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Geoffrey Chapman

Observation of Visitor Private IP addresses

It has been observed for some time that some of our site visitors, usually of the less desirable types have been ‘presenting’ Private IP addresses, as reported by our site protection software.

An IP address is considered private if the IP number falls within one of the IP address ranges reserved for private uses by Internet standards groups. These private IP address ranges exist:

10.0.0.0 through 10.255.255.255
169.254.0.0 through 169.254.255.255 (APIPA only)
172.16.0.0 through 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 through 192.168.255.255

Private IP addresses are typically used on local networks including home, school and business LANs including airports and hotels.

Devices with private IP addresses cannot (?) connect directly to the Internet. Likewise, computers outside the local network cannot connect directly to a device with a private IP. Instead, access to such devices must be brokered by a router or similar device that supports Network Address Translation (NAT). NAT hides the private IP numbers but can selectively transfer messages to these devices, affording a layer of security to the local network.

Standards groups created private IP addressing to prevent a shortage of public IP addresses available to Internet service providers and subscribers.

Despite the above, which is standard(?) Internet criteria, we have observed visitors using addresses in the 192.168 range for over a year.  However since the beginning of the month (February 2014) we have seen a large number of addresses in the 172.16 range as well.  Something has obviously changed as these should not be possible.

Searching on the web,  has not revealed any other site that reported the problem? Whilst not an issue for ourselves, since we do not use the IP address information for any purpose other than providing an assessment of where our visitors original from, it might well pose a problem  for other sites.  It is suspected that the only ‘real’ way to stop the practise would be to block the IP ranges, such that a visitor using an IP address from outside the local network, that has a value within the ranges, being effectively ‘blocked’ from accessing any information upon a site, although this should not, according to the criteria above be required.

Tags:
website security IP Mapping
Geoffrey Chapman

Problems updating iTunes 11.1.4.62

apple logoJust received a update from Apple for iTunes, which I proceeded to install. Unfortunately it failed to install claiming it couldn’t restart Apple Mobile.

The error was 'Error 7 (Code 193)'

Tried a reinstall with the same results.

One suggestion seen on the web was to check the .Net installation, which I proceeded to do (version 4.5.1) and also checked that al .Net patched were applied, which they were.

Regretfully this didn’t not resolve the problem or make any difference at all.

In the end resorted to uninstalling all Apple products, including Quicktime. iTunes. Apple update service, Apple mobile etc., before performing a fresh reboot.

Now this time I could install the update successfully and it all works as before, picking up all existing music etc.

Why was the update so complicated?  I thought computing was supposed to be easy, not take up ones time performing pointless tasks.  Sarcastic smile

Tags:
Apple iTunes updates Errors
Geoffrey Chapman

Website Features to avoid

Just read an interesting article on Mashable about a questionaire they did about annoying website features. I must admit many of them are all too familiar on a lot of sites one visits. I would however add one additional annoyance and that would be sites that do not support all of the common browsers - Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari and Opera. No doubt you have your own particular pet hate as well.
Tags:
browser Humour website
Geoffrey Chapman

Problems with Windows 7 SP1 installation

windows7The question of quite how one is perceived as an expert in all things computing when one knows a little about one aspect of IT, is one that I will leave for those much more knowledgeable than I.

The other week I was presented with a PC that was reported as ‘crashing’ whilst in use.

I must admit I never managed to find it  crashing on me whilst I was looking it over, but there were a number of things that didn’t look quite right, as is usual when presented with a machine with ‘problems’.  There was a lot of ‘temp files’, consuming disk space and it was split into two partitions, the second of which (the data partition D:) was virtually empty and the system partition C: was virtually full, so a repartitioning would be a good start.  The Windows registry revealed a lot of entries that were not being used and there were obviously a lot of updates missing of which the most obvious was SP1.  One proceeded to run virus scans and starts updating with the latest Microsoft fixes. However whilst most of the updates applied themselves without any issues. SP1 would fail with an error message ‘0x800f081f’.

Searching the web suggested various solutions such as running a full disk check, installing the Windows Update Readiness Tool etc., but none of these made the slightest difference to the symptoms, even though there were a few disk errors detected and corrected.  As each solution involved quite a long time to complete, especially the disk check this was not going to be a quick resolution.

The Microsoft web site didn’t throw up any possible solution, but surely after all this time, I couldn’t be the first person to hit this problem? After several days spent trying the suggestions and after much searching I eventually found this link. Although it was concerning Windows 2008 R2 it was still applicable. The symptoms described almost exactly match what we were experiencing. Even the screenshots reflected the symptoms we observed, although the event log display was slightly different.  With this closeness we tried the suggestion.

The removal of the patch KB976932 with the Deployment Image Services and Management Tool, took over an hour and it was not always immediately obvious that it was being removed, or even doing anything at all, but one resisted the temptation to ‘tinker’.  Once removed the next attempt to install the SP1 upgrade immediately started working.

