As already reported a few minutes after the fact and on a few hundred newssites and weblogs, The Pirate Bay is currently offline. As most of you probably know, TPB was one of the biggest BitTorrent trackers and search engines around. They were based in Sweden, where what they did is legal (not seeding the actual files). They had a pretty impressive serverrack as well, I might add.

Now, they’ve had a few complaints and cases but every time it was ruled that they were doing nothing that was against Swedish law. That’s why it’s so strange now that all servers in the rack were confiscated (even ones not powering TPB) and that probably a few crew members are currently in custody. The raid was ordered by Swedish police after complaints from the Swedish anti piracy movement. I wonder how long it will take for them to come back online (not if, because I’m sure this was a desperate measure and everything will be let go once it’s once again proven that they were abiding Swedish laws)…

Although I actually never used it, it looked like a pretty good site – especially since the google-esque internationalized redesign they did, and the letters/emails they sent back to copyright complaints from lawyers were pretty hilarious.

… when you’re a scammer. See >here< for why you really shouldn’t try to rip people off.

Found this >hilarious piece of research< on IRC, thanks ytti.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why I’m ><‘ing my links: I’ve had complaints that they weren’t very clear in the rest of the text, which I agree with. I just couldn’t seem to fix it in the CSS in a jiffy without fucking up other links; I’ll try again later.

No, this isn’t Jeremy Clarkson screaming at the next 800bhp engine… This is me screaming after the thunder+lightning that just struck. I was about to leave the house to go back to the office, then a loud thunder followed by massive lightning, followed by my girlfriend screaming "Your computer!!!" … of which the monitors turned dark… Luckily it came up again after a powerdown/powerup (apart from an annoying noise coming from one of the fans).

boo:~# uptime

14:28:37 up 31 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.03, 0.03, 0.01

boo:~# ssh root@khalid uptime

14:21:34 up 18 days,  4:43,  0 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

boo:~# ssh root@viconia uptime

14:28:54 up 30 min,  0 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.18, 0.18

boo:~# ssh root@sunrise uptime

14:28:47 up 18 days,  4:42,  0 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 

The DSL modem also reset, and probably the switches and wifi routerthingies as well. I wonder why some kept running (like Diana’s computer which was right next to mine but in another wallplug).

While on the way back, I noticed most of Kessel-Lo/Leuven’s traffic lights were blinking orange too 😉

Next on the shopping list: a big UPS for the serverroom and a small one for our workstations… no more colo stuff. You’d think I/we’d have enough of those toys by now with 2 APC masterswitches, 1 STS, 4 switches (2 Cisco Catalyst, 2 HP Procurve), 3 routers in Brussels & 1 in Amsterdam, 2 25xx console routers, and a whole bunch of servers doing *cough* interesting stuff 😛

Michiel , my girlfriend and I went to the sea yesterday. We left a little late, so it was around 5 in the afternoon when we got there. The wind was pretty strong; we went for a walk on the beach but were firmly pushed in one direction 😉 Diana was almost flying away 🙂 Afterwards we met David/RedLED for some drinks, that was fun – got back home around 1, time for bed. But it was a fun minitrip 🙂

A few days ago a vulnerability in RealVNC was discovered allowing anyone to take over a desktop without any authentication at all (the client is allowed to select the authentication mechanism, of which one is "none"). Not too smart, but ohwell :s I wonder how much this effects the other VNC derivatives, since I thought their code was based off the "original" VNC. However, if they’re fixed, why didn’t they alert the RealVNC maintainers?

In the meanwhile I saw a basic scanner and a refined multithreaded scanner appear on Bugtraq . Fun for the kiddies! I don’t really do any firewall logging at the moment, but as noted in Filbert’s blog, scanning has certainly taken a steep curve upwards.

I want >this< .

As usual, Belgium already lost in Eurovision Song contest preselections. Good job, Kate! (Although I must say I can’t understand how Turkey was any better).I only saw the Turkey blonde, the Shakira imitation after that, and Lordi (thought those were pretty good, although I wouldn’t call it "hard" rock). But ohwell. 😛

 That’s what you get for forgetting your kniezwengel, Kate!

Been trying to fix up an installation for the last few days now. SLES9 on a box with an 8 port Areca SATA controller in it, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 as OS (will run Oracle). Areca supplies a driver floppy to use with the installer; all very nice. However, the SuSE installer does not copy the driver module into the initrd (even though it is regenerated on install, and even set to be loaded on boot in the config!), so after the installer reboots you get a kernel panic saying it can’t find the root fs. Which is correct, since the module isn’t loaded. Areca has some details in their README about "do this when the SuSE installer reaches 70%: press Ctrl-Alt-F2 and …", but the SuSE installer reboots automatically without question or warning, and by the time I could follow their instructions (some files needed to be on the disk first) I couldn’t fix it up before the thing rebooted by itself. PITA. Rescue mode gives kernel oops when I try to mount it the XFS filesystem on it. Debian Install CD finds the controller, but I cannot chroot into it (to run LILO) since the system is 64bit and the Debian one is 32-bit. Argh.

I love Debian, and the Areca ISO from tienhuis.nl … 

Seems the comment/guestbook spammers have rediscovered my blog since I upgraded to WordPress (they thought I was interesting enough to create a custom formfiller when this blog was still running self-written software, but now, they can use their standard wordpress bombers, yippie). Fortunately, I was never bothered even with a request to moderate, thanks to Akismet. Recommended!