RESOLVED: I Hate ATI

Today, I got home from eating breakfast out with the wife (Pinky Dink), turn on my barely one year old Samsung 216BW widescreen monitor and everything was piss-yellow.

I fired up the ATI Catalyst Control Center (which I hate) and bumped the blue channel up until it looked OK. That was fine for a few minutes, but it started going yellow on me again, sort of pulsating.

Certain the monitor was dying, I switched to another box (I have five boxes on a keyboard/mouse/video [KVM] switch). Every box was fine, so I went back to Old Yellowstain and twiddled the cable.

The screen went black and the box rebooted. No video. At all.

Popped the side cover off and pulled the video card out. The cooling fan was jammed tight.

Another. Fucking. Fan. GRRRRRRRRR.

I dropped back to the built-in Radeon Express 200 and it was fine (after a little screwing around). Played a few rounds of UT with no problems.

Obviously during these last ten or eleven months of crashing UT, dicking around with drivers, changing the hardware, etc., the problem was a lousy, fucking, pancake fan.

I ran out and bought an NVidia card to replace it. 9400 GT. No SLI support, which I can't use in this box anyway, having only one PCI-e slot. Off-brand (PNY), sixty-five bucks (which means you can probably get it for $49.95 at TigerDirect), 512MB of RAM (the old one had 256).

It, too, has a fucking fan, meaning some day it will die. By that time, I'm sure I'll be able to get a 1T card for sixty five bucks.

Now, as to why I hate ATI.

It was the FAN, right? No reason to hate ATI. After all, they didn't design the fan.

What I hate about ATI, what I really, really HATE is that bloated, steaming pile of shit called "The Catalyst Control Center" (CCC). After a reboot it takes forever and a day and a half to give you back control of your system once you log in. NVidia's equivalent (NVidia Control Panel) takes seconds to light up in the system tray and you're ready to rock and roll.

The only reason I was running CCC was it was the only way to turn on the "VPU Recover" option (much easier with the Omega driver).

So there you have it. I will probably be playing UT a lot more this Winter.

See you online!

Fuck.

Dear mrhinkydink,

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Sigh... I suppose Recombo DNA is next.

School Proxy Admin Learns About Self-PWNAGE

I'm always on the lookout for proxy news. You may remember this story about Florida government workers bypassing URL filtering in the workplace (one of my present job duties is Network Nazi for a large organization). And yes, I'm well aware of the proxy angle in the latest Palin Pwnage but I'm really tired of her and that's so "last week" anyway.

It seems this fellow decided to open his school's filtered proxy to the world so that students wouldn't have to be bothered entering a user name and password to use it.

His reasoning...

"My thought was why would someone use a proxy that has a filter on it? "

The result: tens of thousands of users from all over the world slam his proxy, using it to forum-SPAM the planet, and resulting in his IP address getting blacklisted by Google ("We're Sorry...").

Then he decides the right thing to do is blog about his PWNAGE.

Jesus.

In a way this is commendable. I've known many admins who would attribute an event such as this one to "getting hacked" in one way or another and initiate a massive cover-up, but the guy did own up to screwing the pooch all by himself. (In fact, we have an assclown admin at work who smashed the Exchange servers single-handedly and the entire IT department, from the top down, conspired - successfully - to cover it up. This is one of the reasons they don't like security - we uncover the truth.)

Still, in many business environments, this is the kind of crap that gets you canned on the spot.

Bahrain Bloodbath

I promised to move all the proxy news off to another page, and I did, but I have an update on the news I posted in June concerning the explosion in Bahrainian proxies.

A couple weeks after that post a second wave hit. At one point The List had no less than 17 pages and more than half were Bahrainian proxies. Pages and pages and pages of that annoying little red and white flag.

Part of the reason that happened in the first was that I was raiding Chinese proxy lists heavily for about four days, checking tens of thousands of address:port listings. I think it's safe to say China was the source of all those proxies in the first place (the usual, non-Chinese proxy lists never really caught up with them, and if they did they probably saved them for their "premium" customers).

