My name in lights

June 14, 2008 — osblues

… well, not quite.

A week has passed since I email The Register about the AVG logfile spam problems, but, after lots of emails between myself and their Internet Editor, they’re now running the story.

I’m a little annoyed that they don’t acknowledge that I brought this to their attention, but ah well. All I really wanted to do was let the community know that this happening and see if together we can sort this.

I’m really pleased to see that an employee from AVG has stepped up within the comments of the article on El Reg and wants to work with us (webmasters/site owners) to see if we can improve the situation. I’ve already emailed them and await a response.

I’ll keep you posted.

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Posted in Avg, Spam, Technology. Tags: , , , , . 2 Comments »

SPF compliant .net system.net.mail .mailmessage

June 11, 2008 — osblues

As a follow up to my post SPF compliant CDO message, here is the equivalent (well, not quite, but similar) vb.net version that I use –

Public Sub Send(ByVal strTo As String, ByVal strFrom As String, _
   ByVal strSender As String, ByVal strCC As String, _
   ByVal strBCC As String, ByVal strSubject As String, _
   ByVal strBody As String)

Dim MailObj As New System.Net.Mail.MailMessage(strFrom, _
   strTo, strSubject, strBody)

'SPF Stuff
If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(strSender) And strSender <> strFrom Then
   MailObj.Headers.Add("return-path", strSender)
   MailObj.Headers.Add("reply-to", strFrom)
   MailObj.Sender = New Net.Mail.MailAddress(strSender)
End If

If Not strCC = String.Empty Then
   For Each cc As String In strCC.Split(";")
      MailObj.CC.Add(cc)
   Next
End If

If Not strBCC = String.Empty Then
   For Each bcc As String In strBCC.Split(";")
      MailObj.Bcc.Add(bcc)
   Next
End If

Dim MailClient As New System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient
MailClient.Host = "mailserver"
MailClient.Send(MailObj)

End Sub

Again, as before, this is generally useful for web generated emails (like send a friend forms etc.), simply specify the users address as strFrom and a generic local address (noreply@mydomain.com) as strSender.

I hope it proves useful.

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Posted in .Net, Spam, Technology. Tags: , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Using LogParser With Awstats To Filter AVG Spam

June 5, 2008 — osblues

Following on from my post LogParser to the rescue, I’ve now worked out how to integrate logparser into the Awstats update process with very minimal effort.

Note: Awstats is a cross platform web analysis tool, but unfortunately logparser isn’t, this therefore is windows only.

To make life easier, I dropped the logparser files (exe and dll, although I’m not sure you need the dll) directly in to the cgi-bin where Awstats lives on the server. I understand doing this may have security implications, so do this at your own risk.

Open up the config file for your Awstats report (awstats.<config>.conf) and find the LogFile directive

LogFile=”E:/logs/W3SVC2074709632/ex%YY-1%MM-1%DD-1.log”

It’ll be something like the above, assuming you use daily logs on IIS. We need to change it to

LogFile=”logparser -i:iisw3c -o:w3c -rtp:-1 -stats:off file:rem-avg-spam.sql?logfile=E:/logs/W3SVC2074709632/ex%YY-1%MM-1%DD-1.log |”

This tells Awstats to execute logparser setting any necessary options and passing in the path to the log as before, it then grabs the output from the pipe and processes it.

That’s it!

The contents of my rem-avg-spam.sql file is just

select *
from %logfile%
where not (cs(User-Agent)=’Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;1813)’
or cs(User-Agent)=’Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;+SV1)’
and cs(Cookie) is null
and cs(Referer) is null)

I’m now using this for some fairly large logs (100mb+) and it works fine.

I hope this helps.

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More AVG & LinkScanner Information

June 4, 2008 — osblues

I’m still testing my LogParser fix for AVG log spam and it appears to do a pretty good job. It’s scarey how many visits are being removed from our stats once this crap is cleared out though. I’ve seen one clients stats for a recent day, drop from 14K to 8K so it really is a serious problem, especially if you aren’t even aware it’s happening.

For more information on the user agents used and some background on other similar AV tools, see this LinkScanner, AVG, TrendMicro, 1813 and SV1 post at WebmasterWorld.

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Speedy Xbox Repair

June 3, 2008 — osblues

A couple of weeks back, my copy of GTA IV finally arrived and I eagerly popped the disc in while on my lunch break. The intro started and I sat, pad in hand waiting to start my new game. The screen then went black and it appeared to hang, I didn’t know quite what had happened. Faulty disc? I thought. Restarted and

Three red rings of death.. aaarrrgghhh

Not happy, not happy at all. I thought to myself, this is likely to be an absolute nightmare, phone Microsoft, book it in, send it off, wait about 4 weeks and get very frustrated. To my surprise, this wasn’t the case at all.

I booked the repair in through my Xbox Live account and promptly received confirmation from Microsoft and a UPS shipping label via email, not bad I thought.

A couple of days passed due me being busy (and lazy), but I finally got around to packing it up and sending it off the Frankfurt. It was collected by UPS about 10 minutes after I booked the pickup online. Again, very impressed. This was now the Thursday before the end of May bank holiday weekend, so not much confidence in a quick turnaround.

I had thorough tracking via the UPS website so I soon realised over the weekend that it had arrived in Frankfurt, I checked my Xbox account later in the weekend and Microsoft confirmed they’d received it, excellent.

Monday night, I went to bed, only to wake up to an email saying my Xbox had shipped and was on it’s way back!

Well, to say I was surprised would be an understatement. I eagerly awaited it’s arrival.

It arrived on Tuesday and everything was groovy! Now that’s service. Microsoft also chuck in a prepaid card for one months Xbox Live Gold membership which can’t be bad.

From pickup, through repair and delivered back to me within 7 days.

All in all, impressed 🙂

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Posted in Technology. Tags: , , . 8 Comments »
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