Checksum Arcanius

That last post was number 300. Sure, there are a few holes along the way, from incomplete and/or deleted posts, but its just like Firefox turning 50, where I am sure there were some repeat downloads in there (heck, I am responsible for a few repeats myself).

I celebrated the occasion by turning power off to sf2, the server responsible for SilverFir.net, off twice without warning. Actually, that had more to do with a 15-amp circuit breaker, lots of power supplies in my room, and a strange same-circuit connection to a certain socket in the laundry-room-turned-kitchen-during-remodel, where the Microwave sent the whole kit and kaboodle over the edge.

Nevertheless, its back up and seems to be healthy, and is now connected to a UPS that I picked up from Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. Long story. Regardless, it power loss should be less common now.

Well, during my conniptions with Google, I discovered an interesting website – Blogshares. It appears to be an online trading site for shares in blogs. I’m not sure why someone would go to the trouble… but whatever. Unto each their own. Apparently, Checksum Arcanius is worth a whopping B$2,630.67!

Google seems to have deemed Checksum Arcanius unworthy. As a result, this site is no longer #1 in a search for “Arcanius” (as mentioned earlier). That alone was not too disconcerting to me (although I was not particularly happy either). What did begin to concern me, however, was when I googled for Titan Robotics, as I sometimes do, and Arcanius was nowhere to be found on the first page. Just a month ago, I remember my site being second in that list. Now, a fellow silverfir.net’er, The Deliverator, has taken up that spot. And I have nothing against The Deliverator (heck I like him, and read his blog, and hang out with him fairly often), but why did I lose the spot? What is going on here?

My search for an answer led me to this interesting article on slate. Ok, it’s silly (and scary) to even think about regulating Google. People who have suggested need to go and choke on a slurpie or something. Seriously, government is not a solution. It is a problem that can, when used in extreme moderation, solve a few worse problems. But moving right along, the article, while interesting, didn’t really answer my question. Clearly, Google has judged this site unworthy. But why? That is the rub.

Earlier Today (er, yesterday) I discovered that a google search for “Arcanius” no longer yeilds my site as the top result. This is distressing and confusing, especially since this site tells me my pagerank is higher than the other site.

It must be that durned rel=nofollow attribute. Or something. Anyways, link to me to help restore me to my proper place. Or whatever.

For the first time since getting the cable modem installed, my IP address changed. The result was an extremely unreachable host.
With me in Portland with the Titan Robotics Club for the FIRST Robotics Competition, figuring out what exactly the problem was, then fixing it, was not a trvial task. Fortunately for me and for anyone else using SilverFir.net, my wonderful mother was local to the server and after restarting the server to no avail, she was able to confirm that it was indeed the IP address that had changed. A quick trip over to No-IP.com and I had the DNS switched over (changes go active worldwide in under 5 minutes!), but then there seemed to be a few latent problems. Apache didn’t start properly, leading me to expect that the server was still down. But then later, when I impulsively checked my email, and found that my mail server was working just find, I thought, “Wait a moment now…” An SSH session proved fruitful as well, and a quick reboot saw SilverFir.net back to full potential in under a minute. Just Lovely.

Today I was searching for a good way to change permissions recursively, but only on directories or only on files, because of the vast difference in meaning for the executable flag between the two. Google is a great friend, and led me to a site, whose address I do not exactly remember, but whose advice was perfect:

find . -type d -name public_html -exec chmod 0755 {} \;

Just strip out the -name argument, and change between -type d and -type f to chmod only files or only directories, recursively from the current directory. A great way to correct past misconceptions about the setgid and setuid bits!

The more I learn about the Unix security system, the more amazed I am with how well it accomplishes so many taks while remaining very lightweight with just 12 bits of permissions per file. With my newfound better understanding of the setuid and setgid bits, specifically at how they behave differently when applied to directories and files, I am now starting to think I have a pretty good grasp of how the Unix security scheme works, and how to make it both high security and highly usable. User Private Groups is in my view the best way to set up a user-friendly filesystem that allows for higher-than-average security and higher-than-average usability for webmasters.