Evilcoder.org

So, currently i think i am a bit cut back in what i can do due to RSI. My shoulders are currently hurting very much so i will not keep this long. To be more precise, i reduced 50% of my typing at work and nearly 80% at home to make sure i do not have this for a long time. My arms and hands are just to precious to destroy them already.

The only thing i did today at home is making this site xhtml 1.0 compliant (updated some tags and improved the template) and made it css compliant as well. So all used elements are a verified standard now.

Hope to be back soon, without pains when typing; for now => Reading my programming books, lecture and other stuff. 

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written by Remko

Sunday beautiful Sunday…. Well after the last hot days this week we have some clouds here now :). I updated the dshield-preparser to version 1.8 to match the packets better (last night i saw that the script actually did not work for one of the most important things : TCP traffic (while i am sure i tested that….)).

But besides that i am playing some guitar again this weekend, my left pointy finger is a little bit hurt from all the slamming on the guitar but i can now play the riff from Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple) and a bit Come as you are (Nirvana) which i learned from: http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/lessons/for_beginners/reading_guitar_tablature_ii.html (offered by Marc my friend ! ). It learns you how to read tabs, and i actually understood a little of them already but this example should learn it to you as well :-).

Well, watching Formula 1 in some minutes and after that coding in the VuXML db’s of FreeBSD to mark some ports as vulnerable. And after that it’s time to update evilcoder-admin a bit more, and perhaps work on the slave parts of the application (slave dns stuff, migration stuff, support scripts, cleanup scripts , backup scripts etc etc etc). I hope i can remain this positive all through the day since the clouds make me a bit depressive.. but in 5 days and 11 minutes i willl see luca again

Enjoy the sunday!

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written by Remko

So,

Recently i saw a discussion that SMTP is no longer the service it used to be. Someone stated (sorry i forgot who and where) that email (which gets transfered over SMTP) is no longer a guaranteerd item. While in the past email "always" arrived at location, current spam and virus defenses prevent some email from getting into a mailbox at all.

There is a solution to that: Postfix with Courier IMAP  , SpamAssassin , Clamav AND Maia MailGuard. Maia Mailguard enables an domain to preserve all emails that gets through the system. Some systems do not use this setup and they can potentially loose email. On my FreeBSD 5.4 hosts i run Postfix as the main SMTP mailer and on top of that Maia Mailguard. With the ease of clicking some buttons i can tell the system to preserve ALL email (virus/spam/non spam etc) to stay in the DB untill the user or domain administrator acknowledges the emails that are preserved. That way someone is ALWAYS able to get all the email he wants. If you use whitelists you can be sure that the mail gets delivered, and if it not and trips a spam level, it remains in the database. I think such a solution makes sure the "old fashioned SMTP" stories remain suiteable for the present and the future.

(This is a draft of an article i am writing for DSINet).

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written by Remko

If you click on the read more button you will find my preparser for dshield pf logging.
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written by Remko

What did i recently do? Well, not that much , i have been focussing on FreeBSD Security (port security to be exact), port docs (someday i will be the throne keeper of the docteam by solving most problems around (currently i am the www throne keeper, doc still to come)), i played with Luca a couple of times which was really great, especially yesterday when we played for almost one and a half hour and created bubbles (bellenblazen) and ran around and such, i am confident we both enjoyed it very much

So my personal life is back on track again, i can enjoy everything again and my counter in my apple tells me when i can see luca again, the lightthingy in my week (for if i feel bad for a little i can look into the counter and be happy again :-)).

Concerning my technical life.. hmm well i am also very busy on that, so the days really fly (that’s good since then i can see luca quickly again). I rewrote parts of evilcoder-admin to make use of a better database structure (yes i put everything i learn into the application), i even fixed a very annoying bug and offered Daniel Gerzo a seat into the development team (together with Brad Davis). And in the last few days i created some neat scripts and one of them will be presented in another post. (below this one). The script is a preparser for dshield’s pf parser. Dshield-PF (the parser) expects the logfiles in a certain format, but when i run the commands to generate the format, i get a totally different output. So i wrote a preparser that puts everything as dshield wants it (perhaps i even am going to update the dshield/pf.pl itself and sent it upstream :). It’s use strict and can be found on my cvstree (https://webmail.evilcoder.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/cvsweb.cgi/)

So far for now, ow no, not yet, as you might or might not noticed. I decided to cut back on my activity for a few items, tienervaders and this very own site for example. I discontinued the Guestbook on this site because no one actually used it and it generated more overhead then required (stupid asian scriptkiddies that found it interesting to attack the guestbook by automating sign ups (around 40 a day (average!)). I will also turn off some other features that are not used and only take maintenance time so please bare with me

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written by Remko

Today i was with Luca and his mother again. Like last time i cannot say differently than that i enjoyed the entire time i saw him. He called me daddy a couple of times and we even played on the computer. We puzzled with memorie and named all the pictures, like a cow, a dog, a cat and other animals. That was really great to do.

It’s really amazing to see how such a little boy can learn so much. He’s just 2 years old but very clever and a very quick learner. I have a positive feeling that i am going to need his aid when he gets older and understands more and more. He might even beat me in my typing records since he is typing so quickly already!

It remains very cool that his mother and i can speak normally and our parents are very positive as well.. Heading to the next friday again, i am already looking forward!

Oh, and we saw eachother through the cam.. .wich is also a very cool part of the technological improvements.. it’s really cool to be able to see him. My mum also saw luca through the cam and she got a bit emotional but loved seeing him very much :D.

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written by Remko

Sigh! I have no other words for it. This morning i was driving to work and came just behind the "van Brienenoordbrug" near "Kralingen" and saw that the road was going to be obstructed by people coming from "Kralingen". So far so good, i decided to move to the left and other cars followed me to give the new cars some space to catch the right lane.

The "fun" started here. Some girl in a Fiat Uno just didn’t use flashing lights and thought that she could outspeed all the leftlane cars who were traveling with +- 100 - 110 km/hr. She had a speed of aroudn 70km/hr and without the flashing lights she moved to the left. Only she forgot so see that i already drove there. So i hammered my alarm and she saw me just in time. It was just some inches away from a car accident. And i do not understand, i had all of my day lights on, drove with a normal speed of around 105km/hr, following some other cars and she without the lights just popped on the left lane not even looking. And then they ask themselve’s, why do i get a car accident… Sigh!

Luckily she didn’t slam me but it scared me actually, i really thought this is it, this is going to be my first accident and it’s not even my fault. And the worst part about that was that we had a rather high speed so the impact could have been huge when we had collided and god knows what happened next. I am glad that i found my Horn (WOOT) and my brake’s in time so that i could break and smash the horn so the noticed me.. finally.

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written by Remko