Category Archives: General

Student Suspended Over Suspected Use of PHP

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I know this is old, but I have loved it for years. I try and share it every so often, just for those who have never seen it before. Today I found the original here on BBspot.

Jeremy

Wednesday  June 14 10:10 PM EDT

Student Suspended Over
Suspected Use of PHP

By Brian Briggs

Topeka, KS – High school sophomore Brett Tyson was suspended today after teachers learned he may be using PHP.

“A teacher overheard him say that he was using PHP, and as part of our Zero-Tolerance policy against drug use, he was immediately suspended. No questions asked,” said Principal Clyde Thurlow.   “We’re not quite sure what PHP is, but we suspect it may be a derivative of PCP, or maybe a new designer drug like GHB.”

php_logoParents are frightened by the discovery of this new menace in their children’s school, and are demanding the school do something.  “We heard that he found out about PHP at school on the internet.  There may even be a PHP web ring operating on school grounds,” said irate parent Carol Blessing.  “School is supposed to be teaching our kids how to read and write.  Not about dangerous drugs like PHP.”

In response to parental demands the school has reconfigured its internet WatchDog software to block access to all internet sites mentioning PHP.  Officials say this should prevent any other students from falling prey like Brett Tyson did.  They have also stepped up locker searches and brought in drug sniffing dogs.

Interviews with students suggested that PHP use is wide spread around the school, but is particularly concentrated in the geeky nerd population.  When contacted by BBspot.com, Brett Tyson said, “I don’t know what the hell is going on dude, but this suspension gives me more time for fraggin’.  Yee haw!”

PHP is a hypertext preprocessor, which sounds very dangerous.  It is believed that many users started by using Perl and moved on to the more powerful PHP.  For more information on how to recognize if your child may be using PHP please visit http://www.php.net.

OpenDNS Dynamic IP Update Script through Linux

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I recently read a blog post on the How-To Geek about setting up OpenDNS and the options it gives you to secure your internet browsing. They have quite a few filtering options including Phishing sites, along with blocking adult-related sites, and about 50 other categories along with a fully redundant DNS nameserver resolving. I decided to try it and set it up on my home network. The problem is that if you have an internet provider that provides you with a dynamic IP (IP address changes occasionally, if you aren’t sure what you have you probably have a dynamic address), you need to update the IP with OpenDNS. They have a lot of clients out there to do it, but as far as I found there were no linux clients. So I created a short linux script to do just that.

[lang=’bash’]#!/bin/bash

# Copyright (C) 2006 Jeremy Brent Hansen
#
# These are for your OpenDNS username and password. At this time, I do
# not know how to hide this info, so you will need to make sure you have the
# correct file permissions.
username=your_opendns_username
passwd=your_opendns_password

# This is where the log file will be stored. Currently it only logs the current IP
# and the response back from OpenDNS. The log will keep one backup. I
# just used a folder in my home directory (make sure the folder exists).
log_dir=~/.opendns

# Revolves the log file. Keeps one backup.
mv $log_dir/log $log_dir/log.1

while [ 1 ]
do

date >> $log_dir/log
/usr/bin/curl -i -m 60 -k -u $username:$passwd ‘https://updates.opendns.com/account/ddns.php?’ -silent >> $log_dir/log
echo -e “\n” >> $log_dir/log

# Resends the info after 5 minutes. Eventually I plan on changing it,

# so it only updates when your IP changes.
sleep 600

done[/lang]

So, there you have it. No root permissions are required, so I just have it in my .profile for my normal user. Just run it with the & at the end, so it will background the process.

Welcome

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Well… this is the first post of hopefully many to come. In this blog/site, I will be using it as a dumping ground for anything geeky. This may include posting code snippets on something I am working on, to post a review on an item, to general discussion, or even about installing software/OS’s and hurdles that I had to overcome.

I welcome all comments (except spam), but if your comments are offensive, they may be edited so they don’t offend other readers.

I have been planning on creating my own site layout for this site, but I haven’t taken the time to do it yet. This will eventually happen, but I haven’t even started work on it yet.

EDIT: To claim my blog through Technorati.
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