Category: Computing

Posts about computing and computing related matters

Another stupid set of spam emails

Yet more stupid spam arrived in my inbox today.

Lets just take two examples from the small tsunami that arrived.

anotherspamm

anotherspamm2

What spammers forget is that sending TWO emails from different people to the SAME address with similar messages in it really does give the game away.

Then why on earth should someone send Security alert emails from an Ipad? They’d be system generated.

Finally why would Rentokil Initial be sending email from a personal address at smile-sumai.jp.

Really guys – are you really so thick you can’t even realise that the junk you are sending out is complete and utter shit?

Post Exporting and Importing

I’m planning on being on holiday later in the year (see  Liverpool in the Autumn for more details ) and I’m planning on doing some blogging whilst we’re underway.

So I want to be able to write my posts on my laptop when I’m disconnected from the internet and then connect and push the post and its images up onto my live blog.

Normally you’d use an offline client of one form or another but I’m using my WordPress Plugin for Canalplan to easily add links to Canalplan places into my blog. So that means that I have to use a local copy of WordPress on my laptop and then move the post when its complete, and that is where the problems start.

There are lots of plugins for WordPress that allow you to do things like export whole blog or a post but many of them (including the Official WordPress ones) expect the source blog to be visible to the internet so they can pull the images over. or they rely on you exporting the whole database and re-importing it which would mean having a whole multi-site install on my laptop which is a bit OTT.

So I sat down yesterday and started coding and I’ve got something working pretty well already.

So I can export a post (along with all its attached media) from one blog into a zip file.
You then move that zip file to the new server
Then you import the zip file either into an existing post (so we overwrite the contents) or into a new post.

Its all working OK so far but there are a few issues to work through. As I have to do search and replace on the image urls then both blogs must have the same image sizes set up because WordPress appends the image sizes when it creates the different sizes:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 7623937 May 8 14:31 IMG_1032.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 4483 May 8 14:31 IMG_1032-150x100.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 15115 May 8 14:31 IMG_1032-300x200.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 149647 May 8 14:31 IMG_1032-1024x683.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 www-data www-data 59728 May 8 14:31 IMG_1032-619x413.jpg

So if those image sizes are different then the replaced strings in the new content don’t match the files that were created when we loaded the exported media files into the blog.

Also the exporter assumes that filenames are unique – its possible to have two files with the same name in two different upload directories on the source. But on the target system it puts all the files in the current upload directory. So what would happen here is the two original image urls would end up pointing at the single new object.

I’ve not tested it on anything but image files so far but its looking pretty good.

Ready To Export A Post
Ready To Export A Post
Post Exported and Ready to Dowload
Post Exported and Ready to Dowload
Zip file loaded up to new Server and ready to load into new post
Zip file loaded up to new Server and ready to load into new post
File imported into new post
File imported into new post

If I like it I might submit it to the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Stupid pages that have paid Facebook to be forced into my Page feed

The mobile browser news feed for Facebook includes a section featuring “sponsored” pages which they think you might want to like. You can’t hide this section but their selection criteria is totally crap..

 

So lets start with this – I drive a Volvo…. A super car it isn’t and I’ve no real interest in cars like this

supercar
Super Car Advocates?

I’m married – so no I do not need “Dating Advices” Facebook seems to have decided to push dating sites (Russian Brides etc.) to anyone it can… which I think says a lot about the morality of the people running the company.

romantic
Hopeless Romantic – or just hopeless?

I’ve no idea what Ceramic Pro Marine is. OK I have a canal boat but its a rather long jump from that to this.

ceramic
Ceramic Pro Marine – Ceramic What?

Radio controlled aircraft for the serious hobbyist. Nope – that’s not me… that’s another page that has wasted money paying Facebook to promote itself to the wrong target.

flyrc
Remote Control Aircraft

OK I said I was going to work on the electrics on the boat – but again one hell of a leap from there to this.

element
Electronics for Enthusiasts

No – I have absolutely NO idea how Facebook even thought of this one..

sawmill
Because Everyone needs a portable sawmill

Its a holiday destination. I’ve never shown any interest in going and even if I had maybe putting out a page in English might be more sensible

Dominican Repulic Page
Dominican Republic Page

Toshiba Dual Boot recovery

A few notes on how to restore dual boot after a Toshiba BIOS update.

Toshiba released 2 updates to my Satellite Windows 10 laptop.

One reset the power settings so that shut down got set back to quick boot and the other changed the order of the UEFI boot so that I could no longer boot into Linux.

