Hinky’s Proxy Obsession

Early this morning all of the updates just STOPPED.

The page was getting refreshed on schedule but nothing new was getting added. When I got home after slaving away all day in the salt mines, the VM that runs the project was choking on its own puke. It was starved for memory and unresponsive. I had to hit the Virtual Big Red Button to get it back. I rebooted it and took a nap.

When I woke up it was doing it again but it wasn’t dead yet.

I killed a lot of garbage database processes. More popped up so I killed those. Then more, until it went back to normal. Then I ran the process manually to see WTF was going on.

As it happens, my ISP has decided to be “helpful”. They have re-hacked their DNS servers to return their own search page whenever a DNS lookup SERVFAILs. This makes my scripts go nuts.

I have one or two Web sites that disappeared after the shutdown of ESTdomains in November. I keep them in the mix because I’m hoping against hope they’ll be back again some day. When the script runs across them it expects to timeout, and not get a “helpful” search page. Since it doesn’t timeout it chews on the nonsense from the search page.

Forever.

The database never got updated (nothing there anyway), process upon process went into forever-loops, and eventually killed the whole system.

Anyway, that’s all fixed now. The 10PM run should have a lot of new proxies, and I’m seriously considering running my own damned DNS server.

I knew this day would come.  Nine months and 1.3 million proxies later, my ISP has finally noticed that Something Is Going On. 

I used to worry about this more, but after I hit the one million mark I didn’t think it was such a big deal.  After all, more than 99.9% of the connections my system makes during the discovery and retesting phases time out.  No data gets transferred at all and in the rare case a proxy is alive a grand total of one lousy proxy judge page is downloaded.

Since they’re not all that bright, they are accusing me of having a virus.  This, as a result of a “network scan”, whatever that is supposed to mean to them.

To me, it means a search for open ports, usually done with nmap or some similar tool.  I do have open ports.  I couldn’t host three UT99 servers without open ports.  I have a smattering of minimal Web sites on port 80, mostly DNS placeholders with very little content.  I run SSH and OpenVPN servers.  So, yeah, I have open ports.

Open ports are not indicative of “having a virus”.  But again, their definition of “network scan” may mean something completely different from the normal definition.

I suppose if there had been an abuse complaint, they would have said as much. 

Since this email reads suspiciously like a form letter, it could be anything.

Anyway, I wrote them back and responded to all their suggestions (install a firewall, run antivirus, disable “Sharing for Microsoft Networks, blah, blah, blah) and asked them if they had any further questions.

No response yet.  Stay tuned.