Update on Greek Spammers Email Addresses Blacklist

The pet-project of GrRBL,which is an IP-based blacklist, The Greek Spammers Email Addresses Blacklist, previously described at a previous post of mine, has grown to 400++ verified addresses of Greek spammers.

From now on, apart from the usual rsync access to anyone who asks for it, there will be a public link on the web with a PGP/GPG signed list of the spammers for anyone to get. The public link will not update as often as the list from rsync, probably once or twice per month is enough.

For anyone who wants to read a bit more: http://grrbl.void.gr/#email_blacklist.

Direct link to the signed Greek Spammers Email Addresses Blacklist.

Don’t forget to read the disclaimer and to submit greek spam at GrRBL Submission.

Upgrading Plesk’s phpMyAdmin to the latest version

phpMyAdmin is a great tool but a constant headache (xss, sql injections,etc) as well. Every now and then there are new security holes discovered that need to be fixed ASAP. On the other hand, Plesk doesn’t seem to follow these security fixes, so if you want to keep yourself a bit more secure than Plesk thinks you should be, then you have to upgrade phpMyAdmin by your self. This procedure isn’t very straightforward due to the way Plesk uses PMA so I’ll post here some notes/guidelines on how to achieve that.

My notes are based on Plesk 8.6, so I am sure newer Plesk versions are way easier to upgrade than this.

Step 1: Download new phpMyAdmin
# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/phpmyadmin/phpMyAdmin/3.3.8/phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-all-languages.tar.gz
Step 2: Extract into /opt/psa/admin/htdocs/domains/databases/

# mv phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-all-languages.tar.gz /opt/psa/admin/htdocs/domains/databases/
# cd /opt/psa/admin/htdocs/domains/databases/
# tar zxf phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-all-languages.tar.gz

Step 3: Rename old PMA and symlink the new
# mv phpMyAdmin phpMyAdmin.old
# ln -sf phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-all-languages phpMyAdmin

Step 4: Copy old config file
This step depends on your old PMA version. Since my version was 2.8.2.4 I had to:
#cp phpMyAdmin.old/libraries/config.default.php phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php
If you have newer versions of PMA just do:
#cp phpMyAdmin.old/config.inc.php phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php
Step 5: Edit necessary files
Substep a: edit phpMyAdmin/libraries/session.inc.php
When the first comment block finishes and before line 14: if (! defined('PHPMYADMIN')) {
add the following snippet:
// Close Plesk's session.
$proxy_session_id = session_id();
@session_write_close();
unset($_SESSION);

Substep b: edit phpMyAdmin/libraries/common.inc.php around line 190 and change:
    'error_handler',
    'PMA_PHP_SELF',
    'variables_whitelist',
    'key'
);

to
'error_handler',
    'PMA_PHP_SELF',
    'variables_whitelist',
    'key',
    // from Plesk
    'PHP_SELF',
    'db_host',
    'db_port',
    'db_user',
    'db_pass',
    'db_name'
);

!! Mind the “,” after ‘key’ !!

That’s about it…you should now be able to use your new PMA version through Plesk.

void.gr on IPv6

Since Leaseweb, the hosting company where void.gr’s server is located, isn’t yet ready to provide native IPv6 to dedicated servers, I decided not to wait for them any longer and to set up an IPv6 tunnel to tunnelbroker.net so that I make void.gr accessible over IPv6.

Setting up the tunnel is extremely easy. Having the following in my /etc/rc.conf does the trick:

ip tunnel add he-ipv6 mode sit remote 216.66.84.46 local 85.17.162.131 ttl 255
ip link set he-ipv6 up
ip addr add 2001:470:1f14:e0a::2/64 dev he-ipv6
ip route add ::/0 dev he-ipv6
ip addr add 2001:470:1f15:e0a::1/64 dev eth2

Yes, I know I could have used some of debian’s config files for these parameters…Oh and you “ifconfig” users, time to give up using that ancient tool, it’s time you learn how to use “ip”.

