Jamie Thingelstad

I’ve seen a huge increase in trackback spam to my sites lately. It’s now reached hundreds a day. I thought this was one or two hosts so I added a rule to snort to capture trackback spam and found it was coming from nearly all unique IP addresses. I’m guessing this is being propogated via spyware that is sitting on unsuspecting peoples computers. I couldn’t just block this at the router like I do with feedback spam since it was coming from a variety of sources.

I did a quick search after a failed attempt at stopping this with ISAPI URL rewriting because it cannot see POST data. However, a developer in Ireland has solved this problem and been kind enough to share his solution. I just installed it and am waiting to verify everything works well. One concern I have is that his solution is built against DotText 0.95.2004.102 and I’m running 0.95.2004.111. The 111 build was a bug fix build, and the last one that I know of, issued by the author to fix some API issues. So far the Dottext.Framework.dll file seems to work fine intermixed with the other version, but I’m not positive yet.

While typing this I got my first spam alert, check it out

Spam has been detected!!!

Title: black jack
URL: BLAHBLAH
IP Address: 218.244.225.180
Excerpt:

Take your time to visit some helpful info in the field of <A href=“URL REMOVED”>vegas casinos</A>

Looks like the detection part is working! Provided I don’t have anything break I’m going to be a much happier blogger.

Mazie turns 4 today, 4 days that is. It’s been an incredible four days. I realize everyone all over the world goes through this process all the time. As a result, it should seem somewhat routine from a global perspective, but on an individual level everything seems profound and amazing and like you are the first person in the world to ever do any of this stuff.

Mazie overall is doing great. She needs to catch up on diapers. There are numbers she’s supposed to be hitting and she’s behind. How do you like that? Four days old and already behind quota. She sleeps really well, usually getting two 4 to 5 hour sessions in per day, along with some shorter naps. She’s a great sucker!

Some thoughts on my new title of “dad”:

• The first thing that comes to mind is that the parts that are easy are easier than I expected they would be, and the parts that are harder are way harder. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but maybe if you’ve been there before you know what I mean. Like changing diapers, is trivial, but calming your kid at 3 a.m. is really hard.
• Those protective father instincts sure kick in. I’m always worrying about her and want to protect her at every turn. Imagine when she starts to walk! I’m going to need a sedative.
• I’ve never been one to be real comfortable with newborns. They seem so fragile. All that disappears in about 2 seconds with your own kid. There just isn’t much better than laying with her on your chest and patting her back.
• The most amazing thing in the world is being able to bring comfort to your baby. When she’s crying for whatever reason, and you pick her up and put her to your chest and she calms down and is happy, that’s amazing. Of course the reciprical is also true, when you cannot provide her that sense of calm, that is pretty much the most horrible thing in the world.
• How can a kid that does not have precise muscle control get her socks off so easily!?

It is tradition that a husband get his wife a present after the delivery of a baby. After being in the room and seeing in every little bit of detail all that is involved, a present hardly seems a satisfactory way of saying thank you. We decided to celebrate this event with art rather than the classic gift of jewelry. Art lasts just as long as diamonds. I contacted Amy Lynn Stevenson who we already have one piece from and discussed what I wanted to do. She came up with a wonderful painting that she titled “New Addition”. The dimensions are 5 feet wide by 3 feet tall.

I really love it and Tammy was very happy with it. I can’t wait to some day give it to Mazie to have in her house.

Mazie Kaye Thingelstad was born on June 14th at 3:17 pm. She weighs 7 lbs 11 ozs and is 21 inches long. Baby is doing great, and Mom is recovering from the [most amazing and traumatic] event.

I’ve been having fun with what I expect will be my last weekend of hardcore geeking with my gear at home for a while. Once Baby Thingelstad arrives I’ll have more important things to do!

This weekend I jammed on two tools. First is Snort, which I have setup in a network intrusion detection mode. I now have one of my Fedora boxes listening on an unnumbered interface to all traffic on my gateway. Snort, with the appropriate ruleset, watches all traffic over the wire and takes note of anything suspicious. Snort then logs this to a mysql database and I’m using BASE to review the information. BASE is nothing to get excited about, but it seems to be the best out there.

I am getting some interesting information out of this rig. I’m pretty amazed at how many times SQL Slammer is still hitting me. It tries to get to me about every 20 minutes. Code Red is less active than it was before, but it’s still out there. Perhaps oddest of all is whoever is at hammurabi.acc.umu.se who is hitting Road Sign Math with a large ICMP packet on a seemingly random interval all day.

The other tool I got going this weekend is Cacti. Cacti is a better (I think?) and easier to use (without a question) SNMP graphing tool than MRTG. I’m going to leave MRTG and Cacti running in parallel probably for ever. Some things I like better in MRTG than Cacti. Cacti uses RRDTool 1.2 (as opposed to 1.0) and generates these super nice images with anti-aliasing and robust font support (static image for example, as compared to.

