So I was having some issues installing ChiliProject on Dreamhost. I had never even deployed a rails application before. But I figured out how to do it.

First you might want to create a new user because you want as much memory available as possible for Rails as it is a bit of a memory hog. IIRC, Dreamhost has about 90mb of RAM available per user (well thats whats in the PHP.ini anyway).

Anyway you can check out the commands to run here or see below:

I recently tried out the Siwapp invoicing system and had a few issues when getting it to install. It was working perfectly on another box however. The difference was that one was installed with PHP as an apache module, and the other installed with PHP as CGI.

To find out that this was my problem I ran the installer_dev.php instead of the installer.php file but first I had to edit the file from its standard to this: https://gist.github.com/848692. See the big red comment in the middle and the error_reporting function used at the start of the file.

On running the installer_dev.php file again and going to the 2nd step, it gave me the error “Fatal error: Call to undefined function apache_get_modules() in /path/to/apps/installer/lib/checks.class.php“. The problem is caused by the apache_get_modules() not working with PHP installed as CGI.

So I went to that file opened it up and commented out the section that checked for installed apache modules. You can see the result here: https://gist.github.com/848705

After I did that I found I was missing an htaccess file in the web directory so I found this off the discussion group: https://gist.github.com/848708

Last but no least the config.php in the web root didn’t have the correct sf_root_dir though that might be my fault – check it anyway.

After those changes it was away… easy.

I’ll just say it is awesome to see politicians running around like headless chickens. It is also awesome to see some of the shit coming out of this.

Keep yourself informed:

• http://reddit.com/r/wikileaks
• http://reddit.com/r/cablegatecables
• http://wikileaks.ch/
• http://www.bradleymanning.org/
• http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/why-im-posting-bail-money

Openness, transparency — these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt. What if within days of August 4th, 1964 — after the Pentagon had made up the lie that our ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin — there had been a WikiLeaks to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? I guess 58,000 of our soldiers (and 2 million Vietnamese) might be alive today.

Instead, secrets killed them.

[...]

WikiLeaks, God bless them, will save lives as a result of their actions. And any of you who join me in supporting them are committing a true act of patriotism. Period. – Michael Moore

Well put. These DDOS’s on MasterCard are the work of bored teenagers. For every 4′channer with a DDOS script there are a dozen real, competent security professionals who have a really good understanding of how the internet works, because guess what, we are the ones who built it and keep it running. I’m not about to risk my job or prison to jump on the internet hate machine bandwagon over something like this. But come the day when the people in power try to take the internet away from us and pervert the original intent of free information exchange people like me are going to come out of the wood work. We are going to take off our white hats and put on black ones. And yes, there will be hell to pay. – Dax420

FUCK YOU AMERICA GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY INTERNETS!!!

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has starting seizing domain names directly from fucking ICANN!!! WTF ICANN!? Who decided to leave DNS root servers in the states anyway FFS? I knew that was a bad idea and it was only a matter of time before those corrupt mother fuckers did something doge.

So far they’ve rerouted the DNS entries for about 70 domains which include sites linking to intellectual property (read: torrents/p2p) and counterfeit products sites. But keep in mind this is without any warnings to the site operators, no DCMA or takedown requests. The DCMA was put in place to provide a means to request the site owners to take down the infringing stuff before you take their shit. The US Govt skipped straight to taking their shit. And the US Govt can do this to any domain in the world. Fuck off you bastards!

News stories:

• http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent-search-engine-domain-and-more-101126/
• http://www.osnews.com/story/24074/US_Government_Censors_70_Websites
• http://fseek.me/2010/11/u-s-gov-seizes-bittorrent-search-site-torrent-finder-technical-details/

The DHS must be involved just to spread fear, looks like they are catering their rich business lobbyists who are unable/unwilling to evolve to the current media distribution formats. ZOMG people taking pirated software on planes are putting your kids at danger!

So the MAFIAA wanna hax our internets by crying to the US Govt instead of being innovative. It looks like they have bought the politicians who allowed this shit to happen. The were already trying to get this through with the secret ACTA treaty and the COICA bill. This legislation protects no one but the copyright holders in MAFIAA who have the law makers in their pockets.

