It's Vokswgen, and i think: lame users make lame cars

Many users want to have internal adresses checked. Guess what happens, if you try 192.168.0.1 - yup, nothing. It's a pity and i sometimes think of giving an errormessage for these adresses. Now I've seen the first failure that makes me real happy. It's only because...

We bought a car four years ago. A new Volkswagen, a New Beetle. It lasted 2 years - since then the car breaks down regularly. Many many things that shouldn't break in three year old vehicle. Expensive parts.

Volkswagen told me that the guarantee lasted two years - not a day more. Besides the "usual" stuff like inspection, oil, fluids, brakes and so on we put many thousand Euros into the New Beetle in the last 2 years. Way too much.

If you are really interested into details, send an email - I'll be happy to send you many many invoices from the friendly Volkswagen-Dealer.

And I didn't even bothered to have everything repaired.

People, whatever you do, remember me:

I WILL NEVER EVER BUY A NEW VOLKSWAGEN AGAIN. NEVER! NEVER! NEVER!

It was so happy to see that ServerSniff didn't work for Volkswagen, even if it was only because Mr. or Mrs. Volkswagen asked for a volkswagen-internal servername (a tld that is not known on the internet) on the ssl-check...

New Alpha-Version: Browsercheck

We made public a new Browsercheck that shows

• your browsers request-headers
• your browsers capabilites
• several JavaScript-Related Infos
• name and version of installed plugins
• your Java-Version
• your private IP-Number (java-based)

Find on Serversniff.net/Serversniff.de at "Tools, Browsercheck". You might consider this an "Alpha-Version" for it lacks some formatting and functionality, especially the plugin-checks on Internet Explorer. We made it public to gather a bit of experience, what browsers are around and (a silent hope) that somebody will respond what functionality you want us to add in the browsercheck. Tell us what you think, what you miss, write to thomas.springer@gmail.com.
tom

SSL-Check back online

The "old" SSL-Check is back online. The ancient OpenSSL 0.9.7e 25 Oct 2004 will be replaced with a more up to date version these days. Thanks again for the hint!

tom

SSLCheck broken

Anonymous pointed out on the wiki, that the script for checking ssl/tls/https-servers is broken. We investigate and restore functionality ASAP. Seems that the GnuTLS-Portion of the check is working while the OpenSSL-Part isn't.
We are on our way to redo the sslcheck anyway - we'll have a fully working version back online until monday, be it the old or rewritten new one.

tom

gethostbyname-weirdness

after migrating to the new v-server the gethostbyname-function behaves strange: calling gethostbyname('nonexistanthostname.nowhere.com') got the queried domainname back, if the host didn't exist. On the new server we are getting back the server's ip-number. I still can't imagine what's the reason of this strange behaviour and wether this is php-related or system-related - but i fixed (hopefully all) scripts to have the lookups done directly via dig.

the subdomain-check should have stopped to report every nonexistent host with serversniff's ip-address.

tom

zefix

switching to the new server broke the connection to the postgresql-db, a few scripts relying on this connection were broken for about 36 hours. they should be up and running now.

the subdomains-function shows some strange results and reports every nonexistant host as "serversniff.de" - hey, folks, this is plain wrong. we'll investigate this, but it might take until thursday for i'm out of office until then.

tom

work in progress

transit of the domains to the new machine already started and is in progress. some things may be a bit rough - the ipinfo-script didn't work as advertised, but we hope to have it fixed now. we finally mastered the traceroute-problem: we had to explicitly specify virtuozzo's (virtual) network-adapter. hping2 didn' like this either - so hping moved to another machine with a "complete" network-stack.

tom

Digital Nomads

After one year on the same, dedicated root-server, we decided to switch to a cheaper hosting and ordered a Virtuozzo-based VHost, costing only a quarter of the dedicated server. Everthing eating up much memory or processor-time will move to a secret backend.

Guess what: Shit happens. Other than the great VMWare, the f*cking Virtuozzo doesn't support low-level-ip, so tools like nessus, hping2 or even silly traceroute won't work anymore. We'll have to switch them to another backend, too, to keep our old scriptset.

You shouldn't notice anything while the domain is in transit as both servers look mostly the same.

tom

we made it into papers

we made it into a "purple paper" - at least, they call us "worth our attention" - thanks, guys. we are still suffering from a static database and incomplete domain-data, for postgres is getting slow when it comes to insert huge amounts of data into indexed tables. we are experimenting and still thinking and fighting to get a sata-raid-system up and running with linux.

tom

hangover

The german serversniff-wiki died silently due to a configuration change of the webserver. It's alive again. We are in the process of switching to a new, faster db-format that will allow us to update our domain-data faster and more frequently.

tom