Joseph Sniderman

Happy Fourth of July everyone!

Not that there is much today that is happy.  I’m in a foul mood, didn’t sleep last night (again.) And life in general sucks.

Oh well.

Over the course of the past several months, I have been inundated with comment spam.  Fortunately, akismet catches most of it.  It still sucks to see anywhere from 2 to 700 comments in the spam queue every time I log in.  So, I set out to find a more forceful solution.

One thing I discovered was that most of the spam comments were coming from the following IP range:  194.8.74.0/23.

Some basic whois research shows some interesting information about the owner of that range of IP addresses [edited here for brevity]:

organisation:    ORG-DRAG1-RIPE
org-name:        Dragonara Alliance Ltd
org-type:        OTHER
address:         Geneva Place, Waterfront Drive,
                P. O. Box 3469, Road Town, Tortola,
                British Virgin Islands
mnt-ref:         DRAGONARA-MNT
mnt-by:          DRAGONARA-MNT
source:          RIPE # Filtered

I looked at their website, and they are a webhosting company it seems.  So, I have no way of knowing if they themselves are behind it or if it is one of their customers.

Anyways, I decided that keeping my site free of spam was more important to me than letting them read my blog, and added the following line to the beginning of my iptables configuration:

/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 194.8.74.0/23 -j DROP

This in effect drops all packets originating from that range of IP’s.  That keeps them from spamming or otherwise accessing this server.

Much to my delight, after making that configuration change, nearly all of the spam has stopped.   What few spam comments do come in, are now dealt with on a case by case basis.  I did have to block an additional range of IP’s recently.  Once again I had to weigh the benefits ( reduced spam ) against the potential downsides ( innocent users in that range might not be able to access the site. )

/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 195.154.0.0/16 -j DROP

A few key points to consider:

1. Don’t even think about just copying and pasting those lines.  If you do decide to use iptables to block spammers, use the IP addresses of the ones who are spamming you.  They may be different.
2. This works on linux servers, that have iptables installed, that you have root access to.  This will not work with shared hosting!
3. Once you put this type of solution into place, those IP addresses will have no access at all to your server, and will not even be able to read posts or get error pages or anything.  This may or may not be what you want.
4. This will not help if the spammers are using a proxy ( as many do. )
5. You need to put the relevant lines at the top of your iptables configuration.  Many people recommend making a short shell script to configure iptables that has all of your rules in it.  I personally like this method.

Of course, these techniques may or may not work for you.  Please read any applicable documentation before messing with any kind of firewall, or you might lock yourself out of your server.

Yeah you.

Disclaimer (of sorts) :  This is not about any one person in particular, rather an expression of frustration for a lot of individuals.

You dance when I fail

You cry when I smile

You claim not to hate me

You lie that you care

But the lies have gone stale

Though it took a while

And as you berate me

I am glad you’re not there

In my heart you are dead

Yes I have written you off.

Nothing left to be said.

Be gone now. Fuck off.

Yep.  It was released today.  I’m downloading it right now….

I am actually somewhat impressed that it was released on the first of the month, rather than towards the end.

You can get it from:   http://www.opensolaris.com/get/index.jsp

Anyways, I will be trying it out tonight, and will report back!   : )

The deep dark depression of the past few days is starting to lift.  I can eat, sleep, get dressed, and do other such basic things once more.

It is interesting how physical health and mental health are so closely intertwined.  I fully believe that this recent depressive episode was triggered by the flu [ or whatever ] that I am now starting to recover from.  One the flip side of things, the fact that I am feeling better mentally more than likely means that I am practically all the way over this flu.

I can’t sleep.  When I can sleep, I can’t stop sleeping.  I feel like shit, mentally and physically.

I am sick of this.  I feel like a dead empty shell of a human, who fights all day just to wake up and get to sleep.  Little time remains for any other activities.

Fuck it.

I just got back into town last night from the best week of my life.

Right now I feel depressed and paranoid.  Depressed because I’m back in WI.  Paranoid about a lot of things.  More to follow.

To say that today has been rough would be an understatement.  Upon waking up, and realizing that it was Wednesday already – not Tuesday afternoon as I had hoped, I immediately felt like crap.  Twenty some hours of sleep has that effect.  Since this morning, my mood has been swinging ever so rapidly from profound, almost suicidal depression to a hypomania the likes of which I have not experienced in a long time.  In between extremes I have been lucky enough to experience both at once!

I am a mess.  Work + School + Daily living is too much to handle at one time, at this time.  I feel like a failure for thinking it, let alone saying it.  That does not diminish its accuracy, however.  Time to do some scaling back.  Hopefully I will soon be able to get some downtime, however short lived.

Jonathan Schwartz’s reminder about the difference between computers and humans comes to mind.  And with that in mind, I think I will make downtime my #1 priority for the rest of the week!

A couple of nights ago, I put OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my Acer Aspire 5515.  Installation went extremely smoothly.  There was only one minor hiccup:  Wireless wouldn’t work at first.

Before even attempting to install, i had already visited http://opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/wireless/ath/ and downloaded the latest version of SUNWatheros and saved it to a USB drive.  When I tried to install the driver however, I got a warning message saying that the driver was successfully added to the system but failed to attach.  It turns out that this model notebook uses an Atheros AR5007 for wireless.  So, a different driver was required, also linked to from the same page.  According to that page on the opensolaris site, the AR5007 driver only works for 32 bit x86, in other words not my 64 bit setup. So, I would have to boot into 32bit mode for wireless to even be an option.

Here is what works:

1.  Edit /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst  removing $ISADIR from the paths.

ie replace  /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix with /platform/i86pc/kernel/unix

and /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive with  /platform/i86pc/boot_archive

This makes the machine boot a 32 bit kernel instead of the 64 bit one.

Please reboot after you have edited menu.lst

2. Get rid of the old SUNWatheros driver

pfexec pkg uninstall SUNWatheros

3. Download the right driver from http://opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/downloads/ath-x86-ar5007eg-pkg.tar.gz

4.  Install the driver

gunzip ath-x86-ar5007eg-pkg.tar.gz
tar -xf ath-x86-ar5007eg-pkg.tar
pfexec pkgadd -d ./SUNWatheros SUNWatheros

5. Restart nwam

pfexec svcadm restart nwam

And wireless should start working almost immediately!  All in all, it is a very nice machine for running OpenSolaris.