mike.mainguy

OK, so I've went round and round trying to figure out how my rackspace server was compromised and have come to the conclusion it was an inside job, but nobody's fessing up. I can see what sort of package was used to compromise my box and I may come back to trying to poison that package, but there isn't enough time in my life to continue to school folks who are hell bent on screwing with other people's property. Instead, I'll give folks a quick primer one how to have a little better security if you choose to use rackspace with ubuntu 10.04. #1 make sure your rackspace console password is secure... some basic rules: 10 chars, no dictionary words, upper and lower case letter, 2 number, at least one special char. #2 Once you get your root password emailed to you, log in via the secure console, and disable both network interfaces. I'm not sure what the 10.* interface is for, I'll figure that out later, but I'm assuming it's some sort of rackspace...

I finally had time to site down and actually analyze what happened to my box. It was certainly compromised by a script kiddie, but I'm not 100% sure if it was an inside job or not. In any event, I stored off the broken image and re-imaged the machine back to my "last known good" configuration. I subsequently added the account that I thought was used for the attack setting the password back to what it was when the machine was originally compromised, but limited login to the rssh shell. This has been running for almost a week with no problems now. I've had a couple of sniffs of folks trying to connect to my machine as root, but no solid hits. Some initial observations: First the default install of Ubuntu Server on rackspace's cloud accounts enables root login via ssh. This is very strange now that I think about it. Ubuntu, by default disallows this (for very good reasons ), and I think rackspace should seriously consider a change to their default build. ...

I've been using Rackspace cloud for testing some server builds and ESB solutions and recently ran into a "gotcha". First off, it looks like maybe the machine was compromised... I HOPE it was an inside job by one of my developer "friends" who happened to know the userid/password. If not, that means the default install of ubuntu 10.04, apache tomcat6, apache2.2, and servicemix is able to be compromised in less that 3 days when left out on the internet. In any event, that particular problem notwithstanding, I now have a different problem... That is, rackspace has suspended my account and I cannot access my server, nor create another one until Monday. Thank god I was only using this machine to test things, I can't image what I would have done if I was actually depending on it to be running. Another problem I'm finding is that I cannot find any reference on Rackspace's web site about acceptable use. They suspended the account for outbound ssh act...

Early Results Here are some early results: Port Huron, MI Rockford, IL These maps show the first page of garage sales on craigslist with about a 50% accuracy rate (meaning, only about 1/2 of time can I find an address). That having been said, it's still pretty impressive as manually entering these things into google maps is.... tedious. This process takes about 60 seconds per city using the script I've written. Back to Geocoding Note, geocoding is the process of attaching geographic coordinates to data. In my case I can find a "reasonable" address in about 1/2 of the entries. This means there is a string somewhere that looks like an address, notably, it has a few numbers, and then a couple of words. To get this data and geocode it, I wrote an awk script $1 ~ /\([0-9]+ .+\)/ {match($1,/([0-9]+ [^\)\(]+)\)/,out); printdata( "\""out[1]"\"")} $1 !~ /\([0-9]+ .+\)/ && $2 ~ /[0-9]+ [a-zA-Z]+ [a-zA-Z]+ /{match($2,/([0-9]...

The Backstory My wife is an avid garage sailer. She finds garage sales she thinks have promise, then cruises by them to see if there is anything of interest. She is so accomplished at this that she routinely turns a profit by snagging things that folks didn't realize had resale value, and flipping them at local consignment shops. While this doesn't pay the bills, it DOES provide enough extra cash to actually have her garage sailing at least pay for itself with a little left over. This is, however, not without it's share of problems: First, the postings online (or paper) for garage sales are scattered to the four winds. At this point, craigslist.org is the hands down winner for quality and quantity of posts. Local newspapers/classified also have a good quantity, but the few sites I found on google geared toward this are suffering terribly from a strategic chicken and egg problem. Second, while craigslist has a fairly high quality set of sales established, it h...

My internet service provider is a bit dicey and I occasionally need to be on the Internet even when they are figuring out how to reboot their remote router when they lose connectivity. So I thought I would just tether my smartphone (Droid ERIS) to my computer. After a bit of searching, I came up with a couple requirements. I didn't want to root my phone. While this is technically a cool thing to do, I just don't want to do that right now. I need to be able to connect natively to an Ubuntu linux machine. All my computers are currently running ubuntu and I didn't want to screw around with wine or a virtual machine. Enter easytether. In 5 minutes I had internet connectivity... here's what I did: downloaded easytether downloaded the ubuntu driver to the phone connected the phone to the computer (via usb) installed the .deb located in phone's download folder ran easytether on the phone ran "easytether enumerate" on my computer ran "sudo dhc...

Here's a copy of my verizon bill: My first reaction is "Hey, I don't owe anything"... However, from experience I think I DO, and I think it might be $127. Unfortunately, by putting a big $0 for my balance at the top, people generally are going to stop and simply assume they didn't owe anything. I've called Verizon about this a few times and 2/3 times the person I talk to ALSO thinks that I don't owe anything. I then need to talk them through my billing history for 15 minutes before they realize I DO in fact owe something. Usually this is after a supervisor gets involved and starts trying to explain complicated billing cycles and all sort of things that neither I nor the CSR actually care to know anything about. This is how NOT to design an online bill presentation screen, they've taken intimate knowledge about how their internal billing and accounting systems work and broadcast it all the way to the customer. In addition to frustration, this...