I just received an email from BLOM Bank Lebanon
I tried to send a complaint through their site and got a website debug error. Very professional indeed! That’s the quality assurance you get from the largest bank in Lebanon. Yay!
*shrug*
Spamming in Lebanon
What Is A Postal Code?
- October 23, 2013
- Blogging
A question like “what is a postal code?” may seem trivial to people all over the world. But in Lebanon, where postal services are still hanging on to our deep rooted traditions of the pre-1934 era, the answer is not an obvious one. But when a postal services employee asks the question, it becomes a little too much.
A month or so ago, I tried to hunt down my apartment’s postal code. I had a couple of items I purchased returned to sender after LibanPost failed to “find” my address. And I was able to get it from someone who seemed to know what a postal code is at LibanPost customer services. Apparently he was the only one in the company who knew!
This whole post was triggered by a very funny (or not, you decide) telephone call I received in the morning asking me to come collect my parcel from the LibanPost office in downtown Beirut. The guy asked me if it was the first time I got parcels delivered, I said no of course. He said that they couldn’t find the address. So I asked him what was he looking for. He read the address to me and it was perfectly findable on Google maps (after all that’s where I got the names of the streets from). I asked him was there a postal code on the label and he was dumbfounded. I told him it was an 8 digits number. He looked and voila, there it was. Next thing he said made me real sad though, so I laughed. He said: “that’s a long number and it’s not a phone number”. I explained it was a Postal Code, and that I got that from their offices. But that did not ring any bells. He just said in a very forced politeness: “Come get your things from Riad el Solh office, TODAY!” I guess he let go of the “or else” part, thankfully.
I’m pretty sure no one reads my rant blogs. In fact I hope no one is reading this one …
Update: I went to pick up my new cycling jacket, and the nice guy at the Riad el Solh post office told me that it was their duty to deliver the mail to my doorstep and that the caller was probably some new guy taking shortcuts. And that next time I should take his name and report him. Well, I have a few things in transit at the moment. Let’s see how it goes 🙂
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Miso Soup with Fish
- October 16, 2013
- Food
it’s that time of the year again… winter is coming indeed!
Here’s my recipe:
- 1/2 tea spoon of the following: ginger powder, caraway, cumin, dried garlic, salt
- 1 large onion diced
- 1 tablespoon miso paste
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 100gr white fish filet
- 70gr noodles (I’m using the Barilla Capellini no. 1)
fry the condiments together with the onion until translucent
boil the fish with some bay leaves until tender
add the fish to the frying pan, strain the broth, add the miso and cook the pasta in it
put everything in a bowl and eat 🙂
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Monkey Bread
- October 15, 2013
- Food
I bought The Soup and Bread Cookbook from Amazon earlier today and there were just too many recipes that made me want to start baking right away. So I tried this Monkey Bread recipe ( snapshot from the book ):
Here are some pics I took:
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Late night French Toast
- October 13, 2013
- Food
French Toast with Peaches
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- None Found
Mbox to Maildir Recipe
- October 7, 2013
- Work
apt-get install mb2md cd /var/mail for i in *; do echo $i; su - $i -c "/usr/bin/mb2md -s /var/mail/$i -d ~/Maildir"; done
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Protecting Against WordPress Brute-Force Attacks
One of our customers was experiencing very high load today. Checking his logs showed too many IPs trying to hack at the wp-admin.php login page. Here’s a snapshot of what I saw:
# tail -f /var/www/vhosts/*/statistics/logs/*_log
==> /var/www/vhosts/example.com/statistics/logs/access_log <==
10.0.1.169 - - [03/Oct/2013:05:50:17 -0500] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.0" 200 4479 "example.com/wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0"
10.1.1.206 - - [03/Oct/2013:05:50:21 -0500] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.0" 200 4479 "example.com/wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0"
10.0.2.197 - - [03/Oct/2013:05:50:23 -0500] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.0" 200 4479 "example.com/wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0"
10.0.55.117 - - [03/Oct/2013:05:50:24 -0500] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.0" 200 4479 "example.com/wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0"
That went on forever!
The first thing I did was use the fail2ban filter I found here.
Unfortunately this did not work as the attack was widely distributed. Fail2ban is ineffective against such attacks. So the next thing I tried was password protect that page. I added a few lines in the apache configuration for that VirtualHost for basic authentication. That worked and the load instantly dropped to normal.
In case the files got lost or misplaced here's the gist:
