Well, we had a week of unfettered bliss, but now the spammers have found the website and have started spamming the Wordpress comment feature on this site. Looks like I’m in for some work now, moderating things.
Welcome visitor from Samoa! He or she was searching for a “Stamp Album from U.S.” on Google and found my Stamp Albums Page.
You can subscribe to comments left on the site, if you so desire.
Hello Associate,
We noticed that you were accepted to the Amazon.com Associate Program several weeks ago but have yet to refer an order.
Yeah, thanks. Rub it in, why don’t you.
It doesn’t really matter. I didn’t expect it to be a revenue stream, I just thought it would be very helpful on my Recently Read Books page. Check it out and let me know if you like it more than the old list.
I’d like to welcome our new visitor from the Isle of Man! He or she visited the
I’d love feedback on the new site design.
There are 264 TLDs (top-level domains) that the analog log analysis software knows about. TLDs are things like “.com”, “.org”, “.us”, and “.uk” that you find at the end of domain names. And for several years I have been keeping track of the TLDs of visitors to mcgees.org. My goal is to have a visitor from each TLD, the internet equivalent of a ham’s “Worked All Countries”. This may not be feasible — some TLDs may be obsolete, and some will just be damned difficult, like “.kp”, North Korea — but I’m keeping track of it. You can follow the progress
of my domain visitors here. As of yesterday, I knew of visits from 141 TLDs.
Today, though, I ran jdresolve on my log entries, which does lookups on unknown IP addresses, and nabbed seven more: Air Transport Industry, Bahrain, Kenya, Monaco, Maldives, Togo, and Tanzania! I’m now at 148. Stay tuned.
Context: You’ve recently switched to apache2 with separate vhost configurations in sites-enabled and you are trying to get CGI scripts to execute in a directory called something other than “cgi-bin“. You’ve turned on the ExecCGI option for the directory.
Symptom: You are getting “Access Forbidden” errors, and your server’s error log shows “Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden”
Further context: You’re not running any RewriteRules.
Solution: Uncomment the line AddHandler cgi-script .cgi in your main apache2.conf file.
Reason this is the error you get: Hell if I know.
In closely related news, ScotchFinder is back.
If Blogger stopped publishing to your server four months ago, change (or ask your sysadmin to change) “PasswordAuthentication” to “yes” in your sshd config file (check /etc/ssh/sshd_config).
In related news, mcgees.org is back.
I actually had to reboot a Linux machine tonight to get it to display web pages properly. Restarting apache didn’t do the trick.
If Blogger broke the formatting of your blog, as it did mine for the last month, go to Settings -> Formatting and change “Enable float alignment” to “No”.
Last weekend’s upgrade, as it was intended, was unsuccessful. After setting all my installation options, RedHat told me it didn’t support my hardware. At least it had the grace to inform me before it reformatted my hard drive. So I took the burst of energy, the Mountain Dew, and the gummi worms, and applied them to getting the things that were bothering me fixed in my Debian installation. I succeeded in getting X running, a bit of a chore under Debian, switched out mouses, and upgraded all my packages. I wanted Firefox, so I used Konqueror to get the installer from the website. Konqueror wasn’t that bad, though, so I was on my way to Blogger to report that fact when Konqueror crashed. So go ahead and ignore that recommendation.
I couldn’t get the Firefox installer to run, so I looked around, and found the proper way was to set apt-get’s distribution to unstable so Firefox would show up in the list of packages and use dselect to install it.
I will be upgrading my Linux installation this weekend. Expect periodic outages.
This server runs Apache 2.0 under Linux. I tried to archive an access log using mv mcgees_access_log mcgees_access_log.2, then I executed touch mcgees_access_log, assuming that Apache would continue writing to mcgees_access_log. It didn’t. My second guess would have been that it would start appending to mcgees_access_log.2. It didn’t do that either. Instead it stopped writing log files and I lost three weeks’ worth. Restarting Apache fixes the problem.
I was not able to install a new OS this weekend; mcgees.org stayed up, but that means it will be down some time later this week.
This weekend, mcgees.org and the other sites hosted by this machine will be out for extensive periods of time as I install a new operating system. I’ll post at the discussion page on the status.
I don’t know why the “subscribe” feature is not working, but it’s not. It’s through a third-party service I like and use on an account basis, but the per-page subscription seems not to work. I’ll try to get this fixed soon. (Now, just subscribe to the RSS feed. -Josh, 2006)
The more serious problem is that my hard drive on the mcgees.org server is in the process of dying. Fortunately I have a backup, but the site (and all other sites I host) may be down intermittently during the next few days.
From staff@mcgees.org Tue Mar 9 00:26:32 2004X-Apparently-To: (redacted) via 66.218.93.24; Tue, 09 Mar 2004 07:55:17 -0800
X-YahooFilteredBulk: 64.30.211.193
Return-Path: <joshua@www.mcgees.org>
Received: from 64.30.211.193 (EHLO www.mcgees.org) (64.30.211.193) by mta122.mail.dcn.yahoo.com with SMTP; Tue, 09 Mar 2004 07:55:15 -0800
Received: from www.mcgees.org (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by www.mcgees.org (8.12.5/8.11.0) with ESMTP id i29FfnMr013388 for <(redacted)>; Tue, 9 Mar 2004 07:41:50 -0800
Received: (from joshua@localhost) by www.mcgees.org (8.12.5/8.12.5/Submit) id i29Ffn1W013386 for joshuamcgee@yahoo.com; Tue, 9 Mar 2004 07:41:49 -0800
Received: from vaio (c-24-13-253-224.client.comcast.net [24.13.253.224]) by www.mcgees.org (8.12.5/8.11.0) with SMTP id i29Fe1Ms013272 for <joshua@mcgees.org>; Tue, 9 Mar 2004 07:40:03 -0800
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2004 02:26:32 -0600
Subject: Important notify about your e-mail account.
From: staff@mcgees.org
Message-ID: <uhodpaoyyjfxwdlpvbp@mcgees.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=”——–njfnkpfuvllatwneivch”
X-SpamBouncer: 1.7 (11/06/03)
X-SBScore: 0 (Spam Threshold: 10) (Block Threshold: 5)
X-SBClass: OK
X-Folder: Default
To: “Joshua McGee, Scanned” <joshua@mcgees.org>
Content-Length: 13350
Dear user of “Mcgees.org” mailing system,
Your e-mail account will be disabled because of improper using in next
three days, if you are still wishing to use it, please, resign your
account information.
Please, read the attach for further details.
For security reasons attached file is password protected. The
password is “28174″.
The Management,
The Mcgees.org team
http://www.mcgees.org
Attachment: Information.zip
That was nice of “The Mcgees.org Management team” (that would be me) to send that to myself, wasn’t it? And nice of my spam filter to let it through?
J. David Humphrey, a man who has apparently had his humor gland surgically removed, found my Number of the Beast program page and pointed me towards his Revelation Study. For only $29.95 he’ll tell me the name of the person he has discovered to be the true antichrist.
If you’ve already paid, perhaps you would be interested in a reminder of my September Rip-Off Revenge post. Maybe you’ll get a newer car worth $9000 more out of the deal.
Granite Canyon, the free DNS provider I have been using for a couple of years, has been having some serious problems lately. My sites were out for a couple of days because their servers were down. I believe they are still down, but it’s no longer relevant as I have changed my DNS provider to (the still free) XName. They seem to be more solid. Let me know if you have trouble accessing my sites. Also, if you sent me mail in the past couple of days, you may need to resend it.
Two new fun scripts to play with. The first decorates text with all sorts of diacritics, and was inspired by Jordon Kalilich of The World of Stuff.
The second needs a bit more explanation. There is a site called TinyURL that shortens long URLs for inclusion, for instance, in emails. Unlike other services such as Make A Shorter Link, however, TinyURL assigns its shortened URLs sequentially, meaning that you can see what pages other people have been visiting. The script I wrote brings up a [Random TinyURL] page (drag that previous link to your links bar for convenience. If your web browser caches the results of the script, giving you the same page every time, drag this link [Random TinyURL] to your links bar. In the latter I’m using the random() function to generate a new URL for each request, to sidestep caching.)