Resetting the power options wasn’t a problem but getting Linux back was a little more problematical.

At first I feared that they’d trashed the UEFI boot settings totally so I got a Linux UEFI USB ready to go.

From Windows I took the option to reboot and pick an alternative boot device and restarted.

That was when I found out that things were not as bad as I feared because when I got to the Device selection I had two options:

  • USB
  • ubuntu

So I booted into ubuntu and everything was fine.

I searched the internet and found that the efibootmgr command was what I needed to use … and this is what it showed me:

How they left it.
How they left it.

As you can see the Timeout is set to 0 but the boot order has been changed so that 0002 (Windows) is the first option.

So I did the following:

efibootmgr -o 0001,0002,2001

and then checked the boot menu again:

How it should be
How it should be

I then rebooted and everything worked perfectly.

So if you’ve lost your boot menu then you might be able to get it back extremely easily….

Merging Sites

I looked at what was over on canalplan blogs and decided that actually pulling the couple of live blogs over to here and closing down that site was the best thing to do.

So I exported and imported the posts along with the images and put a .htaccess rule to force 301 redirects over to here for my blog.

Once I’m sure things are working OK I’ll move the other blogs over.

Capita still allowing hacking from their network

So several days after reporting to Capita that they had a compromised machine on their network what do I see but the same IP address come back and start doing exactly the same thing. A search on the internet shows that other people have had this same IP address hitting them.

So tell me Capita – what are you doing to stop this criminal activity?

Given that your company runs several large scale contracts for the government but you apparently are unable to stop illegal activity from your networks what does that say about your own internal security? If that machine is compromised what else is? What machines on your network are compromised and stealing personal information on UK Citizens?

Bits and bobs

Although I should be working on getting all the data loaded into the Canalplan Boats Database I’ve not been making a lot of progress on getting the new data and the old data mapped into a new structure which I wanted to use to make the data better.

As well as that it’s been a continual battle against the scum who just want to break servers and use them to post spam, send spam or compromise their websites.

Ecatel Limited seem to be a company who delight in hosting scammers and criminals. They had several machines in several different IP address blocks all hammering the xmlrpc.php file on this server. Doing some research into this shows that this problem has been going on for over 18 months and Ecatel do not seem to do anything about it. Emails to their abuse department went unreplied which seems to be pretty much par for the course. So their CIDRs have been firewalled.

The Shellshock attempts continue from various places and although some companies have replied quickly others simply haven’t.

You do wonder how much better the internet could be if people building websites and on-line systems didn’t have to devote significant resources to stopping scum from attempting to break things. All these stupid attempts against servers are also using up resources that should be being used to serve real data to real users.

Todays list of scum

2014-10-23 04:39:51,514 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [apache-wplogin] Ban 198.23.155.76
2014-10-23 11:02:05,033 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 111.249.35.151
2014-10-23 12:44:57,061 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [sasl] Ban 63.152.242.19
2014-10-23 12:47:16,215 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 49.230.184.69
2014-10-23 12:49:02,731 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 185.7.100.97
2014-10-23 12:49:41,087 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 103.229.84.194
2014-10-23 12:51:27,010 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 59.94.15.250
2014-10-23 12:51:51,892 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 94.20.224.54
2014-10-23 12:52:20,205 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 190.178.92.83
2014-10-23 12:52:38,306 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 69.198.18.202
2014-10-23 12:52:50,037 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 118.102.169.44
2014-10-23 12:53:31,943 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 79.97.188.35
2014-10-23 12:54:24,326 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 5.42.193.34
2014-10-23 12:54:24,600 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 117.204.153.6
2014-10-23 12:54:52,445 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 122.171.119.247
2014-10-23 12:57:45,569 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 117.204.143.124
2014-10-23 12:57:58,709 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 154.70.236.29
2014-10-23 13:03:41,906 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 139.216.57.220
2014-10-23 13:04:55,166 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 116.33.2.37
2014-10-23 13:06:18,096 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 123.176.22.30
2014-10-23 13:08:37,083 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 77.234.44.138
2014-10-23 13:11:02,561 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 105.186.68.107
2014-10-23 13:12:33,356 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 74.112.58.73
2014-10-23 13:13:51,867 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 179.8.149.180
2014-10-23 13:14:14,576 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 197.253.66.208
2014-10-23 13:14:32,456 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 82.199.201.242
2014-10-23 13:15:55,821 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 67.231.35.166
2014-10-23 13:16:44,822 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 97.66.124.251
2014-10-23 13:17:42,694 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 124.200.250.27
2014-10-23 13:18:28,604 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 111.91.86.171
2014-10-23 13:18:35,479 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 123.18.208.252
2014-10-23 13:21:52,572 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 39.55.155.246
2014-10-23 13:21:59,394 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 122.167.201.219
2014-10-23 13:23:22,519 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [sasl] Ban 93.125.94.2
2014-10-23 13:23:34,367 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 221.158.66.84
2014-10-23 13:23:39,667 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 94.79.231.59
2014-10-23 13:25:58,138 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 5.160.183.163
2014-10-23 13:29:49,723 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 68.118.118.10
2014-10-23 13:30:06,548 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 50.250.213.34
2014-10-23 13:30:22,595 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 116.202.81.162
2014-10-23 13:31:57,825 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 39.32.186.142
2014-10-23 13:32:28,672 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 194.28.73.230
2014-10-23 13:32:39,027 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 113.173.24.237
2014-10-23 13:32:56,914 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 86.127.100.34
2014-10-23 13:36:51,449 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 121.167.24.204
2014-10-23 13:37:46,247 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 59.103.133.23
2014-10-23 13:39:40,248 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 1.53.13.143
2014-10-23 13:39:53,154 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 77.30.185.250
2014-10-23 13:41:21,550 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 14.141.111.226
2014-10-23 13:43:55,238 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [sasl] Ban 201.213.221.103
2014-10-23 13:45:26,703 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 124.200.250.26
2014-10-23 13:45:54,620 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 122.178.156.172
2014-10-23 13:45:57,720 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 176.121.227.102
2014-10-23 13:46:32,047 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 103.23.33.158
2014-10-23 13:47:55,975 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 122.169.58.113
2014-10-23 13:48:33,866 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 208.46.50.130
2014-10-23 13:49:49,784 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 167.135.119.251
2014-10-23 13:52:53,732 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 139.193.101.138
2014-10-23 13:53:33,484 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 43.252.101.98
2014-10-23 13:53:52,645 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 117.193.55.91
2014-10-23 13:53:59,459 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 121.101.186.118
2014-10-23 13:54:32,347 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 192.30.241.146
2014-10-23 13:54:35,170 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 209.181.18.217
2014-10-23 13:55:20,781 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 178.120.186.83
2014-10-23 13:57:58,082 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [sasl] Ban 87.197.159.118
2014-10-23 13:58:23,294 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 119.35.25.251
2014-10-23 14:00:33,406 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 94.97.129.113
2014-10-23 14:01:12,811 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 117.213.79.39
2014-10-23 14:04:49,980 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 115.112.33.53
2014-10-23 14:05:22,824 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [sasl] Ban 181.15.215.181
2014-10-23 14:05:49,183 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 121.130.137.95
2014-10-23 14:05:51,867 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 221.138.252.114
2014-10-23 14:06:29,756 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 198.0.71.201
2014-10-23 14:06:38,342 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 39.32.208.77
2014-10-23 14:08:17,665 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [sasl] Ban 70.196.64.104
2014-10-23 14:08:46,309 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 72.54.223.53
2014-10-23 14:09:26,133 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 151.64.98.8
2014-10-23 14:10:58,584 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 199.96.245.158
2014-10-23 14:13:49,421 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 91.241.224.135
2014-10-23 14:15:47,858 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [sasl] Ban 71.183.239.18
2014-10-23 14:16:33,898 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 74.202.252.56
2014-10-23 14:17:09,129 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 39.32.155.178
2014-10-23 14:18:08,113 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 12.25.8.201
2014-10-23 14:18:12,973 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 112.150.194.150
2014-10-23 14:18:54,821 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 64.16.141.26
2014-10-23 14:18:58,961 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 97.97.32.66
2014-10-23 14:19:42,557 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 115.241.116.191
2014-10-23 14:20:10,477 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 24.49.3.240
2014-10-23 14:21:46,013 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [sasl] Ban 98.101.135.206
2014-10-23 14:36:04,447 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 154.100.143.195
2014-10-23 14:37:43,726 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [sasl] Ban 76.187.73.212
2014-10-23 14:39:29,745 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [postfix] Ban 124.200.250.21
2014-10-23 15:42:01,739 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [sasl] Ban 111.248.45.220
2014-10-23 18:31:20,220 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [apache-wplogin] Ban 192.99.150.55
2014-10-23 19:39:30,989 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [apache-wplogin] Ban 104.151.230.82