Jim's Depository

An extra note on bogofilter:

Bogofilter is built with a single user in mind. I'm sure it works better when it has a single user's mail to think about and can rely on the human to tag the false positives and negatives.

In a 150 user common filter you can rely on exactly 0 of them to report their miscategorized spam. If you try to force them to comply you will find that 10% of them do it backwards and pollute your statistics so badly you have to erase everything and start again.

That said, it works quite well and is speedy and doesn't rely on external network servers so it makes a good first line of defense.

If you want to collect apache statistics with Munin you need to enable extended server status in apache.

ExtendedStatus On <Location /server-status> SetHandler server-status Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from 127.0.0.1 Allow from munin-server.mydomain.com </Location>

If your web server does not bind to localhost (127.0.0.1), you need to define the server status URL in your /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node config file.

[apache_*] env.url "http://servername.mydomain.com/server-status?auto"

If you run sendmail as your mail server munin has 3 plugins that are in the base Debian install. Link all 3 into your /etc/munin/plugins directory. One, sendmail_mailqueue will work out of the box. The other two depend on sendmail stats files that do not get created in a base Debian install.

To enable stats logging you must manually create the stats files.

# touch /var/lib/sendmail/sendmail.st
# touch /var/lib/sendmail/sm-client.st

Once these files have been created, with sendmail write permission, sendmail will start logging to them. Gotta love sendmail, "If you create the log file for me, I will write to it."

You can test your mail statistics file creation manually with the mailstats command.

Interesting observation when using a single fail2ban on multiple machines. It catches horizontal sweeps much sooner. Today I noticed it catch someone that was making one try at root on each of my machines. The merged auth.log files tripped my 10 hour ban after one attempt on each of three machines.

Hi - Your motion detection scheme is very interesting! I wonder if you have had a chance to develop it further?
Thanks
Steve
sgulick (at) wildlandsecurity.org

More robot chatter:

fandango
tatuazh

So if a tattooed robot offers to dance the fandango with you, you should know it only wants sex.

I have made contact with the robots. We should all be afraid. Thus far the robots have attempted to add these comments:

SEX
SEX
SEX SEX SEX LOVE
zubav1na-ps1h1chesk1e-bolezn1 except the digits 1 are supposed to be the letter 'i', I just didn't want to get indexed by it.

I suppose some filtering software will now block my site because it talks about sex.

Oh look, there is a similar function for scanf(). You can do something like...

char *adj = 0;

sscanf(somestuff,"Some %as stuff", &adj);

... but only if you are using GNU libc. I got burned when I used this in a daemon and then moved it to OpenWRT where they uses a different libc.

Eww, nasty double spacing of the code segments. I'll have to think about how to fix that. Safari put each line into its own div for some reason.

A word about cheap web cameras:

Many webcams are cheap webcams. Unfortunately some of them cost a lot of money. Logitech I have found to be a crap shoot. Some of their camera models are nice devices, others are utter crap sensors. The problem is you can't tell which is which without buying one. After getting burned with a 'pro' model that was built on a terrible imaging element I now buy web cams that are crap, know they are crap, and are priced like they are crap.

My current favorite is the Aiptek Mini PenCam 1.3, which is a 1.3Mpixel camera, maybe if you count the red, green, and blue elements separately and round up… a couple of times. 640x480 pixels, JPEG encoded, 10 frames per second using the gspca drivers in linux. Their autobrightness logic is insane and will drift off to unintelligible pictures over time, but thats ok, I do my own autobrightness. The gspca driver is wrong about how to set and retrieve the brightness, contrast, and saturation parameters, but I fix that. The nice part is that the cameras are $9.99, with a stand, cable, and a handy leatherette carrying pouch that you can throw in the trashcan.

I don't mind a crappy camera that is honest about it.

more comments