Solar power installed
Last Friday, 19-Apr-2019, the solar panels have been installed – 12 on front roof (facing East) and 12 on the back (facing West). It is still too early to make a prediction on the power generated, but in these few days, just under 100 kWh has been produced. Since the weather was all sunny these days, the max amount of power peaked at 4.5 kW for all 24 panels.
One of the results has been a reboot of the servers – where the technician tipped on the breakers by accident (and switched it on again) the server was not shutdown in an orderly manner – so reboot took some time due to mount verifications. But in the end, it all worked again. Or so it seems; It looks like DCHP isn’t working though the process runs normally; but the inverted failed to get an IP address – DHCP failed – and so I had to set it’s address manually within the LAN, and add a rule in the router that all traffic on one particular port is directed to this system, so that is an easy change.
For other local apparatus this is not possible as they rely on DHCP only to get their address. And since it looks like they missed out, I cannot connect to them using the Apps on my mobile…
Got request to port SciPy to VMS
I’ve been asked by Brett Cameron of the European branch of VSI Support, to get into porting this Python package, because of the fact I worked with Fortran (although the real experience dates years ago) and they had no ability to spent tie on this. I told him it had to be done beside my normal 24 hour workweek, but that was no problem.
It means I have to handle a few things before, like requirements and dependencies. Most important: Part of this project is the NumPy extension, which is the base to port first – and that itself has it’s requirements and dependencies itself. Most importantly is a package called openBLAS, available on GitHub, that contains a number of mathematical packages, most is written in C but there are a few that are already available on OpenVMS:
All these packages are available from Delft Technical University, : the base packages as from the Internet (GitHub, SourceForge…) but here the files to build them on OpenVMS added.
Another package is needed to build LAPACK and BLAS (at least) is a program VMS_Aut064 from the same location, that adds 64-bit entrypoints for the routines in thes epackages – potentially also for the other ones. These packages include MMS files to build them.
So I download it all, first to investigate..
Next is to find out HOW to build the whole bunch.
03-Apr-2019
New spammer
No real issues, as usual:
PMAS statistics for March
Total messages : 3344 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted : 0 = .0 o/o (Files: 0)
Relay attempts : 1599 = 47.8 o/o (Files: 31)
Accepted by PMAS : 1745 = 52.1 o/o (Files: 31)
Handled by explicit rule
Rejected : 1195 = 68.4 o/o (processed), 35.7 o/o (all)
Accepted : 142 = 8.1 o/o (processed), 4.2 o/o (all)
Handled by content
Discarded : 182 = 10.4 o/o (processed), 5.4 o/o (all)
Quarantained : 133 = 7.6 o/o (processed), 3.9 o/o (all)
Delivered : 93 = 5.3 o/o (processed), 2.7 o/o (all)
But there is a new spammer on the block. At least, I noted some spams from that area in the past but this one made it over a 1000 attempts on the beginning of the new month, in about 2 hours, hosted in China (China Unicom Guangdong province network China Unicom):
1-MAR-2019 03:19:48.96 - 05:09:29.23 (1012) from 163.204.176.104 to jobmnc@126.com, hr2008_007@163.com (and others)
apart from the known one, that comes once or twice a month from Hostwinds.com – all the normal:
6-MAR-2019 10:54:40.75-10:59:31.47 (248) from 142.11.211.42 to 1029mandaditos@gmail.com
28-MAR-2019 21:22:21.22=21:28:34.37 (277) from 142.11.209.120 to 1029mandaditos@gmail.com
The Chinese network is noted in two anti-spam networks, the address explicitly in one. The access should have been blocked by the router firewall, where I blocked Chine altogether. But it may be that this doesn’t work, either completely or incomplete, on the Vigor 2925. Anyway, network 163.204.0.0/16 will be noted as inappropriate and be denied all access.
Last weekend the Certificates have been renewed automatically, twice, in two contiguous nights. Still to determine why that is, but there is no issue with this, the sites are still available so this is low priority.
Possible abuse attempts?
A week ago I dug into access logs and found a huge amounts of accesses like:
GET /HyperReader/download/FREEWAREV40/BLISS/4359PRO.DECW$BOOK?chunk=164&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sauer-pechelbronn.com%2Fredir.php%3Fgo%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fpokeron999.blogspot.com
HTTP/1.1″ 200 1656
Trying this myself showed just the page – no reference to the referrer site like https://pokeron999.blogspot.com – an Indonesian poker (or gamble) site, it seems. Would it be something to influence statistics?
Not sure what it could be the consequence, I renamed FREEWAREV40 directory, now these accessed end in 404.
It seems there is nothing bad happening if this is tried for some reason, the other freeware CD’s are still available, and there are similar requests on thes too, but using my site in reference, and of course, these succeed:
GET /HyperReader/download/FREEWAREV70/VMSFAQ/VMSFAQ.DECW$BOOK?chunk=41&referer=http:/www.grootersnet.nl/HyperReader/download/FREEWAREV70/VMSFAQ/VMSFAQ.DECW%2524B&title=The%20OpenVMS%20Frequently%20Asked%20Questions%252 HTTP/1.1″ 200 1656
This is similar to what Mark has found on another site (bitrix24) causing problems at his WASD host and he updated WASD code to handle things like this.
There is more to come:
and on April 19th some downtime due to work on the home grid – solar panels will be installed and that requires the shutdown of the power for some time
By the way: WASD’s GZIP is doing a good job:
