Wiki abuse
The number of fake users – those with undoubably fake e-mail addresses – that create an account on the VMS wiki, just to add text with inappropiate content, linking to obscure sites and so on, has suddenly increased. Every few days, there is yet another account that abuses the wiki. Luckiliy, the system has been configured to notify me for new users, and so it’s easy to track them down, de-spam the wiki from their posts and disable the accounts. But it would be nice if the software creating users would check the address to exist: send a confirmation mail to that address and finishing the registration after the address has been verified; next, no posts but their personal page can be done, and only aftre that is finished, they can contribute….
Of course, since MoinMoin is an open-source application, it’s possible to create such a method. But it requires knowledge of Python, and insight in the code. I don’t know Python, though I could learnm to use it; but it requires time, and there are other, more important actions to be taken. And this is not occurring that much that I have to spend a lot of time removing these abusive users and their posts. Just annoying, at this moment…
Spam statistics
I took a look to PMAS’s reports tonight, scanning the statistics for the years I’ve been using this product for filtering incoming mail. These reports clearly show the increase of spam until 2009, in 2010 there was less, and it looks as the amount of spam decreases even more this year. But I need to do a more thorough investigation using all logs – splitting it up in domain, address, if possible, and many other things, store the results in a database and run statistics on that. That would also include rejected messages (that seem to be excluded from the reports) and relay attempts (not shown either). Again, this takes time, and should be part of a larger project for forensics. Again, a project to be started….
Projects
Speaking of projects:
* Remove MySQL and use another database. This requires a drastic change to the WordPress code, and I don’t think such a change would make it into the community. I’m looking around for an alternative: Mimer or Ingress, or even Caché might do.
* Remove PHP alltogether and move to a native program that I can use. Mark Daniel – the creator of the WASD server – has created a content management system that I could use – either as-is, or as a base for own development.
* Remove Python – and the wiki – for the mentioned reasons. Here this native CMS coiuld be used as well. But here as well, I could opt for yet another solution.
* Redo the home page. I could use this product as well, or write my own, fully from scratch or based of the CMS….
Main reason is that MySQL, PHP and Python are resource-hungry. PHP is anyway, it’s an interpreter; Python does some compilation and so it’s faster once started. I could also change the configuration for the sake of speed but there I would suffer decreation of performance elsewhere. The systems holds 512 Mb of memory, and adding more is – due to it’s age – very expensive. I think it a bit odd that older types of memory are far more expensive than state-of-the-art chips…
Second, since Oracle bought the company that is responsible of MySQL, and the way the Oracle company works, it’s my idea that the devlopment of MySQL is now under full control of Oracle. That;s the reason why there will be no MySQL-6 on Itanium. The community is pushed aside, it’s Larry Ellerson – or any subordinate – that dictates the way the database is developed. To me, that’s enough to abandon MySQL as soon as I can. Luckily, there are alternatives: Ingres, as an open source (though I may have to build it from source, the openVMS version is not freely available, alas); caché and Mimer can also be considered, and, once the product has been re-ported to OpenVMS, Postgress is as well (Knowing that Ingres was first (and still is) developed on OpenVMS and Postgres has been derived from Ingres – and once ran op openVMS as well, it might be not too much of a problem. Rumours are that the Postgress libaries are available)
16-Oct-2011
Bringing the system up-to-date
Yesterday I backed up the system disk, and that took all evening so there was no time to do the updates, it had to wait until this evening. I first downloaded all latest updates from the AllianceOne site (I do have a SAID by the company, but I would be able to get one by the membership alone…) and did the installations: Update-15 first, and then all that was not included in the one I downloaded end of last year. Just two fail: ACMELDAP and ENCRYPT, since these two require SSL 1.4 installed. I didn;t do that because it’s incompatible with SSL 1.3, and installation of SSL 1.4 would require quite some extra work.
Apart from these updates, I reset the router to be connected on the first WAN port, so the second was freed again. Just that wasn’t sufficient, it also required a change in the NAT configuration, which is acutally WAN-port specific: and that was still on WAN port 2. No wonder that none of the webs didn’t work…But after this was corrected, it all works fine. Except for the genealogy web – that still resides on the old address. So this needs to be addressed at the registrar that controls DNS.
All in all, the sites have been offline for about 2 hours.
15-Oct-2011
Maintenance – at last
Once again, it has taken quite some time to do the monthly maintenance. That is: checking whether the batch job has done it’s work. Well, it seems. I got the mail stats for September:
PMAS statistics for September
Total messages : 979 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted : 340 = 34.7 o/o (Files: 30)
Relay attempts : 34 = 3.4 o/o (Files: 30)
Accepted by PMAS : 605 = 61.7 o/o (Files: 30)
Handled by explicit rule
Rejected : 148 = 24.4 o/o (processed), 15.1 o/o (all)
Accepted : 191 = 31.5 o/o (processed), 19.5 o/o (all)
Handled by content
Discarded : 75 = 12.3 o/o (processed), 7.6 o/o (all)
Quarantained : 150 = 24.7 o/o (processed), 15.3 o/o (all)
Delivered : 41 = 6.7 o/o (processed), 4.1 o/o (all)
A significant decrease of spam. I’ve observed this in the last month anyway. But still, it’s still a low percentage of valid mail….Moreover, the number of relay attempts have dropped to a low level. Could that be related to the fact I moved to another ISP?
Next, I need to install a number of updates, the last I made was about a year ago. So at the moment the system disk is being backed up, and after that, I’ll do the updates. They may require more time than I have available, it could well be I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to get them installed….These were all updates released until February this year, so I’ll have to get the next ones as well. There has been some trouble (again) with SAID’s but it should now be solved.
I’ll notice in a while 🙂
(TBC)