I don’t have the time to go looking at the mass of research about measuring programmer productivity or project complexity, but I’ve had this quick idea I can share: instead of lines of code (which is just a part of the effort involved in maintaining a project) we can measure the entire effort it takes to conceive it, design it, build it, and maintain it.

What unit of measurement? Days of effort, of course, or DOE. Unless it’s a big project, in which case we can measure in months of effort, or MOE. If it’s a really big project – years of effort, YOE. But tiny projects should not be forgotten – so hours of effort must also be accounted for, as HOEs.

I think I will suggest that to my project manager if I have one again some time soon..

This month (last month actually, I am slow with my blogging) there was something obviously unusual from the beginning: instead of the typical six or seven logrotated 50MB access logs I had 15.

While I did hope for a couple of seconds that all of a sudden the popularity of one of my projcts doubled – I suspected immediately that the extra logs were full of bad rather than good things.

And so they were! I opened one of the middle files, access_log.07 and found many many lines like this:

178.65.217.96 – - [24/Mar/2013:04:40:09 -0400] “GET /isomaster/releases/isomaster-1.3w-installer.exe HTTP/1.1″ 404 3121 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”
77.35.44.146 – - [24/Mar/2013:04:40:10 -0400] “GET /isomaster/releases/isomaster-1.3w-installer.exe HTTP/1.1″ 404 3121 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”
94.51.3.138 – - [24/Mar/2013:04:40:10 -0400] “GET /isomaster/releases/isomaster-1.3w-installer.exe HTTP/1.1″ 404 3121 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”
178.65.217.96 – - [24/Mar/2013:04:40:10 -0400] “GET /isomaster/releases/isomaster-1.3w-installer.exe HTTP/1.1″ 404 3121 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”
77.35.44.146 – - [24/Mar/2013:04:40:11 -0400] “GET /isomaster/releases/isomaster-1.3w-installer.exe HTTP/1.1″ 404 3121 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”

Yep, that’s 3 requests per second. And how long has it been happening? Some quick grep commands found that it started on “21 Mar 08:01:11″ and ended on “1 Apr 14:36:26″, that’s 12 days of constant hammering!

The file the requests are for has been removed months ago, I got tired of dealing with the windows version of ISO Master, so my first thought was that this was someone’s broken script that was supposed to download the latest version or something, but then I noticed that the IPs are different. Note that even in the random 5 lines I pasted in above the requests are coming from 3 different IPs!

Sure is starting to smell like a DDOS attack, but why? Who cares enough about my server, or about me to bother wasting valuable botnet nodes on it?

Let’s do some more grep magic, this attack:

• | wc -l: Made a total of 2.6 million requests, that’s 260 thousand requests per day.
• | cut -f 1 -d’ ‘ | sort | uniq | wc -l: Used 1183 unique machines (or at least IP addresses).
• | cut -f 1 -d’ ‘ | sort | uniq -c | sort -b -g | tail -20: Had these 20 worst offenders, check out that last one, two hundred and seventy thousand requests!

24209 46.41.102.187
33104 95.27.161.96
34276 109.201.122.167
35827 178.159.30.31
37249 109.201.103.230
41455 91.124.244.192
41603 176.96.64.243
42493 109.201.119.242
43714 158.46.46.195
47652 95.106.16.222
54098 178.65.217.96
59760 37.229.68.141
67490 188.122.249.84
67596 46.118.177.113
68509 5.142.224.71
107007 178.213.194.220
109235 92.240.209.14
183352 46.185.61.81
197865 109.185.126.177
273314 5.35.29.186

John recently told me that you can use the host command to do reverse DNS lookups, and I did a few, but didn’t record the results, though I remember that 2 out of 3 were russian. Let’s try again now (do you like my mad commandline skills? :))

for IP in `grep ‘/isomaster/releases/isomaster-1.3w-installer.exe’ 2011-mar-access_log | cut -f 1 -d’ ‘ | sort | uniq -c | sort -b -g | tail -20 | sed ‘s/ *//’ | cut -f 2 -d’ ‘`; do host $IP; done

187.102.41.46.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 187.102.41.46.donpac.ru.
96.161.27.95.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 95-27-161-96.broadband.corbina.ru.
Host 167.122.201.109.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
31.30.159.178.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer peer31-30-159-178.ll.magnitogorsk.multinex.ru.
Host 230.103.201.109.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
192.244.124.91.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 192-244-124-91.pool.ukrtel.net.
Host 243.64.96.176.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
Host 242.119.201.109.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
Host 195.46.46.158.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
Host 222.16.106.95.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
96.217.65.178.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer pppoe.178-65-217-96.dynamic.avangarddsl.ru.
141.68.229.37.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 37-229-68-141-broadband.kyivstar.net.
84.249.122.188.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 188-122-249-84.clients.tlt.100megabit.ru.
113.177.118.46.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer SOL-FTTB.113.177.118.46.sovam.net.ua.
Host 71.224.142.5.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
Host 220.194.213.178.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
Host 14.209.240.92.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
81.61.185.46.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 46-185-61-81-sum.broadband.kyivstar.net.
177.126.185.109.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer host-static-109-185-126-177.moldtelecom.md.
Host 186.29.35.5.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

Some of the hosts are no longer online, but pretty much every other one is either from Russia or Ukraine (except the one from Moldova). Interesting. Actually they are not offline, they just don’t have reverse DNS working. The biggest one I found via whois (thank you Gnome Network Tools) has an address and everything:

address:        LLC “Multiscan”
address:        I.Lukyanova
address:        ul. Sokolova, 8
address:        141090 Yubileynyy, Moscow Region
address:        RUSSIAN FEDERATION
phone:          +74959743623
fax-no:         +74957555344

Hm, suspicious looking building, it’s too nice for where it is:

I don’t recall having any enemies back home, in fact I remember eastern europe with fondness. So my guess is this had nothing to do with me (since noone contacted me about it) and is rather some practice or testrun for something or someone or another.

