I published a new release of backup-manager.
This release is a minor one, which resolves minor packaging issues. A COPYING file was added in order to specify the GPL 2 licence, and the debian subdirectory was removed from the tarball. The only change that was made to the code is a minor bugfix.
From a Debian point of view, I plan to upload soon a new package for closing some bugs and for providing DTSG compliant Debconf templates.
There are new releases of the bugzilla package in unstable and experiemental :
Thanks to Christian Perrier, the bugzilla package has now DTSG compliant templates fully translated in 5 languages.
The experimental package has a better shape too, and seems to be stable enough for a daily use.
As before, any report either on the BTS or on this blog are welcome.
Vim maintainer, Norbert Tretkowski, uploaded this weekend the first package made by the Debian Vim Team: vim 1:6.3-067+1
This package closes a lot of bugs and underlines the collaborative work that has been done among the past few days.
Yeah, what a pleasure it is to receive such a mail for a piece of software you wrote.
Thanks to Esteban Manchado Velázquez who sponsored me and to Joerg Jaspert who accepted the package in the NEW queue.
Looking at my logs this morning, I found that 5 new domains are used by spammers to fake referers hits on websites. Update your blackist friends:
Moreover, I randomly chose a range of IP I blacklist to contact their owner when it looked like the owner was definitively not the spammer himself.
Indeed, I found this note on a WHOIS request performed on one compromised IP:
remarks: For any kind of abuse orignating from our network please
remarks: abuse@xxxxxxxx-company.com
I then sent them a mail in order to inform them that 4 of their IP were used to attack other websites.
I’ll quote here the template I wrote down, if it can be useful for others:
Hello,
I run a webserver and have setup a protection against spammers which
give me a list of IP addresses that are used by them to attack websites.Sometimes, I perform some WHOIS action on those IP to find if I can
contact their owner to inform them that their IP are corrupted by
spammers.I’m sorry to tell you that, at least …. of yours are in this case:
- IP #1
- IP #2
…
- IP #NThose IPs were used by spammers to send malicious HTTP requests on my
webserver.
Maybe you can investigate to see how thoses computers get corrupted.Note that this becomes a very wide method for spammers, they launch
worms and viruses to get access on webserver and then use them as
“zombie” machines.Best regards.
If you can, take the time to send such emails, that can be helpful for a lot of people.
The RFH Vim maintainer, Norbert Tretkowski made was what we can call a great success.
A real maintainers team arised from that mail and I’m glad to see I’m in the party. Let’s hope we would be able to enhance the shape of that package.
For those interested in the packaging of Vim in Debian, a new channel was opened on irc.debian.org, named #debian-vim.
It seems that the spammers launched their bots once again today. More that 150 trackback requests sent to my blog, coming from 54 diffrent IPs.
Don’t know if the spammers are aware of that, but all those attacks are blocked with a dummy RewriteRule:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !(sukria\.net) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^-$
RewriteRule ^(.*) - [F]
As you can see, every POST request coming with a referer which is not from my domain is refused. Although, every spammers requests I’ve seen have no referers, so only the second rule would be enough.
Some new domains are also used as fake referers :
Go on spammers, come to me, my IP blacklist is hungry !
Thanks to Neil McGovern, my TecnoballZ packages have just been uploaded to the NEW queue (not yet visible at the time of this writing).
I’m pretty happy to see how quick this sponsorship was:
Oh my god, is that real? A less-than-24-hours-sponsorship-quest!
Thanks Neil!
Here it is, I can now say that I read the famous Tolkien’s prelude to The Lord of the Rings.
It was a charme to come back to Tolkien’s world and to discover his original words instead of reading a french translation.
This is the first non-technical book I read in English in order to improve my writing and understanding of that beautiful language.
Next one I purchased is Clans of the Alphane Moon, by one of my favorite author, Philip K. Dick.
As I posted before, I plan to close the libapache-mod-spambot RFP.
My package works now fine for both Apache 1.3 and 2.0 versions. I updated my Debian page to add that new package.
It just remains to contact my sponsor in order to say him that the package is ready, stay tuned.