GaryC

Just received this little beauty of an email and it came with pictures!

Dear Sir / Lady,

I am a poor woman from Romania,affected very badly by the economical crysis.

Well it has been weeks since I last received any scam emails, I was beginning to think they lost my email addy :(

oh look here is a banker that needs to transfer funds and he's going to give me 30%!

After the move to Nginx, i noticed that php5-cgi was a little unstable and would occasionally die. To get around this i wrote a small script that checks if php5-cgi is running and if not, it runs spawn-fcgi to start it again. I then just added the script to cron and set it to run every minute.

#!/bin/bash
 
if [ "$(pidof php5-cgi)" ]
then
        # Do Nothing Here as the process is running!
        exit 0
else
        # The process has died or the server has just booted so start it up
        /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u www-data -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi
fi

Here is all the scam email i have received this week.

ok lets start with one of my favourite types of scam, The lottery scam!

SHELL INTERNATIONAL LTD
SHELL FOUNDATION, NIGERIA SE1 7NA.

Dear Donation Beneficiary,

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the program, the Shell Foundation Nigeria,
in connection with some of the many national companies
and other relevant bodies to issue an annual gift of 1.3,000.00 USD to eight lucky recipients.

i have grown tired of the shear amount of memory that Apache2 seems to consume so i have decided to give one of the smaller lighter web-servers ago. First i tried Lighttp, at first this seemed ideal but it slowly began to leak memory eventually taking up as much as apache2! this left me with nginx which i found to be a little hard to configure but once i had it up and running it made a hell of a lot of difference to the amount of ram & cpu being used on the server.

with MySQL + PHP5-CGI + Apache2 the server would be hitting swap within a day or two.

I finally got around to making my very own cMoy based mini amp for my headphones!

I really enjoyed making it to. This was the first amp i have ever made and it worked first time, well ok almost first time as there was a small grounding issue but that was easy to resolve. It's nowhere near the quality of a mid range amp, but it sounds good to me and that is all that matters.

All i got to say is wow, proper grammar and spelling I'm impressed. well OK all-most proper grammar but at least they're trying.

Obviously i needn't have to say do not contact this person.

I decided i had enough of the attempted loggings to my SSH server so i decided to install Fail2Ban. Fail2Ban bans IPs if they fail to loggin a set number of times. so far it's banned about 30! I wish these people would just go away :)

Here is a sample of my Fail2ban log:

2009-11-19 20:49:02,909 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh-iptables] Ban 220.165.9.232
2009-11-20 05:58:21,430 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh-iptables] Ban 60.217.229.224
2009-11-20 05:58:24,194 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh] Ban 60.217.229.224

Luck was on my side it turns out that the VM HD was not completly destroyed. thankfully windows had yet to overwrite the data so i was able to recover it! all i had to do is recreate the VM, and now it's all back!!! now i created a backup that does not reside on a drive on my system :)

PodScript.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# By Linc 10/1/2004
# Find the latest script at http://lincgeek.org/bashpodder
# Revision 1.21 12/04/2008 - Many Contributers!
# If you use this and have made improvements or have comments
# drop me an email at linc dot fessenden at gmail dot com
# I'd appreciate it!
 
# Mod'd By Gary Crowhurst
# The script now takes a single podcast url from a commandline argument
# as well as the directory where to save it. The log is also saved in the specified directory.