Over an hour later after a reboot we could then check for any further updates. As you may guess there were nearly another 100 patches to apply, so we were not complete yet, but at least we were over our major hurdle and we were almost ready to finish our tests and give the machine back to its owners.

Tags:
Windows 7 updates Tools
Geoffrey Chapman

Problems with a SEF component

We are currently trying to track down a strange problem with an installed SEF component.  The problem fortunately only occurs on our Development site but it has some very strange symptoms.

First we created our development site with a backup of our live environment.  Everything in the back end works fine but in the front end some pages display completely blank, with no tags what so ever.   Fine one would say, there must be a PHP error, (although why this should only occur on a restored system rather than the live site is another question), so we turn on ‘Site Error’ reporting to Maximum (or Development) and it makes no difference to the front end displays they still shown blank pages.

Perhaps a cache problem, but no, clearing all the caches, in the system, browser etc., still makes no difference.  Nothing is reported in system or error logs what so ever.

Then a break though, we disable our SEF component and the pages display OK. So if must be something with the SEF component!  We reinstall an older version of the SEF component and it all works perfectly.  Re-install the current version of the SEF component and the blank pages re-occur.  Re-install the ‘older’ version and the pages are fine.

At this point we report the problem to the component author’s support forum.

Now frustration starts to kick in.  The support from the vendor says that there isn’t a problem, since there is no PHP error, and it doesn’t occur on our live site!  Exactly what sort of support is it they are offering? And this is a component for which we pay for support!  I will withhold the name of the vendor for the moment, perhaps they will improve, and it might be a problem at my end, although it is not looking likely.

I am starting to hate SEF with a vengeance, and this is just another straw that is ‘starting to break the camels back’.

At least we have a mechanism to enable us to continue testing our components for a forth coming release, but we really need to resolve this at some time, so it will be revisited when we have some more time.  Watch this space.

Tags:
components joomla SEF PHP
Geoffrey Chapman

Chinese Domain Name Scam

We received the following email yesterday and were immediately suspicious and did a search on the Web to see what we could find.  We immediately hit upon this blog article which matched what we had received.  Reading the blog post we could see that although our email had a nice looking logo and a slightly different registry name it was the same thing just dressed up a little differently.  The General manager has also got a new first name, perhaps he is the brother of the previous incumbents?

Looking a little further we wonder why an Office Supplies company would want to give IT consultancy services?

For those interested the blog article, describes it very well and we will not repeat it here.  Suffice to say, I also do not consider it worth while going into what I will be doing with the emails.

Just another example of the types of scams that we see so often these days!

=== Email follows ===========

(Please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent. Thanks)

We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in Shanghai, China. On Nov 26, 2013, we received an application from Huamai Ltd requested "macrotoneconsulting" as their internet keyword and China (CN) domain names. But after checking it, we find this name conflict with your company name or trademark. In order to deal with this matter better, it's necessary to send email to you and confirm whether this company is your distributor or business partner in China?

Kind regards
Scott Zhang

***************************************************

Scott Zhang
General Manager 
Shanghai Office (Headquarters)
Tel: +86-21-6191-8696
Mobile: +86-182-2195-1605
Fax: +86-21-6191-8697

 cnregistry

============ End of Email =============

Tags:
SPAM SCAM Fraud
Geoffrey Chapman

Design Criteria for processing emailed issues

We have been busy with a forthcoming feature for our Issue Tracker, which is the ability to receive emails with details of new issues or emails containing updates to previously raised issues.

After much thought and consideration the following design criteria are  deemed necessary in the email issues functionality. They are included in no specific order of
priority.

Continue reading
Tags:
components joomla Issue Tracker Email
Geoffrey Chapman

reCAPTCHA updated by Google

We have noticed recently that on some sites, that Google’s reCAPTCHA have included a number of numeric challenges instead of characters. We didn’t take much interest at the time but mentally noted it.

Google has today rolled out an updated version of its reCAPTCHA system.  We first saw the details here.  reCAPTCHA is a user-dialogue system originally developed by Luis von Ahn, Ben Maurer, Colin McMillen, David Abraham and Manuel Blum at Carnegie Mellon University's main Pittsburgh campus, and acquired by Google in September 2009. CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, and as its name implies, it is a quick test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human, and one has probably seen it many times on different sites, and we even use it upon our own, however we still seem to be displaying character strings.

http://techglam.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/reCAPTCHA.jpg

Generally reCAPTCHA  presents two words (and the term words is used loosely): one which it knows (used to test whether you are human), and one which it doesn’t (used to help digitize the text in books). Since humans find numeric CAPTCHAs (pictured above) significantly easier to solve than those containing arbitrary text, Google will be showing you more and more numbers, which explains our observations. So we can expect to see it more often.