So for you people who have IPv6 connectivity, just try it. The current IP of void.gr is 2001:470:1f15:e0a::1. Ping6 it 🙂

Time is ticking away…bye bye IPv4: http://ipv6.he.net/statistics/

Investigating SIGABRT problems on Debian

3 days ago, after a Debian(squeeze/sid) upgrade on my laptop some programs started not to open. Specifically, pidgin and google-chrome were crashing while trying to open them. When I started them from a terminal the output was this:

kargig@laptop:~%pidgin
[1]    3853 abort      pidgin
kargig@laptop:~%google-chrome
[1]    3882 abort      google-chrome

The first thing I checked was the updated packages, whether there was some culprit.
The upgraded packages included among others:

[UPGRADE] libk5crypto3 1.8.3+dfsg-1 -> 1.8.3+dfsg-2
[UPGRADE] libkrb5-3 1.8.3+dfsg-1 -> 1.8.3+dfsg-2
[UPGRADE] libkrb5support0 1.8.3+dfsg-1 -> 1.8.3+dfsg-2
[UPGRADE] libnspr4-0d 4.8.4-2 -> 4.8.6-1
[UPGRADE] libnss3-1d 3.12.6-3 -> 3.12.8-1
[UPGRADE] linux-base 2.6.32-23 -> 2.6.32-25
[UPGRADE] linux-headers-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem 2.6.32-23 -> 2.6.32-25
[UPGRADE] linux-headers-2.6.32-5-common 2.6.32-23 -> 2.6.32-25
[UPGRADE] linux-image-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem 2.6.32-23 -> 2.6.32-25
[UPGRADE] linux-libc-dev 2.6.32-23 -> 2.6.32-25
[UPGRADE] xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.9.1-4 -> 2:2.12.0+shadow-2

My first point of checking was the xserver-xorg-video package. I started searching the Debian bug tracking system for references of crashes with abort. Nothing. Then I tried to check the other “suspicious” packages with abort crash reports on the bug tracker…still nothing.
It was time for strace.

kargig@laptop:~%strace pidgin
...
[snip]
...
open("/usr/lib/nss/libfreebl3.so", O_RDONLY) = 14
read(14, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0\3\0\1\0\0\0\0\30\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512
fstat64(14, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=253328, ...}) = 0
mmap2(NULL, 268988, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 14, 0) = 0xb58e3000
mmap2(0xb5920000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 14, 0x3d) = 0xb5920000
mmap2(0xb5921000, 15036, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb5921000
close(14)                               = 0
open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY)      = 14
fstat64(14, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=79200, ...}) = 0
mmap2(NULL, 79200, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 14, 0) = 0xb5ab7000
close(14)                               = 0
access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK)      = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/swiftfox/libnspr4.so", O_RDONLY) = 14
read(14, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0\3\0\1\0\0\0P\227\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512
fstat64(14, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=251136, ...}) = 0
close(14)                               = 0
munmap(0xb5ab7000, 79200)               = 0
rt_sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK, [ABRT], NULL, 8) = 0
tgkill(4027, 4027, SIGABRT)             = 0
--- SIGABRT (Aborted) @ 0 (0) ---
+++ killed by SIGABRT +++
[1]    4026 abort      strace pidgin

What immediately caught my eye was this line inside the output:
open("/usr/lib/swiftfox/libnspr4.so", O_RDONLY) = 14
I have a 3rd party package called swiftfox installed, but why was pidgin trying to use this package’s library instead of the system one ?

# ldconfig -p | grep nspr4
ldconfig -p | grep nspr4
  libnspr4.so.0d (libc6) => /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d
  libnspr4.so (libc6) => /usr/lib/swiftfox/libnspr4.so
  libnspr4.so (libc6) => /usr/lib/libnspr4.so

So the system package libnspr4-0d has installed its files in /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d and has also placed a symlink from /usr/lib/libnspr4.so to /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d. For some reason though the /usr/lib/swiftfox/libnspr4.so appears before /usr/lib/libnspr4.so in the cache output for the libnspr4.so library.
Checking out /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ directory, there was a moz.conf file containing the path “/usr/lib/swiftfox/“.
An “ldconfig -v” confirmed the finding:

/usr/local/lib:
/usr/lib/swiftfox:
        libnssckbi.so -> libnssckbi.so
        libssl3.so -> libssl3.so
        libsqlite3.so -> libsqlite3.so
        libnssutil3.so -> libnssutil3.so
        libnss3.so -> libnss3.so
        libnspr4.so -> libnspr4.so
        libsmime3.so -> libsmime3.so
        libmozjs.so -> libmozjs.so
        libsoftokn3.so -> libsoftokn3.so
        libplc4.so -> libplc4.so
        libxul.so -> libxul.so
        libplds4.so -> libplds4.so
        libxpcom.so -> libxpcom.so
        libnssdbm3.so -> libnssdbm3.so
        libfreebl3.so -> libfreebl3.so
/lib:
        libnss_compat.so.2 -> libnss_compat-2.11.2.so
        libselinux.so.1 -> libselinux.so.1
...
[snip]
...

Moving /usr/lib/swiftfox/libnspr4.so to some other location allowed applications like pidgin and google-chrome to start normally (and swiftfox still runs properly).

I guess that was my punishment for using 3rd party packages on Debian…

*UPDATE 23/11/2010*
Google chrome was crashing with some https:// sites with SIGABRT. After further investigation I had to delete /usr/lib/swiftfox/libnssutil3.so as well.

AAAA records with Plesk

Plesk is surely not ready for IPv6. Despite that fact, many people – me included, have the DNS records of their favorite domains managed by Plesk and still want to be able to add some IPv6 records to those.

Some time ago I had posted on my twitter account a link to another blog that had a “hackish way” to add AAAA records to Plesk. I have written a slightly more elegant shell script (to be run by root only) than the one provided by experimentalworks.

First of all you _need_ to alter dns_recs table of the psa database to allow AAAA records:

# mysql -u admin -p psa 
mysql> alter table dns_recs modify column type enum('NS','A','AAAA','CNAME','MX','PTR','TXT','SRV','master','none') NOT NULL default 'A'; 

Then download my plesk-AAAA.sh script and use it like the following example.

To add www.foobar.gr to point to 2001:db8:1001::1

Usage: ./plesk-AAAA.sh [zone serial]
#./plesk-AAAA.sh foobar.gr www 2001:db8:1001::1
#./plesk-AAAA.sh foobar.gr ipv6 2001:db8:1001::1 12

Known bug/feature:
If you add a record without adding a serial, for the soa record, at the end, it will add the serial of the domain in the form:

YYYYMMDD10

So if you add two ipv6 hosts in the same day for the same domain you _have_ to manually add a serial >10 for the second host (and so forth).

For the ones who don’t like downloading but would like to see the script source, here it is:

  1 #!/bin/sh
  2 
  3 usage () {
  4         echo "Usage: $0 <domain> <hostname> <v6 IP> [zone serial]"
  5         echo "Usage: $0 foobar.gr www 2001:db8:1001::1"
  6         exit 1
  7 }
  8 
  9 if [ $# -lt 3 ]; then
 10         usage
 11 fi
 12 DOMAIN=$1
 13 HOSTNAME=$2
 14 v6IP=$3
 15 INPUT_SERIAL=${4:-10}
 16 FULLHOST="$2.$1."
 17 
 18 ADMIN_PASS=`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`
 19 MYSQL_BIN_D=`grep MYSQL_BIN_D /etc/psa/psa.conf | awk '{print $2}'`
 20 PRODUCT_ROOT_D=`grep PRODUCT_ROOT_D /etc/psa/psa.conf | awk '{print $2}'`
 21 SERIAL=`date +%Y%m%d${INPUT_SERIAL}`
 22 mysql="${MYSQL_BIN_D}/mysql -N -uadmin -p${ADMIN_PASS} psa"
 23 
 24 query1="SELECT dns_zone_id FROM dns_recs where host like \"$DOMAIN%\" LIMIT 0,1"
 25 ZONE_ID=`echo "$query1" | $mysql`
 26 echo "ZONE_ID=$ZONE_ID"
 27 query2="INSERT INTO dns_recs (displayHost, host, displayVal, val, type, dns_zone_id) VALUES ('$FULLHOST', '$FULLHOST', '$v6IP', '$v6IP', 'AAAA',$ZONE_ID)"
 28 echo "$query2" | $mysql
 29 
 30 query3="UPDATE dns_zone SET serial=\"$SERIAL\" WHERE id=$ZONE_ID LIMIT 1;"
 31 echo "$query3" | $mysql
 32 
 33 echo "REBUILDING zone file for $DOMAIN"
 34 $PRODUCT_ROOT_D/admin/sbin/dnsmng update $DOMAIN

