Linux, musical road-dogging, and daily life by Paul W. Frields
 
Author: <span>Paul Frields</span>

So apparently the White House is up in arms about the upcoming comedy film Team America: World Police, from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the constantly irreverent, irredeemably vulgar, and frequently hilarious South Park. Is there anyone at the White House who doesn’t suffer from Humor Deficit …

Got my report back from the administrator — and yes, they’d been rooted. Another reason why it’s important to watch for security updates and such! Good luck to them as they reconstruct their servers. I thought about simply moving my SSH to a different port, but then I realized that …

Additional interesting information about the ssh probes can be found here. Looks like exactly what I thought, another script kiddie special. I found additional probes yesterday and contacted the source box’s owner to determine whether he is aware of the problem or not. I would bet that if I hear …

Today’s dumbass script kiddie award goes to: sshd:    Invalid Users:       Unknown Account: 2 Time(s)    Authentication Failures:       unknown (202-6-75-195.safenz.net.nz ): 2 Time(s) —– Failed logins from these:    guest/password from 202.6.75.195: 1 Time(s)    test/password from 202.6.75.195: 1 Time(s) **Unmatched Entries** Illegal user test from 202.6.75.195 Illegal user guest from 202.6.75.195 My guess …

Not much happening today, but here’s a nice picture of my family: I’m constantly amazed by how little I miss Microsoft Windoze. ?

Recently, Linda Ronstadt had a bad experience at the Aladdin in Las Vegas. Her comments supporting filmmaker Michael Moore apparently had many guests very upset. While personally I don’t see what’s to be so upset (or surprised) about in her comments, Moore’s letter to Aladdin CEO Michael Timmins is more …

I once went to the National Archives with a coworker, who had to look up a document for her boss. When you arrive at the Archives you have to surrender any containers, and usually unnecessary outerwear like a jacket or coat. When you get in the room to retrieve a …

This morning I sat down to get my e-mail, which includes server logs mailed to me daily from most of my machines around the ‘net. I found that some fugnut had been trying to SSH into one of my servers from the University of Geneva (yes, Switzerland). At least that …

Annoying telemarketer call of the week: My wife and I give to a number of state and federal charitable organizations. Typically the process begins several times a year with a call from a fundraising telemarketer with a request. If the organization is one whose cause we support, has good standing …