A nice little story on How The Death Star Works.
Category: Geekdom
We Got Our First Nigerian Scammer
Our office here has an online reservation server so you can book our homes online. We usually get about five or six bookings a day on it, as well as all the bookings we get from people calling us.
Last night we had a $2,000 booking online that the front desk was getting all excited about, until they noticed the card didn’t go through. Since I have access to the credit card logs on the server, I looked at the logs and it gave an ugly error code followed by “Hold Card — Call” which I assume meant that the card was stolen. They tried to call the phone number on the reservation, and it didn’t go through (and reverse look-ups didn’t show anything). So I started to look a little closer at the reservation, and there were several things that were whacky:
- The state code was “LO’ which, last I checked, wasn’t a state abbreviation (Louisiana is “LA”).
- The phone number was a repeating pattern of four numbers, and the area code is for Pennsylvania.
- The zip code was a Missouri zip code.
So I knew this was obviously a stolen card, and since it was an online transaction, there would be some sort of IP record in my server logs for this guy (and Visa was probably going to ask for it when we call). Since a full online booking with our system only hits a certain page after the booking was completed, it was easy to search the log lines out just by searching for that file name. After matching up the time stamps from the booking with the logs, I come to find out that the booking was made from an IP address in Nigeria.
Needless to say, the booking has been cancelled and our accountant will be calling Visa here shortly. More than likely, the owner of the card was caught up in some phishing scam and gave out their credit card number. Just the same, I do want to make sure whoever did this gets busted (though I do doubt that it will happen).
Cheat In World of Warcraft, Thanks To Sony
Sony has some ugly copy-protection on some of it’s music CDs (some would call it a rootkit) so you can’t copy them on your computer (if you’re infected, check this page out). That little root kit, however, is handy for people who want to cheat at World of Warcraft as it’s undetectable by Blizzard’s anti-cheating spyware so you can use the software to cheat in WoW.
Watchguard Firewalls Can Kiss My Hiney
For the last two days, I’ve been racking my brain on a port routing issue on my old Watchguard firewall. Folks were complaining that they couldn’t make online bookings. I ping the server internally, and it appears to be responding on the port just fine. I go off-network to a few different sites to test it, and the SSL port isn’t routing on the firewall, despite the firewall logs saying it was. So I resetup the port forwarding on the firewall, still wasn’t going through. Since you have to pay a great deal of money to get upgrades to an older Watchguard firewall, or even to look at the support pages I need, I just took the firewall offline and things worked again. Since I’m not about to let the network sit open without a firewall, I had to get a new one up and running fast (as we do a good deal of business with online bookings).
I scrounged around for some parts. I managed to find an old Slot1 Pentium 2 motherboard, and I had an old Celeron 333 sitting in a closet. Found a few sticks of ram, grabbed a couple of old network cards, found an old 2-gig hard drive and CD-ROM drive in my desk drawer (I really need to clean out my desk), burned the SmoothieMods Fix 1-7 ISO, grabbed an old Dell case from the closet and built myself another Smoothwall box (which I’ve had good luck with before). After about 45 minutes of building and installing, the thing was up and running, and ports were routing perfectly. After a few more hours of tweaking, I’ve got a bunch of modifications, tweaks, and features installed that my Watchguard never had, performance is great, and management is easy (and actually works in Firefox, which I can’t say about the web interface for my Watchguard).
So Watchguard, you’ll never be in this office again, or any other office I deal with. If it can’t be done with an Smoothwall box and a bit of hacking, it can’t be done, so I’m not about to encourage anyone to pay for those things again.
Sudoku Puzzle Solver
Personally, I’m not really into Sudoku, which is apparently really popular especially among morning commuters riding the bus or train to work. It’s so popular that the Oregonian now has the puzzle in their comic section. For those of you who don’t really care about solving the puzzle, need help with the one you’re working on, or just want to impress your friends, this Javascript-based solver might be handy for you. Source code and tutorial on how the script was created is available here.
Waste Your School Day Away
If you’re one of those cool kids that has a TI-83+ or TI-84+ model calculator, you could very easily kill off your entire math class playing this Dance Dance Revolution clone on your calculator. That’s, of course, assuming your batteries last the entire class, as this is probably pretty hard on them. Link via BB.
Connect to Multiple WiFi Networks at Once
I actually have a few different access points accessible from my home, so I’ll try this later tonight, but this is pretty dang cool:
VirtualWiFi is a virtualization architecture for wireless LAN (WLAN) cards. It abstracts a single WLAN card to appear as multiple virtual WLAN cards to the user. The user can then configure each virtual card to connect to a different wireless network. Therefore, VirtualWiFi allows a user to simultaneously connect his machine to multiple wireless networks using just one WLAN card. This new functionality introduced by VirtualWiFi enables many new applications, which were not possible earlier using a single WLAN card.
Hat tip to Greg for the link.
Free SharePoint Applications
I’m experimenting with SharePoint a bit here at the office, just to see what it can do, and I came across this on Greg’s site for a pile of free SharePoint templates for those of us who are not really in the mood to create all of this stuff from scratch. I’m mostly bookmarking this here for my reference, but it might be handy to a couple people who read this site.
Yes, I Know Hermiston Has A Big Wi-Fi Cloud
I actually knew and posted over two months ago, so please quit sending me this link or this link or any variation of the story.
And also of note: For those that aren’t familiar with Oregon’s geography, no I’m not close enough to get a signal (Hermiston is over 200 miles from here and the current record for unamplified Wi-Fi is 125 miles).
DNS Troubles
I’m having some issues right now with my server that’s hosting this site (and many others). It’s affecting domain resolution on the machine. I’ve posted a support query over here (also copied in the extended entry for this entry in case people don’t want to register) that’s much too geeky for much of this site’s audience. But if you’re getting bounces when using my e-mail form on the left, this is probably causing it.
If I don’t get an answer soon, I’m probably going to have to reboot my server, which I never like to do as a server should never have to be fully rebooted (usually services can be restarted to fix most problems).
Update on 10/7: It actually ended up being a host problem. They changed some things on their routers and/or firewalls that required more declarations in our resolv.conf file. So after lecturing the host about notifying me about those minor little changes, things are up and running again. I’m changing the post time on this post so it goes below my videos post on the front page until I can get up more entries.