Vadim Chobanu

Recently I had a task of streamlining the contacts and team collaboration workflow. As the business grows, the usual outlook contacts, tasks and appointments are running out of functionality, so the natural choice was a good CRM solution. A custom software was probably the best thing, however the budget didn’t allow for it, so I began my homework on researching the ready made solutions available, ideally a free one or not more than £10 per month per user. I came across SalesForce free, which was integrating nicely with outlook, however I didn’t like that all my outgoing emails sent from CRM had the ’sent by salesforce on behalf of’, plus a few more downsides. The paid version obviously didn’t have this, so I felt like doing a bit more research before making any decisions. I came across a few more ready made free solutions, out of which SugarCRM seemed the next best choice at the time as they have an open-source community version, which means that all I have to worry is about hosting it myself. Sounded very promising, so I installed it on my server and then moved on to making it work with the email. The Community version has a slight downside – they didnt provide outlook integration, however there are a few 3-rd party softwares that do the same job, so next thing was to obtain a trial for them. As I am running windows 7, 2 of these applications didn’t seem stable enough, so I was about to give up and go back to salesforce. Then I came across another 3-rd party application which was integrating the CRM with exchange server, however the problem with it was the actual price – from $1400. No budget for that, sorry. Next! was I just about to say, when I found one more 3-rd party soft which was integrating contacts, tasks and calendar with an exchange-like-server called Zarafa and was free for up to three users. How handy I thought – we are three partners in the business, so we will even save some money by not paying for a hosted exchange solution each month.

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For the past month or so, I have wasted a lot of my time on dealing with hackers! That’s right. Firstly they found a way to exploit my tmp folder on the server and placed an IRC bot called emech. Thanks to Coreix - they noticed some unusual traffic and helped to stop it.

Then they managed to exploit one of my user’s site which had a weak password. I noticed that quickly as whatever they tried to do caused the apache to die.

The last part that got me furious is somehow they managed to write to my htaccess files a few lines of code that was telling google to go and index their site instead:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://dfsg.us/ [R=301,L]

Now that’s cheeky. I have no idea how they did it as the file is accessible for writing only by the owner. There is no way they know my password as if they did, they would have probably done more damage. I guess there is a new php/apache vulnerability which is yet to be reported and a patch made available for it.

For now, I disabled ftp access, installed a few programs to block IP addresses of users who attempt anything suspicious, changed all my passwords, installed a php patch for improved security and I am looking forward to wasting more of my time in due course!

Oh, the same issue has been reported by a guy over here - http://44px.net/blog/2009/02/28/napominayu-prosteyshee-pravilo-teper-i-iz-svoego-opyita

He thinks its the ftp details that got hacked – I looked through my ftp logs – nothing there on my end.

Update 05/03/2009 – Coreix was kind enough to do a audit on the server and suggested a few extra security measures that I gladly accepted to make the server extra secure. Now I can sleep at night

And once again I will comment on how good the Coreix support is – professional, knowledgeable, polite and not trying to rip anyone off! They worked to apply all the security measures and disable the services that were not necesary etc for a good part of the day and I got charged a very reasonable ammount of money for that!

Credit crunch is what you see every day in adverts, on TV, read online, in newspapers, but for the last few weeks it was stressed a lot in the IT channel, so I would post my thoughts on this. Before I do that, below are a few news headlines that caught my attention, all of them reported in January.

• Intel has reported a 90% drop in profits and is considering a global job cut of 6000 employees.
• Microsoft is considering laying off 5000 employees.
• Empire Direct going into administration.
• Foxconn, the biggest OEM motherboard manufacturer joined the ‘profits warning’ club.
• AMD cuts another 900 of their workforce and reports remuneration pay cuts.
• Nvidia reports dramatic revenue slowdown.
• Denis Publishing closed Computer Buyer.
• Dell to close its Ireland facility making 1900 redundancies.
• Lenovo announced 2500 job cuts.
• IBM is to cut 2,868 jobs, but it may be up to 16000.
• Logitech – 2500 redundancies and profit drops.
• Circuit city in the States to close all its stores.
• Samsung reports loses.

