Col’s Tech Stuff

Someone’s been attempting to perform a SQL injection attack on my websites, but thankfully without much luck.

I was running through my error and access logs this morning (whilst trying to troubleshoot an issue) and spotted this rather strange entry, well 16 of them this morning alone:

24.47.218.244 - - [28/Aug/2008:05:59:13 +0000] “GET /blog/saffer-brings-veggies-to-life
/?’;DECLARE%20@S%20CHAR(4000);SET%20@S=CAST(0×4445
…[truncated for brevity]…
%20AS%20CHAR(4000));EXEC(@S); HTTP/1.1″ 200 6191 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;
MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”

The truncated part is one huge long hexadecimal string. Being the curious person that I am, I investigated these requests a bit further.

Continue reading ‘SQL Injection Attack’

Here’s a great excerpt from the panic.c file in Solaris/OpenSolaris:

113 *
114 * A Note on Word Formation, courtesy of the Oxford Guide to English Usage:
115 *
116 * Words ending in -c interpose k before suffixes which otherwise would
117 * indicate a soft c, and thus the verb and adjective forms of 'panic' are
118 * spelled "panicked", "panicking", and "panicky" respectively. Use of
119 * the ill-conceived "panicing" and "panic'd" is discouraged.


So remember this next time you’re emailing someone about one of your machines “panicing”.

My little Ultra 20 under my desk runs with two boot environments and flip-flop between them as I upgrade using Live Upgrade. The basic procedure is: rename the old inactive BE (lurename), update it with the contents of the currently running BE (lumake), upgrade it to the latest and greatest (luupgrade), activate it (luactivate) and reboot.

This is quite a pain free experience and has worked well for me. I never actually delete the alternate BE as I don’t need the space. However, other people need to and ever since GRUB was introduced into Solaris 10 (x86 only) they encounter the following error when attempting to delete the BE that contains the GRUB menu:

This is a long standing issue (I’ve got a workaround if you want it) that has plagued many a sysadmin using Live Upgrade on Solaris 10 x86 and Nevada. Well, not any more.

Continue reading ‘ludelete of BE Holding GRUB on Solaris x86 Fixed’

If you’ve popped over to Blastwave.org in the last few days you’re likely to have encountered this…

(Click for full size)

I don’t know the exact reason for this, but if the comments on the various forums, eg comp.unix.solaris, are anything to go by, it’s such a shame greed has got the better of a great resource.

I’ve never been a big fan of Blastwave (too many non-Solaris supplied dependencies for my liking), but I know many other people are fans and use it quite extensively, but hopefully Dennis or Phil Brown will release an official statement explaining what’s potting.

Update: Unofficial update from Ben Rockwood (an outsider like the rest of us). Looks like things have got very smelly between Dennis and Phil

Update: The Official Response from Dennis Clarke.

I stumbled upon the concept of “Local Shared Objects” for the first time today after reading about the Objection extension for Firefox.

For those who have also not heard of “Local Shared Objects” or LSOs for short, Wikipedia define them as:

A Local Shared Object (LSO) is a collection of cookie-like data stored as a file on a user’s PC. LSOs are used by all versions of Adobe Flash Player and those subsequent to Version 5 of Macromedia’s now-obsolete Flash MX Player

Well, sounds reasonable enough as I’ve had to use cookies to my advantage before, so why shouldn’t Flash developers have the same functionality? I mean, the user can always reject the cookie if they want, like normal cookies, right?

Well, actually NO.

Continue reading ‘Local Shared Object: Flash Cookies You Didn’t Know About’

Links of interest for 1 Jul 2008 - 30 Jul 2008:

• Direct Mounting of Files - As of snv_91, you no longer need lofi to mount a filesystem image, like an ISO. You can now call mount(1M) as you would a normal filesystem.
• DTrace IP Provider - Cool. The first step of implementing TCP/IP DTrace providers in Solaris has made it's way into snv_93.
• OpenSolaris 2008.11 - A Preview For The Storage Admin - A great review of the features you can find in OpenSolaris 2008.11 from a Storage perspective, ie the stuff sysadmins want, but the other reviews never mention.
• NetApp Litigation - an update - Just in case you haven't seen it yet. Looks like several of the patents NetApp rely on in their WAFL filesystem are open for scrutiny again and one has already been struck from the litigation.
• 100 Best Places to Work in IT 2008 - Interesting list, but I'd take it with a pinch of salt. Sun are on the list (14th), but none of the other big IT corps like MS, IBM, Dell or Apple are.

If you’ve been following the developments of Habari, you’ll be pleased to hear Habari 0.5 is now out the door and waiting for you to download and use.

Habari 0.5 is a vast improvement on the previous stable release (0.4.1) so if you tried 0.4.1 and didn’t think much of it, I recommend you give 0.5 a go. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

If you host with Joyent, be sure to check out my post on installing Habari on Joyent.

I’m not a sysadmin in the true sense of the word - I only tend administer the machines I’m using for testing and my own personal machines - but I am one of those people behind the sysadmins, helping them out when things go wrong and on those rare occasions when sysadmins don’t even know what to do, so I suppose I can partake in today’s “celebrations” too.

Maybe we should introduce a “Those that Support SysAdmins Appreciation Day”.

Habari has some pretty stringent requirements that need to be met. Thankfully Joyent’s Shared Accelerator (and I believe all other) accounts meets all of these already so there’s no need to install any additional software or log tickets to get software updated. You will however need to make some configuration changes which I’ll detail here.

Continue reading ‘Install Habari on Joyent’