Today included more messing around with gnuplot and various web programming tasks. I also helped Dan format a pdflatex document. I'm kind of cursed with being really fast at working with these formatting markup languages, so such tasks get thrown onto the end of my work queue a lot.

I noticed we were having a network dip in the afternoon and found once again our web site was being DOS'ed. Somebody (or some robot) was scraping our site, completely ignoring our robots.txt file, etc. Quite infuriating. I wonder if it is officially unethical to make public IP addresses which exhibit this kind of foul behavior. The worrisome part is this kind of activity clobbers mysql (and thus the whole project), and last time this happened everything seemed to recover, and then the database crashed twice over the weekend. We shall see, I guess. It's recovering now.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Thanks, Matt!

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A quick

# iptables -I INPUT -s $IP -j DROP

Will sort that out!

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I noticed we were having a network dip in the afternoon and found once again our web site was being DOS'ed. Somebody (or some robot) was scraping our site, completely ignoring our robots.txt file, etc. Quite infuriating. I wonder if it is officially unethical to make public IP addresses which exhibit this kind of foul behavior. The worrisome part is this kind of activity clobbers mysql (and thus the whole project), and last time this happened everything seemed to recover, and then the database crashed twice over the weekend. We shall see, I guess. It's recovering now.

- Matt

Thanks for the good work.

As to why you don't announce publicly, you are supposed to call the UC Police and report this person/robot for violating Penal Code 502, unauthorized use of a computer system. It is a felony.

That or maybe put a privacy statement up that such use will be publicly disclosed. Then you have given fair notice and the lawyers won't get upset. ;-)

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I think their IP address should be fair game. Maybe some social pressure could be brought to bear.

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http://boincstats.com/signature/-1/user/18390/sig.png

I get portscans and attempted DOSes here at home quite often, and I just went in with iptables and blocked entire subnets. 99% of them originate from China. *shrug* It works fine here at home since I have no reason to access anything from China, and nobody from China has any reason to access me, but a worldwide project like this has to have careful consideration of IP or even subnet blocking.

I used to forward excerpts from the connection logs on the firewall to the various holders of subnets, but never got any responses and kept getting portscans from said IPs, so I just started blocking subnets. Problem solved.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Lovely when people on BOINC say SETI should be DOS'd
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=3837&nowrap=true#24506

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Yeah. A great way to make enemies and (negatively) influence people.

Lovely when people on BOINC say SETI should be DOS'd
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=3837&nowrap=true#24506

???? WTF ????

All that thread is is a secondary source of information (and, as always, some speculation) about the current state of the SETI project and possible causes of recent difficulties - accessible if and when the message boards here have to be taken down for remedial action.

The only mention of DOS attacks in the whole thread is in the message you linked - #24506. And all that is is a word-for-word backup copy of Matt's opening post in this thread - explaining what has already happened.

I fail to see how that translates into saying that people "should" do any such thing. I think an apology to Perryjay is in order.

Lovely when people on BOINC say SETI should be DOS'd
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=3837&nowrap=true#24506

???? WTF ????

All that thread is is a secondary source of information (and, as always, some speculation) about the current state of the SETI project and possible causes of recent difficulties - accessible if and when the message boards here have to be taken down for remedial action.

The only mention of DOS attacks in the whole thread is in the message you linked - #24506. And all that is is a word-for-word backup copy of Matt's opening post in this thread - explaining what has already happened.

I fail to see how that translates into saying that people "should" do any such thing. I think an apology to Perryjay is in order.

Message 24506 was written by Dagorath and I have read it.
Tullio

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Message 24506 was written by Dagorath and I have read it.
Tullio

I'm not sure that 24506 was the offending message, but the passage in question (posted by Dagorath) has definately vanished since 4:55:00 UTC. Good idea too!

Message 24506 was written by Dagorath and I have read it.
Tullio

OK, panic over.

What I'm seeing on my screen now is:

Message 24506 - Posted 23 Apr 2009 23:17:38 UTC - in response to Message 24505.

by perryjay - as I described - and I think I saw it last night too.

BOINC shouldn't re-cycle message numbers. We sometimes talk about messages being 'deleted' by moderators, but they can't do that - the most a mod can do is 'hide' a message, so it remains in the database with its message# intact (meaning it remains available as evidence in any police action).

Meaning any apology to perryjay is owed by the BOINC forum software, and I owe an apology to Gary Charpentier. Sorry, Gary - I was careful to check message #s etc. before posting, but Tullio's explanation never crossed my mind.

Hmmm, seems I started something without even knowing it. I had no intention of supporting someone DOSing SETI. I was just passing on what happened as stated by Matt so that people that read that thread would know.

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

Hmmm, seems I started something without even knowing it. I had no intention of supporting someone DOSing SETI. I was just passing on what happened as stated by Matt so that people that read that thread would know.

You didn't. There was a reply by Dagorath to your message that has now been hidden. In it Dagorath advocated DOSing SETI until it never came back up.
And I'll apologize to you if somehow my cut and paste got the wrong message number.

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No problem, I just couldn't understand how my post could have been interpreted as advocating a DOS attack. :)

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

The aforementioned user (his nasty message now hidden) has also had a vendetta against LHC which he posted in several projects boards. I hadn't known until that post, he also had something against Seti. He needs anger management consoling. I tend to just ignore anything he posts.

I noticed we were having a network dip in the afternoon and found once again our web site was being DOS'ed. Somebody (or some robot) was scraping our site, completely ignoring our robots.txt file, etc. Quite infuriating. I wonder if it is officially unethical to make public IP addresses which exhibit this kind of foul behavior. The worrisome part is this kind of activity clobbers mysql (and thus the whole project), and last time this happened everything seemed to recover, and then the database crashed twice over the weekend. We shall see, I guess. It's recovering now.

- Matt

it's the aliens. We are about to find their top secret message to their agents on the ground. LOL! i say post the ip address. you never know; someone in the seti community may have good resources and can tell the physical address of the ip.

Speaking of MySQL, Here's a small story on It right Here.

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Savoir-Faire is everywhere!
The T1 Trust, T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, America's First HST

Speaking of MySQL, Here's a small story on It right Here.

And another one: http://blogs.computerworld.com/which_sql_is_mysql

It seem Seti@Work is now blockaded as they've said below:

Seti@Work wrote:

Berkeley seems to have blocked our IP address so there will be no statistics update for the rest of the month until I work something out using the updated-once-a-day XML data.

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Savoir-Faire is everywhere!
The T1 Trust, T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, America's First HST