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…

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.

Click here to view it

Click Here

This is the first set of pictures of the built day, they’re un organised so there may be some pointless ones in there.

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A month or so later we persuaded our Physics teacher to let us run it at school in his classroom. We actually managed to get a visible standing wave due to two things, first there was no wind and secondly I miscalculated what the frequency should be because I forgot that propane is of different density to air. Also using a square wave provided a better view.

Unfortunately no pictures were taken of this however someone spectating have posted a YouTube video of it.

Max is the guy who keep relighting it, You don;t see me until the end as I’m adjusting the sound. At the end (About 4:02) I’m the other guy next to max also wearing a brown shirt.

Edit:

Found the rest of the pictures, over 100 of them:

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The tube is 3m long and there are holes every 1cm with a 10cm margin either end, therefore 280 holes. We ordered both 0.5mm and 1mm drill bits, starting with the smallest. So my brother and I started by affixing a drill stand to a workbench and used some pieces of wood to support the tube whilst drilling.

The first problem was that because the drill bits were so thin, when the chuck was fully closed the bit could still slide in and out, luckily I used some electrical tape to pad out the bit thus enabling it to fit on.

Here are some construction pics (click for original image)

My brother marking the holes on masking tape (I gave up after 20)

Drill Setup

Close-up of the drill bit

My Brother doing some drilling

Me Drilling (The bit is so small and spinning so fast that you can’t actually see it in this shot, but it is there)

You may have noticed there is an absence of any gas fittings etc, a large delivery of about 60 items including all piping, jointed, fittings and regulators.

Also we’ve got some marshmallows to toast

Steel Tube:

Propane Tank

And, just in case:

Fire Extinguisher

Latex Sheet – For Diaphragm

It is taking place this Saturday (22nd May). Watch my blog for the pictures and video.

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.