As of today, they are all gone. GONE. The List is down to four pages, the shortest it's ever been. In fact I'm thinking of taking the number of proxies per page down just to get a higher page count (heh).

Infuckingcredible.

Considering I predicted it would happen in the first place, I'm not sure why I'm so surprised.

Plucky little Bahrain Telecomm finally got their shit together on this one.

The Great Scumbolini™

I've been using the moniker "Scumbolini" for one reason or another for over fifteen years. Today it occurred to me I should Google the word "Scumbolini" just to see where it may have popped up over the last few years.

It hasn't. Let me clarify that. No one besides myself in recent Google-able history has used the name/term/word "Scumbolini" for anything, anywhere. It is unique to me. Therefore I hereby copyright it for now and forever. It is mine. Don't touch it.

Some have suggested that it is a perversion of "Thumbalina" since there is something of an obsession about her at BOT House. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scumbolini predates Thumbalina (well, our Thumbalina, at least) by many years.

And here's the story for posterity.

I never considered myself a huckster or snake oil salesman or wheeler-dealer, but in the early 90s I was looking for a way to make an extra buck or two.

I heard of a salvor (a person who salvages things) who stumbled on to a literal truckload of used, functional Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) from - of all places - CompuServe, a company long ago swallowed up by AOL. He had the product, I had the market (long story), the means to advertise to that market, and - most importantly - a way to deliver that product to the market. He wanted $50 each and I knew the market would consider $75 a sweat deal (a brand new UPS in those days was about $350).

Cut to the chase, this guy was a complete doofus. I had the market all charged up and ready to buy. I was even taking orders. He left the truck out one night and all the UPSes froze, popping the batteries, and ruining the lot.

A total loss, and a major embarrassment to me because I couldn't deliver the product. And of course he got stuck with a truckload of JUNK. A potentially great deal gone sour.

So anyway, this guy's name was "Tony Scambalone".

When I first saw his name on his business card I thought it was pronounced "SCAM baloney". That in itself nicely summed up the UPS deal.

However, he pronounced his name "SCUM -ba-loan".

I took his pronunciation and my own and came up with "SCUM baloney". From there it was a short hop to "Scumbolini".

Somewhat disrespectful, but the deal went so badly I didn't suffer any guilt over it. Still don't.
I never saw him again but I appropriated his mutated name for my own purposes over the years.

For all I know Tony is in that Big Salvage Yard in the Sky now.

UT99 @ 785kBps

Today I upgraded my cable service to "RoadRunner Turbo." Now the top upload speed is 785 kilobits per second, so the UT99 playahs will definitely see a performance boost on the servers, especially when they get crowded.

Or maybe not. You never know about these things.

Being a Hotshot Internet Security Dude, the Dinkster uses the Internets 24x7. I have a number of covert channels running from my Place of Employment back to DinkNet which I use constantly during the week (mostly Terminal Services but I have been known to drag large files back and forth over OpenVPN and SSH). This has been the source of some lag in the past, but now it shouldn't be a factor.

Much.

The download speed is 15mBps, which is nice, but it doesn't have much affect on the UT99 playing experience. The upload speed has always been the bottleneck.

Anyway, rock on and Happy Presidents Day!

Safari 3.0.4 Now Supports Proxies - Barely

If you've been running Apple's Safari on your Windows box you may have noticed that in the most recent update, 3.0.4 (523.12.9), the "Proxies" setting is no longer grayed out.

Don't get your hopes up yet, boys and girls.

Clicking "change settings" takes you directly to your Internet Explorer "Connections" tab.

Duh.

What's worse, support for the [fh][t]*tp[s]*_proxy environment variables is completely gone.

C'mon Apple... this isn't rocket science! And since you're re-hacking Mozilla/FireFox anyway, the code is there to do it right. Use it!

The Dinkster does not approve.

