All posts by rbowen

IIS SEARCH worm – Seen on IRC

<Curtman> Whats all this “SEARCH /x90x02xb1 …” stuff going on lately? New worm, or just script kiddies?
<DrBacchus> Curtman: It’s a worm. Couple months old.
<DrBacchus> fajita: SEARCH?
<fajita> rumour has it SEARCH is not a valid HTTP method, so disabling it becomes difficult. or https://drbacchus.com/recipes/SEARCH2.txt
<DrBacchus> Curtman: What fajita said.
<Curtman> DrBacchus: Yikes. It’s getting more and more frequent it seems. I’ve got 26 of them in the past 24 hours.
<DrBacchus> Curtman: It comes and goes. Depends on the concentration of IIS machines in your part of the IP-space.
<Curtman> DrBacchus: But its safe to assume they are coming from compromised boxen right? I’ve been trying to alert them as they come in.
<DrBacchus> Curtman: Yes, that is coming from a compromised IIS.
<DrBacchus> Curtman: I had an automated notification thingy going for a while. A hacked-upon version of Apache::CodeRed
<Curtman> DrBacchus: I’ve just been using smbclient to connect to them, and printing a warning on their printers. 😉

Yikes.

Frances

I was supposed to be leaving on Sunday for a week of training in West Palm Beach Florida. Turns out that Hurricane Francis anhiliated the facility in which I was to be doing the training. So, I’m out the $100 for changing air tickets, as well as indefinitely delaying the expected income from the training. But Sarah really didn’t want me to go anyway, so I suppose it balances out.

Oh. I need to remember to cancel the text book shipment. Oy. Almost forgot.

Ghyll

Morbus Iff has created a game called Ghyll which is a kind of fictional Wikipedia. The degree to which people have gotten into the game in the short time it has been running is absolutely amazing.

Old man

Shane has an amusing, but oddly nostalgic (for me, that is), summary of his life thus far. So apparently I’m going to be an OLD MAN pretty soon here too. Next month, in fact. While I don’t really think of myself as an OLD MAN just yet, I have myself been thinking more about the events of the past, and thinking I might write about some of them before I’m too old and feeble to open the Geritol bottle. Darned kids these days.

Writing again

Last night I figured out a story problem I’d been worrying at for about 4 months. I knew what the character in my story had done, but I couldn’t figure out why he had done it. And that, of course, was the key to the story. Well, once I figured that out, large parts of the story just about wrote themselves. I think that if I ever get this one done, it’s going to be a really good one. And then maybe I can go back and fix the one that I got not-quite-written last year. At this rate, this book is going to take about 7 years to write.

In one of his essays about how to write (I think it was actually in Cat’s Pajamas), Ray Bradbury said that you should stop writing while you still know what’s going to happen next. That way, the next time you start writing, you know how to start.

Apparently, if you ignore that advice — if you write until you don’t know what happens next, you’ll spend the next 5 or 6 months trying to figure it out.

So, hopefully, since I left off before I was done, and I know exactly what needs to happen next, I can actually get through this chapter before the end of the year. 😉

So, Chris, how’s your part of the story coming?

Huskey Grove Branch

This morning I attended the Huskey Grove Branch United Methodist Church.

I did this because I wonder what would cause someone to live in a place like that, and what kind of people they are. Why would someone live in a place where 4-wheel-drive is a requirement to get to your front door? I suppose I also wonder why people would live in Pigeon Forge, or towns like that (Las Vegas, for example), but I suppose that most of these people lived in Pigeon Forge long before it became the 24×7 flashing lights tourist trap that it is now.

The church was a very beautiful building way out on Huskey Grove Branch road, which is off of the road into the Smokey Mountains National Park, a little ways in, if you go in from the Pigeon Forge entrance.

There were 13 people in attendance, if you count me. One family has 3 boys, and so comprised close to half of those in attendance. After the service, they had a congregational meeting, because they had a majority of the members present. One of the topics, unsurprisingly, was that, due to falling membership, finances are becoming a serious problem, and they’re not sure how they will remain open very much longer.

The people were very pleased to have a visitor. Apparently that never happens, which is hardly much of a surprise. It’s not the sort of place you’d stumble upon by mistake. But I had seen the sign several times a year, driving past it to the mountains, for more than a decade now. So it seemed worth a visit.

Although I had intended to stay in the mountains for two nights, after having such a hard time finding a place to stay, and then the episode in the Elkmont woods, I decided to come home tonight. I’m worn out.

A candidate for sainthood

I’d like to nominate for sainthood the bloke who thought it would be a good idea to throw some tincans up in the air and have them tell us where we are. The Global Positioning System is one of the top hundred inventions of the last 100 years. I think I’d put it right up there with the Internet.

Of course, if it wasn’t for the Internet and the GPS, I would not be lost deep in the woods …

The image displayed here shows me walking in (I believed) a straight line, between about 12:15pm and 1:55pm today. The point at which I decided I was lost is left as an exercise for your imagination. This is the backtrack from my GPSr, intermittently losing contact with the satelites, so you can assume that my actual path was even more circuitous. (Note: I changed the image a few times, because I wasn’t sure I had the right part of the track. I’m certain I have the right bits now.)

If you read the book “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon”, and didn’t understand why it was scary, here’s a few friendly tips for you.

When you’re lost in the woods, everything looks like a trail. Right up to that “Dear God I’m going to die in here and they’ll find my bones next spring” moment. Then nothing looks like a trail, even if it has a yellow center line. So don’t leave the trail, because you won’t find it again.

If you believe, as I once did, that carrying a GPSr ensures that you cannot ever get lost, make sure you take your cell phone with you. You’ll find that you get the best signal if you climb to higher ground.

When you’re deep in the woods, the GPS starts lying to you. For a time, it will tell you that the destination is 300 feet ahead of you. Then it will say that it’s 2 miles behind you. Then it will stubbornly refuse to tell you anything at all. Then, suddenly, you’ll crest a hill, and it will tell you that you just fought your way 500 feet through thorns in the wrong direction.

When you’re lost in the woods, all spiders are poisonous, and even pinecones can transform themselves into rattle snakes. Don’t ask me about the mechanics of this. I think it’s covered in “Tom Gordon.”

0.15 miles is approximately 750 feet. This may take you about 3 minutes to walk on flat uninterrupted ground. When you are lost, this may take more than an hour, because you are incapable of maintaining a straight line for any distance, and although you are certain that you are correcting back to the straight path after going around an obstacle, you’re wrong.

And, if you missed the other tips, here’s the important one. Never leave the trail. Never leave the trail. Never leave the trail.

Ok, that was a *REALLY* scary hour. Or was it just 20 minutes? I’m really not sure.

Then, suddenly, you emerge back onto the 4-foot-wide pave trail, with startled pleasure-walker tourists and their kids in strollers, looking with mild curiousity at your wild eyes and soaked-to-the-waist jeans, and it all seems vaguely silly and not worth talking about. “Oh, don’t mind me. I just spent the last 2 hours – or was it 15 minutes – in terror and certain that I’d be eating leaves and grass by sundown.”

Sheesh.

Oh, and just so there’s no confusion, I *did* find the cache, and logged it. So there. Nyeah.

Yawn

Morning.
I’m enjoying a spot of tea (frightfully civilized, wot?) by my campsite. I’m still not quite sure of my plans for the day. Yesterday was very frustrating. And, at this price, I really don’t want to stay here, as nice as it is.

I had thought of going to the little church just inside the National park. I have been curious, for about 15 years now, what it is like. I think I can still make it on time, but my tent is still rather wet.

I guess I’ll try. I wonder what traffic will be like this morning.