My script is better than the two other scripts I found on the web that claim to do this: one only looks at pages through AZZZ, about ten percent of the total available, the other looks at all pages of the form XXXX, most of which haven’t been assigned yet. If you find any startlingly good (or just startling) links through this script, feel free to post them here.
Warning: The resulting page may be anything found on the internet, and therefore may, of course, not be appropriate for all viewers (http://tinyurl.com/lnbz, for instance, to cite an especially pronounced example.) Viewer-discretion-own-risk-etc.
I’m trying out a new feature on this site, a contest. If successful I’ll make it a monthly feature. Win a US$5 bill by answering the following question correctly: In what field of study would you encounter the following expression, and what (roughly) does it express? You will need a non-text-based browser to view it properly.
π4*2A4B-C4 (C3+Χ2) D-G4 (±G2) H4 (–H2.3,=*2)
Post your answers here or email them to me. Winners will be announced on mcgees.org.
It looks like my Postal Cancel Art page got written up in the Wikipedia under the entry for Cancellation. The link text is “Some people attempt to use stamps relating to the theme of a pictorial cancellation on the envelope.” Very cool. Thanks, anonymous wiki contributor!
(Note added 07 May 2004: Oh, right, OK. Now that I know more about how to use Wikipedia, I can see that it wasn’t an anonymous contributor, it was surrealist painter and mail artist Daniel C. Boyer who heads the The International Union of Mail-Artists. Weird that I’m on their radar screen. I’m going to have to learn more about the movement.)
When the Code Red worm attacks, it tries to access the file default.ida to propagate itself across Microsoft IIS servers. The Nimda worm does the same thing, except it tries to access root.exe and/or cmd.exe. My server, running Apache, is immune to these exploits, but my site returns a 404 page in response and consumes my bandwidth in the process. I could create an empty file and redirect all results to this file, but I get a deeper, more smug satisfaction by sending these requests on to Microsoft. Let the worm eat up their bandwidth; it’s their sloppy programming that caused the problem in the first place.
To do the same thing yourself, add the following RewriteRules to your httpd.conf file:
RewriteRule ^(.*default\.ida.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com$1 [R]
RewriteRule ^(.*root\.exe.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com$1 [R]
RewriteRule ^(.*cmd\.exe.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com$1 [R]
For more information on using RewriteRules, consult the Apache documentation.
(I have no idea if the worms actually go to the redirected URLs. Anyone know?)
Sorry that mcgees.org has been so slow of late. Trust me, it’s frustrating to me as well. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with the charming Charity at Linkline Communications to determine why my DSL connection is slower than a 28.8 modem. She got in touch with the line provider who said that they traced it back to a short inside the house (how they could possibly know that remotely is beyond me) so it would cost money to get someone out to fix it. I thought I would give it a couple of days to see if it “gets better on its own”, but that’s looking less and less likely. In the mean time, it takes seven seconds for pings to bounce back from Yahoo! servers.
Oh, and sorry that mcgees.org, and all the websites it pulls down with it, were unreachable part of Sunday and Monday. That was unrelated, this time due to a power outage, followed by my forgetting to turn the server back on afterwards. Everything should be back up — if slow — now.
Woohoo! My RedHat Linux course instructor (the aptly named George Hacker) just fixed my server problem that has kept blog updates from working since I upgraded to RedHat 8.0. It took him less than a minute. The blog is back!
OK, everything should be up and running again, save ScotchFinder, which will take quite a bit more work. Let me know if you have any problems with the site, email, etc.
The mcgees.org server (which is also the davidjmcgee.com server, the ScotchFinder server, etc.) is undergoing a major upgrade. Expect outages and bounced emails for a bit, but then everything should be much more stable.
mcgees.org will be down during the move. Expect an outage from tonight or tomorrow morning through Sunday, perhaps Monday. Everyone with mcgees.org email addresses will be affected.
Finally, the site and my email are back up. Sorry for the long outage.
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