Month: May 2015

Ipswich Town Centre Blues

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Reading Time: 5 minutes

Ipswich isn’t the wealthiest large town in the UK but it’s certainly not in line for any EU deprivation grants. It does pretty well, yet there seem to be rather lot of empty shops in the town centre. It’s something I’ve particularly noticed since moving back to Suffolk (from Hull) 3 years ago.

So on a recent visit I thought I’d snap every empty shop I saw. I wasn’t prepared for just how many there were though!

Sure, I know that the effects that The Internet, out of town superstores and the remaining fallout from the global banking crisis have had on all town centres but some are faring better than others. Ipswich seems particularly bad.

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Shell Attacks!

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Reading Time: < 1 minute

Toad!
…because toads are lovely really
I’ve been having some networking issues recently so I was watching the router logs on my main gateway. I was genuinely amazed by the number of attempts to hack my ssh server, every few seconds I saw another line telling me that the firewall had rejected another attempted hack.

So I started pondering what I could do to try to stop this. Perhaps I could write a little script that works out who the appropriate admin is and emails them? Yes, but I think that might cause me rather a lot of trouble. I can’t exactly send the logs to my ISP or to the Police – simply attempting to connect to a ssh server isn’t exactly strong evidence of nefarious intent.

So instead I thought I’d just publish them – each day’s log is uploaded to the downloads section as a text file.
If I get bored and fancy writing some php then I’ll start stuffing them into a database so we can run some basic analysis on them – produce graphs and run some analysis.