The script has been tested with bash and zsh. I have no idea whether it works under any other shells.
The script probably won’t delete your databases, but…use it at your own risk 🙂 I hope someone finds it useful.

Worst web application database design I’ve ever seen

Lately I was given a task of moving some websites/webservices from real boxes to some VMs. Most of the sites were Joomla! applications so moving the installation was quite easy, tar files, check configuration.php for db username/pass/etc and dump the database on the old server and then copy these to the VM. Restore files, import database, minor path changes to configuration.php… that’s about it.

But then it was time to move an “eclass” application. Specifically it was an installation of Open eClass, a web based e-learning software created by Greek Academic Network. So I copied the files, found the configuration file with database credentials, dumped the db and moved it to the VM. The site came up but it was not functioning properly. Course material was missing from the website, but I could certainly see the files on the file system. I dumped the database again and re-imported it. Nothing, the site refused to work as expected. I went back to the original machine and shut down mysql to start it with “–skip-grant-tables” since I didn’t have the root mysql password. MySQL came up, I logged in as root and I typed: “show databases;”

Oh the horror!!!!
I couldn’t believe my eyes…in front of me there were more than 200 databases with the names of courses of the e-elearning platform! I shut down mysqld and restarted it normally. Then I logged in as the “eclass” user and issued the following:
show grants for eclass@localhost;
The output:

| GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON *.* TO 'eclass'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD 'XX' | 
| GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON `eclassdb`.* TO 'eclass'@'localhost'  |

I immediately started thinking that someone had _really_ fucked up the installation. I went to Open eClass website and tried to search for documentation on installation instructions. I downloaded a pdf and I read between the installation instructions:

A “username” and a “password” for MySQL with database creation rights.

.
Okie..let’s translate that to simple english, it needs a ‘root’ mysql account renamed to something else.

I am not a web developer, I do not even consider myself a developer, but this setup makes no sense for me. Who and why decided that it would be a good idea to have a web application’s mysql user being able to create new databases ? Is this application only to be installed on a machine of its own ? If so, it’s such a waste of resources. I can understand the complexity and the extra time that a well designed and correctly normalized database requires, but this isn’t an excuse when creating software to be distributed and widely used by lots of people, especially universities. I can’t judge the application, it actually looks quite useful, but it’s setup certainly has design problems that need to be solved.

And finally, what “if” there is some security hole in the application (sql injections anyone?) and a malicious user starts dropping databases other than the ones belonging to eclass ? Who’s to blame for that ?

My advice to anyone running this application is to have it as isolated as possible from the rest of his infrastructure. Possibly in a virtual machine of its own. And there should be a warning about it on the website.

P.S. Looking at the credits, it seems that I know in person some of its developers, and that makes it ever harder to blog about what I faced. I’ll certainly ask them about this web application the next time I meet them though.

Awesome Tech Support by Seagate

This post is about a friend who had a faulty (firmware bug) hard disk replaced by Seagate…

A few months ago she bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 GB loaded with firmware SD15. This specific firmware is known to be buggy and Seagate has provided a firmware upgrade for them, but of course she had no idea about that bug. Everything was OK until one day, suddenly, the BIOS couldn’t detect the disk. It didn’t take her long to find out the cause of the problem…

After several failed attempts to upgrade her firmware following the instructions placed at Seagate’s site she decided to send her disk to Greek companies that specialized on data recovery. One of them broke the seals of her disk but failed(!!) to do anything else. The other companies, asked a serious amount of money, 200-1000 Euros(!!!) in order to handle her case/take a preliminary look at the disk.

