*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

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 About a month ago a lot of our Blackberry users at work switched from using the RSA SecurID token (you know, those tokens that go on your key rings?) to using their Blackberry devices to generate their keys so they can access the company’s VPN.  It is nice since you have one less device to carry around.  Not owning a Blackberry and having a Windows Mobile device I wanted to do the same thing.  There have been times where I absolutely forgot to take my RSA Token with me and therefore I was locked out of accessing the company VPN.  Forgetting my mobile phone is a lot less likely.  So I set out on a mission to get RSA SecurID to work on Windows Mobile.  Here are the steps.

Step 1

Download the program and get it installed from the RSA web site.  Once you get the program installed on your windows mobile device, the first time you launch the screen it will look like this.

Step 2

Select the “File Import” option.  For me this was the option that worked since my network admin sent me the file I needed.  Obviously if your admin provides you with the numeric input you’ll chose that option.

Step 3

I took the file sent to me by my network admin and using the file explorer copied the file to my storage card on my phone while it was plugged up to the USB cable.  Browse to where the file is located and select it.

Step 4

Once the token is imported you select the token and then get presented with this screen.  The program supports the ability to use multiple tokens and this makes sense as you might have more than one VPN connection.  For example one of my banks, E*Trade offers RSA SecurID as an option (and no I haven’t checked with them to see if I can use the program yet, but maybe will).

Step 5

For your first run you will want to enter in four 0000’s as the pin.  I already had a pin number established but it didn’t work until I entered the four 0000’s.  Once I did that it generated a number as shown in Step 6.

Step 6

Take the number generated for you and enter it into your VPN software.  In my case, after I entered in this number I was given the option to create a new pin #.  I did and subsequent times I logged into the VPN connection I used that pin to generate the securID.

Overall the setup is really simple and takes less than 2-3 minutes to setup.  Now I can carry around one device instead of two.  The Elder is happy. 

If you have a blog as do I, one of the things you enjoy looking at is your PingBacks or TrackBacks.  PingBacks and TrackBacks were created as a nice way for bloggers to who know when other community members linked back to their articles.  Essentially they work like this.  Let’s say I write an article on my blog.  Another blogger reads it and links to it in one of their blog articles.  When a viewer on their blog clicks on my article link, a comment gets added to my blog article linking back to their site.  This is called a TrackBack.

For the original author this provides a way to keep track of who is commenting off line or linking to his/her information.  This has worked really well until the porn and drug industry figured out they could post unwilling information to thousands upon thousands of blog sites for free.  Spammers and hackers have literally taken this feature away from bloggers like myself by automating TrackBacks of web cams, sex toys, and so on.  Surprisingly the mortgage industry has yet to catch on. 🙂 

There are some spam systems out there that fight this which plug into several blog packages.  For example Akismet API is one the blog software I use (SubText) comes with.  Akismet is actually powered by Word Press (another popular blog software package written in PHP) and does a fair, not great job, of stopping TrackBack spam.  I say fair because I wind up still having to clean this junk from my comment logs.  To make matters worse if a blogger doesn’t clean this stuff out then it will count against him or her in the long run on search engine rankings.  A lot of bloggers have given up and turned TrackBacks off all together.  This is a shame because the feature is really useful.  This brings us to our question.  Where is this stuff coming from then?

The results may astonish you.  The same blog engine that is suppose to help you fight TrackBack spam is the very one that is creating the spam!  One Hundred  percent of what comes through to my site that is considered spam TrackBacks comes from one of three things:  Compromised Word Press blogs, an Apache Server, or a server running Linux.  Notice I said 100%, not 99% or 95%.  I can attribute each spam TrackBack to one or the other.  Don’t believe me?  Then let’s look at some examples.  Here is a screen shot to show you what I mean.  Below are the last four spam TrackBacks I received that were not filtered by Akismet.

Let’s look at what Netcraft says these domains are running below.

University of Alaska Fairbanks is obviously a distance learning community site and it has public_html folders enabled for user accounts.  In this example the user account idesign has been compromised since we see several hidden directories, “.psy” and “.xml”.   For those not in the know, if you EVER see a URL like /.something/ don’t click on it (ever wonder where http://www.slashdot.org gets it name? now you know).  This is a hidden folder on Unix servers.   The reason it is hidden is because when you type “ls” to get a directory listing the command doesn’t show you hidden folders that start with a dot.  It is a way hackers hide information on Unix systems from users.  This is one thing all the TrackBacks have in common.  The first URL is cut off but trust me, there is a folder start with a dot in the URL. 

The other interesting thing to note is three of the four URLs are generated from Word Press.  The “/wp-content/” folder gives this away since all word press folders typically start with the letters wp.  Out of the four URLs listed, three of them are Word Press and they all are running the Apache web server and two of the three unique domains are reportedly running Linux. 

