Curious About Everything
Apart from the deadlines, maddening clients and screaming bosses, there some moments in life that you feel actually glad that you are a programmer. One of those moments is reading mailing list humor. Here’s a funny thread from ruby-talk. Enjoy 
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/47064
This really makes me red-faced with shame. But I have to admit. I have been too careless with the security of this site. I wonder if using Drupal for this site is a bad idea. PHP sites, as usual, seem to be the script kiddies favorite honey pots. I have been lax in deleting a xmlrpc.php file that comes with Drupal, used mostly for trackbacks and such. Bad mistake.
Apparently, somebody has been accessing my system quite a lot, and I observed that my account space is being rapidly filled up. I should have suspected some foul play. And as some of you might have observed, the site has beend down for the last 2 days. My disk quota filled up, and apache2 crashed.
I panicked and wrote to Bytemark, my hosting providers, and the service was, as usual excellent. They have found that somebody put a bunch of DVD rips and similar crap in my /var/tmp!! I was dumbfounded. A valuable lesson learnt. I have to be much more careful and paranoid now. I have half a mind to ditch Drupal and use Typo for my blog and develop the rest of the site in custom Rails code. I’ll give it a serious thought.
So folks, protect your servers. Maintain them regularly. Use a firewall, change passwords frequently, and upgrade your PHP apps frequently. They have enough holes to put a strainer to shame.
P.S: I have put some of my pictures of FOSS.IN/2005 in the gallery. Take a look!
Wow. A great time was had at FOSS.IN/2005. I have spoken to many cool people, and I’m glad that I decided to speak at the conference this time. It was truly a memorable experience. I will post the pictures soon, so stay tuned. I even met Alan Cox, chatted with him (ok, I admit, I wanted a picture with him) though I don’t know too much about the linux kernel.
I met some very interesting people like Venkat, and had a great time chatting with them. My only regret is that I couldn’t attend the Gentoo track – I was looking forward to knowing the distro better. The Ruby track and Gentoo track were more or less on the same time, so I couldn’t go. Sigh, maybe next time.
Though I’m very satisfied with Debian, and I use it practically everywhere, I’m still looking out for better distros. Debian has it’s own drawbacks. That reminds me – I just upgraded the viamentis.com machine. The site feels much snappier now. Thank God. I don’t have to upgrade my virtual machine from Bytemark right now. They are an excellent hosting option if you want full-root access linux machines at reasonable rates. They’re currently run user-mode-linux, I think they’re trying out Xen too. Go check them out.
Phew… life feels a lot less hectic now, the last month has been totally crazy. Lots of work piled up, but shouldn’t take me more than a week to blow it all away. Okie, come back for the FOSS.IN pictures. Me back to work. Thanks to all the people who met me up at FOSS.IN. It was a joy meeting you all guys.