Richy's Random Ramblings – Page 110 – Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B

Net: Faster ‘net Connection

January 1, 2004

It’s looking like I need a faster internet connection here at home. At the moment I’ve got a “bog-standard” ADSL link (512k downstream/256k upstream) and it’s just been maxed out recently – a little bit of background first:

I’ve been working on a BIG personal project for a couple of months now which has necessity a LOT of data crunching (somewhere in the region of 20Gb of raw data) on my two machines (‘Zaphod’ my Fedora/RedHat Linux Box and ‘Ford’ my WindowsXP box)- most of that data has been downloaded from the internet via various methods (plus I’ve got all my email and other downloads using the connection). I’ve now processed the data and I’m in the stage of getting it up to ‘houston’ (my webserver which this blog and various other sites run on: it’s called Houston not because of the star of the World’s Largest g-b or because of the space shuttle, but because it’s actually in Houston, Texas): however, ADSL is short of “Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line” and hence I can only upload at 256k (Asymmetric basically means the download and upload speeds aren’t the same). I tried moving a 7Gb.tar.gz file (yep – that means it’s already been compressed: and that’s only half the data) and it just wasn’t going to be uploaded. First my router/firewall was stopping it after a few hundred Mb, then I switched to “passive mode” (if you don’t understand how FTP works and “Stateful firewalls” operate you perhaps can’t see why this was necessary) and managed to get around half a gig uploaded, but still no dice. So I’m having to work around it for now.

At the moment, I’ve got Houston fetching the data “from the source” and I’m going to have to run the “cruncher application” on the server remotely (which will cause CPU usage to spike), but then I just need to get around another 5Gb uploaded. Fun fun fun 🙁

“But that’s just going to be a spike for a few weeks” I hear you cry. Well, no it isn’t. My “home network” (consisting of Ford and Zaphod) is growing by the week at the moment: I’ve just brought an oldish Acorn A7000 computer and a RISC PC is on order from ebay and they’re going on the network (I need access to various floppies, CDs and Zip discs which only they can read) and I should have an Dell Inspiron notebook coming to add to the network (with a wireless card). Talk about expansion: by the end of the month, I’m going to have 5 machines running for various tasks and it’s just me in the house(!).

Now, that’s why I’m looking for a cheaper “higher bandwidth” connection – BulldogDSL seem to be offering 1Mbps ADSL connections for the same price as my 512K link: but has anybody had any experience with them?

Net: Words to Auld Lang Syne (II)

December 31, 2003

3 Comments

With 27 minutes to go until 2004, I would just like to wish everybody a Happy New Year and re-post the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne (you can even listen to a 9k MIDI version if you want).

So here’s the “Scottish/English” version, the English and (by request) the German lyrics – however, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of these, but I’m told they’re correct… Auld Lang Syne, incidentally, means ” old times; times past, esp. those remembered with affection or nostalgia”.

Snippet: Brrr(!)

December 31, 2003

1 Comment

I’ve just found out why I’ve been so cold the last week (mainly staying in bed wrapped up until midday, returning to bed at 6pm and just popping out of bed to change the “tape” of the film(s) I’m watching). Even though I was increasing the central heating temperature to 30degrees (celsius), I was still cold. Why?

The blinking boiler had packed up!

Yep – end of December, middle of Winter and my boiler’s been broken for a week and I just hadn’t noticed? No heating or hot water for a whole week! How come I hadn’t noticed the lack of hot water? Well, I’ve had the washing machine (which has a heater) and the dish washer (which also has a heater) running quite a bit so I just assumed they had taken all the hot water. D’oh!

Luckily, it was just a case of: remove the cover of the boiler, remove the metal safety cover, restart the boiler flick the fan with my finger: as it was the fan/pump that had stopped, let it run and then oil it. Watch for a bit then seal the beast back up. The radiators are beginning to feel warm and I should be able to have a nice HOT relaxing bath before I decide what to do regarding New Years Eve….

Spam: Text Message Spam

December 30, 2003

7 Comments

This entry is mainly for my records, but it’s here if anybody else requires reference…

Basically, at 19.20, I made the following complaint to ICSTIS and The Telephone Preference Service in relation to a spammy text (SMS) message I received:

A SMS text message was sent at around 19:05 GMT (although the timestamp on the message reads 00:43:53 31-12-2003) from +08717120395 to my telephone preference service registered mobile phone (07732XXXXXX) with the message:
“You have 1 new BPQ voicemail message. Please call 0871 712 0395 to listen to it.”

When calling the number it says (in a format similar to a voicemail) “Sheila Brown of the BPQ awards department” tried calling and for me “reagrding an award prize which has to be claimed within 48hours” and for me to call 090 65393698 with NO cost of call disclosed.

Spam: I’m giving up….

December 29, 2003

3 Comments

I think I’m just about to give up on the email addresses provided by my ADSL provider (Demon). Why? Well, over Christmas Eve (from 4pm) to Boxing Day (2pm), I received nearly 25,000 emails. That’s a lot – but I’ve got a couple of custom Perl scripts which can crawl through my POP3 email box and zap spam (as it’ll probably be dictionary attack sort of spam).

It’s now 4 days on and I’ve managed to delete over 44,450 emails and there are another 47,552 still awaiting deletion. Yep – that’s over 90,000 emails in a space of a few days(!) I’ve spent most of today re-writing my email zapper (it’s called cleardemon.pl by the way) to be more efficient (previously it was making a separate connection to the mail server for each “attack name”: but now the last of “spammed addresses” is over 1,400 I needed to make it work on the mail as a group). But still running TOP on the emails in 1,000 blocks and then sending the DELETE command didn’t have much affect (it was taking around a quarter of a second to a second to send the delete command for each email: in that time 2 more emails came in!).

I’m now running a quick script to try and clear the POP3 mailbox down a bit more (by just sending 50,000 “DELETE” commands to the server), but I don’t hold up much hope. It’s looking like I’m going to have to give tech support a call tomorrow to get them just to flush my mailbox.

Why don’t I run something like SpamAssassin? Well, I would if I could. But it’s a “dialup/ADSL” POP3 email account, Demon don’t provide SMTP delivery to ADSL customers (but they do to conventional dial-up Modem users: go figure!) and I can’t change the MX records either. The good news is is that in the new year, they are introducing Brightmail filtering which should hopefully see spam drop (I’ve heard of figures between 75% and 98% with less than 1 in one million false positives!).

Ho hum. Oh, since typing the last two paragraphs I’ve now got 47,729 emails awaiting deletion: that’s nearly 200 emails in a matter of minutes(!).

[add] Actually, I’ve just taken a five minute average from 00:52 to 00:57 and I’m getting 16.6 emails per minute: that’s 996 per hour or 23,904 per day! Gulp!