I am sure there are/will be more of the above, but it is worrying to see all that in just a month – it certainly doesn’t smell good and shows just how tough was the last quarter for the IT, which even with the new tech released such as Core i7, x58 chipsets etc, it didn’t help in achieving the targets. I see the new Intel technology revolutionary enough to want to spend money on it, yet everyone is reserved and you can’t see the enthusiasm that could be seen back in 2006 when the Intel Core was released. The current slowdown is caused mostly by the customer spending, or the lack of it if I am to phrase it better. The cut in that spending originates from the general panic infused by the media and the end result is job losses which in turn will cause even less being spent, as to save for the bad times – a chain reaction of inevitable events… hm, dont i sound like half life here? Nope, that was ‘Unforeseen Consequences’. Joking aside though, the reality is not very sweet.

On the other hand, the above news could be actually good news for IT and I will explain why.

I see the PC industry as a relatively honest industry that does innovate a lot and pays adequate remunerations to its executives and everyone involved. To put it in contrast – you don’t see a graduate working in IT to get hundreds of thousands of pounds in bonuses… This is enough in my opinion to argument that the state of the PC industry wasn’t a messy one before this entire global crisis begun, unlike ‘those other industries not to be named’ that created this situation. Yes, quite a lot of companies were and are dependent on credit, but still there are a lot of them that do have history and a strong backing behind them. So what was to be affected, it has been pretty much pruned. I felt the first signs of this downturn in Feb last year and observing it all since then it leaves me but to think the companies caught unprepared or weak are gone, the other players have already understood the new conditions and have begun to readjust as we can see above by cutting down in their production capacity/consolidating its workforce etc. I somehow don’t see the current market turning very much worse – so brace yourselves IT fellas, it can’t be that much longer now before we see it stabilizing and growing again. Maybe we haven’t seen the worst of it, but I still have confidence that soon there will be some light too. It just takes time for everything to readjust to the new state of affairs.

I learned over the time to give the second chance, as things at times can go wrong. I learned it from customers. Yes, we did at occasions fail to provide to the expectations for one reason or another, but we had always been given the second chance and together with the personal touch, we took that chance and it eventually resulted in customer satisfaction. That exact customer patience and ‘niceness’ has always inspired me and given the strength to carry on at difficult times, for which i am thankful to all those that provided their support and believed in us. This ’second chance’ patience is not something I always possessed to be honest, as by nature I am someone who wants everything yesterday.

Why am i telling you this now? Well, my previous post mentions that my server was down for over 24 hours and this is how it all happened.

Back in July, I signed up for a dedicated server from webfusion.co.uk for quite cheap – £36.99 ex VAT

It was a ubuntu linux installation with some weird in-house developed CP that provided basic functions – add domains, subdomains, emails etc. We needed a bit more, so we requested the root access to perform other needed functions.

All was running ok innitially, but then in August-September my friend Roman (programmer) and I started work on a new project which required the latest php and apache version, so we tried via the command line to update them. A bit of googling and research didn’t help, so we thought – webfusion must know how to do it – I am sure they came across this before. So I opened a ticket and patiently waited. I was given some clue as to how to solve it, but I needed a bit more guidance, so after a few days of email exchange (normally they were taking 24 hours to reply) I am told – pay us £100 and we will do it for you! That is to update the PHP server version to the latest one! I believe it is a host’s responsibility to do these updates free of charge as they normally improve the security.