I’d share access to these tools with you like I do with MRTG and my web logs but they require logins and I also don’t know that I want people being able to see attack alerts my intrusion detection system is throwing. You can admire the login pages from the links at the bottom of the page. As a side benefit of this work I’ve now designated a Linux server as a first-class citizen in my server setup and can now deploy other packages on it in the future if I want.

I’ve been asked many times in the last day “Why is thingelstad.com down?” I guess I should be happy that people actually cared when my little corner of cyberspace became unavailable for 21 hours and 26 minutes in the last couple of days. But really, it’s not like “the Internet” was down or anything. 🙂

We had a wild, wild storm here on Tuesday night. This was by far the worst storm I’ve been in – maybe ever. The winds were in excess of 70 mph. It’s the first storm that I felt a real need to get into a room that had no glass in it. The power went out fairly quickly and all the battery backups did their job, as long as they could at least.

Here is a visual display of the last couple of days.

Needless to say it was more than a minor inconvenience to be “in the dark” for so long. And if you know me, you realize this is just another episode in the continuing saga of horrible electric service where I live (example, example. I’m very seriously considering a generator. Nothing huge, just something to keep the refrigerator, some lights and the Internet up. You know, the essentials.

This should hopefully be the last of these baby updates before I’m putting up a picture of the little tike! We had another check-up on Wednesday with the midwife and not much is going on. The baby is healthy and all, but seems to be liking it in the womb a whole bunch! The official due date was last Sunday so we are +4 days after the due date now.

We are going to see the midwife again on Monday along with an ultrasound to check on things. And if the baby hasn’t decided to come out by Thursday we’ll be induced then. We’d really like to avoid that, but at least there is an outside date now.

Today we go straight from the PhatBox MP3 player in the car to the Roku M1000 for the baby’s room. I decided a couple of weeks ago that we needed to get music in there, the idea is both for us, the parents, and for the kid.

For the last year we’ve been in music nirvana with every bit of music we own stored digitally on our server. Obviously I didn’t want to start dragging out CDs to listen to in the kids room so I went looking for a stand-alone, WiFi music player. There are a lot of options and I’ve even played with some in the past (like this one that I thought was horrible). I decided to go for a high-end unit and ordered the Roku M1000.

This unit is simply amazing. I unboxed it, turned it on and put in my WiFi WEP key and instantly it was on my network. After a few clicks I was listening to streaming music. If only every product worked this well. I clicked a few more buttons and had upgraded the firmware in about 30 seconds. Seriously, I’d rate this one of the best products I’ve ever purchased. I’m tempted to rip out my Audiotron and replace it with one of these.

We can now put childrens music on infinite repeat in the babies room at the drop of a hat and every now and then we can play some music or podcasts for ourselves when feeding or rocking the baby.

I’ve felt for a long time that the car was absolutely the best platform for digital music. You can be in your car for hours and you need entertainment. While a CD changer is a step in the right direction if you are like me you listen to those same six CDs for weeks, or even months, before changing them. I looked around a few months ago for solutions but didn’t come to a conclusion. Recently my friend Chris (excuse his website, I think he’s working on bringing it into this century) decided he wanted to pursue this goal so I piggybacked on his very thorough research and got a PhatNoise PhatBox.

I would say we installed it this afternoon, but unless you count fetching a few tools and asking questions I don’t have much of a place in the we. The install took the whole afternoon. A few things came up on the install. I’ll share them here for others that may try this at home.

• I had the PhatBox unit for Volkswagen but was installing in an Audi A6 wagon. The unit is exactly the same, but the cable is different. Chris did the solder iron magic and put a female DB-13 connector in place of the VW connector.

• We blew the fuse in the Audi head unit while installing due to plugging and unplugging a lot of times. I’d suggest not plugging the PhatBox in until you have the connectors fully connected.

• I upgraded the system files on the PhatBox to the newest versions. Took a few minutes on first boot but everything worked perfect.

• The physical install was a bit rough, a hole had to be cut in the back of the steel frame that held the old CD player to allow room for the cable. Be ready to cut into some serious steel.

• The screwholes on the unit weren’t ideally placed. In order to get the access panel back over the unit once installed new holes needed to be tapped into the aluminum chassis and even then the insulation had to be cut out to accommodate the unit. But after that, it fit fine.

I’ve only had it for a few hours now but I really like it. The voice prompting system seems to work well but I’m still getting used to it. When you turn it on the first time you get this rocking welcome sound. The PhatBox uses your standard car stereo so it cannot display menus with long text. PhatNoise has a fairly elegant solution to this using voice prompts. It will announce your genre for you, and it creates album names so you can pick what to listen to. As a bonus the random button on my head unit now has a purpose since it does something that is worthwhile. Anyway, you can read up on your own if you want more information.

Huge thanks to Chris for doing the install! I would have been way over my head. We didn’t take out the camera so no pictures of the install. I can now happily drive down the road listening to one of a few thousand different songs at a time. Plus, I get to feel cool since I’ve got a little Linux computer in my trunk.

PhatBox Stuff:

• PhatVoice is a program to put higher quality voice prompts on your PhatBox DMS.

• Get more voices to create prompts with.

• Various PhatBox notes.