Netflow Developments

Sample CISPA Blackout Page HTML to save you the time

admin — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 01:01:36 +0000

Just incase you are planning on blacking out your site(s) on April 22nd, 2013 I’ve made a sample CISPA page which I think is pretty decent. All you have to do is save it as index.html and put it in your domains root folder/directory. Obviously you’ll want to back up your existing index.html file first.

The code can be found here: http://pastebin.com/4S6pNXxt and if you want to see what it looks like in action you can go here: http://ironbellystudios.com/cispaIndex.html

Or I’ll just paste it below. Do me a favor and help me spread the word by upvoting this article on reddit, sharing on twitter, facebook, etc etc

Don’t know what CISPA IS?

CISPA Explained

(thanks minds.com)

For the next 24 hours we will be blacking out the website to raise awareness of a very controversial bill called CISPA that the government is trying to sneak in under our noses. A bill that will irreparably destroy fundamental rights to privacy that citizens everywhere are entitled to. Please take today as a day of focus and action to learn about this destructive bill and what you can do to prevent it from becomming a reality.

Right now, the US Congress is sneaking in a new law that gives them big brother spy powers over the entire web — and they’re hoping the world won’t notice. We helped stop their Net attack last time, let’s do it again.

Over 100 Members of Congress are backing a bill (CISPA) that would give private companies and the US government the right to spy on any of us at any time for as long as they want without a warrant. This is the third time the US Congress has tried to attack our Internet freedom. But we helped beat SOPA, and PIPA — and now we can beat this new Big Brother law.

Our global outcry has played a leading role in protecting the Internet from governments eager to monitor and control what we do online. Let’s stand together once again — and beat this law for good

Taken from the CISPA Petition found HERE

Who Voted for CISPA?

Sign Petition

Contact your Representative

WTF IS CLOUDMARK

Care of Digital Trends

• CISPA effectively allows the federal government and corporations to “spy” on citizens. One of the main problems with CISPA is that its intentionally broad language gives corporations both the ability and incentive to share almost any type of information they like with the federal government. It also allows the government to use the information in an almost unlimited fashion.

• Yes, the bill does contain limitations on the types of information that may be shared (namely: data related to “cyber threats” or “national security”), but the ambiguities of these terms render these limits completely meaningless. Because of this, private communication, like email or messages sent privately through social networks, could be considered fair game. And nothing in the bill requires companies to strip shared information of personally identifiable details — something other cybersecurity bills mandate.

• Information shared under CISPA could be used for almost any purpose. Despite what CISPA supporters want you to believe, the legislation effectively provides no limits for the types of information that may be shared under the bill. As mentioned above, this is because the bill uses overly broad language to define the relevant terms.

Read all the bills, amendments, and “discussion drafts” of CISPA here: http://intelligence.house.gov/hr-3523-bill-and-amendments

The best windows archiver between WinRar and 7zip

admin — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 01:10:17 +0000

Alright so I was looking at Archivers today as I just wanted to make sure that Winrar, my goto archiver was the best one I should be using. I read a lot of reviews and found most people saying that 7zip can compress things smaller without taking a lot longer to do it. So I wanted to find out and post up the results.

The target was 612MB worth of PSD files

7Zip :

Final File Size: 340MB
Time to Compress: 8 Minutes

WinRar:

Final File Size: 370MB
Time to Compress: 1.5 minutes

So to conclude I am getting a 9% decrease in file size at the expense of a 550% increase in compression time. Worth it on my little machine, I don’t think so

Fixing ‘This page includes script from unauthenticated sources’ problem with ssl wordpress install on apache+nginx server

admin — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 01:57:21 +0000

This was a headache and a half that ate up 4 hours of my life. So here’s the deal, I have a wordpress install that NEEDS to run completely on ssl(https) and everything was running tickity boo until we did a wordpress update last week. All of a sudden all of the css and js files are being blocked by chrome and we can’t get into the admin area. In the url bar is a little grey shield telling us that ’This page includes script from unauthenticated sources’ (great grammer google) and what was happening was that because the domain was on https:// and there was a cert for the domain, chrome was blocking all of the scripts and css files in the source code that were being called from http. Like this:

By going into tools–>Javascript console I could see that ALL .js files were being called from http as well as all .css so chrome was just blocking the lot. IE and Firefox were fine with this but chrome, not so much.. Which makes me question firefox’s security procedures because the way chrome was behaving is clearly the safest way to be.

