Spam and SI Captcha

Well, I’m going to try to cut down on the spam (only a few spam bots so far have attempted to post, but I know there will be more.) I’m trying out SI Captcha to see if that helps. I just wish it had an option to still email upon failed comment posts (or something similar till I’m sure it’s working.) Oh well, I’ll still be moderating comments, but I hope this will help cut down on the amount of spam comments I have to moderate.
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Halloween Theme

First off, I’m a big fan of Halloween to begin with, and I was kind of on the ropes if I should do a Halloween theme for this month or not. Well as you can tell, my girlfriend talked me into using this theme. Honestly, I do quite enjoy how it does quotes. When the month is over I think I know what theme I’ll be using for the foreseeable future.
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Server hammered

So, I recently set a link to my discussion of Linux, GNU, and OS’s to someone on Identi.ca. I made a point not to add groups to !linux and !gnu because I knew my server would probably get hit hard (if you’ve looked at my server’s specs, you’ll know it doesn’t take much to be considered hit hard.) Well, they read it, after which they posted a link to my blog with the groups !
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Linux is the OS

So, the comments got a bit long in the last post. I think I’ll clean it up, and get the interesting tidbits out of there and present them here in a clear fashion. Also, while I appreciate Michael B. Trausch’s discussion on the topic, and provided some interesting discussion points (which will be discussed further here.) Also, reading through my arguments that I put in the comments of the last post really didn’t flow together.
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It’s still Linux, not GNU/Linux.

I’m in the process of rewriting this with some information and rebuttals to some of the comments. Stay tuned for that later tonight. Sorry to anyone on identi.ca in !ubuntu !linux or !gnu that may be writting a comment now. I’m locking comments so the newer one will get the traffic (since it’s going to be much better written than this one which I spent all of 10 minutes on.) </end edit> I don’t understand why there’s so much push to have the Linux OS, called GNU/Linux.
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Spam and Server stuff

So, I’ve only been up for about three weeks and I’ve already got my first spam comment (which is why I moderate all comments ATM.) Also, it was kind of strange, I went to go here at work today and I wasn’t able to connect. So, I logged into my router. I thought that my iptables were screwy again, so I started trying to fix them by hand. Deleted a rule and BAM no more connectivity to my router (at all.
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Taken care of

Well, I think I have all the previous issues taken care of. Caching may or may not work, but it’s supposed to be happening now. So mail and DNS lookups work now (DNS only being useful from my side.) So, all-in-all I hope this beast can just run for several months and I’ll see what (if anything) needs to be done in that time. So now that my server should be stable, I’m free to work on other endevors!
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Few more things that I should fix yet

Well now that the system is live, I think there’s going to be a few things I’m going to need to fix. Most all of them are from using mod_chroot. Most aren’t anything critical, but things that should be addressed (sooner rather than later.) For instance, I think DNS lookups are failing from inside WordPress. I breifly read in the mod_chroot caveates that this may happen, and I think this is happening now.
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We are live!

Well, technically we’ve been live for about 4 hours, but I didn’t realize at the time that using DNAT with iptables actually caused the NATed server to become unavailable from the LAN. I was actually trying to get everything setup in FwBuilder, but I may have hit a limitation since I could not find a way to do “-A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/16 -j SNAT —to-source 206.127.184.118” I must say this was an interesting learning experience.
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Pretty much ready

Well, my server is pretty much ready I now. Apache is chrooted and seems to be working well. I also did a self-signed cert in hopes that’ll make my remote logins even more secure to WordPress. SSH access is limited to keyed logins. Ntpd is running in hopes of keeping the system’s clock sane. I’ve moved all my Git repos here and even have my CGit vhost running/working. Git daemon is also running.
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