A webmastery interlude

[dianeduane]

(Non-technically inclined people, look away now. Or skip down to the bottom of this where it gets less technical.)

I have a lot more screenplay stuff to do today, but I had to take an hour or so off from that after having a quick look at the “Out of Ambit” log files on arising, and noticing that someone had been trying repeatedly to access pages on my site that didn’t exist. The URLs they were trying to reach had all the telltale signs of attempted SQL injection attacks, which I hate as they mess up my tidy logs. So I spent a relatively pleasurable short time watching the Doctor Who episode “The Girl in the Fireplace” on UK Gold while getting things fixed. (There was a certain enjoyable resonance to watching the Doctor blowing up robots while I dealt with other people’s bots to their detriment.)

I am not going to reproduce the actual string in question, but info about it and a detailed analysis of the string and the attack are here. If you’re a webmastery-type person, or you run a blog or website and are technically capable of dealing with problems of this kind, you should have a look at your logs and see if you’ve been having this sort of attack. Then decide how you want to deal with it — redirects, blocking via your .htaccess file, whatever.  (IP blocking is of no use because the attacks are coming from all over the place.)

Since I didn’t feel like spending all day futzing around with writing redirects, I downloaded a copy of the Redirection plugin for WordPress, activated it, and created a custom redirect to deal with this problem. Works fine. The naughty people (or the poor bot-infested machines that have been dragooned into this) who come to OOA and attempt to inject this string are now being sent to a place of appropriate punishment.

That’s all the techie bit for today.

The only other thing of interest that’s happened is that (after finding myself thinking how long I’ve liked the Doctor, and liked him a whole lot) I got vaguely curious about the whereabouts of an article I wrote for a Balticon program book many years ago: a discussion of the uses of imagination (among other things). It was called “Meetings on the Stair”. I dug it out, updated and cleaned it up a little, and posted it so I can find it later if I want it for something: it’s here, if anybody’s interested. I suppose I’ll also stick it up as a pre-dated blog posting, so it won’t screw up the present blog entry sequence.

Now then… back to that script.

Tags: Balticon, injection, Doctor+Who, Girl+in+the+Fireplace, webmaster, redirection, plugin, WordPress, UK+Gold, bots, robots, program+book, Meetings+on+the+Stair

Comments

[tortoises.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I had no idea you were quite so technical. It's lovely. ♥

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Thanks in particular for that last item, Diane.

[eavanmoore.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed, it was an unexpected treat.

[scarfman]

The other day upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I think he's with the CIA.

--MAD Magazine, c. 1972

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

Ooo, thanks for the article/essay -- I'll pass that link around to some of the fans (esp. fellow Whovians) and writers I know. :)

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Sure. :) Thanx!

[iamfiction.livejournal.com]

Holy... I checked the logs for my blog and lo, I found the same string in that article you linked there. Thanks for the heads up!

[dduane.livejournal.com]

The attack seems to be making the rounds: a lot of people are reporting it. If your system is set up correctly it doesn't seem to do much... but there are a lot of systems out there that aren't set up properly, and those are the ones this will be preying on.

[iamfiction.livejournal.com]

Well, not being super technical myself, I contacted the people who run my server and asked them about it. Hopefully all will be well! I don't like any sort of injection, virtual or physical. Heh.

On the Stairs: a response

[meepa.livejournal.com]

Since I can't figure out how to comment on the thing itself, this will have to do.

First, it made me cry. So much of that short piece both reminds me of myself, and reminds me why I read your work. Because, ultimately, my life would be a little poorer if I didn't halfway believe that I really ought to pay attention to what I swore when, in a fit of 10-year-old gullibility, I read the Oath out loud in my back yard...

...and because I'll never forget the day my friend and I sat atop her parents' RV in San Jose, during a rare sleep-over, and saw (what I still swear looked like) a badly-cloaked Warbird fly over in the direction of San Francisco.

Yes, I'm sure it was really a (semi-illegal) spy-plane, coming in for (or from) a landing. I tell the story these days mostly for a laugh, a sort of look-how-gullible-kids-can-be story. But I remember going to check (and not telling my mother why) all the Golden Gate Park clearings the next weekend when we were there, just to make sure there weren't scorch marks anywhere...

I don't hallucinate people. But Londo Mollari likes to argue with Severus Snape and Four in the back of my head, and I spend probably over half of my spare time writing fanfic because I can't quite bear not to explore the paths not officially taken. Not sure whether that makes me more or less sane than you.

I have to put in a plug for fanfic here; I think fanfic lets those of us who aren't very good writers explore the trappings of SFF and let out those little voices in a good and creative and constructive way. My personal creativity runs in very odd channels... and I get my personal kicks by taking the oddest story ideas ("Harry does what? And Rose turns into a what? Are you mad?") and getting people to believe they're sane. Again, what that says about my sanity...

Also, as a side note, my computer decided to play The Doctor Forever while I was reading it, which... set an interesting mood for it.

[kayshapero]

Thanks for the link! I'm reminded of a song I wrote in response to Bill Roper's "The Wind From Rainbow's End", to the same tune. It's called "Rainbows' Ends"

I'm also reminded of a discussion recently held on one of the rec.arts.sf newsgroups, consisting of one person who couldn't quite understand what a writer meant by his characters telling him what they will and won't do, and the rest of us who couldn't quite understand NOT understanding that.