William Hector's Blog

The rest of the parts arrived here today:

		Watercooling parts – Part 2 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

This is the first batch of the watercooling parts. The rest of the stuff is arriving Monday by courier.

		Watercooling Parts – Part 1 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Long time, no post. Soo, firstly an update on me, I’m currently about to start University at the University Of Southampton studying Electronic Engineering (MEng – 4 years).

As my pc is currently in a movable state (When I got my new Graphics Card, ATI 6970 2Gb, my primary HDD cage wouldn’t fit in, thus it’s cable tied to the side). I needed a new case, I also decided to redo my water cooling setup (Plus I haven’t yet installed a waterblock on my GPU), whilst I would keep my Reserator 2, It will only be used as a radiator with no electronic in it.

Here are the case pictures, I went for a Coolermaster ACTS 840.

Ooo:

Popup I/O!

Yeah, I kinda dropped the case from about .5m, there was no damage whatsoever to the case but the floor suffered…

Hah, take that sTalksTalk (TalkTalk stalking bot).

Basically I was looking in my server logs and noticed that something called TalkTalk Virus Alerts Scanning Engine was accessing files which noone knows about, stuff I was working on. That means they are scanning what urls I access. (You can read about it here: https://nodpi.org/2010/08/07/talktalk-becomes-stalkstalk/)

After googleing I found they’ve been doing for a while, and haven’t been stopped; they claim its part of their “HomeSafe” thing, you can Google it.

So, I thought, can I play with the bot? So I set up one of my fast servers that whenever a random string at a particular url it would server up a 500MB file (The server has a 1gbit pipe and unlimited b/w so it’s no prob to that) (Like a honeypot)

Then I made a quick page which just kept loading random urls on my server, my script would instantly disconnect, just sending the request. This means there was no real load on my home broadband but their bot would pick up the request.

I then sat watching the server throughput shoot up and saw the requests from the bot flooding in about a minute after I started.

I left it going on two pcs and did some other stuff…

A few min later the trigger scripts had both sent about 10,000requests. I looked at the logs and noticed the Talktalk bot was no longer sending anything…

I then checked it hadn’t just blocked the url/ip of the server with the honeypot on by trying another domain I hadn’t used yet.

So far there’s been no request from the bot to the new domain/ip, so either I broke their servers (Extremely unlikely, seeing as they are scanning hundred of thousands peoples broadband urls) or I was blacklisted (Most likely).

Either way it means they won’t scan my url. If it starts up again I’ll step up the honeypotting.

I’ve recently moved this blog onto a new VPS server in the UK, to improve my editing speed of other sites and most peopel looking at my blog are in the uk, It’s not to slow for the US or anywhere else anyway.

The point is when I tried to upgrade wordpress, or any plugins I got this error: “PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Invalid archive structure”

Some quick googling shows that normally the error is due to a problem with the http.php file makeing corrupt archives. I tried the new version but to no avail, I was then looking at the sourse to see if it used a function I forgot to enable for some reason and saw this line in /wp-admin/includes/file.php (which contains the extracting function):

&ini_set('memory_limit', '256M');

Now the server only has 256MB at the moment, which is enouge for my use; but this will cause the above error unless it is lowed, I set to 128M with no problems.

This morning when I tried to logon to msn messenger, I was greeted by a message telling me I had to upgrade; knowing It wouldn’t work I could only click ok.
It downloaded then installation failed due to me running XP x64.

So after a quick search I found this:

http://oss.netfarm.it/wlm.php

This allows you to just download the setup file from microsoft, run the above patch and it works.

For a very long time my broadband randomly cuts out, I think it always has. Only for a few seconds though as my modem reconnects. The problems is I then get a new IP. With a router it doesn’t care. However I’m using, and have been for the last year using Small Business Server 2003 as my router. When the external IP changes it needs to renew the ip. How this was getting annoying as it seems to be increasing lately. So I made a small program (this is an ugly hack)  to ping google every 2 seconds, if it fails 3 times in a row, it releases and renews the IP. I also decided to log every time it has to do this. I then plotted a graph, with some interesting results:

I’m still logging to see how this trend continues.

Realised my old gallery wasn’t working so here is the pics of my computer.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]