Fed up with those companies she finally decided to contact Seagate herself and she was given instructions via telephone to complete the online application form for technical support and data recovery.

The very next day, a courier took her disk, delivered it to Seagate Labs at Amsterdam and within a week, she had her disk brought back, totally repaired, with all her data intact(!!). Everything was free and her data was saved.

So the next time you have a hard disk problem, especially if it is a Seagate disk, contact Seagate before contacting these “specialized data recovery companies”. sigh.

6 years! + grrbl news

It’s been exactly 6 years (!) since I started this blog: http://www.void.gr/kargig/blog/2004/07/18/hey-ho-lets-go/

Too bad I don’t have as much free time as I had in the past to post about interesting things. It’s a also a time for a redesign…I think I have the same theme for more than 5 years…

Anyway, GrRBL got redesigned yesterday by Christine and now there’s also a submission form for those who prefer it over forwarding emails. I also merged my other Greek spammers email addresses blacklist with lists by a couple of friends (postmasters) and now the list contains over 300 unique, verified, spammer addresses. This list is not yet public but if you are interested to use it and test it, give me a shout and I’ll give you access.

scanning for base64_decode references

A friend’s site was recently hit by the massive infections/hacks on Dreamhost‘s servers, so I decided to do some scanning on some servers that I administrate for base64_decode references.

The simple command I used to find suspect files was:
# find . -name \*.php -exec grep -l "eval(base64_decode" {} \;

The results could be sorted in just 2 categories. Malware and stupidity. There was no base64_decode reference that did something useful in any possible way.

The best malware I found was a slightly modified version of the c99 php shell on a hacked joomla installation (the site has been hacked multiple times but the client insists on just re-installing the same joomla installation over and over and always wonders how the hell do they find him and hack him…oh well). c99 is impressive though…excellent work. I won’t post the c99 shell here…google it, you can even find infected sites running it and you can “play” with them if you like…

And now comes the good part, stupidity.
My favorite php code containing a base64_decode reference that I found:

$hash  = 'aW5jbHVkZSgnLi4vLi';
$hash .= '4vaW5jX2NvbmYvY29u';
$hash .= 'Zi5pbmMucGhwJyk7aW';
$hash .= '5jbHVkZSgnLi4vLi4v';
$hash .= 'aW5jX2xpYi9kZWZhdW';
$hash .= 'x0LmluYy5waHAnKTtl';
$hash .= 'Y2hvICRwaHB3Y21zWy';
$hash .= 'd2ZXJzaW9uJ107';
eval(base64_decode($hash));

Let’s see what this little diamond does:


% base64 -d 
aW5jbHVkZSgnLi4vLi4vaW5jX2NvbmYvY29uZi5pbmMucGhwJyk7aW5jbHVkZSgnLi4vLi4vaW5jX2xpYi9kZWZhdWx0LmluYy5waHAnKTtlY2hvICRwaHB3Y21zWyd2ZXJzaW9uJ107
include('../../inc_conf/conf.inc.php');include('../../inc_lib/default.inc.php');echo $phpwcms['version'];

So this guy used a series of strings which all of them together create a base64 encoded string in order to prevent someone from changing the version tag of his software. That’s not software, that’s crapware. Hiding the code where the version string appears ? That’s how you protect your software ? COME OOOOON….

Greek spammers email addresses blacklist

GrRBL
In the beginning of the year I announced my RBL for Greek spam emails. The blacklist is growing larger by the day, thanks to some really kind people forwarding me their Greek spam emails, and has reached more than 120 IP addresses of verified Greek spammers.This alone though is not enough.

Why
Some spammers use their aDSL lines which have dynamic IPs to send their massive email “newsletters”. These people are split into 2 sub-categories. The ones that use their own PC as an SMTP server and the ones who use their ISP’s mail server as SMTP. I’ve tried to complain to some of their ISPs…some replied back saying that they were willing to look into the issue (but did nothing at all in the end) and others did not even reply to me. For both sub-categories, GrRBL is ineffective since I can’t add dynamic IPs in the blacklist nor can I add the IPs of the email servers of those major Greek ISPs.