Linux Kernel 2.6.23

Dinkster has upgraded the BOT House Operating System. W00T!

This is a W00T-worthy upgrade because it has been the fastest, least painful upgrade EVAH. And the Dink has been building kernels since 1994, back when it took no less than 18 hours to compile the 1.3.x kernel on my old 386DX/16 with 6 megs (SIX!) of RAM.

Kernel 2.6.23 came out on 10/09/07. I had a working package, complete with the latest netfilter patches, on a Debian 4.0r0 Virtual Machine by 10/10/07 and I installed that package today, on the Ides of October (the Ides fall on the 13th in October).

Beware the Ides of October? I hope not.

Booboo Jeebies, Revisited

Oh my, that didn't take long at all...

Like Someone's Walking Over Your Grave

As I have mentioned before, I use (abuse?) Google News Alerts extensively. One of the first was "Gartner says". This particular alert has been very rewarding at work, since upper management has a serious hard-on for whatever comes out of Gartner's corporate pie-hole.

There's the occasional basketball coach or county sheriff coincidentally named "Gartner", but they sponsor so many corporate powwows and dog-and-pony shows that barely a day goes by without a Gartner hit or two.

The latest... and strangest... of the "Gartner says" alerts advise businesses how to leverage a presence in Second Life.

Excuse me? Sounds like there's a Gartner analyst with too much free time on his hands.

Early this year I added an alert for "hinkydink". Shortly thereafter I was deluged with news-ish stories about Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna, an old time Chicago political boss. So I changed the alert to "mrhinkydink". Now I mostly get alerts for that fellow on Daily Kos ( hey, Hink, wanna buy mrhinkydink.com? Make me an offer! ).

But every now and then I get a hit. Today I found this one in my mailbox:



Creepy. Somebody fingered me at Unreal Admin.

In fact at this moment (8:19AM EST 09/10/07) that same link is the Number 2 hit for "mrhinkydink" on Google (first being, of course, our buddy at Daily Kos).

Oddly, my horoscope for today advised me that someone had "more information than I suspected" and that I should "listen to the omens".

This shit gives me the booboo jeebies.

Beware the March of IDEs

Shortly after I started fucking around with sockcheck.c, I got involved with one of those inevitable side projects that starts distracting from the problem at hand.

I decided I needed a decent Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C/C++ in order to get the project done. Hacking around in jed (I hate vi) just wasn't cutting it.

Then I realized I had gone through this all before.

Twenty years ago next January I got my first "IBM compatible PC". It was a slick dual floppy 8mHz XT with EGA graphics. I bought it from a "friend" and paid about eight hundred bucks for it. The first thing I did was buy the $19.95 Power-C compiler.

Oddly enough, even though it only works on MS DOS, you can still buy it for $19.95.

Then next thing I dad was look for a decent editor. My friend had thrown in a bunch of software, including a text editor from DAK, another company that's still around for no apparent reason whatsoever.

In the 80s DAK sold mostly blank cassette tapes. By the time I got around to buying a PC in 1988 they had moved into the floppy disk business. Their "value add" at the time was including worthless software with their floppies.

And that was where I found "DAK Edit". I used it for all my C hacking until my programs got too large. It seems DAK's programmers had no idea what the "PageUp/Down" keys were for, so you had to hit the Up/Down arrows to navigate through your source code.

The search for a decent editor eventually led to Blackbeard, a decent DOS editor with all the bells and whistles. Blackbeard has passed on. You may be able to find a copy on some of those old BBS file dumps, but don't try to Google for it because some guy named Bill Blackbeard, who, as fate would have it, happens to be an editor, gets all the hits. Only oldtimers seem to remember it now.

In 1990 Borland introduced Turbo C++ 1.0, which was my first exposure to IDEs. It came on a half dozen floppies and shipped with twenty pounds of manuals. I bought it at the low, low introductory price of $99.95.

In 1992 Windows 3.1 came out and later that year Borland produced Borland C++ Professional. At $799, it was out of my price range until they offered a Turbo C++ upgrade for $99.95.

