bash / wordpress — No comments
05
Oct 09

WordPress HACKED! Everbody Panic!

Okay, yes, the title is absolutely link bait. I am the worst kind of internet ghetto barker, flashing neon and shouting lewd incitements to the passersby, hoping to lure them into hot sweaty posts of ill repute.

Yes, my wordpress installation was hacked. No, you shouldn’t panic. It was an old version of WordPress, 2.4, that I had installed on an unused domain for testing purposes. Somebody figured out how to hack the built-in file uploader included in WP, and they were using it to install folders on all the other domains on that same server. The folders they installed generated thousands of link-farm pages. Assholes.

So, I had to go into search and destroy mode. I needed to find every file on my site that had been modified after a certain date. To do that, I used the “find” command, with a few modifiers. Here’s the full command (type it, don’t copy it)

find . -name "*" -mtime -1 -print | grep -v cache | grep -v logs | grep -v cache

Here’s what it means

find . = “Find some files for me, starting right here in this directory.”

-name “*” = “I want you to find files where the name matches … um, everything (thus the wildcard).”

-mtime -1 = “Once you find those files, narrow it down to just the ones with a modification time of 1 day or sooner.” If you want to search further back, increase the number to however many days back you want to search.

-print = “When you get those files, print them on the screen.”

| grep -v logs = “Now just before you print those file names, filter out any that have the word “logs” in the name.”

| grep -v cache = “And finally, filter out any that have the word “cache” in the name.”

You can modify how far back you want to search, you can modify the names you want to exclude (logs and cache files will always have recent modification dates, so I exclude them from my results), tweak it until it works for you, and then go forth and destroy the intruding files.

Oh, also, GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! Whiskey and Cigarettes! Come on in, sir, experience the experience of an experienced lifetime!

Popularity: 1% [?]

detours — No comments
05
Jul 09

Carnage Blender

Everything awesome about arena style fighting, with none of the distracting graphics. I’m in love with this game! Carnage Blender.

Popularity: 1% [?]

apple — No comments
26
Jun 09

iPhone 2.2 … really?

Scrolling through the server logs, I ran across this:

Apple iPhone OS v2.2.1 CoreMedia v1.0.0.5H11

Really? There are really people who just haven’t bothered to hit “update” on their phones yet? I guess I just don’t understand people who don’t install software updates. If only there were some way of punishing that habit, say with code that exploited the unpatched software they refused to update, and making it do bad things. That might be a way of correcting their bad habit!

Popularity: 1% [?]

apple / google — 1 comment
04
Jun 09

Apple Mail, Gmail IMAP, play nicely!

Every so often, my blissful rage against linux is interrupted by some obnoxious hassle in my apple/google world. Mail connects via IMAP to gmail? Check! But what’s this? Mail automatically downloads all of my shitty spam from gmail? Cannot have! Do not want! Other syntax memes employed!

The solution is buried deep in google labs, and by deep, I mean one layer down. Here’s the fix:

  1. Cut a hole in a box
  2. Login to your gmail account, go to “settings” then “Labs”
  3. Under Labs, enable “Advanced IMAP Controls”
  4. Then, go to “Labels”. You’ll find a brand new check box next to each label, asking your permission to show that label when accounts sync by IMAP. Uncheck the spam box.
  5. Profit!

Ahhhhh, bliss. Now I can go back to loathing how Ubuntu renders on-screen fonts. Uggggggh.

Popularity: 6% [?]

tutorials / ubuntu — No comments
11
May 09

Jack That Shat!

So you just wooted some awesome new desktop speakers for your Ubuntu desktop computer, you plug them into the headphone jack, and you behold the megawatt goodness of thumping 4-inch speakers. But what ho? What’s this? The on-board sound card speaker is still pumping it’s pathetic little pings and bleeps into your otherwise blissful aural wonderland! It’s enough to drive a command line idiot to drink. Well, pretty much anything is enough to drive this command line idiot to drink. Things like “Mother’s Day” and “Tuesday”.

You would think that plugging something into the headphone jack would automatically shut off the speaker inside your box. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. Not only are you wrong, but it’s such a stupid thing to want that the Ubuntu gods have hidden the setting under like 500 menu levels. Let’s go digging, shall we?

In the upper right corner, you have a volume icon. Click on that, and select “Volume Control”.
toolbar_icon

In the “Volume Control” dialog, you’ll see all of the volume sliders for various outputs. Select “Preferences”.
volumecontrol

Now, you can control which settings show up in the “Volume Control” dialog. About halfway down the list, you’ll find the setting for “Headphone Jack Sense”. Yes, let’s please jack some sense into these headphone outputs, shall we? Check the box.
preferences

Now, back in the “Volume Control” dialog, you’ll find a new tab for switches. Our preference for headphone jack behavior shows up there.
jacksense

That’s it! Now, you perfectly idiotic request to shut down the internal speakers when you plug in headphones (just like every other operating system does) will work with your fancy new speakers.

Now leave me alone. It’s 10am, and this tear-soaked gin & tonic isn’t going to guzzle itself.

Popularity: 2% [?]

bash / networking — 3 comments
05
May 09

I Spy, With My Little Bmon

So, it’s been a little while. Rehab was great, then I did a little walk through the Colorado Mountains that lasted 9 months, now I’m back and more command line idiotic than ever I was.

I built a little rsync script that uploads all of the audio from my recording studio hard drive to a backup drive on my home network. Why? Because mozy.com has a stupidly slow upload limit, and carbonite won’t allow you to backup external drives. So, rsync, cron, a home network and $100 hard drive from costco to the rescue. I’ll give a detailed outline of how I built the system later, but for now, just a little tool to alert you to.

The rsync job, when it runs, takes forever, and chews up a ton of bandwidth on the home network. I wanted a quick way of logging in remotely and seeing, in realtime, how much bandwidth was being used by the home server (a Linux Mint mediabox, mostly). My initial plan was to call my wife at home, have her fire up the monitor and read the numbers to me, but that only works twice, then she stops taking my calls.

Bmon to the rescue.

sudo apt-get install bmon

It’s simple, it’s quick, it works, it has fancy (ascii) graphics if you want them, and it tells you at a glance just how much of your network pipe is being sucked down by a silly little backup script from a remote studio computer.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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