yaleman.org

Miss Silvia – my first!

Posted on December 16, 2014 · 1 min reading time

So, as of 13/12/14, I’ve finally bought myself a coffee machine.

For $380 plus the cost of driving down to the Gold Coast, I scored a near-perfect example of the Rancilio Silvia. The only important thing missing (which I didn’t notice, in my excitement) was the tamper, but that’s easily sorted. 🙂

I’ve wanted one of these for a very long time - the simplicity and quality of the whole design just grabbed me from the get-go - and it didn’t hurt that the Silvia’s a well-respected piece of kit.

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On Splunk crashing every 18 minutes

Posted on December 16, 2014 · 4 mins reading time

Every 18 minutes, give or take ten seconds the Splunk heavy forwarder we run was spontaneously crashing. There had been no change in traffic or other conditions that we knew about on the ESX host the server runs on.

The operating system is Debian 7.2 x86_64, installed from the netinst ISO with a very minimally modified install, and the logs weren’t showing the OOM errors I’d been fighting with previously - 2Gb of memory for Splunk is never enough.

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Using fail2ban to mitigate Apache POST flooding

Posted on December 16, 2014 · 2 mins reading time

Every so often a bot has a go at my poor little Linode, triggering a notification about CPU/memory/IO usage and I have to come up with a way of defending it. Today’s notification was about high CPU usage, as usual.

linode CPU graph

I toddled off to my handy (free) splunk instance and saw that this time it was an attack against my wordpress instance’s login page. I could see there were lots of 302 responses to POST requests, so it was an easy case for fail2ban to handle - something I’ve used before with great success.

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