MuchTallWare: fixmyself.pl

Today at work we had a situation where a server wasn't coming back on the network after a reboot. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but the server was across the ocean in a vastly different timezone, so troubleshooting normally has to be done in a 2-hour window.

It turned out that the sk98lin module that we were using for our nic has been superceeded/deprecated by skge. So I wanted to test out the new module on the new kernel version, but didn't have someone on the other end to reboot and types things in on the console should something go wrong. I needed a way to make the server roll back the changes and reboot if it did not see me come back to the server after 10 minutes. I didn't have any handy script to do this, so I wrote one up.

fixmyself.pl checks for a condition that you specify in the subroutine test_condition() and if the test fails (such as not finding any processes running on pts0 through 9), then it executes a response_action() subroutine. In this case it finds the changes I made, changes them back, and reboots the server.

I hope you find it useful: fixmyself.pl

MuchTallWare: ftpautoban.pl: Auto-ban IPs from VSFTP

Some dumbass has been pummeling my ftp server with brute-force FTP attempts. So I've written a script that you can add to your cron tab to help you auto-ban them via hosts.deny. Pay attention to the variables as this was written on a RedHat 9 box and may not be entirely applicable to other platforms or versions.

ftpautoban.pl

John's!@holmstadt.com

I give up. Thunderbird, as great as it is at classifying spam, just isn't good enough to combat the all the crap that fills my inbox. It probably only catches %80 of the spam that comes my way, and that's pretty bad when I get 50-100 spams a day.

Why so much spam? It's pretty simple. Just go and register any domain. Set up a catch-all for @yourdomain.com to point to an account, and watch the spam come in.... for everyone. Susie, Ron, Bob, Jack, Tom, Tim, Phil, and of course, John. If it's a common name, you'l get email for it at name@yourdomain.com. Spammers guess at all sorts of common names to try to find new targets for their herbal viagra ads and genital enlargment creams.

This has become a problem for my email address. John is a pretty common name after all. But really, few people actually email me there. I've taken to creating a new email address for each entity I share my contact info with. I've prepared for this by creating a catchall for the subdomain of @john.mydomain.com For instance, if I share my address with Joe Blo, I ask him to email me at jblo@john.mydomain.com. If his computer ever gets compromised, or he decides to share this address with spammers, I simply tell sendmail to start rejecting this address.

Other than the fact that i've been still accepting mail for john@, It's been working pretty well. The only people who have emailed me directly are family members and spammers. So I've told family to start using a sub-domained address and told sendmail to start rejecting john@mydomain.com.

So that's it. I give up. You've ruined my uber-slick email address, so I must reject all of your mail and move on to a less convenient address.