By this time I was writing shareware. Everything I did was written in BC++ and I was clam happy.

I could've hacked away forever on BC++, but '95 rolled around and MS DOS was, like the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, history. In 1997 I gave in and bought Microsoft Visual C++, which I still have and still use.

Except recently all of my hacking has been on Linux.

If you run a Linux distribution that comes with the Synaptic Package Manager, don't waste your time searching for "IDE" or even "integrated". The only thing that shows up is eclipse.

Eclipse is fine. In fact it's damn near wonderful. But the version that Debian 4.0 supports leaves much to be desired. Go to www.eclipse.org and get the most recent version. Then go to (ugh) www.java.com and get the highest version you can find that isn't 1.6 (easier said than done). The GNU Java VM that ships with Debian doesn't play well with eclipse.

If you don't believe me, install it and try to insert a colon while you're inside eclipse. It'll crash and burn.

After I finally got the www.eclipse.org version installed & configured the sockcheck.c project started to cook. I hacked away on it for a weekend. The following Monday I decided to fire up Xvnc4 and work on it during lunch.

Crash.

Burn.

It turns out Xvnc4 & eclipse don't play well together.

In fact the only way I could get it to run remotely was to start an ssh session with X forwarding and run eclipse through Cygwin-X.

Slow, but it didn't crash.

I worked like this for a few days and then stumbled upon this page. There were IDEs I had never heard of. Sockcheck went to the back burner again while I tested alternatives.

So far anjuta seems to be the winner. It doesn't require Java (I hate Java), doesn't crash Xvnc4, and ships with Debian 4.0 (although it is impossible to find by searching using the aforementioned search terms).

Unfortunately, the latest version (2.2.1 - Debian ships with 1.4.something) will not compile. It demands versions of gnome and GTK+ that only ship with the "unstable" version of Debian.

So now my side project is installing Debian "lenny" on a VM to compile the new version.

It never ends.

SOCKS Fucking

The updates went well. There were no issues at all. I got out of bed at around 6:15AM and no one was on either server, so I nailed it.

I spent most of the rest of the morning on my current project, fucking around with anonymous SOCKS proxy servers. Several weeks ago I ran across sockcheck.c and started hacking away at it.

Proxies have been the bane of my existence for the last ten years. It started when the company I used to consult for sent me to a class on Microsoft Proxy Server 1.0. After that, proxy servers became my problem.

1.0 was a piece of crap that was soon replaced by Proxy 2.0. Proxy 2.0 was yet another a piece of dookie until Microsoft rewrote the whole damned turd pile and decided to call it Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2000 (or ISA Server 2000, as we poor IT folk know it).

Of course that was a piece of shit as well and was replaced four years later by ISA Server 2004.

And continuing their anal expulsive tradition last year Microsoft shat out ISA Server 2006. At the moment the next version is just now beginning to poke its little turtle head out of Microsoft's ass and will be delivered, complete with a new name (which escapes me at the moment) sometime in '08.

While Microsoft was exercising its bowels over the years I spread out, transferring my mad proxy skillz to SQUID, Dante, and mod_proxy for Apache.

Except for Dante, all these products are variations on the original CERN http proxy. That is, they are basically Web servers that take http and ftp requests for other Web servers. Those requests are stored (cached) to disk and wait to be fetched by the next user, who hopefully experiences a faster retrieval time since the request is served locally.

Dante is a SOCKS server. SOCKS servers don't typically cache Web requests and can proxy much, much more than http and ftp. The catch is the client program must know how to deal with a SOCKS proxy server. This must be built in to the software itself or additional software needs to be used in order to socksify the client program.

Unfortunately, 99% of Web traffic (that isn't SPAM) is http. As a result SOCKS servers tended to fall out of style outside of their traditional Unix environments.

