I think I’m almost ready to let some other people bang on SpamValve. I want to get a closed group of users to try it out and give me some feedback before I release it to the general public. If you’re interested in testing it, and meet the requirements below, contact me.
Requirements:
- Requires root access on your server.
- Currently requires the ‘ipfw’ firewall system (I’m on FreeBSD). But if you think you can modify it to work with ipchains or some other firewall, feel free to give it a try. [...]
By Dougal
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Also posted in Blogs, Plugins, Spam, Tech, WordPress
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Tagged Perl, PHP, plugin, Plugins, Programming, Spam, SpamValve, Web
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Last night, my host finally relocated my server (as previously mentioned). The move occurred around 3am EDT. For some reason, apache didn’t automatically restart when the machine came back up, and I had to start it manually this morning. So the web site was down for about 6 hours. Also, DNS has changed, so if you were still unable to reach this site after about 9am EDT today, it was probably a DNS propogation issue.
I’ve been informed that my host server will be relocated later tonight. So if you find that you can’t access the site for a while, that’s probably why. This will not be a migration to new hardware as mentioned previously, just a physical move of the existing hardware to a new location.
Update: It looks like the move didn’t happen last night after all. So just be warned that the site could go down at some unknown time.
I’m sure some of you have noticed that I’m experiencing occassional server problems. The host I’m on has been overtaxed, mostly due to spammer activity (both web and email varieties). There are times when the server load spikes up into the 20s, which is ridiculously high. To combat the problem, I set up a cron job which monitors the load level, and restarts apache and mysql when it goes above a certain threshold. However, for some reason, the mysql database server sometimes fails to restart properly. I’ve just added another monitor program which should fix that, so the database should never stay down for more than a couple of minutes. [...]
If you’re like me, you’ve been hearing “Ruby this” and “Rails that” everywhere you go. But I don’t have time right now to be playing with a new development framework, however nifty it may be. Busy, busy, busy, that’s me. I’ve got my perl programming to do at the day job, and in those tiny little niches of time that I can nab for other things, it’s generally PHP for me.
But maybe now we can have our Cake and eat it, too. [...]
SpamForceField is my newest anti-spam plugin for WordPress. This one does a couple of interesting things:
- All connections via pinappleproxy are denied.
- Every connection’s
Referer is checked against your blacklist keys. If a match is found, the connection is denied.
- If a comment is flagged as ’spam’ due to the normal spam checks, the client receives a
403 Forbidden HTTP status. This also occurs for connections denied in the other two checks above.
- When connections are denied, the client receives a message explaining what has occurred. [...]
By Dougal
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Also posted in Blogs, Plugins, Security, Software, Spam, Tech, WordPress
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Tagged Google, PHP, plugin, Plugins, Programming, SEO, Spam, Web, WordPress
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February 1, 2005 – 9:57 pm
Earlier today, I upgraded the webserver on this box to the latest versions of Apache, PHP, mod_ssl, and a few other things. I still need to go back and do some tweaking, since the a lot of configuration file paths were different from my previous compiles. Currently, I’ve got a hodgepodge of symbolic links and config file hacks acting as a bandaid. If you notice anything misbehaving, please let me know.
Testing a new spam blocker
I’ve been trying to snatch a few minutes here and there to work on the automated spam blocking system that I proposed last week. Earlier today, I finished up one of the components, and I’m currently testing it. It seems to be performing as designed, so far.
There are three pieces to the system, currently:
ipupdate: A perl script which accepts an IP number as an argument. When run, it checks whether the IP already exists in its configured database table. If not, it adds it. [...]