YouTube.com blocked?

This is a premature post. PIE routers are dropping packets destined to any of the various IPs youtube.com is living on. The following are two traceroute dumps that show packets destined to youtube.com abruptly disappearing after touching PIE routers.

From behind NTC link:

1 202-83-175-145.reverse.ntc.net.pk (202.83.175.145) 1.193 ms 1.172 ms 1.338 ms
2 khi77.pie.net.pk (221.120.192.105) 19.050 ms khi77.pie.net.pk (221.120.192.101) 30.789 ms 18.679 ms
3 192.168.9.2 (192.168.9.2) 10.169 ms !H * 34.435 ms !H

From behind PTCL DSL link at home:

1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 0.540 ms 0.432 ms 0.472 ms
2 116.71.0.1 (116.71.0.1) 30.967 ms 35.191 ms 29.968 ms
3 203.99.170.98 (203.99.170.98) 26.720 ms 25.927 ms 25.967 ms
4 khi77.pie.net.pk (202.125.128.134) 26.219 ms !H * 26.785 ms !H

As best as I can tell, PIE is regulated by PTA. The bans lashed over blogger.com earlier were enforced at PIE routers as well.

This is an interesting debate on SlashDot.org about the apparently nine hundred Danish websites that have been defaced.

So great to have someone to come home to!

Lubna tagged me. The lines I have chosen aren’t exactly three lines, they aren’t exactly from a book lying nearest to where I had been when I chose the lines, and the first of those lines isn’t exactly the fifth line on that page. They are from an electronic copy of the enthralling THE CUCKOO’S EGG by Cliff Stoll.

      I biked home, thinking of devious hacker-trapping schemes. As I came closer to home, though, my thoughts turned to dinner. So great to have someone to come home to.
      Martha Matthews and I had lived together for a few years now, and been friends for almost ten. We’d known each other so well that it was hard to remember a time before I knew her.
      Old friends shook their heads. They’d never seen me stay with one woman this long. I’d fall in love, hang around for a couple of years, and then we’d grow tired of each other and move on. I was still good friends with several former lovers, but the romance never seemed to last. I’d always been cynical and sarcastic, protecting myself from getting too close to anyone.
      But life with Martha felt different. Barrier after Barrier came down, slowly, over time. She insisted on talking out our differences, demanded to know the reasons for my moods and tempers, demanded that we think of ways to get along better. It was unbearable sometimes–I hated to talk when I was mad–but it usually seemed to work.

The wind.

The wind howled consistently. The wind chimes that had once hung peacefully by the edges on the doors and windows, occasionally being pushed around by gusts of wind, wailed loudly. The wooden shutter flipped across the window, depriving for mere seconds the window of its veil, creating a rattling sound as it came flurrying down, clashing its wooden lower edge with the hood of the window. The leaves swayed almost perpetually, their stems strenuously trying hard to grip them tightly, as the branches flapped and clashed and struggled violently with the resolute winds. Anything and everything that could feel it, shuddered and shivered.

And then, it went silent.

The wind chimes sealed their lips nearly uniformly. The wooden shutter stood still, at peace within itself. The leaves sighed, the stems loosened their grips, and the branches froze almost as if they had been cutoff in one fell swoop. The wind died down, almost deafening the restlessness of the night. Not a sound that could be heard, save for the tapping of keys being touched almost softly by quivering fingers, the sounds from which echoed in the room profoundly.

I pulled back my fingers and closed my eyes.

And in that serenity, I could almost sense another heart beating somewhere close.

[BASH] Quickly deleting empty files in a directory.

I thought up of the following BASH one-liner half an hour ago to remove lots of empty or zero byte files from a directory. I have prettified the presentation of the one-liner below, but you may safely pull all the lines together into a single line and use it on BASH. Do note that the actual command to remove the files has been stashed inside an echo command for safety.

for file in *;
  do
    file_size=$(du $file | awk '{print $1}');
    if [ $file_size == 0 ]; then
        echo "Deleting empty file $file with file size $file_size!";
        echo "rm -f $file";
    fi;
  done

UseDNS resolution and OpenSSH

Ever wondered why sometimes it takes an awful lot of time for the password prompt to show up when trying to SSH into a system running OpenSSH on the local network? I have. And I have always suspected it must have something to do with DNS resolution.

It turns out there is a setting in OpenSSH that controls whether SSHd should not only resolve remote host names but also check whether the resolved host names map back to remote IPs. Apparently, that setting is enabled by default in OpenSSH. The directive UseDNS controls this particular behaviour of OpenSSH, and while it is commented in sshd_config (which is the default configuration file for the OpenSSH daemon in most enviornments), as per the man page for sshd_config, the default for UseDNS is set to enabled. Uncommenting the line carrying the UseDNS directive and setting it to “no” disables the feature.