Now he only eats guitars
Q: I’ve seen a lot of the following in my DenyHosts log. What the heck is this?
ERROR regex pattern ( User (?P<user>.*) not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers ) is missing 'host' group
A: Ah, yes, DenyHosts. This is a Python script that examines your system logs for failed SSH login attempts. It will add the IP addresses of offending systems to your system’s hosts.deny file, more or less blacklisting them. While this alone probably won’t stop a determined attacker, it will at least stop automated dictionary attacks from cluttering up your system log.
As for the error message, it seems to be complaining that one of the regular expressions that DenyHosts uses to analyze the system logs is missing a little something. Fortunately, you can redefine any of these regexes by appending the appropriate line to your denyhosts.cfg file. For example, to redefine the regex that’s causing this message, you could add a line like this:
FAILED_ENTRY_REGEX7=User (?P<user>.*?) from (::ffff:)?(?P<host>\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}) not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers
Since I’m feeling uninspired, let’s do the meme book edition
- 1. Pick up the nearest book.
- It’s Shiny Adidas Track Suits And The Death Of Camp by Various.
- 2. Open it at page 123.
- Uhm… Ta-da!
- 3. Find the fifth sentence/ phrase.
- There are only two complete sentences on this page. You’ll have to settle for that.
- 4. Blog the next four sentences/ phrases together with these instructions.
- I haven’t read this book yet, so I’ve no idea of the context, myself:
The Yamaha Indians of Bolivia have a word for this kind of thing—pachakuti, the disruption of the universe. But pachakuit also implies the inherent resumption of cosmic order—nayrapachar—which, as the sun rose out of the plane’s window, seemed nowhere in sight.
- 5. Don’t you dare dig your shelves for that very special or intellectual book.
- You mean Practical UNIX & Internet Security? Wouldn’t dream of it…
The shell escape is left over from the days before UNIX had job control.
- 6. Pass it forward to six friends.
- Yeah, that worked so brilliantly the last time I tried it, you’d think I was warning them that the Internet would be down for maintenance for 24 hours between March 30 and April 2. Instead, I’ll leave it open for participation by anybody in particular, so long as you leave a comment with a link to your post.
You’re The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!
by Douglas Adams
Considered by many to be one of the funniest people around, you are quite an entertainer. You’ve also traveled to the far reaches of what you deem possible, often confused and unsure of yourself. Life continues to jostle you around like a marble, but it’s shown you so much of the world that you don’t care. Wacky adventures continue to lie ahead. Your favorite number is 42.
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.
Q. I’ve set up a shiny new SSL server (Apache) but now Firefox keeps saying "could not establish an encrypted connection because the certificate presented has an invalid signature." I know my certificate hasn’t expired. So what’s up?
A. Check your httpd.conf. If your SSL server is configured in its own Virtual Hosts section, ensure that the ServerName parameter exactly matches the common name listed in the certificate itself. For example, if the certificate is issued to www.example.com, ensure that the line is ServerName www.example.com.
You can’t, by the way, use SSL with name-based virtual hosts, only IP-based virtual hosts. This is because the SSL connection is established before the HTTP request is made, and it is the HTTP request that identifies to the server which name-based virtual host the client is attempting to contact. You can continue to serve your non-secure pages from a name-based virtual host, and begin serving your secure pages from an IP-based virtual host, but because these two hosts will need to have different IP addresses, they’ll also need to have different hostnames, such as www.example.com and secure.example.com. Of course, this will only work properly if you’ve had the foresight to issue a certificate to secure.example.com. If not, and all you’ve got is a certificate issued to www.example.com, then you’ll need to serve both secure and non-secure pages from the same IP-based virtual host.
Friday is upon us once again. It’s time for Friday Fun: Gaming Edition
- 1. What was your favorite outside childhood game? Kick the Can, Ghost in the Graveyard, etc.?
- I’ve never heard of Ghost in the Graveyard, but if it had rules and/or points, I wasn’t interested. I could (and did) skip tag, kickball, tetherball, red rover, hopscotch, and jump-rope. I was more of a Spaceman Spiff sort of boy.
- 2. How about board games? Do you have a favorite?
- I’ve enjoyed just about every game I’ve tried from both Cheapass Games and Looney Labs: Fluxx, Witch Trial, Nano-Fictionary, Kill Doctor Lucky, etc. They’re fun, and they don’t take hours to set up and play. Anybody want to organize a Game Night?
- 3. Do you play any PC games? Online or offline? If so, what is your favorite? If not, is there one out there you want to try?
- Not so much any more. I’ve tried a few online games, City of Heroes having been my favorite, but I think I’m pretty much over the whole online thing. As for "offline" games, I was a big fan of LucasArts adventures, like Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Mix Hit The Road. That’s why I’d like to try Sam and Max, Season One.
- 4. Gaming stations,… there are so many out there and I know jack about them! Do you have one or more and which ones? XBox, XBox 360, Playstation, etc.?
- All of the above, as well as a PS2 and a GBA. I hardly touch any of them, except for the 360, and even that’s not very often. It’s not that I don’t like swarms of goblins, assassinations, and the Dark Side of the Force, it’s just that most of my time is now spent in other pursuits. Maybe the situation would be different if the 360 had a game involving giant Anime robots…
Yesterday:
Today:
"By Wednesday it will be August, and by Thursday it will be the end of existence as we know it!"
Topncal writes:
Why did you choose your blog platform? It is not one of the top 10 or 15 systems. So how did you find it? I checked out the page for it a few weeks ago. Nothing really stood out to me as making it different. So I guess it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on why you chose it.
I don’t remember exactly where I discovered Thingamablog, although I do know approximately when I did so. I uncovered a bookmark for Thingamablog in a stratum of bookmarks dating from 2004-5. I suspect that I was combing the likes of linuxlinks.com and icewalkers.com for Wiki software and happened upon Thingamablog by accident. I tried it out, thought I’d make my own template from scratch, got really bored with that, and forgot about it for a while.
A little later, an old classmate of mine started a blog of his own, which encouraged me to do the same. Sure, I could have just joined LiveJournal, etc., but to me that would have just been my account at somebody else’s site. A grouchy sysop could capriciously, conceivably, delete my account– and that would be end of my fun. Also, if I didn’t like the service, it wouldn’t exactly be easy to move my stuff to elsewhere, as I’m sure you may know.
Anyway, since this was going to be strictly for fun, I had no desire to involve a hosting company, and my ISP had no desire to allow me to run a public Web server in my living room. They were willing to let me upload a few old-fashioned pure-HTML pages to their Personal Web Space.
So, I needed a blogging platform that would not only run client-side and output static HTML, but that could do so on my Linux desktop. As it turned out, Thingamablog fit that requirement pretty well. It’s written in Java, so the code’s very portable, and since the output is ordinary HTML, that’s portable, too. So if, for example, I get annoyed with my current hosting provider, I can pack up and leave in a clap of the hands. And there’s no chance of anybody getting cute with stupid SQL injection tricks, PHP inclusion, or parameter fuzzing, because none of that’s applicable. This isn’t to say it’s not possible for someone to deface this site, it’s just a little less likely… and if they did, it would be overwritten the next time I published.
Is Thingamablog perfect? No. In fact, the editor in the current version has some sort of memory leak or something that causes it to become decidedly unresponsive. Also, the way it handles the category archives leaves a bit to be desired. I have to contract out commenting and site search to HaloScan and Google, respectively. I don’t think I’ll trade up to a server-side solution any time soon, but I think that if I did, I’d bypass WordPress and Movable Type altogether in favor of a full-fledged Content Management System such as Joomla, although I hear good things about Drupal, too.
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