Andy Kopciuch's Blog
Sunday, March 29, 2009
db2sql, download quotes & the brier
So really working on the Power Broker to Toolkit integration last week. Jeff did a bunch of the leg work, and produced a dump of the dbf file with a utility from whitetown. They seem to be dbf conversion specialists. Handy tools they provide. We switched to the conversion directly to Postges SQL format, instead of CSV. So now it is a direct import. I ran into a couple of small issues with escape characters, and how close to the SQL spec PG is with regards to string literals. I now have a working script that sets the proper options, and the right sequence of events. Also converts the encoding of the data to UTF-8. Which is required for the import to work properly. Onwards and upwards.
I also spent some time back in the world of bikes. I changed some of the navigation, and added some options to download a copy of the quote in PDF or email it to your address. Didn't take too much effort. It's nice to have handy libraries like FPDF. I also did some quick work with jpgraph for some of the statistics pages to get them going. Again ... nice to leverage existing work.
So the brier was in Calgary a couple of weeks ago. I had some tickets. I caught 1 draw, and our party never made it back from the brier patch for the evening draw. Ian, Scott, yaz and myself. TOTALLY SHITFACED! We were all gong-show drunk. It was such a great night ... well ... early night as it was. Kinda funny that happens when you start drinking at 2:00 P.M. Cheers to the Brier! ¶ 1:22:00 AM 0 comments
I also spent some time back in the world of bikes. I changed some of the navigation, and added some options to download a copy of the quote in PDF or email it to your address. Didn't take too much effort. It's nice to have handy libraries like FPDF. I also did some quick work with jpgraph for some of the statistics pages to get them going. Again ... nice to leverage existing work.
So the brier was in Calgary a couple of weeks ago. I had some tickets. I caught 1 draw, and our party never made it back from the brier patch for the evening draw. Ian, Scott, yaz and myself. TOTALLY SHITFACED! We were all gong-show drunk. It was such a great night ... well ... early night as it was. Kinda funny that happens when you start drinking at 2:00 P.M. Cheers to the Brier! ¶ 1:22:00 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Romanians, Toolkit 3.0 & Alabama Slammers
Back up a few weeks. Craziness ensues! So I was not even back from Montreal for a whole day before the crapola hits lots of different fans. :( We had some typical SPAM problems, although 350,000 SPAM messages from a single source is not really "typical". Yeah that took like 4 hours to clear up. Added some extra postfix options, but they still need a policy server to control the connection / bandwidth limits properly. Or something else entirely. Nothing heard since, so I am guessing it's all good.
Immediately following that debacle. I ended up dealing with a compromise. A pretty nasty one at that. I was shown some of what was going on after the fact. Some nasty passwords recording in clear text. Box was completely owned. Someone else was tracking them down outside the box, following them in IRC channels etc. Turned out to be some Romanians (not that I have anything against Romania ... that's just where they were from). Translate the IRC chats, and they are talking about Bank accounts, and Credit Cards. Some nasty folks. Box is since rebuilt, and deployed.
Right around this time is when I discovered OSSEC. Sweet IDS. Easy to install, nothing to configure, but insanely extensible. XML configs, and crazy options. it alerted me the other day when the # of log entries in mail.log, increased over the average entries for a time span. WOW ... that's what I like to see from an IDS. The active response to block IPs under certain conditions is really nice to see as well. Brute force on SSH ... See Ya!
So during, and after all of that craziness. We released the first Toolkit 3.0. Kevin and I were there all Sunday until the afternoon Monday. Do what you gotta do. It went exceptionally well considering the gravity of the changes. Of course there is some small noise from things, but nothing major. We were all quite pleased. So now we are onto 3.1 development. We have moved to roughly 2 month release cycles. So Early May is planned for 3.1. We are adding the "Opportunities", "Power Broker Data Integration", and some distribution changes. There's soo much needed to be done, and some things are simply going to be pushed back to 3.2
...
time passes
...
Looks like I forgot I had started a draft. :S oops.
I'll sum up this blog with my recolection that Jack Ass sized Alabama Slammers @ Jack Astors are super yummy, they taste like cool-aid, and when you pound back like 4 or 5 in the time the rest of your party has 1 drink ... you tend to get a little smashed. I'll just end on that note. ¶ 9:24:00 AM 0 comments
Immediately following that debacle. I ended up dealing with a compromise. A pretty nasty one at that. I was shown some of what was going on after the fact. Some nasty passwords recording in clear text. Box was completely owned. Someone else was tracking them down outside the box, following them in IRC channels etc. Turned out to be some Romanians (not that I have anything against Romania ... that's just where they were from). Translate the IRC chats, and they are talking about Bank accounts, and Credit Cards. Some nasty folks. Box is since rebuilt, and deployed.
Right around this time is when I discovered OSSEC. Sweet IDS. Easy to install, nothing to configure, but insanely extensible. XML configs, and crazy options. it alerted me the other day when the # of log entries in mail.log, increased over the average entries for a time span. WOW ... that's what I like to see from an IDS. The active response to block IPs under certain conditions is really nice to see as well. Brute force on SSH ... See Ya!
So during, and after all of that craziness. We released the first Toolkit 3.0. Kevin and I were there all Sunday until the afternoon Monday. Do what you gotta do. It went exceptionally well considering the gravity of the changes. Of course there is some small noise from things, but nothing major. We were all quite pleased. So now we are onto 3.1 development. We have moved to roughly 2 month release cycles. So Early May is planned for 3.1. We are adding the "Opportunities", "Power Broker Data Integration", and some distribution changes. There's soo much needed to be done, and some things are simply going to be pushed back to 3.2
...
time passes
...
Looks like I forgot I had started a draft. :S oops.
I'll sum up this blog with my recolection that Jack Ass sized Alabama Slammers @ Jack Astors are super yummy, they taste like cool-aid, and when you pound back like 4 or 5 in the time the rest of your party has 1 drink ... you tend to get a little smashed. I'll just end on that note. ¶ 9:24:00 AM 0 comments