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*** If you are a vegetarian please navigate away from this page***

Dear reader, I am yet again sorry for not writing anything more PC hardware related… I have a weakness that is called good food… To be more precise, I love home grown meat. I love it so much that I even refused to eat supermarket pork long time ago and I always struggle to find a good butcher to supply a decent piece of pork. Call me choosy if you like, but the majority of pork meat in the UK in my opinion is substandard. Compared to other European countries such as Germany, Spain etc,  we are very much left behind unfortunately in UK. I have nothing against British Lamb or Beef, actually I love it very much, though I can’t force myself to eat British Pork from the majority of suppliers. However, earlier this year, my searches paid off and I finally found a place that offered some really good pork. It was a farm in Devon and apparently they use some rare Berkshire breed and rear them outside organically. Oh, just so we don’t get confused here, no, I didn’t travel all the way to Devon…I took the risk to order online and they did a home delivery service using citylink, so the meat was arriving fresh all the time. The place is called little foxhole farm and you can find it at their website – http://www.littlefoxholefarm.com/

To be frank, the pork was so delicious, for the first few weeks, it was my only choice for all the meals, no matter what. I didn’t even want to go out… It tasted completely different from anything else that you normally can buy. My only problem was the fact that I had to wait after ordering. I remember the first time when i placed the order it was a good few weeks wait. Being a nature that wants everything yesterday, I found this a bit of a challenge. Therefore, whenever i was coming close to any markets, I didn’t hesitate to take my chances again, yet fruitless.

As a firm believer in the simple fact that when you try hard enough, it eventually pays off, the disappointments didn’t stop me from trying yet again and again. So yesterday it was my day! But I will explain as to how it happened as well as show you some pics, plus a quick recipe.

It all started that I had to attend a business meeting in Canterbury and my wife wanted to visit the Cathedral for her coursework. As you can imagine, there was no much hesitation, as killing 2 birds with one stone and 2 rabbits with one shot is something I can’t say no to, especially considering that I don’t drive and my wife does.

Anyway, Canterbury even on a cloudy day is a nice place to go to and the Cathedral is quite an outstanding building to see inside and out.

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Apologies for not writing more often… I don’t know the exact reason, but recently, I found it difficult to focus on writing something about hardware and to be even more honest, I haven’t even played any games for a good few months now. I know, it’s a disaster, and some of you may say, I must be going mad, but I found myself preoccupied with the real world pleasures and to be more precise I took a trip to Moldova. For the purpose of this blog, I shall call it a business trip as it had to do with my next venture of which you will find soon enough

Until not so long ago, Moldova wasn’t even on Custom PC Map and what’s even more ironic, I was always forgetting to take a picture with me holding Custom PC when I am away… ok, ok, I am lying – I just find myself doing something different all the time and my magazine always happens to be left at home. However, I have nothing to blame my nature any longer as it seems someone called Nick Stevens has done it last week! 

So, while hesitating in writing my next blog, which was to be called ‘Building your own Vadim PC’, I just changed my mind and decided to write this article about my trip to Moldova. I guess it won’t be the last blog about the country , so I won’t go into much detail except that Moldova even though being a communist country (on the paper) it doesn’t need a visa for British and EU citizens. The other problem with Moldova in becoming a good tourist attraction is the fact that there is only one ‘direct’ flight per week and that ‘direct’ flight makes a stop in Paris (go figure out) to pick up and drop off some passengers there. So instead of paying £410 for a return flight I decided to make my way through Romania with BA. Daily departures from Heathrow, early arrival in Bucharest, twice as cheap (just something over £200), so cant complain. One tip for the traveller – avoid the Bucharest airport Taxi drivers like plague! They are absolute nasty rip offs. I won’t go into this one too much, but be warned – they can charge 3 times more than they should and won’t even blink. Knowing that, after fighting a few annoying taxi drivers to leave me alone, I took a bus to the Train station priced at just a few quid and then the train to Galati – a city on the border with Moldova, not far from where my parents live. The train was relatively cheap – less than 10 quid for the whole distance which is around 200 miles. I could have taken a flight to Kishinev – the capital of Moldova, but I was feeling adventurous and saving a bit of money is always a good idea if that involves seeing the country by train and having the time to do so

As my parents live in country side, all the food is home grown, so a few days there is always something to look forward for me, as you can see below – all is natural and indeed home made. As I arrived on a weekend, it was only Monday that I had to make my way to Kishinev for the planned meetings, which allowed me to fully enjoy the country.

Wont comment here, but was very tasty

Grapes - Moldova variety

Sundried Fish - perfect with beer

Start Flash Slide Show

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