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Day: 28 March 2008

B0rken eBay Express

Broken Ebay ExpressI was just poking around eBay earlier and I came across mention of “eBayExpress” and thought it’ll be interesting to sign up. So I tried to – but hit a load of debug information.

Interesting stuff: eBay Express appears to run in PHP (as can be confirmed in the URL), but it runs on Microsoft SQL Server (as can be evidenced by the MS SQL/mssql mentions in the error messages) and they use the “sa” (super administrator) account to login to the MS SQL server: a big no no in any security aware programmer’s book. They also have the web server running on the same server as the database server (as evidenced by the “Unable to connect to server: localhost” section) and they keep everything in nice distinct files. They also have warnings turned on on their server.

Interesting stuff (for a techy like me!).

[added]

Steps to replicate:

Techy: New Free Monitoring System

Beebware (the company I operate in my spare time) is slowly ramping up with a number of new services – and the first one is the Beebware Internet Monitoring system at http://monitor.beebware-internet.co.uk/ and to help promote the “soft launch” of the service (before the main Beebware Internet site is up and running) we’re giving away free trials of the service.

So, what does it do and how does it do it? Basically, we’ve got 9 monitoring stations (in Seattle, San Jose, Dallas, Virginia and Illinois in the US, Berkshire in the UK, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Singapore and Queensland in Australia) running 24×7 which checks your site/server for any interruptions to pings, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SSH, SMTP, DNS, POP3, IMAP, MySQL, PostgreSQL or any other TCP/IP service. And unlike other services, we’ll also check for certain keywords on your site (some will mark your site as “available” even if it’s just returning a holding page!), send reboot notifications to your datacenter if necessary, send you alerts via email or SMS and it’s all web based!

Feel free to give it a try free of charge – whilst we accept payment via Paypal, you don’t even need to provide your Paypal email address to try the free trial!

Oh – did I forget to mention, you can even have a public status report on your site in HTML or RSS and that, if you decide to upgrade from the free monitoring account, it’s only £12 for ONE MINUTE interval checks – no matter which service? (For example, My Unitard .co.uk is being monitored at a five minute interval over HTTPS – Beebware Internet will just charge £3 per month for this – Alertra charges $144 (approximately £72) for the same service!