I won’t be able to figure out much more than that (cause I’ll be busy with other things), oh well, it was an interesting experience and I’m quite smug about that my server took it so well that I haven’t even noticed the attack during the 10 days it was going on. And I use this server all day long! Sackware rocks.

I’ve been getting bug reports about the selected directory not being saved when you save the preferences and looked into it again today. I could hardly believe what I found.

If I double-click on the directory I want selected and click “Open”, what I get looks like this:

But gtk_file_chooser_get_filename() returns.. “/home/andrew”. I dug and dug through my code and the GTK reference looking for an explanation, but found none. After experimenting some more I found the problem:

This only happens if I double-click on the directory I want (“temp” in this case). If instead I single-click on the directory I want – I get it. Using other GtkFileChooser getters doesn’t fix anything. So this is not a bug in my code (in fact I don’t think I could hack around this even if I wanted to), this is probably some retard deciding that his 0.001% use case is more important design-wise than everyone else who uses GTK.

I guess that’s just the way things are in a lot of open source. Instead of being brushed aside because you’re not the highest-paying customer your needs are brushed aside because they aren’t matching someone else’s vision.

There’s a chance that this is an honest bug (not a design decision), but how is one to know for sure? I mean look at what they’ve done to KDE4 and Gnome3.. my faith in open source is starting to waver.

I hope this is not a sign of things to come.. There is no alternative for linux. I don’t want to be as screwed as the Mac people!

Thankfully the file opened in a Windows vm where I installed 3.6.4

To solve

It always pissed me off big time that the more popular Linux distros don’t install the development files (like header files) or the documentation for the software that comes with them. Being a developer – this is a big pain in the ass for me. It became a really big pain in the ass when I switched from Slackware to Linux Mint a couple of months ago.

I’m no free software fanatic, but damn, why the hell not include the development tools and documentation with Linux? Not only will that make my life easier, but it may encourage some other people to dabble in programming on Linux. Otherwise, do you know what a serious roadblock it is to get a newbie to figure out that there’s a metapackage called build-essential and a package called libgtk2.0-dev which you have to type in exactly like that, with the lib and the dot and the (wrong) version and the dash and the dev? Hell, it’s easier to set up a development environment in Windows (you should be ashamed, Debian).

Whining about it would have been enough, but I actually needed to solve this problem, so here is the solution, you can use it too. It’s a shell script you can download here or copy paste from here:

#!/bin/sh
#
# install-all-dev-packages.sh
#
# Author: Andrew Smith http://littlesvr.ca
# Version 1.0 (12 Dec 2012)
#
# The following script installs all the -dev and -doc packages that should have
# been installed with your software but were omitted for some stupid reason.
#
# Tested on Linux Mint 13 but should work on any Debian/Ubuntu/Mint 
# or really on any Debian derivative.
#
# If you get errors like A : Conflicts: B but C is to be installed
# then add those packages (all of the A) into the following list:  
BADPKGLIST="libdb5.1 libglew1.5 libglew1.6 librdf0"

# List of all available packages
apt-cache pkgnames > /tmp/allpackages

NEWPKGLIST="build-essential"

echo "Searching for required -dev and -doc packages..."
for PKG in `dpkg --get-selections | cut -f 1`
do
  # Make sure it's not in the ignore list
  echo $BADPKGLIST | grep -q $PKG
  if [ $? -eq 0 ]
  then
    continue
  fi
  # See if a -dev package is available
  grep -qe "^$PKG-dev$" /tmp/allpackages
  if [ $? -eq 0 ]
  then
    NEWPKGLIST=" $NEWPKGLIST $PKG-dev"
  fi
  # See if a -doc package is available
  grep -qe "^$PKG-doc$" /tmp/allpackages
  if [ $? -eq 0 ] 
  then
    NEWPKGLIST=" $NEWPKGLIST $PKG-doc"
  fi
done

echo "The following packages have been found:"
echo
echo sudo apt-get install $NEWPKGLIST
echo
echo -n "Do you want to install them? (y/n) "
read YN
if [ a$YN = ay ]
then
  sudo apt-get install $NEWPKGLIST --install-suggests
fi

if [ $? -eq 100 ]
then
  echo
  echo "If you got apt-get erros such as 'A Conflicts: B but C is to be installed'"\
       " then make a change at the top of this script to ignore those packages,"\
       " hopefully that will work."
fi

There is potential for some typical apt-get quircks with the “bla bla is to be installed screw you haha” messages but that’s solvable, you just need to edit the script and blacklist those packages that are erroring. Presumably the list will be different on different OS versions.

Enjoy, you’re welcome!

So a couple of years ago I went against my instinct and embraced the convenience of wireless networks. I thought I had secure setups, using WPA2 only, but recently I found out this is not enough.

I switched away from that lame ISP called Rogers to ElectronicBox (a DSL provider), and I returned the wireless router to Rogers. To replace it I bought a new router and set up a new network with the same SSID and password.

What a shock I got when every WiFi device in the house with the exception of my Slackware laptop happily connected to the new hotspot! That basically means that if someone else set up a wireless router with the same SSID – all my devices would happily send my password to that hotspot. Yay! Even if the password is hashed – that is some scary shit.

Now I have to spend hours reading about Wireless security again, and require PSKes or something to avoid such nonsense. Piece of shit stupid crappy garbage technology..