Kris Tarr

Yeah, it’s that time of my life again. Job hunting time!!!

Gee I almost wrote that time of the year again, which wouldn’t be that accurate since I’ve spent about a year and a half at my current employer which will officially move to the my previous employer status as of November 27, 2008. No worries, I’ve done nothing wrong. The company is about to tank and I guess I was just making too much money here so they had to let me go along with hundreds of other employees… So I did what most of us do in this situation: shined up my resume and made sure they are up-to-date on workopolis, monster etc.

This brings up an interesting job interview experience I had just a week or so ago: Read the rest of this entry »

Is it just me or Google is updating PageRank(as it appears on their toolbar) more frequently? Just noticed that though my blog (this site) has dropped in PR (probably because of my long European vacation I did not have time to post on this blog), most of my other sites increased in PageRank as of today. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently opened up SSH ports on one of my servers’ firewall. Since then, I see tons of attacks on my server and firewall logs. The attackers all seem to be bots hammering the ssh port on that server trying hundreds of user name and password combinations, so far unsuccessfully. I exported the list of source IP’s and ran an IP to country lookup on them which I’m going to post here for your convenience.

Why? Well, because if you a system administrator or webmaster responsible managing security on a server that is connected to the Internet 24/7, you could do what I did to prevent these bots doing the same to your server, by adding the IP addresses to your block list (black, disallow or whatever it’s called on your firewall). Now, my firewall is denying access from those IP addresses on any ports. I also changed the port for the SSH service from TCP/22 to something else. Though, this will not prevent human hackers finding out which port SSH is running on my server, it will prevent bots hammering the server with login attempts. I’m also working on a code, kind of an add-on to my firewall that will block IP’s automatically after detecting these kind of attacks in the future.

I bet most of administrator responsible for these IP’s have no idea that their servers got hacked and being used for attacking other servers. If you do your own searches using tools like domaintools.com and others, you will see that most of these IP’s are running DNS and Email servers.

Huhh, here is an idea: Maybe I should make a site to post these IP’s on and write about the type of attacks and user names and passwords tried, similarly to the email spammers site where I post spam emails getting caught by my email servers to help sys admins better protecting their servers against those spammers. Read the rest of this entry »

I almost got bored again yesterday, so I tried something new to prevent me from getting bored, letting my mind rest a bit, by creating a web-based command-line interface, just for fun. First I just put together an ugly web based Commodore 64 looking interface to entertain my coworkers. But then when the laughter stopped I had to come up with some new and productive. Read the rest of this entry »

I (you may as well) have been wondering why I haven’t been posting on my blog lately. The truth is that I am working on several projects at a time that I can’t blog about, because they are either at a very delicate stage or because I am not allowed to mention due to confidentiality agreements.

There is also personal developments that are keeping me busy which I cannot mention just yet due to privacy issues. Family members and close friends know about them. No worries. Nothing bad is going on. It’s good. It’s all good… Read the rest of this entry »

I just can’t stop building search engines. My latest one is called: Where Can I Find Pages. Every time I come up with a new idea that I think would be a good improvement I just have to implement it. The problem is that I cannot just add that new idea to an existing search engine, because in most cases it would change the structure of that site so much that it would get the site flagged on other search engines which drive traffic to the site already. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my tools occasionally accessing internic’s whois server for domain whois info freaked out this morning when it was trying to get results for some domains. So I tried to query some domains manually to see if it’s my tool that’s acting strange or there is some changes in the internic response. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the reasons I am a vegetarian is animal cruelty. I just found this page about animal cruelty that brakes my heart: http://www.chooseveg.com/animal-cruelty.asp

Imagine watching this video every time before eating meat versus watching a video about planting and harvesting vegetables and fruits before eating a healthy vegetarian meal. Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t been able to find the source of this list of reasons why go vegetarian. I see it all over the web, but I think it’s very well said and it’s worth spreading the word. If anyone knows where it’s from, please let me know so I could link back to the original site.

ONE HUNDRED & ONE REASONS TO GO VEGETARIAN

PEOPLE
Every year in the UK we feed our livestock enough food to feed 250,000,000 people while in the world 30,000,000 people die of starvation
20 vegetarians can live off the land required by one meat eater
Every 3 seconds a child dies of starvation somewhere in the world
If Americans reduced their meat consumption by 10% it would free 12,000,000 tons of grain - enough to feed 60,000,000 people (the population of Great Britain) Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago, I found a AdWord ad while reading an SEO blog. The ad was promoting a service which promised to get unlimited amount of back-links to their customers’ sites for a fixed low rate. I decided to check it out. I read the marketing blah blah on their front page (I believe back then it was on searchenginetrust.com later moved to getsearchenginetrust.com). The service was called Search Engine Trust (SET) operating by Nicolas Messe of Yoffi Internet Marketing. Read the rest of this entry »