New Year, New Stuff

January 4th, 2011 at 19:06

I finally got around to some stuff I’ve been meaning to do for a while this weekend/holiday.

1. With the help of the rest of the l3ibs, l3ib.org and all its corresponding services have been migrated from a dedicated rusty old celeron to a shiny new linode. I like the idea of virtualized machines, since in theory it reduces the impact of a hardware failure, since the virtual machine can be migrated to working hardware with little to no noticeable effect. We’ll see how that turns out.


2. In addition to the migration of services, I put together a short list of security priorities for the new server. Embarrassingly, the old one wasn’t even running a firewall. The new server feels much safer with the addition of a strict firewall and some rootkit mitigation, but there’s still more to be done. In depth auditing of privilege escalation is possible via sudo, which has an option to launch subprocesses in a virtual terminal and log everything in a way that can be played back like a video. I’ll talk about this and more if I ever get around to setting it up.


3. As part of the server migration, and part of something I’ve wanted to do for a while now, I’ve migrated to tumblr from wordpress. My wordpress was constantly being hit with comment spam, and I was reluctant to spend time updating a platform I barely ever posted with. Tumblr will let me have a more hands off approach.
   
   Tumblr’s templating engine is easier to figure out than wordpress’s and I managed to get a working theme ported over in an hour or two. It’s feature barren, but I never intend to use a lot of the features that tumblr provides anyway.
   
   I like tumblr’s custom domain solution. It was easy to set up and works nicely.


4. With a new season of GOMTV starting up again, I took it upon myself to see if I could get my video scraper working. The goal is to be able to grab all of the videos without much human intervention. It was possible to get all of the videos before by just taking them out of Flash’s temp directory, but it was a cumbersome manual process, and prone to spoilers. If I can get this to work, it’ll provide a technique for archival, as well as a way to much more easily stream the content to my PS3.
   
   Turns out GOM has modified their site between seasons again, which meant that about half of my previous reverse engineering work had to be redone. Fortunately they didn’t change the fundamental way of authenticating that you have a season ticket and downloading the video. HTML scraping just had to be done in a different way, and I’m guessing this problem will repeat itself because will continue as GOM improves their site as time progresses.
   
   I sort of have a script working. It can fetch some videos, but I’m running into frustrating-to-debug corner cases.
   
   I will post about progress as it happens.

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