Life, The Universe, and Everything

[johnf]

Doug Ping

[Doug Coulter]

Hi John, all...
Sorry I haven't been posting much. What's been going on is mostly boring to the extreme, when not sort of soul-crushing, and I haven't found that complaining helps me or is interesting to most others, so...
Basically, some fairly bad habits exacerbated by a spell of bad health (now mostly recovered) led to so much clutter and squalor that something had to be done. A combination of pack-rattery and diverse interests overwhelmed my ability to organize the "too much stuff" I happen to have, and it got to the point where I couldn't get things done effectively. Along with winter making it too cold to work in the shop, and too expensive to keep heated (I'm good at excuses) and it plain being a nasty job to restore sanity to things too heterogeneous to organize in the space I have...along with the usual "the washing machine is broken, and so is the backup electricity" I simply stalled out. And after a month or two of dilatory effort, it's still horrible...moving out of the shop let me ignore how cluttered it was getting until it got so bad that even sneaking in there to do some repair on homestead infrastructure required more time to make a spot to work than the fix took.
So that's what's up, along with writing some neat software I plan to share - but talking about it before it's done seems a waste of everyone's time, and a little political activism I kind of try to keep off of the board - politics has become fairly poisonous and polarizing, and that's counter to the goals here.

At any rate, all is as well as can reasonably be expected, I'm just in a major slog to get things right around here. I'm contemplating how to do a new grid build to get the geometry I(think I) want to do the ion recircution parameters vs density and energy experments, and that software (and hardware) in progress are in support of that whole thing.
But the room that the work is going to happen in has an old tinker bench so messed up it's just become a place to mine some of the parts that happen to lie in the mess, a chemistry/high temperature/ lead casting bench that's almost functional, a depleted/disused but very toxic electroplating line...and that's just one room of a few. Even my lab away from lab got bad...so it's just a case of trying to set priorities, organize what I keep, painfully ditch what I shouldn't have kept (or clean out enough deep storage...and shuffle the pile) and on and on.

Since that's probably not so much fun to read or think about...I've kept mum and will go back to not talking about it to spare everyone who reads my stuff for awhile!

Some pix of the mess, FYI.

No bench left...I need to clean up after each job instead of letting it pile up.

Can't even use the table saw...everything horizontal becomes an archaeological dig.

The room for the new work is kind of toxic just now

Upstairs bench too

Even my lab away from lab in the living room...too many projects at a time.

And a litte side distraction...the state wants me to give up 10's of thousands of bucks worth of cool things - illegal of them but these days that's not holding them back.

What can I say?

Of course, the fact that every tyrant in history has first disarmed their subjects...means nothing. And here the main outside interferrer is trying to frame a constitutional amendment designed to
protect against such as him as being about hunting, rather than a free state, because of course liars gonna lie, spin, and generally be politicians.

An out of state billionaire with ambitions bought the local elections..but it's OK when the left does it?

[Doug Coulter]

Boy, there sure are a lot of lurkers of late (According to the board) but no posts, and something is slowing down the board. Anyone have a clue about that?

I just had a little excitment...well, actually it was a lot. I had a burn box fire jump containment in a sudden wind and it almost got the whole place. But not, and I didn't have a heart attack, but it was close. I'm black from head to toe, and a little toasted. I'll live, but what a lesson in "be prepared" that was!

Here's the result:
https://youtu.be/Ax0smm3TdSw

[Doug Coulter]

Some info? The first buncha hits are an Amazon EC2 instance (?) and the rest are from a range owed by huawei, according to whois.
Are we under attack? We're also getting the usual hits, more or less, by "legit" bots from google and other engines, they're not usually a problem.

Any sleuthing help appreciated.

[Donovan Ready]

Can you provide me a text list of the IPs that are suspicious? Amazon in particular, since the NSA and others use cloud servers in Ashburn, VA to snoop. When I was running the Joint, my blocklist was frickin' huge.

I assume you're using iptables or something similar? I can take the Joint's server out of mothballs if needed. Us it to block anything that resolves to Merck or Ashburn, because they aren't good actors. Nor is Huawei.

Edit: As you might remember, I did network security for a living a few years ago. I'm rusty, but I can get it back more quickly than I could relearn R...

Edit again: PM me when you read this.

[Bob Reite]

I blacklisted all IP addresses from China on my servers.

[Doug Coulter]

I may have to do that too. I don't have any problems with Chinese users (see monty python, I like chinese) - but their state actors, not so much.
There's that one Amazon that whois says is an EC2 instance in their range...it's active on weekdays, like someone is playing around.
Hard to say if someone is trying to create a VPN from it or whatever...probably not?

And there are a crap ton from Huwei all over their range, and each one is eating a certain amount of bandwidth, every day. Those overflow my dashboard list - whois shows a big range for them. Looks like some kind of scripted slow attack.

I think I'm going to try blocking those and see what happens - each one is using as much or more than that one amazon IP is. I'd like to see some more-random hosts hitting us, the actual human users should not be pushed off the bottom of the display. It'll be sad if linux goes off the top opsys, which it probably will, and the 30-50 always on users looks nicer than the usual 3-5 before, but...gheesh, you wonder, as if they wanted all the content, they could have gotten it all long ago without all that.

[johnf]

So Doug is going to kick the sleeping bear
its going to be fun watching

[Doug Coulter]

Hopefully not too much fun!
I thought it was the Russians who were the bear? No indication of their IP ranges, but then they always were clever. Anything appearing to come from them is more likely from
the CIA project UMBRAGE (do nasty things and get them attributed to whoever they want to vilify today).

I'm going to try that Huwei range first and see if there's any yelping. That one looks just too much like something isn't quite right.

[johnf]

In this case a panda