The ongoing struggle

• Penetrating Wagner’s “Ring”
• Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer — Wired
• Business Owners, Customers, Unicorns Upset Over Controversial Billboard
• Sidewalk Psychiatry
• Man Caught Having Sex with a Picnic Table — First Coast News
• Lower Back Tattoo Stickers FINALLY Available For Kids At Toys ‘R Us

• Aspiring Politician Changes Name To Pro-Life
• Lamb leg hurled during sports event
• The Table Tap Beer Sales System
• 2.5″ 256GB SATA SSD — a snip at $6k

• Oregon man’s property ransacked after Craigslist hoax

Tonight I happened to be looking through one of my server’s logs for something and found my ability to do so was being seriously hampered by the amount of crap being logged by iptables logging dropped packets (even though that is rate-limited). I was mildly surprised to note that most of it was like this:

Mar 23 16:26:58 kwak kernel: world>somedom DENY: IN=eth0 OUT=v-somedom SRC=24.64.119.208 DST=192.168.194.1 LEN=512 PROTO=UDP SPT=24642 DPT=1027 LEN=492
Mar 23 16:26:58 kwak kernel: world>somedom DENY: IN=eth0 OUT=v-somedom SRC=24.64.119.208 DST=192.168.194.1 LEN=512 PROTO=UDP SPT=24642 DPT=1026 LEN=492
Mar 23 16:26:58 kwak kernel: world>somedom DENY: IN=eth0 OUT=v-somedom SRC=24.64.119.208 DST=192.168.194.1 LEN=512 PROTO=UDP SPT=24642 DPT=1028 LEN=492
Mar 23 16:26:58 kwak kernel: world>anotherdom DENY: IN=eth0 OUT=v-anotherdom SRC=24.64.124.244 DST=192.168.194.2 LEN=512 PROTO=UDP SPT=31002 DPT=1026 LEN=492
Mar 23 16:26:58 kwak kernel: world>anotherdom DENY: IN=eth0 OUT=v-anotherdom SRC=24.64.124.244 DST=192.168.194.2 LEN=512 PROTO=UDP SPT=31002 DPT=1027 LEN=492
Mar 23 16:26:58 kwak kernel: world>anotherdom DENY: IN=eth0 OUT=v-anotherdom SRC=24.64.124.244 DST=192.168.194.2 LEN=512 PROTO=UDP SPT=31002 DPT=1028 LEN=492

It’s been so long that I had even forgotten what UDP 1026-1028 was all about. It’s WinPopUP — the mechanism by which spammers (used to?) put up dialog boxes on the screens of unfirewalled Windows machines.

At first I thought “stupid spammers,” but if they’re doing it then it must still be working to some degree. This should have been dead and buried since 2002. Sad state of affairs!

BitFolk is providing additional mirrors in London and San Francisco for the Ubuntu UK Podcast.

I think my end is sorted out so hopefully the Ubuntu UK side of things will be ready in time for episode 2’s release early next week.

Obviously as it’s only on episode 2 it’s rather new so I’m not exactly expecting a deluge of requests, but it will be interesting to see actually what bandwidth is used.

(click images for more detail; if image is broken then the graph is currently updating)

BitFolk’s spamd service in London has been a little overloaded in recent times. A lot of the times the backend servers have been complaining that they’re full and some connections were being delayed. As a free service it is challenging to keep it performing perfectly and I only attempt to do so on a “best effort” basis, but hopefully things will be better for a while now as I have finally got around to starting up a new backend server on the most recently installed hardware. I gave it a decent amount of RAM to begin with so hopefully I won’t be facing problems trying to squeeze it in later.

I haven’t yet really considered trying to enforce any sort of “fair usage” policies although that may be an idea, since the top few users tend to use the majority of the resources. I’m pretty sure that they could avoid sending quite so many connections directly through the relatively expensive spamd stage if they were to try other antispam things first, such as insisting on greater RFC compliance, greetpausing, greylisting, stricter use of DNSBLs etc. etc.

I have also noticed that some users are going direct to the backend spamds as opposed to using the load balancer’s service IP. This is bad because the load balancer has an overview of how busy each backend is and tries to direct new connections to the least-used backend. If it then finds that backend is busier than it thought, or worse still, if it’s actually too full to take a new connection, then things get even less efficient. I may have to crack down on this by firewalling off the backends except from the load balancer. Of course I’ll need to make sure that use of the load balancer’s service IP is fully documented, and properly warn people.

I should also investigate dspam at some point.

I’m currently thoroughly enjoying FOSDEM, as I have all the other times I’ve been. It’s great that these people have made the time to come and give talks for free, so I hope I don’t sound ungrateful when I make these observations.

