This site, along with a lot of others across many web hosting providers, suffered a WordPress hack which injected malicious code in to the web page, and redirected users off to another site.

I have gone through all of the files on the site, changed all of the passwords, and sacrificed a stick of Non ECC memory to the bit-gods in the sky in the hope that I have removed all traces of the malware hack (after taking a site backup for analysis, of course ).

I will be doing a fresh installation of whatever CMS I end up using in the near future as there are plans afoot!  I will be porting over most, if not all, of my articles.  Okay, so there aren’t that many but… 

If you believe my site to still have active infections on it, please leave me a comment (if it will allow it) and I will endeavor to resolve it.

I was browsing a supplier’s website, and one of their forms had a Captcha at the end of it to verify that I was human.

Unfortunately I couldn’t pass the test.

http://securosis.com/blog/rsa-breached-secureid-affected

RSA have filed an 8-k – see Here

People seem to forget that they need to maintain their computers. Clean up the temporary files, run a disk check, run a defragmentation program. It’s not a difficult regime, but one that many people seem to forget.

It certainly surprises me how many Windows Servers I come across where the very active main data partition has _never_ been defragmented. I came across such a beast this week. The data partition was only 69% full. This particular installation of Windows has been running since Windows Server 2003 R2 came out and had never, from what I could see, been defragmented. The data partition holds the main fileshares, and also is the storage filesystem for some SQL databases.

The main SQL database was 19GB in size. It had over 140,000 fragments. Yes, an average and median of approximately 140KB/fragment. Running a speed test on the drive before anything was done to it yielded 10MB/sec transfer. Pretty horrific when you consider that this is a server in a RAID 1 configuration.

I had to remove temporary files and use custom scripting in a third party defragmentation application just to allow large enough contiguous free blocks to allow us to defragment that behemoth.

So when all was said and done I got to perform another speed test on the drive. It yielded an average transfer rate of 60MB/sec. Thats right, a 6-fold improvement in direct performance on the drive itself.

It’s amazing what a little maintenance can do.

I think that a lot of non-technical types wonder why we should need to perform this sort of maintenance as they don’t understand what is going on “under the hood”.

When you want read a file off the disk, the computer has to request the start of the file from the hard drive. The drive positions the head while the platter is spinning, and when it reaches the right “track”, it has to wait for the platter’s spin to place the start of the track under the drive head.

When the data is fragmented, the head has to reposition itself to get the subsequent pieces and wait for the spinning platter to rotate so that the correct data is under the head. Each “seek” for the next bit of data comes with a time penalty.

What happens when your file is in 140,000 pieces? To read the entire file you have to endure 139,999 extra head repositions and wait-time for the platter spin to place the right part of the track under the head. When you read in a file, you ideally want all the data to be in one piece, or as few pieces as you can manage.

In a future post, I’ll talk about fragmentation, what causes it, how we can prevent it, and how sometimes it can be a good thing.

For many people “The Right Way” is just the way of doing things that they are used to, and anything else is “wrong”. The problem with this viewpoint is that there are various ways of resolving issues or configuring servers, some are just more efficient than others.

To be fair, I’ve seen some pretty horrendous implementations of DHCP and DNS services on Windows Server operating systems over the years and it’s something that gives me something of a nervous twitch… I’m sure there have been servers that I’ve set up in the past that have made my colleagues do the same thing, but the main thing is that we learn, and we look at how it is/isn’t working and the error messages the Operating System gives us.

I hope to help over the next few weeks with some practical guidelines on setting up these sorts of servers on a Windows based OS and how you can avoid some of the pitfalls I see on a daily basis. Will my way be “The Right Way”?. No, but it should help resolve some commonly seen issues.

There are a whole host of subjects that I hope to get in to here, and have basic draft ideas for how it will be structured. I now have the wordpress app on my Android-based phone so I certainly hope to see myself pushing more “quick thought” posts such as the last two, even when I’m on the road, or it’s 3am and my wife and son are sleeping in the bed with me

I’m not making any more promises about this. I will, however, do what I can, when I can.

The president ordered that all external access through the internet, cell phones calls, and sms messages be cut off. It was certainly interesting watching the bgp announcements with the dropped routes from the announced prefixes.

With internet connectivity being restored after 5 days, and text messaging also being re-enabled (despite some protests about the govt using it to send incorrectly attributed messages to subscribers…) we have to ask ourselves the question “In a modern civilization where so much relies on communication, do we place too much faith in concentrated exchanges without suitable independent redundancy of transit links?”.

We are down to 5 prefixes, one of each which will go to the 5 Rirs.

Have we run out of space? No… But the unallocated pool is looking shallow these days. 

The move to ipv6 will be gradual as there is still a lot of debate about the features and pitfalls. It is a major paradigm shift in the way we consider networks, routing, address allocation and the like.

More to come as I get back in to my blog.