Peter's Blog

Looking at the access logs for this site, most entries have a referrer string that tells me how a visitor got here. This string contains information about the page they were on when they clicked and got to my site. For a google search, for example, the referrer string gives the actual google query that they used.

However, some visitors come without referrer information. Presumably they are worried I will figure out what sleazy sites they have visited or they are ashamed of using yahoo search rather than google (would explain why I get so few hits from yahoo). I wondered how they had set up their browsers to stop the referrer string being sent.

Doing an about:config in Firefox and looking through the options, I found one called network.header.sendreferrerheader which sounded interesting. A google search gives very few hits for this but one here confirms my suspicion: setting this variable to 0 (by default it is 2) stops firefox sending out the referrer string. This means you can surf around and no sites you visit will know how you reached them. You will be like an apparition that appears from nothing, only to disappear again, leaving nothing more than an IP address to identify your computer.

I shouldn't really be describing this as I don't want my visitors to hide their referrer information but then again it is my duty as a tech blogger to pass this tip on.

Coming soon: how to deny access to people who block their referrer strings.

I was fast forwarding through the ads in Big Brother and the Sky Plus box just crashed. It refused to come up again, even when removing and restoring power.

I have seen something like this before so I followed the force firmware download: hold backup button while applying power until lights start flashing, then release button and wait. It takes a few minutes to finish and is a little nerve-racking but it does the trick. I think my box has a problem where I have to force firmware download every time it loses power.

As it was we missed most of Saskia's eviction interview At least we got to see her evicted

This morning I got two emails from Linode, this one:

We're currently receiving a large number of UDP packets coming from your machine:

01:33:33.136745 70.85.129.118 > 24.110.229.206: udp (frag 57902:1480@1480+)
01:33:33.136871 70.85.129.118 > 24.110.229.206: udp (frag 57902:1480@2960+)
01:33:33.136873 70.85.129.118 > 24.110.229.206: udp (frag 57902:1480@4440+)

I've blocked the offending traffic for now. Please reply within 48 hours to avoid service interruption.

and this one:

More DoS traffic:

03:30:42.548612 70.85.129.118 > 194.146.152.98 : udp (frag 56782:1480@2960+)
03:30:42.548617 70.85.129.118 > 194.146.152.98 : udp (frag 56782:1480@4440+)
03:30:42.548874 70.85.129.118 > 194.146.152.98 : udp (frag 56782:1480@7400+)

Your Linode's networking has been disabled.

So my Linodes network access was gone and the site was down. I could log in through the lish console and this showed two tasks called 'bashex' owned by the www-data user i.e. apache taking most of the cpu time. I guess someone had hacked in and were up to no good.

Well, I have been pondering what to do about the Linode, in one way I love it but in another way I am not getting the uptime I would like. Ok, this security breech is MY problem, I didn't secure the server properly but then again, I don't want to spend my valuble spare time securing servers, I have more interesting things to do. Together with silly power problems in their racks, I have had more downtime in a month with Linode that I have in 10 or so months with Site5.

I don't know how long it would take me to secure the linode now it has been breeched, I would want only feel it was clean if I reinstalled everything, and then I would have to go into adding extra security.

I decided instead that no, Linode is not for me, I'll go back to Site5. There are a number of reasons for this:

• someone else does system admin and worries about backups and security and this is included in the price.
• I can afford a top-of-the-line shared hosting package for less than a bottom-of-the-line linode. This gives me, for example, four times as much disk space.
• Site5 have many tech support people ready 24 hours a day and pride themselves on 15 minute response times. Linode only appear to have 'caker' who is good at his job but presumably needs to sleep.

Disadvantages:

• I am not root, I am not free to install what I like.
• The python on the site5 server is version 2.2 which is too old to be useful to me.
• I cannot run any long-lived processes such as a python-based web server.
• It is not as cool

As my networking had been disconnected, my only access to the linode was via the lish console. I got all my data from my web sites off it as follows:

• cd /var/www
• mysqldump -u -p >petersblog.sql
• tar xvvzf www.tar.gz * .htaccess
• uuencode www.tar.gz www.tag.gz

This dumped the tar file as Ascii. By logging all console output to a log file I captured it all on my local pc. I uploaded it to site5 and

• uudecode putty.log
• tar xvfz www.tar.gz
• reload sql and away
• make sure drupal is up to latest version (once bitten...)

