Ping is one of the most a-must mechanism for interactive web community and blogging platform. Drupal comes with ping.module which periodically pings to pingomatic.com. However, sometimes you might want to specify a list of pinger URLs that pingomatic don"t support or pingomatic may be too busy for you. To satisfy this requiremnt, David Herron suggested to modify ping.module directly.

Fortunately, Richard Eriksson submitted a patch for configurable settings. That patch is for Drupal 4.6.x so I adapted that patch to work properly on Drupal 4.7.x. Download the patch from the drupal site or see below.

Since 3 days ago, My AdSense Status in Google Sidebar bundled with always shows "Invalid Username/Password" no matter what I tried. Fortunately, I have just got a popup said that AdSense Status has been updated! to version 1.1 for fixing this problem and added support for searchs and referals. Wow!

For more information, see Invalid Username/Password in support forum.

I spent about one week to install Sneak Preview SAP NetWeaver 04 on my PC. I encountered a timezone problem during installation and login failure problem after installation. Finally, I found a perfect procedure to avoid all possible problems.

System Environment

1. Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1
2. Physical Memory 1 GB
3. Free Space in C: 50 GB
4. This machine is just a part of workgroup. It is not a member of domain.

Installation Steps

1. Make sure that you have installed main memory at least 512 MB. Otherwise, increase virtual memory to 1 GB

Today, I have just found that one of my machine has been hacked by unknown intruder. That machine is Rocks 4.1 which is an extension of CentOS 4.2 Final. Actually, I didn"t know that it was hacked before notification from NOC. My NOC received the notification from eBay. I am one of the team to investigate this problem. Below steps are what I do.

1. My colleage found that there were many process named `(swapd)`. Unfortunately, the executable was removed.
2. So I looked for login record using `last`. I found one weird login namely `ftpd`.
3. As I remember, I have never started any ftp service on this machine! There was something wrong with user ftpd.
4. So I opened /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow to find more information about user ftpd.
5. Sadly, it was on the last line and enabled logging in. This must be some kind of backdoor.
6. Then I tried to find out more using netstat and ps. Nothing found! This is so strange because I couldn’t use netstat -p. It seemed netstat were replaced by rootkits.
7. So I didn’t believe anything I saw and started to verify common executable like netstat and ps using rpm -V.
8. Well, they were replaced by rootkits like I thought. So I downloaded all necessary executables from another machine.
9. Next step was to see what command user ftpd had done in .bash_history. Nothing.
10. So I backed to verify history of user root. Bingo! The intruder forgot to remove history of root.
11. In the history, I found commands for preparing eBay phishing in 4 steps!
12. Create .eBay directory in /var/www/html
13. Download http://www.pishat.com/ebay.tgz and extract it in .eBay
14. Download http://www.pishat.com/neptune.tar and extract it somewhere
15. Run install script

Once I had the ebay.tgz, I looked into the code and found that it was a kind of phishing against eBay! At the last step, the victim’s credit card information will be sent to . Are you hacked? Don’t worry too much. If you are already hacked, you are hacked. You can change nothing. For me, this machine is just for installation testing so I will just simply reinstall it again and again.

ADTmag has published a long article regarding Apps on the Grid. Below are basic ideas of this article.

Technorati Tags: English, HPC, Grid Computing, Review

BREAKING THE GRIDLOCK

Sadly, my friend"s machine running MS Outlook 2003 always shows error message "Interface not registered" whenever he tries to send a e-mail. After googling for a while, this error message is a well-known one. It usually occurs if "Use Microsoft Word to edit e-mail message" and "Use Microsoft Word to read Rich Text e-mail messages" both are turned on.

For the exact solution, I have to run below command.

Regsvr32.exe %windir%\System32\Ole32.dll

For more information, read KB870707.