Tags:
security Tools joomla
Geoffrey Chapman

Strange 1604 errors with upgraded Joomla 3.1.5

b2ap3 icon joomlaWe today tried an upgrade of a copy of our Joomla 2.5.14 site to Joomla 3.1.5 as a test to see just how much we would have to change and the work involved.

The upgrade seemed to complete successfully and then we started to look further.

There are some obvious component that do not have Joomla 3.1 versions and we found that there was a need to upgrade some plugins which were causing front end site errors of various types but mainly relating to Mootools. Nothing too difficult to resolve.

On the front end we then started noticing a few page errors 1604 with messages similar to the following:

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'FROM WHERE ='index.php?option=com_xxxxxxxx&view=yyyyyy' AND ='1' LIMIT 1' at line 1 SQL=SELECT FROM WHERE ='index.php?option=com_xxxxxxxx&view=yyyyyy' AND ='1' LIMIT 1

It is very evident as to what is wrong with the SQL statement but the question is why and where is the statement coming from.  It certainly doesn’t look like a statement in any specific module as far as we can see.  The particular components (and modules)  in question work perfectly fine upon a fresh install of Joomla 3.1.5 so I think we can eliminate the component/module from being at fault.  It is not restricted to one component either.

Disabling module(s) sometimes indicates a specific module at fault but as I said earlier the module(s) works fine on a ‘fresh 3.1.5’ install.

We have also seen ‘404’ errors reported when trying to install/upgrade an existing component to the latest version to run on Joomla 3.1.5.  Again the components install fine on a fresh ‘3.1.5’ install.

Of course it could be that the various components do not upgrade correctly on Joomla 3.1.5 but this seems unlikely especially as one can update the component successfully on a ‘fresh 3.1.5 install’.

Our conclusion is that it is probably the ‘Joomla’ upgrade itself that is at fault. Even ‘reinstall’ of the Joomla update doesn’t resolve the problems. Inspection doesn’t provide any clear ideas at present as to what could be at fault, so it is probably fair to not even contemplate thinking about updating our ‘live’ site just yet until a few of the remaining ‘issues’ are resolved.  There is a need to ‘preserve’ our existing data and an export/import approach doesn’t really bear thinking about.

One to revisit later possibly once 3.2 has stabilised.

Tags:
joomla updates
Geoffrey Chapman

Another PC puzzle

windows7It must be the week for PC problems, since I was given another one to try and puzzle out the other day.

The machine was running slowly, and seemed to have difficultly in logging off users, shutting down, and even performing any long term tasks. Also noted that Windows Update would loop forever ‘Searching for updates’.   Even trying to run a virus scan kept hanging on files which I am reasonably sure were virus clean.  The machine wouldn’t ‘hibernate’ or ‘sleep’ and the user was forced to depress the power button to close down the machine.  To add insult to injury even the ‘task window’ was behaving erratically making diagnosis night on impossible, but when it did work the machine was showing less than 3% usage.

I have never seen a machine behave quite like this and immediately suspected a virus infection of some form. Norton and McAfee kept 'sticking' on various files when running and wouldn't run in safe mode for some obscure reason.  Even the McAfee program was refusing to use 'Real Time checking' and would periodically say it needed updating, even when at other times it was 'up to date'. Managed to run a virus scan using the excellent McAfee Stinger program in safe mode, which revealed that the machine was virus free, which whilst satisfying still got one no nearer to knwing what was going on.  Next various attempts were made to resolve individual symptoms with mixed success. Never could get Windows Update to work reliably though.  Even resorting to system restore and using the oldest restore from a month earlier, exhibited the same symptoms.

After wasting several hours trying to pin down the source of the problem the final step was just to bite the bullet and perform a factory reset, having ensured that I had copies of all the users files (documents, music etc.).   The restore worked perfectly and then comes the task of updating it with all of the latest Microsoft updates, which is no small task.  It is at times like this that you realise just how many fixes Microsoft release for their operating system. Several hours later it is still finding more fixes. Once you have run an update, running it again shows even more fixes are found.  It took six, yes six separate update checks to get up to date and that is just for the operating system itself, not for the Microsoft applications (Office). 

Next to load the user applications and copy back the users files.  In all over 24 hours have been spent dedicated to just getting the machine back to a usable state and I still have no distinct idea of what was causing the problem in the first place.  No viruses appeared to be present with all virus software fully up to date, and the program installation history indicated nothing new had been installed for several months.  Obviously a few program updates may have been made to things like browsers, but the problems were present even with no browsers active (but background processes were of course still present).

I suspect I may never really know what was the cause of the problem and searching the web doesn’t throw up any similar reported situations. One to put down to ‘unknown’ I guess. Never had to resort to a Factory reset before, but it proves the worth of the manufacturers (in this case HP) supplying them in a reserved disk partition.

Tags:
updates Windows 7
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