News archive 2002 - Koos van den Hout

Lately the log of my Linux firewall has become unreadable due to the highamount of port 137/udp traffic. Traffic rose over 1 packet/minute which is(was?) somewhat unusual in my 'part of the woods' (an IP block dedicated toDSL customers of an ISP).There is only so much room in the kernel message buffer, room which I liketo keep for serious system troubles such as failing disks. At certain times,the *only* thing in the message buffer was dropped port 137/udp traffic.

HP printers with 'Internet ready' overdo the 'Internet ready' bit since anyone with port 80 access to the printer can change the configuration, even when an access-list has been set using the jetdirect config file. Set an administrator password and firewall the printer.

I mailed the same as I wrote in my previous piece onISPs and filesharing contents in a mail to the Sans editor.After more then a week, I got a reply, which was in its entirety:It really all boils down to whether organizations and individuals takecopyrights seriously. It appears that you do not. I do....

I have a public webcam running again giving you the view outside my living room window. Need to fix the problem with light in the evening .. good optical cardboard is hard to find (optical cardboard is very very black).

Reply to SANS NewsBites Vol. 4 Num. 49 article/editorial commentQuoting The SANS Institute who wrote on Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 08:25:37AM -0700:> --26 November 2002 ISPs May Limit Bandwidth Consumption> Some high speed ISPs are considering placing limits on the amount of> bandwidth their customers may consume each month. If they decide> to do it, it could significantly curtail file-swapping activity,

Ik sta op de HCC dagen 2002 (zoals jaarlijks) en de stand heeft na wat hackwerk een van buiten af bereikbare webserver met webcam. Aanbiedingen op de HCC beurs vallen tegen, beursgoodie van het jaar lijkt het keycord te zijn.

More pictures on-line and a better framework for it. Categories include random pictures, cat pictures and bruggen in Utrecht.

Yes, I owe several people a report of my Alaska Holiday. I am working on a nice set of webpages, in both English and Dutch. Learning stylesheets and multi-language support in the process.

Sunday I ended up in a stranded train because of the storm that went over the Netherlands. Besides 4 and a half hours of catching up on my newspapers, I also took some pictures of the surroundings. It is hard to get the idea of storm captured in an image.

Upgraded my home DSL connection. Note to self: update /etc/ppp/pap-secrets too for the login stuff, otherwise it won't work.

Recently I visited the US and I got exposure to some of the TV there.Although my primary interest was some of the programming used to fillthe gaps between commercials, I also saw some of the commercials.Commercials that use even the slightest form of exaggeration inphysical form have tiny letters in the bottom of the screen withdisclaimers such as "Done by professional stuntdrivers on a closedcircuit" or "Screen images were added later".

Familie leden of mensen die algemeen op zoek waren naar de naam van den Hout.. ik heb nu ook de domeinnamen vandenhout.info en vandenhout.com.

Simply said: yes it does. Limited, but it works.The long answer:Sometimes you receive unwanted e-mail (spam) telling you some company willmake a huge stock profit the next few days because some breakthrough orother reason that they will become worth a lot more. It looks like a genuinestock tip. But you never asked for it. You then ask yourself "what's thecatch".The catch is that the spam is the reason of the stock profit. The idea of

I am back in one piece from my travels through the beautiful state of Alaska in the US. I took loads of pictures and made a lot of notes, so more follows.

Ik ben toe aan vakantie. Mijn geduld met mensen is momenteel wat minder dan gemiddeld en ik wil weg. Gelukkig zijn er wilde vakantieplannen.

I bought a CyberDrive scsi cd-rom drive last November (HCC) and kept having termination problems. But no manual. So I got tired and bought a different (faster) drive and searched for technical support pages for the CyberDrive to return it for repairs. Where I found a Technical issues page explaining that 'jumper open' is terminated and 'jumper closed' is not terminated. That was the other way around from what I expected after all other scsi devices with jumpers.