Anyways, how the hell could I fix this? I was doing an apache redirect in my vhost.conf file so the user couldn’t get to http:// if they wanted to. Well it turns the solution was a bit of a two parter.

1.) First of all I needed a wordpress plugin that would go into my source and convert all those pesky http urls into https urls if the user was hitting the site via https:// (which they all would as they didn’t have a choice). At first I tried wordpress-https which ended up being a giant flop. As soon as I set it up and clicked save in it’s setting page it set a cookie that caused the site to hang for me indefinitely. So I scrapped that piece of shit and went to a much simpler and better solution: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ssl-insecure-content-fixer/ . As you can tell by the name this plugin is designed to basically fix my exact problem, the gods were finally smiling upon me. So I installed the plugin and then, as it always is with everything problem, nothing worked. Same problem, urls were all still http:// which takes us to part 2

2.) The problem I later discovered was that the plugin, hell the apache server, had no clue that the user was seeing the site via https:// even though the url bar clearly said https:// . This is because I am running my web traffic through nginx, so apache see’s everything as http and just passes it all off to nginx wherein nginx then see’s the incoming forward from apache on port 443 and serves up the content securely. Apache is just the middleman and to apache it’s all the same shit. The problem is that wordpress and this plugin are only talking to apache so they are never being told that the content is coming at them through ssl. What I need to do here is to create a custom little script found here: https://gist.github.com/webaware/4688802 and stick that in my wp-content/plugins dir and then go into wp-admin and activate it

Once that was in there it all worked beautifully, which is still a shock after all my years of being a sysop. Nothing is supposed to work before you exhaust 10 possible solutions. So hopefully that helps you out. Big huge, massive thanks to the creator of the plugin not only for the plugin but also for this blog post here: http://snippets.webaware.com.au/snippets/wordpress-is_ssl-doesnt-work-behind-some-load-balancers/

How to make an automated connection checker and IP blocker for your server

admin — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 22:23:25 +0000

I like to think of it as a door man for my server, or my little centurion What this little guy does is checked the last 5 hours of access logs to your server to see if there are any IP’s that are hitting your server an unusually high amount of times. If it finds any that are over the set limit it blocks them with iptables. So as a disclaimer you need to have the following things setup and know how to use them:

iptables
global access logs turned on
Default log format for nginx:

log_format main ‘$remote_addr – $remote_user [$time_local] “$request” ‘
‘”$status” $body_bytes_sent “$http_referer” ‘
‘”$http_user_agent” “$http_x_forwarded_for”‘;

My environment is a debian 6 server running apache 2.2 and nginx, so for me I’m accessing my nginx access logs as apache is just acting as a proxy.

#Declare the date

Just a quick variable for the date, to be used with the logging

now=$(date +”%m_%d_%Y”)

#badIPChecker

#What we need to do first is to go through our access logs and print out a list of the top 10 offending IPs, sorted by the most connections. I’ve also put a make believe IP at the end with a grep -v command.. this means that the listings will exclude all ip’s from that range, it’s a way to white list certain IP’s such as internal IP’s running automated processes. Everything is appended to a text file for the day

cat /var/log/nginx/access.log | awk ‘{print $1}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | grep -v 55.555 > /home/ipChecker/ipcheck_$now.txt

#autoBanIP

#Using Perl we are going to check the above generated daily log for any IP’s that have logged more than 600 connections to the server. You will have to adjust this limit depending on how you and others use your server. I have some users that log 500 connections every 5 hours some busy days so that’s why I had to up this to where it is but I would think that anywhere between 400-600 would be appropriate. After the scan is done we print just the IP’s to a file and insert the command to run a block script I made for that particular IP(usr/local/sbin/blockIP). It runs the little script it just made, turns the txt file of the IP’s into a log file(which will get appended to every script run which I have set to every 5 ours via a cron). After that it just does a little tidying up and then truncates the log files so we get to start fresh This last action will erase your global access logs but if you are worth your salt as an admin you no doubt have domain specific logs running(assuming you are using this for a webserver) and the global one just takes up space.

