That took a little more time than I thought it would but it was worth the wait.
Catching up on the hourly runs right now. The next page update will be at noon EST.
I came down with a bad case of “Upgrade Fever” and did a couple of other VMs concurrently. I have an ESXi server at work that I tunnel into over ssh. That had an Ubuntu 8.10 VM on it, so I upgraded that.
I also have VMware Player on my laptop, with an 8.04 Ubuntu VM. That one glitched on the 8.10 upgrade. It came up without a keyboard or mouse. Not very useful that way. But I ssh’d into it and twiddled the xorg.conf file. For some reason the upgrade commented out the keyboard & mouse section!
I was lucky I was able to ssh into it because the old 8.04 image always booted with networking screwed up, but apparently 8.10 took care of that problem. That upgrade has a way to go yet and I might just wipe and copy over the 9.04 test VM I installed yesterday.
Anyway, Hinky’s back in business.
Complete!
Halfway there.
Turns out gocr has been abandoned. I need that one for the project. I had to keep a lot of extra crud on the system in order to keep gocr around.
Why is that? They should let you pick & choose what you want to keep around, not just make it an all or nothing situation.
8.10 is better than 8.04 was, but the snapshot has been made and now we crank it up to 9.04!
After writing that diatribe yesterday I installed a 9.04 VM to test it out.
Very nice. But VNC4 is still broken after… what… three years?
It’s OK, though. I’ve pretty much learned to live without it.
It took two attempts. I keep trying to make a VM with JFS (IBM’s Journaling File System) but I’ve never been able to make that happen on a virtual machine. VMware just doesn’t like JFS for some reason. Installation went to 53% and the VM choked. Just DIED.
It was ugly. I had to reboot the host in order to kill the VM.
Second time through I bit the bullet and used ext3 instead.
It ran slicker’n shit.
I was so impressed I upgraded my Mythbuntu box to 9.04 and I’m halfway there on upgrading the proxy project platform’s VM.
Using snapshots judiciously, of course.
I was contemplating using the first 9.04 VM as the platform but I really didn’t want to go through that migration shit all over again. Hence, the upgrade. I’m doing it in two steps, 8.04 to 8.10, then 8.10 to 9.04. It worked fine on the MythTV box doing it that way. The biggest issue is all the Ubuntu servers have been getting hammered ever since 9.04 came out last week.
We’ll be down three or four hours today while the upgrade churns.
Don’t get me wrong. The Xubuntu 8.04 VM platform I built for the proxy project is running just fine. The scripts, the database, all run smooth as silk.
But as a desktop platform, it’s a complete wash.
Epic FAIL/
There is simply zero performance. This has been a real disappointment, but, like I said, everything else runs fine if you don’t mind doing all your dirty work in a Bash shell (which I don’t).
I’ve done some research in the Ubuntu forums and I know I’m not alone in this. The other poor schmucks who are facing this issue are getting the same old tired advice from the Linux “experts” that they’ve been using for the last fifteen years: “Well, you must have done something wrong.”
That doesn’t cut it anymore. Guys, it’s possible your beloved OS could have flaws (personally, I think it’s a Gnome problem).
Anyway, as I type this I have installed Ubuntu 9.04 in a VM on the same machine (with the crappy Xubu 8.04 VM running simultaneously) and it is a much better “user experience”. If Xubu 9.04 comes out in a reasonable amount of time I may run the upgrade. I took the wife’s (Pinky Dink) 6.04 system up to 8.04 with no problems at all. I will do a snapshot first!
Bye, bye, Macau! It was nice knowin’ ya.
Upon further hacking around with the Macau proxies I noticed they were extremely short-lived and very picky about what pages they’d serve up, so I did a special recheck on all of them.
They were all dead. Every last one.
I did this after putting the new server VM up. It is working well, although I missed the first run because my ftp settings were screwed up.
I have put up a short blog post about the transition here.
The old VM has been shut down.
May it rest in peace.
As it happens, all those Macau proxies work (that is, all that I have checked so far), but the trick is they send you to another IP (202.175.26.155).
Why?
Who knows.
I think at this point I’d attribute it to a clueless (or devious) ISP. Since they’re all transparent they don’t do much to hide your identity and given that they all go to the same IP, that address is likely to get blocked sooner or later by proxy-hostile sites. As always, use with caution.
Work continues on the VM move. The database has been moved over and I’m working on the scripts. I ran into a side issue of the GeoIP scripts (hacks I threw together before I took time to learn the API – which is actually quite simple). I need to clean that up, but at the moment it seems more trouble than it’s worth. I want to get this thing in production before the database gets too stale.
Yes, I’m still alive. And I’m still working on this mess.
I took a little nappy on the couch tonight. Woke up in the wee hours of the morning, and checked the list.
Two pages of proxies from 125.31.0.0/19 came from nowhere (also known as Macau).
Do they work for you? They sure don’t work for me. All those addresses seem to have been NULL routed since they were discovered. That is, packets go out but they don’t come back. I’ve tried tracerouting the IPs but I get stuck in a router loop after ten hops, when the packets hit ctm.net (CTM Internet Services, according to the whois record), the people who own the IPs.
This is very reminiscent of last year’s Bahrain Incident.
There’s definitely some sort of problem going on with CTM Internet Services, but whether they’ve been hacked or they’re new at the ISP business is anyone’s guess right now.
However, I’ve seen this coming. Proxies from Macau (“MO”) started showing up a couple of weeks ago. They screwed up the list because I didn’t have a flag for “MO”. As soon as I fixed that, more and more (MO and MO?) started to show up, culminated by today’s flood and NULL route.
I’m thinking Conficker, since the time frame is right, but it could be a coincidence.
In other news, I’m working on moving the project to another (virtual) server. I finally hit a wall with Xubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) and got stuck in the Land of Non-Support. Right now everything but the database has been moved over. This weekend looks good for a migration.
Wish me luck.