Another category of spammers is the one that uses their gmail/yahoo accounts to send their emails. GrRBL is ineffective for this category as well since I can’t add gmail/yahoo to the blacklist…

What
So there was no alternative but to gather all those email addresses of these 2 categories above and add them to a new blacklist, one that will contain email addresses. I use this blacklist with my spamassassin configuration to eliminate Greek spam that GrRBL can’t. Each time I receive (or someone forwards me) a new Greek spam, I add the “From:” email address to this new blacklist. This new blacklist grows far more aggressively than GrRBL since it’s a lot easier to gather the data and already has more than 140 addresses.

Distribution
There are two available formats of the blacklist, one ready for use by spamassassin and another one with clear formatting ready to be used even by SMTPs to drop these spam emails without even touching your inbox.
The blacklist is currently only distributed to a group of well trusted people and it is available only through rsync with a username/password.

I don’t want to make the list completely public yet, but if you are interested you can request it at the contact email of GrRBL and I will reply to you about accessing it.

Sidenote
If you need a good tool to check a host again some RBLs, adnsrblcheck by Yiorgos Adamopoulos is the way to go (and it includes GrRBL!)

Using OpenVPN to route a specific subnet to the VPN

I have an OpenVPN server that has the push "redirect-gateway" directive. This directive changes the default gateway of the client to be the OpenVPN server, what I wanted though was to connect to the VPN and access only a specific subnet (eg. 100.200.100.0/24) through it without changing the server config (other people use it as a default gateway).

In the client config I removed the client directive and replaced it with these commands:
tls-client
ifconfig 172.18.0.6 172.18.0.5
route 172.18.0.0 255.255.255.0
route 100.200.100.0 255.255.255.0

What the previous lines do:
tls-client: Acts as a client! (“client” is an alias for “tls-client” + “pull” … but I don’t like what the pull did–>it changed my default route)
ifconfig 172.18.0.6 172.18.0.5: The tun0 interface will have ip 172.18.0.6 on our side and 17.18.0.5 on the server side. The IPs are not random, they are the ones OpenVPN used to assign to me while I was using the “client” directive.
route 172.18.0.0 255.255.255.0: Route all packets to 172.18.0.0 on the tun0 interface. In order to access services running on the OpenVPN server (172.18.0.1) I needed a route to them.
route 100.200.100.0 255.255.255.0: Route all packets to 100.200.100.0 on the tun0 interface

A traceroute to 100.200.100.1 now shows that I accessing that subnet through the vpn.

Searching for a new house

I’ve recently moved from Thessaloniki to Athens, Greece and of course the very first thing I had to do was to find a new house. To make my life easier (?) I tried to go a bit techie on that. Using tools/sites on the web and my Android. And here’s what I did and what I used for anyone who might be interested.

First of all I found some sites with real estate listings. The ones I found/used/tried to use were: Χρυσή Ευκαιρία, Rento, Spitogatos and aggelies ta nea.

Each one though has it own benefits and problems, apart from some who only have problems.
Aggelies Ta Nea:
pros
None. I can’t find anything innovative about this site.
Cons
i) It has very few listings of places to rent in the areas I liked (downtown Athens).
ii) It is full of listings by real estates agents who ask you as payment one full rent if they manage to find you a house.
iii) There’s no map showing where each house is.
iv) There are pics of very very few houses in the listings.

Spitogatos:
Pros:
This site has a really neat feature, price per square meter. It’s quite nice to have the site calculate it for you.
Cons:
i) It has very few listings of places to rent in the areas I liked (downtown Athens).
ii) It’s default drop down price filtering boxes are a bit weird. It goes from 150->200->300->500->750>1000 Euros. So if I choose a price range of 300-500 euros I get a url like this:
http://www.spitogatos.gr/gr/search/results/residential/rent/r100/m2011m/nd/all/300/500/nd/85/nd/nd/nd/nd/nd/nd/nd/nd/all/rankingScore_desc
If I change it to:
http://www.spitogatos.gr/gr/search/results/residential/rent/r100/m2011m/nd/all/350/450/nd/85/nd/nd/nd/nd/nd/nd/nd/nd/all/rankingScore_desc
I get exactly what I wanted.
Having drop down boxes might be fine for some people, but they don’t let me be as specific as I would like. A form to fill the price range by hand would be a lot more useful for me.
iii) There’s no map showing where each house is.

