Misreply.org

Some (cough Stu cough) of my friends will continue to preach that Google is evil, and will inevitably turn into Microsoft. In fact, they have even begun to register domain names with references to stopping google, as if that possibility even exists.

That aside, I like google. No really….I like google. I don’t just mean that I like their simple layout, their powerful search engine, gMail or any of that. Instead, I like google on a more personal level. While marriage is out of the question (Google could never love me!), I think that they succeed in their motto of “Do no evil”.

I was just reading Digg and came upon a story that dealt with Google’s handling of a situation in which another company was reverse engineering their product. The product in question was Google Earth, and a company called Gaia was self-proclaiming “an attempt to reverse engineer famous Google Earth and implement its functionality in open, portable, customizable and extendable way.”

In this kind of situation, most other companies would have resorted to a violent Ballmer-esque outburst, or come out with legal teams galore. Google, on the other hand, was much more understanding of the plight of independent developers. For probably the first time…a large company was NICE about it. Is that really so difficult for every other company in existence? Is it that hard to first politely ask someone to stop their work and explain why? Apparently it must be, because it is not something you see very often. Kudos Google!
Full story here

Lately, I have been noticing that the server has been working a bit slower than usual. Being the resident geek that I am, I decided to check into it.

So there I am, looking through “top” and process lists, scanning /var/log/messages and pretty much doing everything else you can think of. In the process I found a few cool and odd things.

The first thing is…I noticed the uptime on the server read 4 days. Now, I sure as hell do not remember rebooting the box, even in various intoxicated states. I also checked my eggdrop bot in the shacknews KOCK radio channel, and he reported being up for 47 weeks. Various googling led me to this post: http://www.jimohalloran.com/2002/12/30/linux-uptime-wraps-around/

Basically….the 2.4 linux kernel resets to 0 after about 497 days. So we have a “yey look my linux box as an uptime of over 500 days” and a “wtf were they thinking”

The other thing I noticed, in my messages log…was that some random asshat decided to try to root me. The rhost was showing up as web8.conquestbusinessventures.com .

The first issue here is….that hostname does not resolve to anything. The second thing is…go to that conquest website…its all kinds of odd. Scam/spam perhaps?

A whois check on the domain reveals that the admin and tech contact email addresses go to a nonexistant domain. Fun huh? Anyway…fortunately for me, they can try to ssh in as root all they want; they won’t get anywhere since I have root logins disabled.
Apparently, Im not the only one…a lot of sites are reporting traffic from various conquest domains, none of which seem to exist, and none of it being legit.

ANYWAY…all that aside…why was the server working slow? Wasn’t Joe Wannabe-cracker. It was actually partly my fault.

I had set google to index the site, AND the photo gallery, and had posted a link to the “random funny images” gallery on a few places. Well…that gallery has a large amount of items in it, and I guess people just did not want to click through them all. I had the slideshow feature enabled, so why not use it right….wrong!

Gallery 2.0….a WONDERFUL piece of software…who happens to have dropped the ball on the slideshow module. Granted, there is not anything WRONG with the module per se…it works as advertised. However…it pre-loads the entire album’s slideshow before displaying it. So it goes through every picture, resizes it to the slideshow size, and creates a new 2gig instance of the slideshow…all while taking up 95% processor for a minute or two per request.

Yea…sorry guys…slideshow disabled for now.