When giving a technical talk:

• make sure you have actually read your material! It’s surprising the number of presenters who will not know the order of their slides or what some part of what they have written means!
• try to practice delivering it. It will give you some idea of what pace it needs to be presented at.
• test all the facilities you need in your talk! If you need to plug a projector into your laptop, try this ahead of time and make sure it works! If you need Internet connectivity, try this ahead of time and make sure it works! If you have a demo, try it and make sure it works! The message here is, try it ahead of time and make sure it works!
• resist the urge to show a shell in a terminal emulator. They’re really hard to read on a large screen and don’t get across the essential information in the brief way needed for a presentation. Try to avoid showing anything running in a shell unless absolutely necessary. Watching pages of output fly by only to have you say “see, it has worked” doesn’t work particularly well in this setting, as there is far too much distracting information.
• if you must use a terminal then set it to black text on a white background, turn off coloured output (e.g. in ls and other applications) and hike the font size up. Go through things slowly and try to remove all irrelevant output. Be prepared for people to still be unable to tell what is going on.
• try to deliver your material in an animated way. The smartest person in the world talking about the most Earth-shattering subject will still make their audience fall asleep if they deliver it in a monotone. Especially if it’s just after lunch or near the end of the day! It’s not the audience’s fault, it happens to most people if they sit passively all day.
• invite questions, either during the talk, at the end or both. When people ask a question, repeat the question for everyone to hear! Most of the room will not have heard the question that was just asked so your response would otherwise be meaningless to them. Doing this also helps to ensure that you understand the question they have asked, so it’s probably worth it even if the person who asked the question had a mic also.

After a tremendous effort by a few of the other admins and volunteers, the new-look lug.org.uk has been launched.

I’m not going to go into massive detail as plenty of other blog posts have been written about this already, and I wasn’t one of the admins doing much work on it. However I am really impressed with what has been achieved and very happy to see the back of the old site and server it was on.

It will be interesting to see what we can come up with in terms of managed services for our users in future. I would like eventually for all new accounts by default to be given only restricted access and a prearranged list of customisable applications, instead of the current full shell account and free use of PHP/CGI that they have had previously. Whether we should ever (again) offer anything more is something I am not convinced about.

The vast majority of accounts do not require anything but the most simple web hosting, and supporting the legacy environment would be a challenge for even a commercial hosting company. I think that providing complex custom hosting for free is not our remit and groups desiring that should be looking for a commercial hosting provider. It’s also my opinion that providing hosting services should always remain a relatively minor part of what we do — okay, mailing lists are essential but most LUGs can scrape together some web hosting for themselves if they need to. What we are primarily there for I believe is to help with cross-LUG communication and publicity, simply keeping track of which LUGs exist and how to find them and so on. The new site should help us do that but there is always room for improvement.

Another issue we’ve done a lot of talking about but not managed to make much progress on is the issue of incorporation. To date, lug.org.uk has been run by individuals, services have been donated and we’ve never really accepted monetary donations. In the last couple of years we’ve faced having to buy decent hardware, because no company was interested in donating something suitable, and begging for it was time-consuming and soul-destroying. We also now have a recurring cost for hosting which is basically being paid for by a couple of us as individuals. It would be nicer in some respects if we could formally incorporate lug.org.uk as a non-profit society / club / charity / whatever, so that it could have its own bank account and pay its suppliers.

We’ve made a couple of stabs at the charter that would be required for this — Hugo in particular has spent a lot of time on it — yet we’ve never managed to come to an agreement amongst the active admins over responsibilities and burdens it would place on us. I hope we can resolve this one day soon. In the meantime we should probably just add some sort of donations page.

A number of the lug.org.uk admins including myself will be at FOSDEM for the next few days. If you have any ideas for lug.org.uk or just want a chat please do seek us out! We’ll be wearing lug.org.uk t-shirts but if you’re having no luck finding us then the phone number in my contact details will work.

I’m off to FOSDEM in Brussels tomorrow, in the yearly pilgrimage with the Hampshire LUG lot. If you’re also there and I haven’t made it obvious that I don’t want to talk to you, feel free to say hi!

I had thought that my use of mutt was completely ordinary, but after pasting a screenshot of it:

into IRC for unrelated reasons, a number of people asked how I set it up like that. The answer is I read the manual!

But for those not interested in reading the manual, the image is of the pager view, i.e. what is used to view an individual message. The top few lines show a view of the index, i.e. the list of messages in the current folder. People have referred to this as a split window but it isn’t really as there is no way to make it “active” and give it commands that you would use in the index. It’s just for display purposes, but it does help to see where you are in the thread.

Adding:

set pager_index_lines=10

to your .muttrc will dedicate the top 10 lines of your pager view to this view of the index.

The colour scheme shown is determined by the following lines:

color header cyan black .
color header yellow black ^From
color header yellow black ^Subject
color body yellow black [_a-z\.\$A-Z0-9-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9\./\-]+
color body yellow black (http|ftp)://[_a-zA-Z0-9\?\=\&\@\%\#\:\,\./~\-]+
color quoted green black
color signature cyan black
color attachment yellow black
color tree white black
color indicator black cyan
color status yellow blue
color tilde blue black
color normal white black
color index green black ~N

The lines with regular expressions just pick out things like email addresses and URLs. The last line makes new (unread) mails stand out in the index view. The regular expressions could be improved but really, they work well enough for me. I haven’t edited this part of the config since 2005!