Computers: December 2004 Archives
So, we have been getting a fair amount of comment spam for the last several months. Once I installed Jay Allen's "MT-Blacklist", it has really only been annoying. When I got home from work today, however, I noticed that my machine was thrashing. It was working so hard, that the console was unresponsive. A reboot later, and I was back in control of the thing. Doing some initial investigation, it looked like somebody (or somebodies) was jamming on the comment system for the blogs that are hosted here. I disabled it quickly, so that I could get on with my life.
Later (after dinner & "The Daily Show"), I found that as soon as I re-enabled the "mt-comments.cgi" script, the box was immediately hammered again. I managed to narrow all of the spam traffic down to 4 IP addresses, being served by an ISP called SAVVIS. Looking in DNS, it looks like these IPs are being used by a company called "Marketscore". From their website, it is hard to tell if they are legitimate or not. For the time being, I have firewalled them off, and fired off an e-mail to the abuse department over at SAVVIS. But in 2005, I'm going to have to do two things:
- Come up with a better anti-spam solution for the blogs hosted here.
- Tune my FreeBSD machine -- because getting pounded with HTTP CGI requests shouldn't hork the box to the point that I can't login on the console.
-Andy.
So, on MacNN today, I noticed a blurb about some instructions for compiling the MythTV Frontend on MacOS X. I had a hard time loading the page (I tried all day -- it was posted to some wiki that was overloaded), but finally managed to get a peek late this evening. I found the instructions for compiling it up, but that looked like a bunch of, well, work. Luckily, I also found a pre-compiled binary, and so I was off to the hacking races. I had to do some mysql hacking, and poke some holes in my DMZ firewall, but even after all of that, I was having issues.
It seems like MythTV stores information about the backend servers in the MySQL database. This information includes the IP address of the server. So, my mythfrontend on MacOS X was connecting to the mysql database on my myth box, and then trying to connect to the mythtv server ports (6543 and 6544) on the backend server. Unfortunately, when I configured mythtv, I was thinking only of the single-box case, and so it appears as if the backend server IP address that I configured is 127.0.0.1, not the real IP of the box. This means that mythfrontend running on my PowerBook was trying to connect to 127.0.0.1 in order to watch TV.
I don't really know how to fix this, but it probably involves changing some data in the database. Not something that I want to do on my PVR, while it is recording Badly Drawn Boy on Last Call with Carson Daly. So, what did I do? Why, I whipped up an SSH tunnel of course. But that's not the amazing part -- the amazing part is that it actually worked! I was able to stream an tonight's episode of The Daily Show, through SSH, over my 802.11g wireless, and watch it in realtime on my PowerBook.
This is really awesome. It means that I now have a wireless TV in my apartment (and it didn't cost me an arm and a leg!). Of course, I don't really need such a thing in my current one bedroom apartment -- but I can envision several uses when I'm back living with a roommate again.
-Andy.
