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Strange hobbes.nmsu.edu behavior.

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Ian Manners:
Hi Valery,

Nothing personal against any country in particular but some countries do have a habit of allowing people access to whole 255.255.255.0 ranges or bigger and being very slow to act when those ranges are abused :(  as to hackers, Russian or otherwise is irrelevant (real hackers would be using bounce services from Romania, VietNam or other country's anyway - just saying), its the bored kiddie scripter's that do more damage to services like Hobbes especially as it has free access to upload files. ISP's have driven down the price of access that they themselves often are no longer interested in abuse reports unless it affects them, which is why so many people block entire ranges, even the entire ranges of one ISP (OVH France was a regular early 2010's).

Policing the upload directory at Hobbes takes time and is dependent on volunteers as there is only one person at nmsu.edu that looks after it, and it is but one of many things on his plate.

I've blacklisted ranges of IP's in Eastern bloc countries in the past but I have also blacklisted ranges from USA, France, Canada, China, Malaysia,  Italy, Germany, Seychelles etc. ISP's with new staff are often either far to 'innocent', or the ISP's are happy to take the money while they can get away with it. USA is the largest representive country in my email RBL's at present as they "do not take heed of spam reports unless they are from customers" Amazon are the worse with moving reporting goalposts, followed by sendgrid.net with allowing spammers easy access and claiming that I need to complain to MY upstream ISP, not to them. Both of those companies use ranges scattered all over the place, and are happy to move customers around. Even Microsoft and Google are now only concerned about abuse if it affects their customers, unless it is something large scale that might attract media attention.

It is the resources needed to police services and maintain adherence to a countries laws that so many different 'free' services have given up as it gives no return on effort. I do not want to see Hobbes go in the same direction.

I will see if it is easy to get an IP banned list from hobbes and what we can do to address any access problems to do with those banned IP's. Not promising anything as I'm not Hobbes but if I offer to do the work for them it maybe more likely to happen. I can see what IP address that you and others are posting from so that gives me something to use in checking if I can get access to the list.

The Hobbes server is a different machine to nmsu.edu.

Martin Iturbide:
Hi Ian

I don't know if you have a direct contact with the hobbes archiver, but I'm experiencing an issues that affects me a little bit on posting the news on OS2World.

1) I usually link hobbes files not directly, but with the search URL. Why? because when I post the news the files are on the incoming directory and later moved to a different location. I prefer to put a link to the search so the link don't get outdated with time.
Now I have the problem that the files inside the hobbes incoming directory does not get indexed for the search as it used to work on the past. The search is no longer working for files on the incoming directory.

2) The search link URL has changed from the old hobbes to the new one.
It used to be something like:
- "https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/h-search.php?key=<NameOfTheFile>"
now it is:
- "https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?&search=<NameOfTheFile>"
I think the new one is better (shorter) but it automatically broke the links of the older news on OS2World.com.
It is not a big deal since I can adopt the new URL without problems (and I prefer the new one), but maybe some "forwarder" can be set for links that goes the old search way.

Regards

Ian Manners:
Hi Martin,

Will add it to my list :)
It should be possible to alias h-search.php so both URL's will work, I actually thought that Curtis had already done that but it must have been for only incoming.

Tom:
Some differences I notice when searching for dfsee.
Background information: in /pub/incoming is dfsee166.zip (not yet processed), and in
/pub/os2/util/disk is dfsee165.zip (already processed).

https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?search=dfsee

gives 3 search results in /pub (!): dfsee165.zip , dfsee165.txt and hdd_vhd.zip (the last one contains the string "dfsee" in the description field, and is in /pub/os2/util/file).
Note that dfsee166.zip (which is in /pub/incoming) is not returned as a search result.

https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?dir=/pub/incoming&search=dfsee

gives zero search results in /pub/incoming , although that is the current location of dfsee166.zip

Conclusion: /pub/incoming seems to be excluded from the search , even when /pub/incoming is passed as the searchpath.

Ian Manners:
Hi Tom,


--- Quote ---Conclusion: /pub/incoming seems to be excluded from the search , even when /pub/incoming is passed as the searchpath.
--- End quote ---

That is correct, with people occasionally uploading php, scr, jpg, iso and other non hobbes related files (sometimes copyright protected programs), incoming is on purpose excluded from hobbes internal and external search results. Incoming content is deemed to be of a transient nature.

The majority of people automatically check the incoming directory for the latest files already so it would have been viewed as very minor not to have the contents indexed in the search database.

My websites /incoming and /new directories are also excluded from search indexing but that is because the directories are automatically cleared at the end of every month so the content is transient and should not be included in search engine index's.

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