Blog Posts
Yesterday, 06/21/2021, I did a quick road trip from Indiana to Wisconsin to retrieve an older Mac Mini Server that has been providing website, database and email service for the websites Custom Visuals manages. The older one was a 2012 model that was built in March of 2014 and deployed in June of the same year. ...
We check for different types of attacks on our colocated server and ban the offending IP addresses for increasing amounts of time as the attacks continue. For instance, let’s say you’ve been trying to guess VPN accounts, which each generate an error. If you cross a threshold of say, 10 attempts, the IP address will be firewalled for a while. Once that time is up, the IP address can then access the ...
As someone who works remotely 100%, I like seeing these surveys and reports that show how many others are doing the same and how it fits their lifestyle.
I have a very nice home office above our garage with a view of our beautiful neighborhood. This place looks like it's straight out of a picture book throughout the seasons. I occasionally take my laptop on the road to a park or Lake Michigan ...
Zoffix provides a relevant discussion on the Perl vs. Rakudo name for the not exactly a successor to Perl 5 language at http://blogs.perl.org/users/zoffix_znet/2017/07/the-hot-new-language-named-rakudo.html.
I’ve been in the “rename it” camp for a year, not that I’ve shared that with anyone ...
When Custom Visuals started in 1995 (as Custom Data Visualizations), we were working on projects for individual companies with little emphasis on long-term projects utilizing our own servers. That all changed when an environmental company requested a web scraping application for a budget estimation project.
The project started off as a simple request to scrape a few dozen pages from a site ...
Do some industries use one type more than others?
There are a lot of terms used that describe essentially the same process of automatically getting or sending data to or from a remote site. The most common phrase is software automation, but you’ll also hear software bot, software agent, virtual robot, or just bot, all referring to the same concept. And it’s a concept Custom Visuals uses all ...
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As you may know, Custom Visuals automates as much as we possibly can as part of our core business. We have a couple thousand unattended tasks running on our servers (co-located and in-house) on behalf of our clients throughout the day (not including the tasks the operating system runs on ...
Introduction
This series was created because we had a problem with a hacker that infiltrated our system and sent out emails in early 2015. After discussing the information with a couple colleagues and their experiences dealing with similar issues I was encouraged to share what I had created and why.
In this part of the series, I’ll provide some of the SQL code for selecting from and ...
Introduction
This series was created because we had a problem with a hacker that infiltrated our system and sent out emails in early 2015. After discussing the information with a couple colleagues and their experiences dealing with similar issues I was encouraged to share what I had created and why.
In this episode I’ll describe some of the details of the OS X Firewall and what was ...
As we saw on our previous entry of this series , we had a problem with a hacker that infiltrated our system and sent out emails.
There are three log files that are scanned for attacks, the system log, the mail log and the amavis log. They all have different formats, but they all contain the IP address of the machine contacting our server in the log line of the failed access attempt. The program ...