My first IOS upgrade.. interesting are the parts where an error in the settings will leave the router very non-booting.

Some sites will go to court because other sites link to pages on their siteso you can get to interesting bits of the site without clicking throughloads of index pages with al their banner ads.Especially newspaper sites seem to be infected with this disease.But with Apache Webserver it is perfectly possible to set the rules forlinking to articles on a site without having to look EXTREMELY STUPIDbecause you need lawyers to avoid links to your site in stead of someone

Debian has released Debian 3.0 (woody) as stable version. Now make all the jokes about 'giving a woody'.

De volgende slogans zijn afgekeurd voor deze campagne:"Je stond pas 5 jaar op de wachtlijst ? Ja, dan loop je zo'n huis mis.""Wat leuk dat u de keuken gerenoveerd heeft.. nu gaat de huur omhoog.""Nee, die parketvloer moet er uit.. in originele staat opleveren."

Watch The Virtual Bookcase for new additions in information and some redesign of the pages.

The Generating Alcatel Speedtouch graphs micro-howto now contains a pointer to the scripts I use so you can build those graphs yourself.

Voor de nederlandstalige bezoekers is er nu ook een nederlandstalige 'over koos' pagina.

I installed a new server at home.. and made the webpage about it.

A new irregular, Spammers and dealing with the aftermath.

Today I got an e-mail from a guy somewhere "I got this spamcop report andI'm not really sure what this says.. looks like our webserver is sendingspam!"So, I logged into that machine, became root (something with old accountsnever getting cleaned up) and looked in the cgi-bin directory for myfavorite web-spamming script:---------- 1 root other 13559 May 19 1999 FormMail.plThat's after I did a 'chmod 0 FormMail.pl'. Indeed, that was the culprit

More eighties nostalgia.. Rinkeldekinkel online.

24 hours in the life of a bored ADSL line.

If your webserver serves .zip files or other binary stuff, it might get 'attacked' when visitors use a so-called 'download manager' acting quite antisocial and opening a lot of connections at once (leaving no slots for other visitors). Fixed this on one popular server by installing mod_limitipconn.c for Apache. Net result: more outgoing traffic.

Vandaag gezien, een taxichauffeur die het verschil tussen een parkeerplaats en een fietspad niet weet.

Don't play with your mail-headers too much, it might backfire as it did in my case. Oops..

THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA will equip you to challenge myth, distortion and spin in the media in an informed way, enabling you to effect positive changes in media coverage of the Palestinians and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Dingen om te doen in Utrecht als je je verveeld: bij het stoplicht op de fiets met een stopwatch meten hoe lang je wacht. 56 seconden gewacht waarvan maar 5 seconden nodig waren wegens ander verkeer en de rest leek te zijn om te voorkomen dat de fietsers sneller weg konden dan de auto's.

Back from a visit to Spain. Great weather, beautiful nature, great people and a very impressive Sagrada Familia.

The lyrics to the International friendship song aren't available online but I'll sing it anyway for national and international friends.

Interesting experiences in Sony vaio notebook (non) support.

Picture of clouds packing outside my office window.

You can visit Frank the cat who is recovering from a broken pelvis and has his own webcam (awwwwww).

Amazon makes a profit, Slashdot starts subscriptions and now microsoft advertises on slashdot. What is happening to this world ?

Measuring mainboard temperature using lm_sensors .. this is what happens when the system load goes to 100% (running rc5).

Een nogal andere idefix dan idefix.net.

A bunch of pictures titled Chasing the sunset.

The Netgear RT314 router now works with the Terayon cablemodem (as mentioned before) .. Terayon wisened up ?

Back from wintersport holiday in Flaine (France). I enjoyed it.. took snowboarding lessons which improved my snowboarding.

I changed irc client (for the first time since 1993..) to irssi.. sometimes a bit rough around the edges but it has a lot of stuff which I wanted in an irc client for Unix.

I got 15 seconds of fame when my message about the mcafee website made it into comp.risks.