/usr/bin/perl -ne ‘print if grep {$_>600} /(\d{3,})/g’ /home/ipChecker/ipcheck_$now.txt | awk ‘{print $2}’ > /home/ipChecker/badIPs_$now.sh
sed -i “s/^/\/usr\/local\/sbin\/blockIP /g” /home/ipChecker/badIPs_$now.sh
/bin/bash /home/ipChecker/badIPs_$now.sh
cat /home/ipChecker/ipcheck_$now.txt >> /home/ipChecker/ipcheck_$now.log
rm /home/ipChecker/ipcheck_$now.txt
rm /home/ipChecker/badIPs_$now.sh/usr/bin/truncate -s 0 /var/log/nginx/access.log

blockIP

#this little diddy is just to allow me to quickly block IP’s with a quick flick of my fingers Obviously $1 is the IP address so the syntax would be #blockIP 55.555.555.555 or whatever you want to block

#!/bin/bash
sudo iptables -I INPUT -s $1 -j DROP
sudo bash -c “iptables-save > /etc/network/iptables.save”

So that’s it, just put the second script on your server and cron the first for whatever crono-frequency fits your scenario best. I created this script because I was getting hammered by scrapers and spiders(even though my robots.txt clearly tells them to piss off. I would log in after waking up to find my server usage at 22 and every site on the server down. So not the fuckers have 5 hours to do their thing before they are automatically blocked and the server usage can go back to normal. Obviously this isn’t idea as you would want a quicker response time than that but this is mainly so I can take a day or two off and not worry about the server being kurfucked for days on end. A few hours I can handle Hope it serves you well and if you have any ways to make it better just leave them in the comments below.

Remove auto-created email specific thunderbird folders – have everything go into 1 local folder

admin — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:28:32 +0000

This was something that I seemed to have figured out and forgot again so I’ll blog about it this time to keep it permanently in memory

Anyways, so the deal is when you add a new email account in thunderbird it creates a specific set of folders and subfolders for that new email address. This is all fine and dandy and probably a much better system than just lumping everything into one folder for your basic user but most power users are going to have their own more robust organizational system that involves hundreds of folders and dozens of filters that sort email from dozens of email addresses. If you fall into the latter category you probably hate having thunderbird create a new inbox, sent and trash folder for every new email address you create and add. The annoying part is that there’s no simple way to delete them, you can’t just right click, delete and have the emails go into your main local folder.

What you have to do is go into Tools / Account Settings and then go into the server settings for that account.. At the bottom of that box will be an ‘advanced..’ button in the message storage section. Click on that and then change that to Global inbox and make sure that include this server when getting new mail is checked. Restart thunderbird and setup your filters to organize your mail your way and be a little less cluttered in your inbox

Changing vmail user passwords in mysql with phpMyAdmin

admin — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 22:23:56 +0000

So I had a bit of a head scratcher with this one today as I’m used to changing passwords in wordpress by going into the user’s table and typing the password in the value box and choosing md5 in the function dropdown window. Well that just ended up in disaster for vmail.

It ends up that when the table was created(with a script I wrote a couple lifetimes ago while I still scripted in bash) it used the following command: INSERT INTO `users` (`email`, `password`, `quota`) VALUES (‘_EMAIL_@_DOMAIN_’, ENCRYPT(‘_PASSWORD_’), 500000000);

Which tells me the format of that the function dropdown needed to be at ENCRYPT rather than md5 like wordpress wants. Switched it to that and viola, my mail user can login to his account. Huzzah!

God it feels good to write a linux post after doing windows posts for so long. I feel a little like a geek again.. not enough, but a little

Batch renaming files in Sequential order with Bash(in windows)

admin — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:11:23 +0000

So let’s say you save 50 related files from the internets and they are all uselessly named like ksaljf23_13.jpg , etc etc and you want them to be sequentially named something relevant like videoGame_01.jpg videoGame_02.jpg. How can you go and batch rename them all with a quick and dirty script?