Time to get off the root servers. Your ISP will be getting its updates from the root servers. But the websites who had their domain names seized will still be online, but only accessible via the IP (provided they haven’t any virtual hosts). So I would recommend you change your DNS settings to get your DNS from some open dns servers. These ones are unhackable by the govt so you can access stuff they blacklist (unless they break into datacenters and steal some servers – which I wouldn’t put past them).

• http://dns.telecomix.org/
• http://www.opennicproject.org/
• http://www.unifiedroot.com/en/How-it-Works/Overview-How-it-Works

Of course you could say, well I don’t run a counterfeit/pirate site so it doesn’t matter to me. Well this is where it starts people. Like the No fly blacklist in the states (seriously wtf is wrong with these dickbags), there’s going to be false positives and they probably won’t take you off the blacklist. And of course there’s the “first they came for the christians but I was not a christian so I said nothing” et al thing.

Looks like the UK want to do this as well:

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11845961
• http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/11/25/police-get-major-new-powers-seize-domains/

Some other info (pulled from the torrentfreak comments):

• Vermont Senator gets a letter from the RIAA:
  • http://www.riaa.com/…Chorus-of-Support-For-Rogue-Sites-Bill
  • http://image.exct.net/…/101021_MultiIndustry_S3804_CombatingOnlineInfringementandCounterfeitsAct_Leahy.pdf
• http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10133425-38.html#ixzz16Q6wmEHx

This could be the end of the internet as we know it folks. I remember a very wise uni lecturer telling us that we are very lucky to live in the age of the unrestricted internet for governments are surely scared of it, businesses can be threatened by it, so they would naturally move to shut it down.

So blog about this. Tell your friends. Spread the word.

ICANN is now a fascist organization.

KGO!!

While discussing guy fawkes…

cityfriend: what is traditionally burn on bonfires?
   sister wants to know
me: on bonfires?
   anything you fucking WANT!
   :D
   tires/mattresses
   mostly dead trees/branches
   people occasionally
   dead animals
   probably a whole bunch of hedgehogs rabbits
      mice rats and stuff that thought it was
      an AWESOME place to live till you set it on fire

So, the company I work at uses Trend Micro software to monitor the computers for viruses right? Well they must use it to monitor/proxy the internet use as well because I found some strange things going on in the server logs on one of my servers.

I login to various password protected parts of one of my webservers using the work internet. Then some what I assume to be script kiddies started trying to find where I kept various admin tools by going to obvious and not so obvious addresses this webserver. So I got all paranoid and started going through the logs. It didn’t appear as though the script kiddies were getting in or had even found the correct address to the password protected parts of the server.

However I did find some IPs that did and I didn’t recognize them. They USA and Japan assigned IP addresses too. The script kiddies had been using proxies from the USA, France and Japan. However when I did an IP lookup these addresses came back as registered to Trend Micro.

All of the requests to my server gave those IPs 401 Unauthorized errors. So I did a test by navigating to a non existant page on my site with an address that I would notice in the server logs from the work internet. I found an IP from each IP range went to that page as well.

After some googling of the IP addresses I found other people had seen these IP ranges accessing pages that the public couldn’t and shouldn’t know about.

The IP ranges concerned where:

• 216.104.15.0/24
• 150.70.0.0/16

Most of these addresses don’t resolve to a hostname however I did find one that did: 150.70.66.183 resolved to sjdc-wtp-gs-maya6.sdi.trendnet.org but is registered to the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre. It also says that 150.0.0.0/8 is registered to APNIC too, however I’m not sure if it says that even though they have assigned/sold that address to Trend Micro.

As for why this happens I am not sure. Maybe it is a bot to find what customers employees are looking at, keyword grabber or something. I am pretty sure it wouldn’t my employer tracking my net usage as they surely would record that as my HTTP request went out the proxy in my building. However I haven’t checked if the work proxy is actually in the building…..

Why are people always about “you can’t hear what they’re saying” when listening to metal? So what, thats not the point. The measure of talent is not in the singing or songwriting like regular jackoffs, but in the drums and guitaring. It takes a hell of a lot more talent to play guitar and drums like they do in metal, than to sing or songwrite or push buttons on a fucking synthesizer.

I even listen to music in other languages like ukranian, spanish and indian, I have no idea what they are singing about, does that make the music shit? No. Is the answer.

fuckin metal. \m/-