I had to change dns servers again and that took a few hours to propogate but this posting was done on Site5.

Now to tell Linode the bad news...

User was having trouble with an Acer Travelmate 2300 laptop, it wouldn't connect to Wifi, no networks listed. Problem appears to be because the power management is refusing to turn the power to the Wifi on. The user's account is set to 'Power User' (ironically) and the Acer power management stuff crashes when you try to use it. Change user to administrator and can power it up but not a solution.

Probably something to do with security privileges, but with windows that boils down to guessing what privilege is missing and struggling to enable it. It may well be the 'load device driver' privilege, I tried enabling that but no joy but I don't know if this is because I chose the wrong privilege or failed to set it.

Acer's web site is not as informative as it could be.

Moral: buy Dell not Acer.

Site5 is a web hosting company. They host this web site. I have found them to be cheap, fairly reliable and generally responsive to problems.

A google for 'peter blog' brings www.petersblog.org/blog/1 as result number 3! Out of 8,730,000! This url has a page rank of 4, even though www.petersblog.org is still a 3. This may explain why I've been getting a record number of visitors. Neither page has a significant number of backlinks so I'm surprised I have any page rank at all. Methinks pagerank isn't so important any more.

This site appears in the first page of results for Site5 and Linode and both of these go directly to the corresponding tag page. I have a theory that google is looking through the tag page, seeing the word 'linode' or 'site5' many times and assuming that these pages are highly relevant (which of course they are).

Moral: Search engine placings: it's all in the keywords.

n.b. changing from linode back to site5 hasn't hurt visitor numbers a bit, even though I changed www.bisiamd.me.uk to a simple redirect page instead of an alias of petersblog.org.

Update: this page has PR 5!

Wife's Motorola V547 has been sent off for repair. It keeps giving 'call failures' or dropping calls. They tried resetting something in firmware at the O2 shop but this didn't fix the problem. Should take a week or two for them to fix it, which isn't bad as we have an old phone to put the SIM in.

My contract expires next month. The Samsung D500 is tempting me:

• MP3 player
• 88M memory (not great but ok for an hour or two's music)
• bluetooth (hate to think how long it would take to transfer 88M over bluetooth at 100kbps or so).
• 1M pixel camera with flash
• not a boring Nokia.

A short reminder to self on how to get a file open dialog running under python on Windows:

>> import win32ui
>> o = win32ui.CreateFileDialog( 1, ".txt", "default.txt", 0,
"Text Files (*.txt)|*.txt|All Files (*.*)|*.*|")
>> o.DoModal()
>> o.GetPathName()
c:\\blah.txt

This uses the python windows stuff that is pretty much essential for python on windows anyway. I'm trying to avoid using wxPython from now on as it's essentially an MFC/Win32api clone and has inherited verbose messy api that changes with each release.

Notes:

• the 0 is a flag field and can have values from win32con module.
• The filter term needs an extra | character at the end to stop garbage in the combo.
• Works interactively from console.
• ActiveState has some online documentation for the python win32 stuff here. It's a cursory but better than nothing.

Interesting idea. Add a contact to the phone list in your mobile phone called 'ICE'. This is the number of someone you would like contacted in an emergency. If your phone is found at an accident then people can get in touch with your significant other.

More about it here.

Working on a web site, trying to get it to look ok in both Firefox and IE. Firefox is ok, a large GIF image on the site renders in the size I would expect, about 600x400. In IE however, it is shown proportionally larger as if zoomed in a bit and hence the site looks poor, especially as the resizing has distorted the image.

Looking through IE options there is nothing to control this. Text Zoom only alters text size, not the size of images.

On a hunch I looked at my Display settings in Control Panel. I had the font size (Display/Settings/Advanced) set extra large, 132 dpi. I tend to use large fonts because of my poor eyesite. I reset the font size to normal (96 dpi) and did the mandatory reboot and, lo and behold, images in IE were of normal size and my website looked publishable.

It's one thing having to either use large fonts or squint all the time, it's another when MS are plotting to make all websites look awful to the optically challenged.