Rento:
Pros:
i) Rento is the most innovative site I found. Every house listing is on google maps and you can access its details by just clicking on a house.
ii) It also features a VERY innovative search bar. You actually type a sentence about the house you would like and it searches for it.
iii) Each listing has pictures
iv) You can contact the owner by email
v) There’s an option to note each listing you like so you get something like “bookmarks”.

Cons:
i) It has very few listings of places to rent in the areas I liked (downtown Athens).
ii) The search bar did not have a negation clause. You can’t search for “not something”. So since I didn’t want a ground flour house, I couldn’t filter them out.
iii) The search bar would sometimes filter more than you asked for. If I searched for a price range of 350-450 and got some houses, then if I search for a 40-60 sq. meters I got some others. If I searched for both the price range and the sq. meters I got very very few results.
iv) Many of the listings were quite outdated. Places had been rent weeks ago and the listings were still on the site. (I guess that’s a problem with real estate sites…owners don’t tell the sites whether the house has been sold/rented when that happends).
v) There’s no way to see the most recently placed listings.

The awkward thing about Rento was that I met the people who manage it in a Ruby meeting in Athens one week after I got the house. They were aware of these problems and they said that they have already corrected them and will push their changes to the site very soon. I sure hope so because the site is definitely worth it.

One suggestion for rento would be to have an option to export as kml the “bookmarked” houses.

Χρυσή Ευκαιρία:
Pros:
i) Many many houses listed.
ii) The filtering for the search works very well.

Cons:
i) Very few pics of the houses (if any)
ii) Not every house is listed on a map
iii) In order to get the owner’s telephone you have to send an sms, or call a number and pay some amount of money.
iv) Not every house has an address listed.

I ended up using Χρυσή Ευκαιρία due to it’s massive database with listed houses. I tried to use rento and spitogatos but I just couldn’t find what I wanted. (Maybe I’ll get luckier when I’ll try to move to a new house.)

I then created an unlisted google map called “new houses” and started placing marks on the houses from Χρυσή Ευκαιρία that I liked, sorted by date of last update, and were placed on a map in the site. Then I started calling the owners of the rest to find out where they were. If they were in a place that I liked I made an appointment to go and check the house.
I placed all the appointments at the “TagToDo List” application for my android.
Unfortunately I couldn’t use the “My maps Editor” by Google on my android due to some bug it stopped connecting to google maps. It would be really useful to have this app because I could have all the places I placed on “new houses” and have them with me. Instead I had to print the maps with the marks on them.

Finally in order to walk around the city and not get lost I used the Rmaps application. It’s so much better than the standard google maps because you can get many different maps, and with the addition of GPS Status you can copy paste your exact location to any notes applications you might be using on android to track new houses you find while walking.

Debian adventures

This is post is a rant. So don’t complain, I warned you.

<rant>
On my laptop (Macbook 4,1) I run Debian testing/experimental which was running quite smoothly since I installed it apart from the couple few weeks.

The first problem I faced was java not running inside browsers. Firefox, Iceweasel, Opera, google-chrome…nothing. I spent at least 2 hours installing/uninstalling various java packages, moving plugins to new locations and I couldn’t get it to work. I was furiously googling about the issue until I hit the jackpot: squeeze : in case you have no network connection with java apps …

Today I upgraded xserver-xorg-input-synaptics from 1.2.0-2 to 1.2.1-1. Even though it is a minor version bump a kind fairy also told me to reboot…I rebooted and my touchpad was not working properly, tapping was lost, I couldn’t use synclient because shared memory config (SHM) was not activated and so on and so on. My dynamic config using hal was there, /var/log/Xorg.0.log said that I was using the proper device and lshal showed correct settings for the device. I read /usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/NEWS.Debian.gz nothing new. After some googling another jackpot: Bug#564211: xserver-xorg-input-synaptics: Lost tapping after upgrading to 1.2.1-1. For some reason touchpad config has moved to udev from hal and the maintainers didn’t think it was important enough that needed to be documented someplace or put it in README.Debian…

