I found what I would call a bug in resolvconf today, though probably most people don't run a VPN server like I wanted to, so no one ever noticed before.

I have been getting a bunch of spam through my contact form over the last couple of days, so I thought I would check out what they are trying to do.  The domain's contact information is protected by privacyprotect.org, so we can't know who they are, though I filled out a form showing them their customer is a spammer, we'll see if they actually do give me the contact information or not.

pure-ftpd isn't designed to work with TCP wrappers, which is unfortunate, because then I can't simply add an ip address to /etc/hosts.deny to block the hackers when they guess passwords.  But, since the hackers have tried to login to my servers thirty thousand times this month, and occasionally get good usernames, and theoretically might guess a right password eventually, I needed to figure out a solution.

I have been having lots of fun (that's the bad kind of fun, not the good kind) configuring Asterisk for my new IT job.  It has been a pretty big pain getting it to work correctly with a couple different VOIP providers as well as the landlines.

I had a good day today, figuring both how to get Teliax to forward the calls to our landline (since I can't seem to register the connection with Teliax, via SIP or IAX), as well as I figured out the problem with outbound calls using the verizon line.  It turns out my theory was correct, that Asterisk was dialing too fast and not waiting for the dialtone, so Verizon wasn't getting the first digit (sometimes).  But, adding a half second wait before dialing did the trick.

For those of you who have gotten an "You entered an invalid URL" message when leaving a comment, no I didn't set out to ban you from commenting - it is that you didn't put an "http://" in front of your URL.  Due to some security bugs, the input checking code was tightened up a couple months ago, and part of that changed how the URLs were parsed.  After months of procrastinating, I finally got around to working on the problem - and it took all of five minutes to add a new type of filter that checks the URL prior to validation and prepends an "http://" to the beginning if you forget.

So, those of you who thought I didn't want to hear from you, comment away... 

One of the LifeType users reported a security problem in the RSS parser that allowed any file on your system to be read.  ick.

Oscar has fixed it and 1.1.6 will be released tomorrow.

Everyone on my server has been upgraded already and it probably isn't too critical for them, at least in the case of retrieving their mysql password, which was the reported problem, since mysql doesn't allow remote access, so it would have to be a customer of mine.  Though I suppose since any file could have been read, it is possible that some other file could have been opened.

Actually, I just checked the server logs, and no attempts were made to get any files that had a ".." in them, so everyone should be alright. 

I usually end up forgetting how to do this, so here are my instructions of how to keep Usermin, an administration tool I use for my Lime Daley customers, up-to-date with the developers' changes.

Since it took me a while to figure out the answer, I will post this here to try to help the next guy who has trouble when upgrade snmpd to 5.2.2. The rest of you won't care about this post.

For my company's next product, we are thinking about replacing the normal explorer shell with our own, but we want to be able to access the explorer.exe for debugging, etc. It turns out that when you start explorer, it checks to see if it is listed as a shell, and if it is, and this is the first instantiation of the explorer process, it loads up the desktop/start menu/etc. If the answer is no to either of those cases, it just loads the "regular" file manager view.
Search engine keywords: explorer command line options start menu shell

Since we paid for the professional license, we get OpenMake for "free", so I figured I would try it out. The conclusion is that it isn't worth anything.