November 2008 Archives

I had 41,000 spam comments in my photo gallery. I had thousands of unpublished spams on my blog here. Spam comments were showing up as valid keywords attracting traffic on Google searches. So a couple of weeks ago, I shut down commenting in MovableType. It turns out that one other problem, mt.cgi consuming 2 G of RAM and all my processor time, was a separate issue. ImageMagick is NOT optional in MT 4.2. I had installed it, but MT couldn't find it. Thus an infinite loop consumed all my resources through our favorite cgi-bin, mt.cgi. Fixed that, but what about comments?

I didn't think Gallery was popular enough to be targeted by automated scripts. I thought CAPTCHAs could stop them. I was quite wrong. I upgrade Gallery to 2.3 and got me a WordPress API key for Akismet, which I'm now using in MT and Gallery.

I also looked at my logs, and found that 99% of my Gallery spam comments came from a limited set of IPs. Since I started blocking them at the firewall, I've seen 13,000 attempted hits from them. Here they are. If you're running Gallery, ban them now.

One week after my port order for my Comcast phone number transferred to Vitelity, Comcast shut down my Internet service. My Comcast voice port line had been dead for a week, and I got home to a dead Internet connection. My Cable modem could pick up an IP but Comcast wouldn't allow it to connect.

I called Comcast customer service and the generally polite customer service rep told me that a port order terminated phone service and Internet service, because it's not possible to activate a Cable modem with voice capabilities with the phone service off. Which is exactly what I had for a week. Customer service rep expressed that Comcast didn't like it when people ported "Comcast's" telephone numbers. Given that Comcast already sued Verizon over the porting telephone numbers difficulty, it's funny.

My only option was to get a new cable modem with no voice ports. After I hooked up the new modem, one call to an also-polite customer service rep got me connected again. I got a new IP, so a quick edit to sip_custom.conf got me connected to Vitelity again.

It was a positive experience, because I feel much freer to switch to whatever ISP I can find that's cheaper. Thus I'm looking at FIOS or DirecTV with a cheap landline for DSL. For those two shows I like to watch on Showtime and HBO, it costs us about $100 a month. Ouch.

What will next month's Comcast bill bring? Credit for terminated phone service? Extra service fees for termination? We'll find out in a month.