But they persisted for years. In fact in the '90s anonymous SOCKS proxies were a bit of a problem, since they were used to distribute SPAM. This problem was so bad most major ISPs went on a search & destroy mission to eradicate them. And they did a fairly good job.

They still exist, but most won't proxy SMTP mail anymore. No matter, the SPAMmers have gone on to bigger and better things.

If you like anonymity and you don't like having your IP address known, SOCKS proxies are the way to go. Problem is, they are hard to find. Once found, they need to be tested.

And that's what got me interested in sockcheck.c.

I have been collecting SOCKS IP addresses and I've learned some interesting things I will be sharing with you about the state of anonymous SOCKS proxies in the 21st century.

Even More Debian Updates In Store

Debian has released yet another kernel upgrade that will affect both BOT House and Experimental II. This update has also made it's way into the Ubuntu tree and it's going to take down Mrs. Hinky's computer as well.

Lady Dink has been running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS for over a year on a refurb all-in-one IBM NetVista similar in speed & capacity to the EXP II server.

It has run flawlessly all this time and updates have never beeen an issue, but since she runs the same RaLink wireless NIC as EXP II, I expect the same problems (although, thinking back on it, she has had several kernel upgrades in the past year with no NIC problems whatsoever - perhaps that particular driver is in the Ubuntu tree).

Mrs. D. was a latecomer to the 21st century. We've been married 23 years (as of September 4th), and for two decades she has stared at the back of my head while I hacked away at my various projects.

She realized last year she needed the Internet and email to survive.

Her little Ubuntu box resides in a corner of the kitchen and when she's not cranking out batches of her award winning peanut butter fudge or Norwegian Almond Nut Bars she diddles away at the computer writing emails to her various relatives or to our Worthless Kid, who is attending "college" at the Moody Bible Institute, studying Creationology and Faith-Based Logic.

Since this is a three day weekend (I never understood why the USA decided to celebrate May Day in September), I may do the maintenance early tomorrow. BOT House shouldn't be an issue, but EXP II may be down for a couple of hours.

Debian Update takes out EXP II

On 8/17 I did a remote Debian 40r0 update to the piece of crap IBM box that runs EXPERIMENTAL II.

I think Debian dropped the ball on this round of updates. A new kernel (in my case 2.6.18-5-686) was installed, but the reboot notification did not appear. When the server entered a period of quiet time I rebooted it and it did not come back up.

Not much I could do. I was at work and EXP II was at home. Sucks to be Hinky.

The same update on a variety of other boxes and VMs had the same problem (no reboot notification), but EXP II was the only one that did not come back up.

Then I remembered the RaLink rt61 wireless driver.

Ooops.

It doesn't come stock with the Linux kernel and if you upgrade the kernel, you have to recompile the driver. Not a big deal, but it completely slipped my mind, or what's left of it.

Since EXP II run headless in the corner of the Dink Family rumpus room and connects to DinkNet wirelessly, doing anything at all to it is a Major Operation™.

But I girded my loins (heh), unplugged it, and dragged it over to the workbench to recompile the rt61 driver.

Huh. No headers for the new kernel. You'd think those would come with the new kernel, but no. So I got those, ran make install, and rebooted.

Son of a bitch overwrote my interfaces file and set it up for DHCP. I don't have any any philosophical issues with DHCP but in my experience these RaLink drivers just don't do DHCP well.

Fixed that, rebooted again, checked everything out, shut 'er down, shoved it back into the corner, powered up, and let 'er rip.

I love this shit. Gives me something to do.

RoadRunner SUX. GoDaddy ROCKS!!!

I've had the whole week off, so I've been dicking around. And of course whenever I dick around I inevitably fuck something up. Let me explain.

One of the things Debian 4.0r0 has that Sarge never had is support for temperature and fan sensors (see below).

I was quite surprised and a little apprehensive when I found BOT House running at upwards of 67º C whenever there was someone playing. The Shuttle XPC that BH runs on has a variable speed "Smart Fan" and although it's relatively quiet, I could hear it spinning up and down whenever the temp went over 60.