The last issue I am having is with linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686-bigmem not working correctly with KMS and failing with DRM.
[ 0.967942] [drm] set up 15M of stolen space
[ 0.968030] nommu_map_sg: overflow 13d800000+4096 of device mask ffffffff
[ 0.968085] [drm:drm_agp_bind_pages] *ERROR* Failed to bind AGP memory: -12
[ 0.968159] [drm:i915_driver_load] *ERROR* failed to init modeset
[ 0.973067] i915: probe of 0000:00:02.0 failed with error -28

linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686 works fine with those though.
[ 0.973466] [drm] set up 15M of stolen space
[ 1.907642] [drm] TV-16: set mode NTSC 480i 0
[ 2.137173] [drm] LVDS-8: set mode 1280x800 1f
[ 2.193497] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 160x50
[ 2.197435] fb0: inteldrmfb frame buffer device
[ 2.197436] registered panic notifier
[ 2.197442] [drm] Initialized i915 1.6.0 20080730 for 0000:00:02.0 on minor 0

Xorg is amazingly sluggish using linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686-bigmem kernel. I search the debian bugs database and noone seems to have reported such an issue. But google came up with: [G35/KMS] DRM failure during boot (linux 2.6.31->2.6.32 regression). The issue looks solved so I will try and report it to Debian and see what comes out of it…
*Update* Bug Report: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=567352

If you dare to comment saying “that’s what you get for using experimental” I really hope and curse you to spend 3 hours today to try and figure out what has changed in a minor version upgrade of one of your installed packages.
Even worse, if you are on those guys that kept telling me “don’t use stable, testing is stable as a rock, never had a problem in years…” then I curse you to spend a whole day trying to reconfigure something with no documentation 😛
<rant></rant>

Greek adblock plus filter on the official subscription list

Six months after my original post on the creation of Greek Adblock Plus filter, the filter is finally added on the official subscription list thanks to Wladimir Palant.
Apart from Adblock Plus add-on for Firefox/Iceweasel/etc, the filter is also usable by the AdThwart extension for Google Chrome/Chromium

Until today the list peaked at 70 subscribers…I hope this will make more people trust my filter list and reach at least 100 subscribers.

As a sidenote, my RBL for Greek spam has moved to a new, better server thanks to a very kind person who donated it and some people administering mail servers have already added it to their spam filters. Since the original announcement the RBL jumped from 500 reqs/min to 2000 reqs/min.

RBL for Greek spam emails

It’s been some months now that I’ve started collecting some IP addresses of well known Greek spammers and I’ve put them on an DNSBL. I’ve named this list GrRBL. The software I use to run the list is rbldnsd.

The list is strictly moderated by me and only me and I try to be very selective on hosts I add to the list. The list contains hosts not only in .gr zone but also “foreign” hosts used to send spam messages either in Greek language or of Greek interest.

There’s a minimalistic guide on using it with spamassassin, exim, sendmail and postfix on GrRBL’s website. There are currently no statistics and no public listing of IPs in the blacklist. If there’s enough demand for statistics I might create some.

There’s also NO automatic deletion support, once an IP is in the list there’s no automatic way out. Since I am the only one adding IPs to the list, I am also the only one removing them, manually of course.

Even though I use GrRBL in all of the mail servers I own/manage, still I consider the service as beta. I don’t think it’s ever going to eat your emails, but you are still the only one responsible if this happens.

To submit new spam messages for inclusion please send me an email with FULL headers of the spam message to grrbl [at] void [dot] gr and I will try to take a look at it as soon as possible.

If you use it, or plan to, please leave a comment or even better, submit some spam messages so the list gets bigger and better.

P.S. In case you wonder, yes the list contains the IPs of the notorious sofokleous10 spammer.