HR Geeks » meltphace

Googlebot deleted my website

meltphace — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:24:49 +0000

So due to some really bad coding on our part, googlebot managed to wipe out a bunch of web content on one of our webpages today. The webpage is setup so that the individual pages all include a small piece of php code that pulls it’s content out of an SQL database and spits it out. We set this up for particular pages so that the user can make changes to the content with an HTML editor in a /admin sort of setup. It’s not the fanciest, but it’s simple, efficient and reliable.

Well the customer calls me this morning and tells me that all their content is missing, which I quickly confirm to be fairly accurate. I fire back an e-mail saying that the pages must have been deleted through the admin interface because the missing pages have been removed from the database. I then go off to read logfiles with the intent of finding evidence that this customer blew up their own webpage and that it’s not my problem, because that’s how I think. Here’s what I find in my logs:

66.249.73.92 – - [02/May/2008:13:48:47 -0400] “GET /admin/website_pages_delete.php?id=25 HTTP/1.1″ 200 4642 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

66.249.73.92 – - [02/May/2008:13:52:39 -0400] “GET /admin/website_pages_delete.php?id=26 HTTP/1.1″ 200 4760 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

66.249.73.92 – - [02/May/2008:14:10:44 -0400] “GET /admin/website_pages_delete.php?id=42 HTTP/1.1″ 200 4642 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

So it would appear that the session based authentication for the pages in /admin wasn’t added to the delete script, and somehow (i’d really love to know) google managed to find out about, and traverse links from, the page with all the delete links on it. When it did, it deleted every single page out of the database. Obviously this never ever should have been possible but hey. The lesson here is don’t be lazy and just put the authentication mechanism on the index page. Fortunately it was only done on this particular site. Whatcha gonna do. I blame Google…

Google AppEngine

meltphace — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:43:09 +0000

I noticed an article about yet another fine google service, AppEngine. It looks like google is releasing a set of tools that allow you to build a web application to run on Google’s servers. It is in preview right now (registration is already full, I tried). The idea is that you write an application using Google’s SDK which, according to Google, provides:

Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies

Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)

Automatic scaling and load balancing

Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email

Fully featured local development environment

So basically google is giving you all the tools you need to build a shared-nothing web application with great scalability, running on their infrastructure. The glory of it all, is that you don’t even have to know what shared-nothing is or appreciate why it works. Just use the authentication system and database driver they hand you and it’s all done. Oh and the first 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day are likely going to be free. You have to pay if you want more than that. Right now it’s for python only but I see mention of support for other languages too. Oh and they include the Django template module built into the SDK for you Django nerds. I wonder how long it’ll be before they open up more devloper accounts. I quiver with anticipation.

AVG Network Edition 8

meltphace — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:42:40 +0000

For those of you that are after an alternative to Symantec Corporate, I present to you AVG Network Edition. Over the last couple years I’ve become sort of a closet AVG fan, but I’ve finally come to respect it as a fine antivirus product, and the price is right. The Network Edition is setup to give you centralized management of the workstations via AVG Admin Console, letting you silently install it on workstations from the server, monitor client configurations and check for any problems. I didn’t really care for version 7, the network installer was really counter-intuitive and difficult to use but I just started rolling 8 out at a customer site earlier today and it’s as smooth as can be. It’s also worth noting that if you choose to buy their server packages like exchange server or file server edition, they also work with the Admin Console so you can control the servers from the same place. It’s definitely worth a look for small businesses.

DoS! April Fools!

meltphace — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:15:08 +0000

So for those of you who may have had strange Cox outage issues in the HR area this fine Wednesday (04/02/08) morning, I have some good news. I think I know what was going on. At about 9:30 it would appear my network at work was on the painful end of a DoS attack from somewhere on the internet. At the peak we were getting about 40,000 packets/sec through one provider and 70,000 through the other, bringing our router to it’s knees (normal load for us is about 3000/sec). It would appear that this attack caused some pretty major problems for Cox as well. It just stopped all on it’s own at about 11:00 and neither provider has any reliable information about where it came from. It was still Apr 1 in China at 9:00 AM right?

DIY automotive fuel injection

meltphace — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:09:35 +0000

For a while I’ve been talking about using a really neat standalone injection system on one of my cars. The system I’ve been looking at for a good while is called MegaSquirt developed by Bowling and Grippo. The hardware is built around a Motorola MC9S12C64 microcontroller on a custom PCB. If you are inclined, you can even just buy the PCB and buy all the parts from mouser to build it yourself or for the rest of us there are a few places online that will sell you a completed kit ready to go. Some of the early code was written in assembly, but the more modern programs are all written in c.

For those not familiar, in a gasoline engine the ratio of air to fuel that gets burned in the engine is critical for both engine health and performance. Too little fuel and you can risk damaging the engine, too much fuel and you lose power and waste fuel. The fuel injection system is responsible for determining the amount of air entering the system and providing the appropriate amount of fuel for proper combustion. In many cases the same system is also responsible for correctly timing the spark that ignites the air and fuel mixture.

MegaSquirt is ideal for people looking to shed their old carburetors or mechanical fuel injections systems and update to modern electronic fuel injection (assuming they have the expertise and free time). It’s also an excellent choice for DIY tuners if you want to spend the time (and dyno runs) to squeeze every last horsey out of a motor. Similar commercially built systems are available but most of them cost several thousands of dollars, whereas a fully assembled MegaSquirt unit can be had for around $300.

I’m going to be undertaking this project on my 1983 Volvo 240 Turbo (If Telmnstr will let me maybe I’ll try to get it on 757labs) but I’m looking to maybe get some of the car and computer nerds together on this one as there are a lot of things that have to be right before the car will even start. Things like calibrating all of the sensors, building a wiring harness, some machine work for various trigger wheels, programming maps and tables into the computer etc. If anyone wants to get involved shoot me an e-mail.