So today I decided to jump into the BIOS and set the fan for "High" instead of "Smart" in order to keep this puppy as cool as possible.

Oddly, I found that the Smart Fan default for "High" (3500rpm) was 80º C, which makes me think in retrospect that maybe I was overreacting.

But I changed it anyway and rebooted. Better safe than toasted, I always say.

And lo and behold once more RoadRunner had decided to re-IP the subnet, so BH came up with a new IP.

Fuck.

Not such a big deal, really, unless you've saved BH or EXP II to your favorites, in which case you're screwed to a flat board and you have to re-browse to get the new address.

OK, so no problem. Much. A few tweaks to the firewall settings, reload iptables, and we're up and running.

The biggest hassle is going back to GoDaddy's Total DNS Control page to change all my DNS settings to the new address. So, fire up GoDaddy and...

DNS error. WTF?

It seems RoadRunner decided to take its old DNS severs down as well. I don't use them directly since I have an internal DNS server that forwards to their DNS servers (long story). In order to do that I need to drop their DNS addresses whenever BH gets its IP via DHCP.

So I sniff the wire with tcpdump to get a DHCP packet (it only takes a minute or two to get one) and plug those addresses into my DNS server. Fine. Back in business, slicker'n shit.

Back to GoDaddy, change all my global DNS entries (there are quite a few) from the old to the new, jump to the command line and check the DNS entry.

BINGO!

Woomp there it is. GoDaddy says it takes 24 hours but in my experience it's almost always instantaneous. Or about an hour. Whichever comes first.

So why is this important? Because RoadRunner changes my IP. Here's why.

Like I said, I'm on vacation this week. To stay connected to my work environment, I have a couple of covert tunnels (ssh and openvpn) back to my home address. Each one is the backup for the other and they "phone home" via DNS. If DNS isn't right (if it has the old IP, for instance), they get lost and it just doesn't happen.

After about 40 minutes, while I was posting this, the tunnels figured out the new address and hooked me back up to work.

Some vacation, huh?

An Improbable Escenary: CSO Hinky

A couple of weeks ago I was called to Mahogany Row to interview for the Chief Security Officer position.

It was all I could do to keep a straight face. In the end, I told them flat out I wasn't their boy, but I wished them good luck and total support for the CSO when they finally got one.

After all, the position's been open for over three years now. The last CSO went mad. Totally fucking mad. Both he and the CIO were tossed out on their asses. The CIO wasn't crazy. His problem stemmed from not being able to keep it in his pants.

Ah, those were the days.

I value what little sanity I have left. This organization is rough on lowly managers, let alone CxO types. Management seems to have greater longevity, at least in my experience. And they are only slightly less mad.

The less said about it, the better, but the new CSO is scheduled to show up before September. It should be fun and I'll tell you all about it, since we don't have a Blog Policy... yet.

It seems I picked a bad time to try to generate "Free iPhone" Google News Alert hits. Stephen Colbert picked the same time to whine about not getting a free iPhone, so he took all the hits. Then he actually got one and got more hits. Maybe if I mention them both in the same sentence I can get a hit.

Done.

In the meantime, Ive got another Google News Alert on the word "escenary". I keep getting the same hit over and over every week. Don't bother looking it up. It's not a real word. It appears to be a word used only by people for whom English is a second language. Check it out. In context it means either "scenery" or "scenario". Here's a useage example for the Google bots...

"In a humorous escenary witnessed by millions of TV viewers, Stephen Colbert conned Apple out of a free iPhone."

Two birds, one stone.

You could win a FREE iPhone!

But not by playing UT on BOT House! Or anywhere else for that matter.

Sorry to get your hopes up.

The only reason I'm telling you this is because I have a Google news alert for "FREE iPhone" and I'm testing to see if I can get a hit from here on BlogSpot.

I think the chances are good, since Google owns BlogSpot, but it didn't work with "Security 3.0". That was another experiment that didn't work.