I finally took the time to sit down and focus on porting one of the two last
services from the old server to the new. It was a PHP5 site that I was
commissioned to write back in 2009, it's been in production since, and I've
not touched it. This was actually the application that got me the money that
I used to build my first high-capacity file-server. So, this application is
still being used and the organization is happy about it and continue to pay
for me to run it. So finally, today, I took a look, and.. I was positively
surprised at how well past-me had put the thing together.. Except for relying
on default behavior to a degree that I would not anymore, only the mysql stuff
had to be reworked. It's up and running on in a docker container now and I'm
very happy about the whole process of moving it. I really hope the new server
hardware (and software!) will serve me as exceptionally well as the old did.
I downloaded all my inventory from GOG.com, I like to keep stuff on disk, I
don't like to rely on services being online (and compatible) forever, like I
kind of do with Steam. It took about half an hour to click through everything,
and when I was done I was surprised, I'd downloaded 20 Gigabytes.. That's the
entire capacity of one of my first "big" computers.. Time flies..
I played a bit of "World Rally Fever" which is a pretty bad DOS game, maybe it
was not so bad, but it ran very badly in dosbox, so I need to give it a second
chance and tweak the config. I tried getting "Soulbringer" to work in WINE, but
without luck.. The only way to get something on screen was with software
rendering, and while I wouldn't mind the graphics, there seemed to be a problem
with the buffer flipping, so every other frame was black, making for a very
epilepsy inducing experience (I don't get that, but I did get a mild headache).
I am stuck in the map where you start at the base of the building and have to
play through with each character, I got the level floor where I have to use the
no-weapons guy, but something glitched and the pause-menu appeared, it did that
a few times, and one time I hit the rewind button on accident, and then quit.
Maybe tomorrow I will stream it again.
I was browsing gopher://cloudb.zapto.org/ there is a list of gophersites that
he is scanning by brute-force (as far as I understand, just running through the
ip ranges..) and I found a gopherhole serving my site at 24.155.121.189... I
At first, I didn't believe it, and then things got stranger.. I fired up
wireshark and confirmed that packets are indeed coming from that IP..
Then I hit it with my browser, and got an nginx 404 screen, identical to my
own.. I hit it with wget, adding dusted.dk to the header, observed my nginx
log and.. There was a request from this IP, then the HTML was send back to me.
So.. Somehow, I've got a fan out there, who's bouncing my website AND Gopher.
Then I tried with SSH... and got the same fingerprint as my own server...
I know the next I did was a bit foolish, but since the service running there
is not important, I decided to connect to it with my public key, and I was
logged into my own machine. What the fuck is going on.....................
Is it a glitch? A routing loop?! Why is this machine relaying IP traffic to me.
Is it an attempt at some kind of attack? As I write this, I go to IRC, and am
reminded that packet reflection is a thing.. That makes quite a lot of sence,
since this gopher-site I visited is doing a scan, and found itself. So when I
visited, I also found myself. Shining holes in the Internet. A little bit of
mystery left in the world, how exciting! I sent a mail to cloudb to tell :)
Yet, I spent the better part of an hour writing this (and investigating that
weird online anomaly).
Nobody reads this :)
But I've found something
in writing it.
Even when i don't know how
to start.
Maybe it is as they say
Plaintext is beautiful.
Or maybe something else,
something akin to
meditation, a guided
reflection and introspection
that I would otherwise
have missed somewhat.
:-)