It’s funny how multiple thousands of dollars out of your own pocket can focus your attention. That’s the situation I’m finding myself in with regards to DCKickball. With the fields payed for, my only focus at the moment is signing people up. Which, of course, is easy said than done.
I’ve found myself obsessed with metrics like the conversion rate (the rate at which people who come to the site go to the registration page or the rate at which people who go to the registration page actually fill out and submit the form. At the moment, my latter rate is 37%. Is that good? Bad? I suppose it’s late to commission a usability study of the registration page.
I just recieved an email from someone informing me that WAKA is requiring the presidents of their divisions to sign a non-compete agreement.
Let that sink in for a second.
The people who run WAKA (a multi-million dollar for-profit organization) are requiring their unpaid volunteers (who run EVERYTHING) to sign an agreement that they will not start a competing kickball organization.
This is just completely outrageous. I am literally thunderstruck by the level of arrogance of these people. It’s as if they think they hold some kind of patent on playing kickball. Like being first-to-market guarantees a company a lifetime of monopoly profits.
The sad thing is, I’m sure every last one of those presidents is going to sign the thing. It’s revolting.
Linux taurus 2.4.27-1-386 #1 Fri Sep 3 06:24:46 UTC 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
Now that my box (Taurus) was home, I needed to begin the process of backing up its data and re-installing Linux. My first instinct was to install Gentoo, after hearing so many good things about it. To this end, I downloaded the i686 ISO of Gentoo to a CD and booted off of it. From the prompt, I mounted my partitions (hda1, hda2, hda3) to temporary directories and started to tar/gz my important data. After the information was bundled, I simply scp’d the files to my OSX laptop.
With my data safely squirreled away, I was ready to wipe Taurus and start anew. However, about 20 minutes into the Gentoo installation process, I realized that Gentoo wasn’t going to work for me. There simply is no single way (or document) to install Gentoo. This is fine for hyper-geeks who want to tune their kernel, but no good for me. So, I fell back on the latest testing version of Debian (Sargent) and went to work.
BAM! 30 minutes later (mostly spent waiting), I had a repartitioned, reformatted machine with a sparkling new Linux distro on it. A few “apt-get install” invokations later and I had Apache, Apache-ssl, MySQL, PHP, Exim and Mailman installed.
I copied over my Tomcat and Java 1.4 backups, along with the blog.war webapp that powers this site. I reloaded as much of my data (MySQL tables, mailing lists, etc) that I could. Once I felt that everything was working, I drove out to Tyson’s at re-inserted Taurus (along with another rebuilt machine, Rome) into the hosting facility. I plugged it in, flipped it on, ran some tests, and walked away. Let’s hope things stay up (and un-hacked) longer this time.
Here is the text of a recent IM conversation between Taurus and a psychotic Jdate woman. It’s pretty self explanatory, but feel free to get in touch with him for more details:
<CrazyGirl>:hi <CrazyGirl>:do you live in adams morgan in a brickstone? <CrazyGirl>:i think i know u <Taurus>:hey there <Taurus>:I do live in a brick house in adams morgan…should I know you? <CrazyGirl>:yeah <CrazyGirl>:i definately have met you <CrazyGirl>:do you not remember? <Taurus>:okay…well give me a
second here <CrazyGirl>:k <Taurus>:alright, not ringin a bell <CrazyGirl>:do you want me to tell you? <Taurus>:I suppose, though this is a little weird <CrazyGirl>:yeah <CrazyGirl>:you haven’t been on
jdate in a while or atleast i haven’t! <CrazyGirl>:about 2 years ago we met up at a bar near your house <Taurus>:so go ahead <CrazyGirl>:you tried to argue with me about politics and i wasn’t willing to argue <CrazyGirl>:and that made you irritated <Taurus>:oh…. <CrazyGirl>:and then you told me i was fat <CrazyGirl>:yup <CrazyGirl>:i thought that was you but not sure <Taurus>:then what’s this all about <CrazyGirl>:now i am <CrazyGirl>:just wondering if it was you or
not <CrazyGirl>:didn’t know you were still on jdate that’s all
Well, yesterday morning my server (Taurus) died, not with a bang, but a whimper. The /var partition had been filling to capacity, despite a report from du -h --max-depth=1 /var that there was plenty of space available. A full /var means all manner of bad things, such as bounced emails.
Some people have requested more information about the hacking of my box. Alert: nerd content ahead!
I wish I could say that I knew right away that my box was hacked, but I didn’t. I generally don’t have access to my box from work, and certainly don’t have all that much free time to monitor it in any case. The first hints involved degrading performance ofmyvarioussites. First things were just slow, then things (Tomcat, etc) would just crash. Eventually I closed my eyes, held my breath, and remotely rebooted my box. Everything came back up, but the problems seem to persist.
Previous to this, I had recieved numerous emails from cron telling me that certain tasks (cleanup, etc) were failing with errors. Being lazy, I ignored these errors for a while, hoping they would go away (duh!). After enough time went by, and they didn’t go away, I investigated more and discovered my box had been hacked.
After poking around the /etc/cron.daily/ directory, I noticed that the logrotate script had been modified. I opened it up, and sure enough someone had added a line telling cron to send an email (to the hacker) with the contents of a particular file. I opened up the file (.sniffer) and was horrified to see the keystroke input of every call to su, passwd, and mysql. Everytime I changed a password or logged-in to something, my keystrokes were being captured and emailed to the hacker.
Needless to say I removed the mailing line from logrotate and changed all my passwords. However, this file is still being written to, by some process I can’t seem to identify. So, my box is still hacked, and likely only a format and re-install will fix it. I also have no idea how my box was hacked. I have heard about an exploit for a http log analyzer I was using, so I’ve disabled it.
The official DCKickball site (http://dckickball.org) is up and running! Please reference that site for all future information and announcements regarding DCKickball. Sweet!
In case you couldn’t tell, I’m having server problems. Well, more accurately I’m having Tomcat problems. Damn thing keeps dying on me. All my other services (Wiki, Email, PHP, etc) seem to be working fine.
In truth, I think this box is fubar’d. Which means a weekend of fun re-installing software, and possibly swapping out some hardware (memory, hard drives, etc). Anyway, if you notice any problems with this site, please shoot me an email (carter.rabasa at gmail.com).
Thanks to a successful permit application for the use of Walter Pierce Park on Mondays and Wednesdays, DC Kickball is off and running! For those of you who don’t know, I’ve helped run the WAKAIndependence Division for the past three years. I’m really looking forward to bring a new, fun, and affordable kickball league to the Adams Morgan area.
At the moment, I’m asking interested players and teams to
send me an email so that I can start a mailing list. More information can be found here.
It has occurred to me that I have been writing (badly, I might add) about several topics lately that are being discussed in a much more eloquent manner by Will Wilkinson. If you have some time check out the following posts:
