McBlog

Working on two new mix CD’s – one a laid back, cruising set – the other based on “explicit lyric” dirty tracks.

I’ve managed to obtain sufficient diagnostics information so that DELL can confirm the problem with my laptop appears to be the motherboard (with a chance of RAM problems too). So, the tech is (hopefully) going to visit me today and I’ll have a laptop that works again. One can only hope…

MERDE!!!!
My laptop is giving me the shits! Locking up at times, claiming the RAM is bad, sometimes saying it can’t find a boot device (eg: no HDD).
MERDE!!!!
The current DELL Inspiron 4100 is a replacement for my old Inspiron 3800 that kept having keyboard hassles. DELL replaced the 3800 for me under warranty. Now, 1.5 years later, this one’s starting to go belly up. I’m in discussions with DELL to see what we can make of it (other than “Don’t buy DELL!”)…

Was asked to DJ for a friend’s birthday party – lots of fun and did a couple of sets over the course of the night.

Survived another birthday – it started off a little “odd” – hired a truck to go get some furniture from a friend of my mom’s – good stuff and I’m happy to have it, but getting up early to lug bookcases and a desk upstairs on the morning of my 36th wasn’t exactly #1 on my list of things to do :)

All worked out OK though with a relaxing afternoon and then Kitt and I went to a dinner with Andrew and Justina at their place. Dinner was great – 5 year old birthday “Construction Party” theme with fairy bread, chocolate crackles, chocolate cake, cheerios, sausage rolls and even “Passion Pop” (passionfruit flavoured sparkling wine). What a hoot. Will load photos later when I have my hands on them.

Anyhow, back to the work again…

Had fun at an “after-party” in a private venue outside town. Wound up going for a few hours with a variety of tunes.

Helped ruin a SPAMer’s day – doubt that we took them out of business but we’ve hopefully delayed them for a bit and hurt their profit margin…
It all started with a significant increase in our inbound traffic with no linked increase in our outbound traffic (yes, outbound went up but nowhere near the same level). Some sleuthing with tcpdump during the influx showed that most of the traffic was DNS related and coming from three machines under dca2.superb.net. With the help of our hosting provider (RUCC) we were able to block them so our traffic was able to return to normal.

I fired off a quick email to abuse@superb.net thinking that maybe someone’s machines had been infected by a virus or something. I also started monitoring DNS traffic in general and found that many foreign machines were using our DNS to perform lookups on a variety of domains, not just those that we hosted. I modified our configuration so now our DNS would only answer queries about domains we host and started logging DNS traffic in more detail. Sure enough, over time things resolved themselves so now we’re no longer being used for any old DNS query.

As to the machines on superb.net – it turns out that the machines generating the traffic were owned by a single client of theirs that was using superb.net to send out SPAM. By using our DNS and proxies to send the mails, they hoped to avoid detection. The superb.net crew terminated the SPAMer’s connection immediately with no refund of connection fee – which must have hurt the SPAMer as they’d just paid for a year’s connection in advance.

Getting back into the swing of things after the planning retreat in Byron Bay. Trying to wade through the emails and sort out the task list…

Started looking at the problem that AWU Whyalla are having with their membership system (finally got a machine I can run Office XP on for long enough to assess the problem).

Still getting problems with the network – taking way longer than it should to do things like copying files, etc. I’m thinking of going in there on Sunday to strip down the network and try it all again…

Been working on the “new look mcherron.com” – still got a way to go but it should be ready for release in a couple of days or so.

Trying to do this around my main work so it’s taking longer than I’d like. Would be nice to take a bit more time and give it the attention it deserves, but c’est la vie…