Here's a anti-spam tip that a colleague discovered on their server: If you run any kind of web proxy across your firewall, watch out for suspicious port values in POST request URI!

I had a http proxy running in port 8080, and somebody was doing HTTP POST requests to the SMTP port, clever!

200.90.100.80 - - [28/Jun/2003:10:34:19 +0000] "POST http://190.60.100.100:25/ HTTP/1.1" 00/ 2299

And it's just a little frightening; it's not the sort of thing you'd normally be on the look out for when nailing down the security of a system as you'd have to be monitoring your server logs pretty carefully to see it.

In this particular case, the proxy software was very quickly changed (yay Open Source!) to block requests to all but ports 80, 443 and anything above 1024 plus an exceptions list, but I wonder how many products out there have this same potential exploit? Yet another hard techie question that has to be put to the great sea of black-box  read more »

ACK it's happened again! And it's not good: Seems our webhost likes to play an amusing game with MySQL where they spontaneously reboot the dataserver and restore from the most recent backup, and what that means for Teledyn.com users is your kind contributions are sometimes cast into the abyss.

While I feel their pain in trying to run a MySQL server that's being hit by God only knows how many websites on the shared hosting platforms, it's also my understanding that MySQL should be up to the task, and if it's not, then under the proprietary licensed version, it should be MySQL's duty to figure out why, or time to consider either more servers or a different rdbms that's up to the task.

In the meantime, tho' just about everyone posting to this site or our SBP sister site have reported posts they'd verified and viewed many times suddenly vanishing.

If it's any consolation, it happens to me too. Just today, both the new Linux stories had to be re-entered after a brief period of site lock. Because we're poor (_hint hint_) we can't afford the minimum for a colocated server, and that means we're just another of the hundreds of sites hosted on good old no10 and as such, availability and QoS is not within our power. What I do is retain all my posts in an editor (or cached Mozilla pages) until I'm certain they've been caught by the (hourly?) backups.  read more »

The May 22nd deadline for Round 1, Phase II business plan submissions for the Broadband Pilot Program for Rural and Northern Development Pilot Program has been extended until June 6, 2003.

Industry Canada's Broadband for Rural and Northern Development Pilot Program provides funding through a competitive process to bring publicly available broadband access to Canadian communities, with priority given to First Nations, northern, remote and rural communities which are currently unserved by Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) or cable modem service.