Beachballin'

Nice one, Dell

I dunno what Dell’s going for here, but whatever it is, they’ve missed the mark.

You should have gotten a couple of emails from me by now I am in charge of your relationship account with Dell. It has just recently been transitioned to the gold team.  One of the emails that I sent you was a quote please look that over when you get a chance we based it on one of the systems that you had purchased before but the most important thing is to make sure the shipping and billing is correct.  If not please update the word doc  I have attached   to this email and please take a look at the PDF too when u get a chance it will tell you more about the Gold team.

Where do I start?

1. The grammar is horrible. ‘Should have gotten’? ‘when u get a chance’? inconsistent capitalization, run-on sentences. This is horrific, and reads more like a 14-year-old’s text-message inspired D- ‘see me after class’ essay.
2. They did send an e-mail full of quotes - out of nowhere. We didn’t ask for anything. We’re not in the market. No one I’ve talked to knows why on earth they’re e-mailing us with quotes on hardware we didn’t ask for.
3. ‘If your information isn’t right, edit this word document and send it back to us.’ No, fuck you. It’s YOUR job to edit your damn documentation. If you want me to do it, give me a web form to fill in.
4. Oh, and the ‘Word Document’ is a docx file, which requires Word 2007 - which MOST businesses these days have not updated to, and don’t intend to update to. In fact, it’s probably the second least accessible word processing format ever, next to ODF. Fuck you again.
5. As if I’m going to trust random Word documents from nowhere. Who the hell are you? How can I trust you if you sound like a 14-year-old semi-illiterate Yahoo! Chatter? Honestly, give me a break.

Despite this coming from Dell USA Small business, where we do have an account, and despite it having Patrick’s name, phone number, and address on it, I’m still fairly certain that this is some kind of phishing e-mail. More to come.

Update: I spoke with Patrick. This is, in fact, an e-mail from Dell, and they had all the information right. They’re just being useless douchebags. Way to suck, Dell.

This pisses me off

This is irritating. More than that, it’s infuriating. I’m no fan of Russia, especially not with the way things have been going in the country lately, but seriously, let’s be honest here with the situation at hand and get some perspective.

I got even more irate today watching Senator McCain’s speech on the conflict in Georgia, and his misrepresentation of the situation unfolding there.

McCain starts out by talking about the history of Georgia, which includes it being a fourth-century convert to Christianity. Why McCain mentions this is probably to remind the Christian right that this isn’t some Muslim nation full of brown people that they shouldn’t care about - these are God-fearing Christians, and so therefore they matter. That bothers me, but not as much as the rest.

He continues by reciting how events have unfolded there, mentioning first that Russian troops rolled into South Ossetia on Friday, conveniently ignoring the fact that Thursday evening, the Georgian army launched an offensive against the area, bombing its regional capital. Why? Because Georgia considers South Ossetia to be one of its provinces, and the separatists there to be the enemy.

This reminds me of how Iraq rolled into Kuwait, asserting that Kuwait actually belonged to it. Except in that case, Iraq was our enemy, and was also the larger force. In this case, Georgia is the smaller force. Why? Because Georgia mistakenly believed that (like the US), they would be welcomed.

In the 1990s, South Ossetia declared independence from Georgia after a referendum showed 98% support for independence; Georgia, however, doesn’t recognize their independence, and so on Thursday, they started out shelling the capital and moving troops into the region, killing Russian peacekeepers and civilians alike.

So, after Georgia started the conflict, Russia rolled its troops in and pushed Georgia back out again, and now have continued on into Georgia, apparently intent on at least taking out Georgia’s military infrastructure. Georgia has offered a cease-fire, which the Russians have ignored.

McCain paints this as the Russians not honoring a cease-fire, but let’s put it this way. If a small region that wants independence from its big brother suddenly gets attacked by its big brother, its citizens are killed, and the troops that you sent in to keep the peace are also killed - are you going to stop at repelling them? Personally, I’d want to wipe them off the map. Regardless of whether the region is part of Georgia (as Georgia claims) or is independent (as they and Russia claim), shelling the capital and moving your army in, resulting in casualties, is senseless and ill-conceived. 

Dasha is Russian, and has family in the area. They own a summer home there, and live there often. When the fighting started, they were off visiting other family in the Ukrane, which is fortunate because the Georgian offensive obliterated the town they live in, reducing their home and everything in it to burnt-out rubble. Had her family been at home, they would probably be dead. Explain to me how, regardless of to whom the area belongs, killing her family solves anyone’s problems, and I’ll gladly cool down.

Russia does a lot of bad things, but the bad things they’re doing now are as a result of the worse things that Georgia did. If Russia can disable Georgia’s military to the point where they don’t pose a threat to South Ossetia, perhaps everyone can go on about their lives without worrying whether some overzealous, US-backed military nutcase president is going to order an airstrike on your cottage.

Seriously people, learn the facts before you comment, and the world would be a better place.

check pass; user unknown (why I love fail2ban+logcheck)

Anyone running a server on the internet should run logcheck, and anyone who runs logcheck will notice log entries like this:

Jul 21 14:15:03 skywalker sshd[22292]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=122-117-8-14.hinet-ip.hinet.net
Jul 21 14:15:07 skywalker sshd[22294]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): check pass; user unknown

This particular user didn’t just try once. He tried 524 times. I can only assume that he eventually got bored, but in the meantime, he was probably using up a lot of sshd processes, preventing other people from logging into the machine, not to mention wasting bandwidth and server resources.

A short while after that, I got around to installing fail2ban, which basically solves all of these problems. It monitors your logs, and after a certain (configurable) number of failed authentication attempts, it takes action. What action it takes is entirely dependent on the configuration.

On my servers, it’s simple. I tell iptables to add the IP address to the firewall. All packets to the user are dropped silently from that point on, until a predefined timeout is reached, at which point they are removed. If they’re still (stupidly) trying, they get banned again.

There are many benefits to fail2ban, and personally I think it’s a great little utility that no one should be without.

1. It keeps persistent idiots from being able to scan your system and potentially find actual vulnerabilities.
2. It keeps people from successfully using dictionary attacks to guess passwords (unless the password is one of the first ten or so entries in their dictionary).
3. It keeps your log files from filling up on popular servers prone to attack.
4. It can e-mail you, log a notice, send a text, or whatever when it blocks a user, allowing you to watch hosts that keep getting banned and report them.
5. It can watch any log for any event - it could even watch your e-mail logs for spammers who keep trying to send messages through your server, and block them too, or watch for users hammering your webserver with useless requests.
6. It can take any action to block a user - even connecting to your Cisco firewall to block them from all servers at once.

For any sysadmin running a server, this is an indispensable tool.

Music Review: Becky's iTunes Library (★★★☆☆)

In these days of RIAA lawsuits, creative commons music, Pirate Bay torrents, the iPod, the iPhone, the Zune, and the iTMS, it’s refreshing to see music distributors focus on quality AND quantity, providing good music that changes people’s lives and makes their days better. While this has seemed to be a rarity of late, this collection of new music and classic hits is enough to make even the most cynical hardliner hopeful.

I should disclaim this by saying that there is a lot of music in here that really, just isn’t my kind of style, and it can be a little jarring to suddenly go from classic Creedence to Jane’s Addiction to Teagan and Sara. It can also be frustrating to skip forward to a favorite song only to find that it was purchased from iTunes and cannot be played without being authorized. Still, there’s a lot here to love.

The aforementioned Creedence is a good place for classic rock/folk lovers to start, with hits like ‘Born on the Bayou’ and ‘Looking Out My Back Door’ bookending less-known classics like ‘Lodi’ and ‘Hey Tonight’. From there it’s a sandbox, where your experiences derive from your involvement in the world around you. You can jump ahead to Detroit Rock City, slow it down with some Lionel Richie, or remind yourself of Ontario in the early 2000s with some Sum 41.

Truly, there’s a lot to love here, but it’s not all green fields and rainbows. The issue of not knowing which songs are ‘protected’ is a big one that can really contrast with the enthusiasm of finding the exact song you feel like listening to. On top of that, once you find an artist, album, or song you like, there’s no guarantee of musical context to go with it. There might be only one album from an artist, or even one song. Albums might be incomplete, forcing you to go without your favorites, or limiting you to only those songs which received the most airplay during their hayday.

All in all, it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely a refreshing change from the other iTunes libraries that I’ve been seeing a lot of lately. Not to dampen those libraries or their efforts, but let’s face it - nothing beats the Stray Cats when you need to get your feet tapping.

All in all, I give this library three stars out of five, for an excellent collection marred only by inaccessibility and inconsistency.

This is what happens when you're badass

iPhone Love

They say that there’s no such thing as bad press. Rogers, then, must be thrilled at the amount of (what must logically be) good press that they’ve been getting lately.

Vancouver Sun: Unhappy? Assert yourself. Don’t buy the iPhone

Global TV: iPhone costs significantly more in Canada
Globe and Mail: In response to Rogers’ pricing uproar, Bell offers Samsung Instinct with unlimited data for $39.70 (also in the print edition, 04/07/08 page B3)
Fortune Magazine Weblog: 30,000 signature anti-Rogers petition
CTV: iPhones may have ‘poisonous bite’ for consumers

It seems as though the chronology has gone from ‘BTW some people are unhappy’ through ‘Let’s do a video report on how pissed off people are’ and now sits at ‘Don’t buy it.’ It seems like the only way things could get worse for Rogers is if this guy got loose and joined the furor.