Well in linux it’s a simple matter, in windows however you need to bring a little linux in with you, or more specifically a little bash with CygWin. I think I’ve blogged about cygwin before so go research that but you’re going to need an environment in which bash can run properly so go read up and install that.

Now onto the renaming script. It’s incredibly simple and goes a little something like this:

a=1
for i in *.jpg; do
  new=$(printf "%04d.jpg" ${a}) #04 pad to length of 4
  mv ${i} ${new}
  let a=a+1
done

Just copy that into a file, chmod 755 and you are good to go. alternatively I just changed “${new}" to "videoGame_${new}" as that was the topic of all of my images but for you obviously something different wuold be in order

Another even quicker and dirtier way to do it is just through ls with this command:

ls *.JPG| awk 'BEGIN{ a=0 }{ printf "mv %s gopro_%04d.jpg\n", $0, a++ }' | bash

How to Batch convert multiple images into a single PDF in windows 7(for Free)

admin — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:53:37 +0000

So in linux this is a simple matter of using imagemagick to run a command like this: #convert *.jpg myPDF.pdf

Unfortunately windows is another matter for most people, although ImageMagick is available for windows so I’ll link to that at the bottom. But my guess is that if you are a Windows user you are probably looking for a GUI solution.

Introduce PDF995: http://www.pdf995.com/download.html

So the first instinct is to just install the PDF Printer driver as that will allow you to just select the images and print them to a pdf document but before you get too excited you should know that these guys won’t let you install the pdf driver until you have their Free Converter installed. So make sure you download the free converter and the printer driver from the above URL . There’s nothing sneaky about it, there isn’t even an installation dialogue really, it just unzips and loads in. A little suspicious I suppose in how it handles it but it’s on cnet and seems clean.

Now that you have everything installed over there, the rest is easy.. Just go into your directory with your files, select them all, right click and go down to print. On the left side of the print box where you can select your printer from the dropdown select the new pdf995 printer, choose your other options and click print.. This will ask you where to save it and you’re done.. Viola!

How to record a timelapse video of yourself painting or modeling or doing anything for that matter

admin — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:35:43 +0000

Probably one of the best ways to share your technique with others to help them improve or to get their advice on how you can improve. There’s an excellent tutorial here:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-cool-timelapse-videos-chronolapse/

About what to use and how to use it. 30-60 second intervals seem to work well

Click here to view the embedded video.

2 Quick and Easy ways to speed up your thunderbird experience

admin — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:28:55 +0000

So if you are like me you have a thunderbird profile that is 2-5 years old and is 2 – 10GB in size.. As you can imagine with all things to do with computers this can lead to a lot of buildup of junk and cause general slow downs. For me it was almost unbearable as thunderbird would pause/hang every 5-10 seconds when I was typing, I couldn’t drag emails into folders as it would be too laggy it was just a nightmare. And then I found 2 beauties that solved most of my problems.

The first is an addon called ‘No Glass’ that removes all the Aero shit from thunderbird and enables some color options on buttons. It really helps to speed up the UI experience over all

The second and biggest, by far, fixer is something called thunderfix, which can be found here: http://www.parhelia-tools.com/products/thunderfix/thunderfix.aspx

. If you have more GB of emails stored in Thunderbird and if you are experiencing slow start time, slow navigation through email folders, you might try Thunderfix. What Thunderfix does is that it detects *.msf files within your Thunderbird profile and removes them. After that, you can run Thunderbird and wait for new MSF files to be generated and you’ll see the improvement. With time MSF files become corrupted and can contain garbage, so this is quick solution for the problem. This way, the program runs smoothly and faster.

I can’t thank these guys enough as I am right about ready to switch to outlook.. Well I am still going to switch to outlook as it is becomming clear here that thunderbird just cna’t cut it when it comes to email usage as intensive as mine but at least until that switch happens my life will be a little less miserable