBC.

  • Permission improvements such as group inheritance and permission profiles to further reduce the complexity of the permissions system.

  • File based caching for a performance increase on all forums regardless of whether an accelerator is installed.

  • Mail queuing system to stagger the sending of emails to improve performance on large forums.

  • Advanced signature settings to allow the administrator of a forum to more tightly control the contents of users signatures.

  • Personal messaging improvements including ability to automatically sort incoming messages and a variety of display options.

  • Improved upgrade script with better timeout protection and simpler user interface.

  • Custom profile fields to enable administrators to add additional member fields from the administration center.

This release is going to be awesome. I've been trying out a few alpha versions of it, and it looks amazing. Note that it will still be a while before a public beta, as there's still some bugs to work out.

Keep up the great work, guys! 😄

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