Goodbye old friend

Last night I turned off the UKChat server.

UKChat was a chat site that I co-ran and has been running for 10 years. It's been a part of my life after work and at weekends for a long time, so it was a bit of a wrench to turn it off.

Why did we do it? A number of reasons. Chat has had its day. IMs and Social Networking sites have taken its place, and the amount of effort required to keep it running was getting beyond that which we had available.

It was good while it lasted. I made a lot of friends and even had a couple of good relationships as a result of it, but nothing lasts forever, so it was good going out on a high.

Posted at 19:38 | Comments (0)

Google Hype

What a load of hype in the press yesterday about Google "putting an end to traditional phone lines"... Just because they announced their own instant messenger that allows "Free phone calls".

They are not offering anything that is not already available elsewhere in MSN Messenger and Skype. In fact Skype goes even further than the Google offering in that it already interfaces with traditional phone networks in most countries around the world.

Talking of VoIP (Voice over IP, the technology in question here), I have just installed a VoIP telephone exchange in my flat! Using the free Asterisk software I have five phones connected to it and able to route and receive calls via my BT line, NTL line (came with the cable TV) and a VoIP Broadband provider. It does some cool things like if I am not home, it offers the caller the choice of routing the call to my mobile or leaving a message......... Am I sad or what?

Posted at 14:38 | Comments (0)

Moblogging

The latest Internet craze is, apparently, moblogging.

Moblogging is creating and maintaining blog entries from your mobile phone, especially camera phones.

Whilst I've decided not to go completely mobloggy (is that the word?), I have added a section on this page where I can post a picture taken on my camera phone.

Don't expect any great photography here, the camera in the phone isn't of the greatest resolution, but you can be sure that if I do see anything interesting and manage to get a picture of it, it will appear here as soon as I send it from the phone.

Posted at 23:26 | Comments (1)

The smallest things matter

As you may know, I run my own internet server, which, among other things, hosts this and other websites and provides email for about 100 users. In the bottom right-hand corner of this page you can see a counter that indicates how many days since the server last rebooted. On Monday it was showing 515 days.....

About 22:30 on Monday night I started getting phonecalls and text messages from my users saying that their passwords were being rejected. I tried to log in, and to my horror, MY password was rejected! When this happens the first though is "I've been hacked!".

Last night, after work, I went to the data centre that houses my server armed with a bootable floppy disk. Rebooted the server with the floppy, restored a backup copy of the password database and then restarted the server. Oh Joyous Rapture!! It's working again!!!

Then the forensic work started to try and find out what had happened and what was damaged etc. It turns out that it wasn't hacked. A glitch, of some unknown sort, caused the last character of the password database (/etc/shadow for you techies) to be missed. One character (a newline, not even a printable character) caused the system to lock everyone out!

All is working again, and once again I cry "Thank God for Backups!!".

Posted at 08:43 | Comments (1)

Chat Room Hysteria

I feel I have to make some sort of comment on the anti-chat room stance of the British tabloid press...

The main problem with children using the Internet, including chat rooms, is that the parents are not taking enough responsibility for supervising their childrens use of it. I think it can be summed up in a conversation I had with a neighbour a few years ago when they had just installed Cable TV in our road. The neighbour complained that some of the channels showed adult programs that he didn't want his children to watch. I said he should use the parental controls built into the cable box. His response was "I can't be bothered to work out how to use it". If he can't be bothered to restrict what his kids watch, in my opinion, he has no right to complain about them watching the adult channels!! And the same goes for the Internet.

For a much more lucid argument on the subject, read the article my friend Katie wrote for the Guardian Unlimited.

Posted at 00:08 | Comments (6)

Where Spam Comes From

The Center for Democracy and Technology has recently put together a report studying the methods by which spammers get your email addresses.

The report posted email addresses in a variety of locations, using different techniques for visibility (ie HTML encoding vs plaintext) and then watched what accumulated after six months.

They generated some interesting results into the methods by which spammers can track you (with publicly available websites containing your bare email address being the most popular method) and even some techniques to stop spam, such as HTML encoding your email address.

Posted at 19:10 | Comments (0)

My Plugin!

I have written my own plugin for Moveable Type and published it!

It is called QOTD which stands for "Quote of the Day" and generates a random quote for the website.

I submitted the plugin to the MT Plugin Directory website and they have published it here.

It's not much, but it's my first openly published software!

Posted at 23:25 | Comments (1)

Spam, Spam, Spam

Last night the server suffered a major spam attack.

It wasn't spam directed at the server, it was a spammer that had used one of the domains hosted on the server as a fake "From" address, and the attack was the tens of thousands of bounces. It looks like the spammer was targeting every possible email address at Hotmail and AOL.

I can cope with spam directed at my server as I have got some very effective anti-spam software (SpamAssassin) installed, but there is not a lot I can do with this sort of attack. All the mails were being bounced by the server, its just that there were so many of them that the processor load in dealing with them was slowing everything down.

Anyway the domain owner (Katie) and I decided to remove the MX record for the domain as she doesn't use it for mail. Thats fixed it for this attack, but what happens when they choose another domain I host, and one that IS used for mail?

Posted at 10:43 | Comments (1)