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17/09/2009

Determining Spam on Twitter

Posted by Robert under Business, Personal
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First written on Twitter:

@docsmooth: Signs of twitspam: bio is tinyurl; <100 updates, >200 following/ers;all updates “from twitfeed”, inc. link; no conversation. Check yourself!

I just went through my followers list on twitblock.org and thought I’d write a bit deeper on this subject.

Ways to determine a twitter spammer – higher scores are more likely spammers:

  • Bio link is tinyurl or bit.ly or other URL shortener. There is *never* a reason to put this in your URL link on Twitter, unless you’re hiding the destination. +10 pts
  • you have more than 200 “friends” and less than 100 updates. +2 pts
  • you have a follower/following ratio below. .5 +2pts
  • Every single tweet has a link. +5 pts
  • Every single tweet is from TwitFeed. +5 pts
  • More than 2 tweets are from an unregistered API app. +8 pts
  • You have never @replied anyone. +1 pts

I generally block anyone above a “9″ score on this scale.

(cross-posted from my personal blog as well)

 

07/09/2009

Upgraded WordPress

Posted by Robert under Business, Security
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Upgrading software – always required to keep things secure. Windows, WordPress, Mac OSx, Linux, Office, Firefox, etc. So I just finished upgrading TotalNetSolutions.net again. Hopefully I’ll be able to be better about this, now that WordPress does the automatic upgrades now.

I’ve been doing the automatic upgrades on one of my other sites since they came out. They’re easy, fast, and even more painless than the 3-step upgrade that works so well. So now, I should be able to keep TNS much further away from the “cobbler’s kids” syndrome so many small company’s systems suffer with.

 

17/02/2009

IT by Voodoo

Posted by Robert under Business, Technology
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aka: Technology by Voodoo, Information Technology by Voodoo, Troubleshooting by Voodoo, Administration by Voodoo, Troubleshooting by Faith, etc.

The act of “trusting” that a computer will do something every time the same way, only because it did the last 2 times you tried it.

The alternative is to actually learn what the computer is doing, so that you can know it will do the same thing each time, because you’ve controlled all of the appropriate parameters.

Usage: “This sysadmin is performing IT by Voodoo – he just asked if I have faith that my file copy will work.”

Now that it’s defined, can we all stop doing it?  There’s enough resources on the internet to figure out how anything works down to the API call at least, and in some cases down to the processor registers, if you care to go that far.

 

28/01/2008

DEC 2008 – Chicago

Posted by Robert under Business, Domain Controllers
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I have been invited to present at the Directory Experts Conference in Chicago in March, hosted by NetPro Computing, Inc.. I’ll be discussing how we recently integrated dozens of Linux servers into our 300+ server Windows 2000 Native Mode forest. I’m excited, but it’s taking away from the time to update a few things here I have in “unpublished” state.

Of note is a response for T. Colin Dodd regaring his short and sweet post regarding Red Hat Flaws according to Secunia. In short, Mr. Dodd (please correct me if the address is wrong), yes, Red Hat should be proud of what they’ve accomplished, but…

Well, that’s 2 pages of text that’s not yet finished.

 

29/11/2007

Current System Status

Posted by Robert under Business, Security, Technology
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Now that I have the system back online, I thought I’d post a quick “where we are” update for any regular readers:

  1. We have restored from most recent backup, but are missing a single post, “PHP, mail(), Apache, and SELinux (FC7)”, which even google.com’s cache didn’t catch in full. I apologize to the readers who were using the instructions in that post whom we met through their comments.
  2. We haven’t yet restored the “comments” table. I haven’t yet decided if we will.
  3. I have fixed the problem of storing backups for the company in 3 different locations, based on system type. Now we only have 2 – onsite and offsite.
  4. The extremely popular How to Change a DC IP address article was restored first. (That page drives over half of our traffic.)

We did a standard forensics review of what happened, and it appears as though a perfect storm of issues hit us – a weekend outage, a hardware failure, and failure to keep publicly exposed software fully up-to-date. The saying often goes, “The cobbler’s kids are the ones without shoes” or something similar to that, and here we failed to follow our own advice, preferring to keep our customers’ systems running smoothly. I know I’ll be spending a few extra hours a week the rest of this year reviewing our internal systems for best practices.

In any case, things are fixed and running great again.

 

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