the

Little Projects

of Shawn M. Jones

It looks like Network Solutions is engaging in a process called “Front Running“. I found out about this last night when my girlfriend’s brother tried to register a domain name and wanted to see how much each registrar would charge him.

The process to register a domain name is rather simple:
1. Go to registrar’s web site
2. Use their web site to see if the domain name is available
3. Pay for the domain name
4. The registrar registers it

Steps 3 and 4 are rather atomic, happening almost simultaneously (the money gets to them and the name gets registered).

Unfortunately, Network Solutions has been engaging in “Front Running”, whereby the process goes a little differently:
1. Go to Network Solution’s web site
2. Use their web site to see if the domain name is available
3. Network Solutions registers the domain name
4. Now you can only buy the domain name from Network Solutions

This is a process called Front Running. If you decide that you’d rather go with a more honorable company like Register.com, but you have already completed step 2, it is too late. It’s over, you can not change your mind. No money has changed hands, but Network Solutions has trapped you into buying the domain name from them.

Shady!

ICANN has begun an investigation into the practice.

References:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/domain_names/3543456.htm
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9846487-7.html
http://blog.domaintools.com/2007/03/stealing-domain-name-research/
http://www.circleid.com/posts/81082_network_solutions_front_running/
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/08/1920215

Hi folks, it’s your friendly blogger here.

Check out the photos. I’m quite happy to have most of the ones up that were previously down. Unfortunately, I couldn’t maintain the pages made by the old HTML-based tool, BINS. Gallery 2 is a much better tool. One day I’ll get off my butt and make a decent template for it so that both parts of the web site, blog and photos, match.

You may have noticed problems with the site/mail server being down. I think we’ve fixed that now. I got a discount server several months ago, but I don’t think it came with enough RAM to support my needs. I was amazed at how I couldn’t squeeze a normal web server’s needs into such a tiny amount of RAM. Linux has gotten a bit more memory hungry in its later years. Now we should be good.

After this post I’m taking down the comments and trackers areas of the blog until I can find a better way of dealing with blog spammers. At the moment, I’ve got hundreds of comments/trackbacks waiting to be deleted that are from blog spammers. The solutions offered out of the box by this version of b2evolution are not sufficient for my dilemma, so I’m going to experiment a bit and find something better. So, sorry, no comments/trackbacks until I can fix that. There must be a solution out there somewhere.

Until then, you can email me at smj@littleprojects.org with anything questions or comments you may have.

Catch y’all later. I’ll keep plugging on the pics that haven’t been posted yet (rest of Hawaii, the Basilica at the Catholic University of America, etc.).

Update: The trackback/comment spam was much worse than I had thought. Not to mention that I now feel guilty that I had enabled trackbacks to be published by default. Again, I apologize if some of the trackback/comment spam offended anyone. It’s been cleaned out now.

Update to the Update: I’ve re-enabled comments as it was all trackback spam that was the problem. I turned off trackbacks entirely. Other discussions have led me to realize that my comment settings are ok the way they are and that they were driving the spammers toward the use of trackback spam. Bon appetite, feel free to comment!

As usual, when I have some time off, I tinker with my network and tend to break something.

I decided that I could let my wireless router rest a bit by turning off its gateway functionality, thereby accepting it into my LAN and telling it not to treat the other side like the wilds of the Internet. This means it wasn’t translating addresses for me anymore. No NAT.

This is all well and good, but now the network on the other side of that wireless router needs to be known to my central Linux router. Hmmm!

So, I typed in

sudo /<span>sbin</span>/ip route add 172.30.19.0/30 via 172.30.100.2 dev eth2

where 172.30.19.0 is the wireless network and 172.30.100.0 is the tiny (2 connection) network between the Linux router and the wireless router.

This made things work great, but I wondered how to ensure that this route was added at each reboot.

In CentOS 3, this information is stored in the /etc/sysconfig/static-routes file like so:

any net 172.30.19.0 netmask 255.255.255.252 gw 172.30.100.2 dev eth2

This syntax is used by the

/sbin/route

command.

Well, off to bed.

I’ve been playing with databases a bit lately for a small file tagging project I’m working on at home. My muse has inspired me to investigate cataloging methods and my files seemed to be a good start. More updates on this as it continues to grow.

Many of you probably know this, but I couldn’t seem to find it on the Net. I was probably searching on the wrong thing, but wanted to make sure I helped out all of the other MySQL users out there.

I created some tables using the gui from OpenOffice.org Base and put spaces into the table names. Surprising to me, it was ok with the spaces. When I tried using the mysql command line client later, I found that I couldn’t figure out how to reference them.

Yes, Virginia, you can have spaces in your database table names. This is how you referenced them:

SELECT * FROM `My Table`

Those special characters there are not apostrophes (‘), but backticks (`). Slight difference. The symbol is on the same key as the tilde (~) on your keyboard.

In theory the ` should also work for fields with spaces in them too.

Supposedly Microsoft SQL Server uses brackets ([]) to handle tables and fields with spaces in them, but MySQL does not seem to follow this convention. I hadn’t checked Oracle, Sybase, or PostgreSQL.

And, now I’ve been bad and stayed up too late again. G’night folks!

Where’s the fun in normal?

I’m home sick today. Another doctor’s visit. If anyone wants to know, I’ll email you with what’s up. Thank you all for your support during this painful time.

The ladyfriend and I went to Baltimore where we checked out the aquarium. Pics are here. You should check them out. I’m getting better.

I’m not going to make it to Otakon this year. She’s taking me to a Dave Matthews concert and I don’t know if I can afford this much traveling. Sorry folks.

On the home front, Koneko has moved out. I’m sad now. She’s not around. Even though she didn’t do much with me while she was here, at least the company was nice. I’ve got the freedom to cook naked (like Joey on Friends), but I can’t help but want to bug someone occasionally. The cats are only marginally interesting.

I’m glad I’ve got a new friend to bring over and bug.

On the other hand, I can finally get down to business with some things I want to do to the house with impunity. Also, it’s nice to be able to browse porn^W^W enjoy some alone time.

Next week is CISSP training. The test promises to be quite difficult and I’m not sure if I’m up for this, but we’ll give it a shot. I should really review the books before the class!

Speaking of books, I’m still making my way through my Ruby on Rails book. Eventually my plan is to redo this entire site in rails, giving me the control I want. I have to say, though, b2evolution and gallery have been meeting my needs quite nicely.

I haven’t talked to Sigje lately and think I should give her an email/call/etc.

Oh, and the solution for Spamassassin didn’t work. I’ve put the following into my local.cf file:

trusted_networks 72.36.174.35 127.0.0.1

Wish me luck. Hopefully this will force it to just accept anything from itself without checking it. The fact that SPAM URLs were in the log emails was tripping it, but then again, these SPAM URLs are what the log emails are reporting. Sheesh. This wasn’t an issue on the previous version of CentOS.

I really miss my girlfriend. I really need to ask her what name to give her on the blog. I could pick, but I don’t want to be mean.