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I recently had an unexpected part 3 to this tale the other day, when the display went. Again. But this time, different symptoms. This time, the backlight went. Oh sh*t, replacing LCD panels isn’t exactly cheap, and since the backlight diffusers and CCFL’s are fused to the back of the LCD panel itself, there was no way of replacing the individual unit.

Continue reading “Compaq CQ60 Display Issues – The Unexpected Part 3” »

So in my previous post relating to this, I’d sent the machine back twice to HP to be repaired. The first visit gained a new motherboard and CPU. The second visit gained a new LCD assembly. But still the fault persisted. It sort of worked alright-ish for around a week or so, but then gave up the ghost completely. Sometimes the backlight would come on but no picture. Having had enough of it at this point, I phoned HP technical support a third time, claiming to them it would be my last call before phoning their Customer Complaints department.

So last Wednesday (July 14th 2010), it got picked up again, and was delivered back to me yesterday (Monday July 19th 2010). What did the service report say this time? I hear you ask.. “LCD cable replaced”… Are you serious? All this for a f*cking piece of wire? However annoyed I was at what their resolution was this time, so far it’s behaved exactly as it should. Resolved? Dare I say it this time? Yes…

So, third time lucky. In the meantime, I’ve found that the CQ60 isn’t on sale ANYWHERE anymore. It’s been deprecated and replaced with it’s mate, the CQ61. Casandra has one. There’s some key changes to the chassis and port placement on the unit. The power connector is on the opposite side to the CQ60. I assume that the Graphics, CPU and Power circuitry all the same corner of the board causes somewhat of a problem. I dunno. Either way..

I was recently recommended some software to prevent (or at least act on) automated hack/DoS attacks on services. The usual suspects triggered this, dictionary attempts on common usernames on servers, “admin”, “administrator”, “root”, etc. Up until now, I’ve been monitoring for unusual network activity. When the traffic reached a certain peak for a specific length of time which was out of the ordinary, I knew something was going on. The hard job then was trying to find out which service was being targeted. I started on the usual suspects, proftpd, ssh, httpd. What I wasn’t expecting at this particular point was someone trying to hack open apache.

Anyway, I digress. The software is called fail2ban. Basically, it’s a python daemon which you configure to sit and monitor the log files from all your exposed services. It uses various timestamp algorithms along with checking using regex for failed auth attempts (configurable). In the regex, it also uses extraction parentheses to extract the host/IP address, then automatically turns to iptables and bans the host within a certain number of failed auth attempts. It defaults to 3 failed attempts getting you a 10 minute ban, but again this is configurable. I’ve set mine to 3 failed attempts with a 30 minute ban, and it seems to be quite happy with that. Since then I’ve actually noticed server load go down a touch, which tells me how many times my servers were being targetted without me even knowing it!

And since it’s configurable for practically every service that logs to a file, it’ll also work for custom applications that do the same thing, no matter what they are. I’ll have to bear this in mind when I write stuff in the future that could be prone to hack attempts.

Check it out: fail2ban

So lately I acquired a (almost) new Compaq CQ60 laptop from the missus as she got a new one from the government (*sigh*). Anyway, we got this laptop about 6 months ago back in November ’09. When setting it up, I noticed the internal screen would take a while to switch on. I never thought anything of it as it was a first boot, then the screen came on and everything was happy. The troubles I had setting it up only become evident after more recent events. Just before she gave it up to me, opening the screen would result in a almost-white screen, one of them ‘pictures’ that show up when the LCD controller is goosed. It’s was very ‘wet’, drippy almost. But resetting the machine and the picture would come back to normal – weird.

Continue reading “Compaq CQ60 Display Issues” »