... using Blosxom to retrace my steps

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Thu, 06 Dec 2007

Bad Behavior - no solution - oh yes, a solution!

Acting on instructions I found on the Bad Behavior website, I accessed the databases of my two websites and searched the Bad Behavior table for my (workplace) IP address. On one of the websites, I found one completely innocent entry - in the other website, nothing at all.

Am I looking in the wrong place? "bad_behavior_log table" it says on the Bad Behavior website, and this table should have a "denied_reason" field. I can't see either.

Oh well. Found something after all. I had to look through other users' comments to the instructions I mentioned. Some of them had the same problem as I. One of them, however, mentioned another post on the same website, which I then found. Well, that's convenient ... :-(

Apparently, the creator of Bad Behavior ruined his own plugin by mistake yesterday and, as a result, found himself locked out of his blog, too. Now he's made a new version available for download. However, only his latest post provides a download link to the updated version.

I mean, this guy offers a great WP plugin for free and I'm obviously very grateful for that. However, a link or just a few words on the page where most people will probably start looking for help when they find themselves blocked by Bad Behavior - this would have saved me, and presumably a lot of other people, hours of googling, reading, searching their databases, trying this and that ...

Posted on 06 Dec 2007 at 15:50 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

FreeBSD on my laptop?

If you want to run FreeBSD on a laptop there is a jungle out there. That doesn't sound too good ... Even though I'm adventurous (well, I think trying new things on my computer is fun), running Ubuntu on my ThinkPad is so much fun, I really don't see myself risking to lose that.

My old Toshiba laptop is no doubt too old for such an experiment. I mean, if even on a ThinkPad X60s there's kernel panic after kernel panic ...

I find even less optimistic information on running OpenSolaris on my box.

So - how about buying another computer? :-/

Posted on 06 Dec 2007 at 14:30 in /technology. -- Permalink

Relative links in Blosxom

I realised I made a stupid mistake - I used relative paths instead of absolute ones for the internal links on this blog. The relative links work fine when you click on them from the main page; they lead to nirvana when you're on a different page, e.g. after clicking on a category path. The reason is that Blosxom creates a pseudo-path for such a page, appending stuff to the name of the Blosxom script file (blosxom.cgi).

Fixing this will be quite a hassle: editing the relevant files (using sed or just vim) is easy enough but resetting the timestamp individually for each file will be cumbersome. Can I do this automatically with a script?

Posted on 06 Dec 2007 at 13:02 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Bad Behavior problem

When I tried to log onto my "entries" blog this morning, I found myself locked out. I got a 403 message and was told that my IP address was "associated with malicious behaviour", or something like that. The "fix this problem yourself" link didn't get me anywhere; and of course I could have contacted the site administrator (= myself) by e-mail, quoting the "technical support code" I found on the error page - but I couldn't log onto my administrator account either. So what the heck?

The problem was caused by the Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress, and deleting the relevant directory over FTP solved the problem. Apparently, Bad Behavior had gathered so much incriminating information on me in its log file that it decided to block me.

Interestingly, I was also blocked from accessing the Amity website. It ran Bad Behavior, too - until I deleted it this morning, too. How come that the plugin on both websites came to the conclusion that my IP address was part of the axis of evil?

Maybe Bad Behavior was correct after all? Maybe terrible stuff is being sent out from my IP address all the time because my computer was infected by a Trojan or something? I'm kind of worried, even though it seems very unlikely that anything is wrong with my computer. Maybe I should have had a close look at the log files instead of deleting the plugin directories on both websites right away.

Posted on 06 Dec 2007 at 11:22 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink


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