I have used IPCop for about the last 6 months or so and I love it.  Monday, however, the IPCop Firewall sitting in front of my office completely died.  I have had a few problems with it locking up on me, plus I occasionally had to reboot it during the day to free up memory.  This not so much due to any error on IPCop's fault but largely due to the modules I had running had a very large memory footprint.

While I was getting a new machine prepped to reload the firewall, I remember someone had mentioned Untangle about the same time I was originally playing around with IPCop. (I believe it was Scott P. but my memory is not what it used to be.)  Liking a little variety, I decided to see what Untangle was all about.

INSTALLATION
Installing Untangle was very painless.  The base installation of IPCop goes by quickly, but with Untangle it was a complete breeze.  One nice thing about the Untangle installer is it runs in an X shell which makes things a little easier for me.  Another nice feature, when configuring your network connections you don't have to try to figure out which card is which.  It automatically assigns the card to the Internal or the External interface, all you have to do is plug in a live network cable and you can see which is which.  Aside from filling in some personal information and supplying your network configuration for the External interface you are done.

Once installed, Untangle has a Java-based front end you use to control the features of the firewall, reminiscent of  Cisco PIX firewalls.  Untangle is also completely free unless you want to buy the premium services.  The set of free services they offer are great: spam blocker, phish blocker, spyware blocker, web filter, virus blocker, intrusion prevention, protocol control, firewall, OpenVPN, attack blocker, and also a GREAT reporting module.  Basically every tool you could hope for comes prepackaged when you install it.  This is much easier than trying to deploy the same features to IPCop.

If there are some tools you do not want to use, click on the "power button" on the virtual rack for that "device" and that feature is disabled.

Definitely a product worth checking out.

Well I was browsing over my WhosOnCFCStats today, as I usually do, just to get a casual glance at the sites referring browsers to me.  I have seen a few queries coming from people working on getting WLW working with BlogCFC.  I have spent quite a bit of time covering XML-RPC related issues but I suppose a quick recap could not hurt.

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Just a quick note...  I updated WhosOnCFC to v2.0.2 this afternoon.

This version adds support for ignoring potential bot's with masked user-agents.  For more information you can check the related posts.

Well, I finally got around to pushing the latest round of updates to RIAForge this morning.

New features include:
- When more than 5 sessions are created from one IP address WhosOnCFC treats the address as a bot.  All the information tracked will be purged from the active user list.  Also, the user maxcount will be adjusted accordingly.  WhosOnCFC defaults to 5 sessions, but you can adjust that value higher or lower in WhosOnCFC's initialization code:

<!---
    What is the threshhold (how many hits from 1 IP address) before we assume it's
    a bot and should not be tracked by WhosOnCFC?
--->
<cfset variables.ipBlockListThreshhold=5>

- When a sessions are removed by WhosOnCFC, it will also check to see if the stats package exists.  If so, all sessions from that IP address will be removed from WhosOnStats tracking.

I have not actually updated the download package because I prefer to test if for a few days before I release it to make sure I thought everything through.  If you would like to take a sneak peek at it you can download a ZIP of the current SVN version here:  http://whosoncfc.riaforge.org/index.cfm?event=page.svnzip.

Well, today has been a rough day to say the least.  To get my mind off of things, I have followed Joshua Cyr's advice and added a few options in to help control how bots with masked user agent's are handled.

First I added in the ipBlockList array.  Basically, this is just storage for IP addresses we no longer want to track since they keep creating a new session on every page they view.

Next I added a new argument to the WhosOnPageTracker() function in whoson.cfc, useIPBlockList which is just a boolean value that defaults to true.  If this is enabled, once an IP address creates a predetermined amount of sessions in the active user array (indicated by variables.ipBlockListThreshhold defined in the initialization of the CFC) it will add the IP address into the ipBlockList array and will then delete all sessions in the active user array with that IP address as well.  The next steps are to have the max user account adjusted accordingly as well as having that information reflected in the WhosOnCFCStats information.

These are things I will probably tackle this evening if I am not running around Azeroth.

EDIT: The new code has not been uploaded to RIAForge yet nor has the SVN repository been updated. I am waiting until I get the code polished off.

I have just released the new version of WhosOnCFC.  This release is more or less a maintenance release to bring things up-to-date with the SVN repository.  This version includes the CFLayout-based CF8 viewing utility which is incomplete, but it is currently working.  This is something I plan on getting wrapped up as soon as I have a little bit of extra time.  If someone would like to expand on it, I am open to that as well.

I also added in a sanity check for whoson.cfc.  Over the weekend I pulled up my blog and noticed I had approximately 987 active sessions and that number was growing by about 60 sessions a minute.  In an effort to avoid crawlers masking their user agent with legitimate browsers, WhosOnCFC will quit logging hits after the first 10 sessions from one IP address.  I may make this configurable later on, but it seemed the best way to handle the situation.  Another idea was to make it more of a first-in first-out situation where it deletes the earliest hit and keeps the newer one.  Again, I am open to suggestions.

In an effort distance myself from all Windows based machines I have recently moved my main development machine to Ubuntu Linux. While the change has not exactly been seamless, I would say it has been fairly painless.

My main concern in moving to Ubuntu was the fact I primarily use wireless networking at home or at the office. When I do not have a wireless network available I also use my Sprint Mobile Broadband adapter which concerned me because I use it quite a bit. Doing a little digging around it was actually quite easy to configure the Sierra Wireless 595U adapter in Linux.

Next I just have to get the development environments working. Hopefully it will be just as painless getting Eclipse to work as getting the rest of the hardware setup.

I have been extremely busy lately so I have not had a chance to finish the next round of updates to WhosOnCFC.  However, I did push my latest round of updates to the SVN repository on RIAForge which includes the ColdFusion 8 CFLAYOUT based viewer.  It is not yet complete, but it is at least working.

I finally had a few minutes to sit down and get some updates done on my ColdFusionBloggers.org mobile page.  I implemented the search feature Ray just added in as well as making some minor cosmetic changes to the site to make it look more "ColdFusionBloggery."   It is still caching the post query unless you perform a search and even then it will return the top 50 results.

If you want to check it out point your mobile device to http://www.kisdigital.com/cfbloggers.cfm. 

Yesterday Ray gave  me permission to use CFBloggers.org's click.cfm to redirect browsers to blog posts.  This way, the total click count gets updated when you view an article from my mobile feed.  Nothing fancy or new, I just thought it was cool.

Also, yesterday Ray added in the ability to search CFBloggers RSS feed which I plan on getting implemented shortly.