Obviously the most ironic thing about this is the same blog software that is trying to help stop TrackBack spam is the same software that is creating the majority of it.  Thank you Word Press.

One of the key, very key things I had been wanting Google Reader to add was the ability to search.  Today I was looking up something and without even thinking about typed in a keyword into a search field located at the top of Google Reader and pressed the search key.

Wait a minute, that wasn’t there earlier!  Sure enough I then searched for “google reader search” and found this.  Quite funny, almost took me back there for a second.  Anyway, thank you Google Reader devs for adding such a much needed feature.  Now that you have that done please don’t rest just yet, add the ability to save searches so I don’t have to read every single Engadget article for Xbox or HDTV or whatever I’m interested in during a given week.  Make it so.

I signed up for a Twitter account this morning so you can keep up with what is happening in semi real-time as it happens.   This is of course assuming I keep sending text messages to it and the new shiny penny factor doesn’t wear off.  I figured what the heck, go ahead and sign up now before my desired login account is taken.  The link to my Twitter account is http://twitter.com/keithelder . 

Today I’m out of the office so if you want to know what I’m up to today there you go.  Right now I’m friendless on the Twitter site and it appears that no one has any love for The Elder.  I need friends. If you Twitter and aren’t a stalker, let’s friend up!

For your RSS pleasure I created a feed burner URL of the Twitter Rss here http://feeds.feedburner.com/keitheldertwitter .

Awhile back I mentioned playing around with SubText and DasBlog, two open source blogging engines written in .Net.  After several weeks of further investigation I decided to migrate to SubText. 

The decision was pretty easy in the end since SubText works with .Net 2.0 and appears to be somewhat architected the way I tend to do stuff.  That coupled with the pretty active email list made the choice easier. There are some features that it doesn’t have that I wish it did.  For the features it doesn’t have I hope to be able to contribute them to the project.

Before today I had two main blogs:

blog.zorka.com and a .Net blog

Both of these are now combined into one blog on http://keithelder.net/blog/.  It took a lot of hard work to get everything merged into one blog and I thought I would outline the process of how things went since I had to migrate a WordPress and a Community Server blog to SubText. 

Migrating WordPress to SubText

WordPress is written in PHP and I have been using it for a long time on my original blog at zorka.com.  My information went all the way back to 2000 before blogging was even blogging so needless to say I didn’t want to loose it.  I had a couple of options that I could go with when I ported the data:

1. Write some custom PHP code to get the data into a format I could import.
2. BlogML export.  WordPress doesn’t support BlogML at this time so even though I investigated it, I couldn’t find anything. 
3. Export the data from PHPMyAdmin (mysql database web interface) in some format and then process it into SubText.
4. Write an SSIS package.

In the end I chose option 3 and 4.  PHPMyAdmin allows you to export data in CSV, XML, Excel etc.  The one that worked the best for me was the Excel format since SSIS has a built in Excel reader.  Instead of writing custom code in .Net, I decided to take this opportunity to leverage SSIS (SQL Sever Integration Services) to assist with the import.  After creating a new solution I was able to quickly throw together a Data Flow to take the Excel file which held the blog posts and import it into the SubText database.  There were some conversions that needed to be done since SubText has some columns that are required in order to work but in the end nothing that was terribly hard.  Looking at some sample articles SubText required 4 additional columns that WordPress didn’t provide so I derived those from global variables after data was converted and verified that I had written the blog post.

Once I got the initial posts imported I had a little bit of clean up to do on some posts because of the way PHP handles characters as well as escapes a lot of quotes.  In the end it was easier to search and replace the exported file and replace the characters before the SSIS package ran. 

Migrating Community Server to SubText

 Once WordPress data was imported I had to get the Community Server data imported.  Once again I had four choices and initially tried doing a BlogML export.  While Community Server supports BlogML imports and exports via a plugin, the plugin bombed while exporting data for me.  I think there was some malformed XML or something in one of my posts that caused it to fail.  I couldn’t really tell so I stopped going down the BlogML route and wrote another SSIS package to extract the data. 

BlogML Makes It Easier

For those that aren’t familiar, BlogML is a new format that allows you to easily migrate your blog data from one to another.  Several of the major blogs support it that are written in .Net and a lot of us are hoping it catches on in other platforms.  With all the data from both blogs loaded into the database locally, I copied the SubText files to the server and did a new installation.  Once SubText was running on the server I did an export into BlogML and then imported it into the server.  Within minutes all of my blog data was on the server.  BlogML is really nice when it works and I hope more blog engines start to adopt the format.  It saved me from having to backup and restore the database onto the server, definitely much easier.

In the end of the conversion I lost my comments from both blogs.  I just didn’t feel like saving them for whatever reason.  Hopefully those of you that commented will re-comment.  The conversion is complete and I updated my RSS feed to point to FeedBurner as well.  If nothing else, if I have to move things around again, you won’t have to change your readers. 

I hope you enjoy everything being in one place finally.  I know I do.