Introduction – sol!ursa!ari

I’m back, for now, I think

In case anyone noticed that this blog has been down for a little over 3 months, it was because I logged in on my birthday and saw something that made me think the AWS EC2 instance that this runs on was hacked and the instance was busy mining bitcoins for someone else. I don’t think that they would get many bitcoins from an EC2 t2.micro, but I guess they were trying anything that they could get. I shut down the instance and left it for the past few months. Today, I finally took the time to look at it and decided to bring it back up and see what happens. Before I brought it back up I created a new instance, detached the disk from the old instance and attached it as a second drive to the new instance where I glanced briefly at the logs to see if I could see anything that looked bad. I didn’t, so I just made a snapshot of the drive, then re-attached it to the old instance and started it up. After logging back in and updating the SSL certificate I was able to bring this blog back up.

I’m not sure when I’ll take the time to write anything else, but I will keep a closer eye on this blog and if I see any more signs of hacking it will go away for another while.

All the best,
Ari

Introduction to sol!ursa!ari

I’ve added this introduction as a new post because I recently upgraded my AWS EC2 instance to AWS Linux 2023 and installed WordPress newly and something has messed up the default so that if you just go to the home page of the site you get a 404 (Page Not Found) page instead of the introduction. I’ll see if I can get this working again, but until then I’ll be fighting with WordPress, PHP and MariaDB to see if I can fix it.

Welcome to my blog. I have been thinking about this for several years, but I was never sure that I had anything worth saying. In addition to that, I’ve often silently laughed at my friends and relatives who post what they’re making for dinner tonight, or where they are out for drinks. I don’t think anyone really cares what Holly and I had for dinner last night, or that we stopped for drinks at The Trailer Park or Walker’s on our way home. On the other hand, people have been interested in some of my stories about things I’ve done in my life, so much of this blog will be stories from my memory. This will be a random collection of my thoughts, some will be remembrances of things past and some will be comments about current events.

You are welcome to share these with others and comment, but please don’t bother to attack me or anyone else in the comments since I will delete any attacks on myself or others which I don’t think are appropriate. Also, these remembrances are coming from my memory, so don’t bother to complain about inaccuracies in names, dates or places. My memory is not what it used to be, in fact, I don’t remember if it ever was that good.

I’ve added a new form so that you can contact me privately if you have any comments or questions which you don’t want published to the blog. Feel free to use it to reach me and let me know that you have been here.

More about why I’m doing this

If I really knew why I was doing this I probably wouldn’t have started. This is more a learning experience for me than anything else. As I stated in the introduction to this blog, I really don’t think most people care what we’re making for dinner tonight, or where we stopped for drinks the other night, although I do have social media friends who often post what they plan to cook for dinner every day or who check in at every watering hole they stop at in an evening.

I recently read a book called Borscht Belt Bungalows : Memories of Catskill Summers. Some of you may know that my grandparents owned a bungalow colony where I spent most of my summers when I was a kid, so the title of this book looked interesting to me. Of course, my grandparents’ bungalow colony wasn’t in the “Borscht Belt”, it was closer to the city and easier to reach that the ones mentioned in the book. What surprised me a little about the book was that some of the stories in the book really interested and delighted me while others bored me almost to tears. I was trying to figure out what the differences are, but it wasn’t obvious to me. What I think is the situation is that personal memories, telling of unique incidents or memories which were specific to the author and his family were not as interesting as those more universal incidents which had a larger impact. Of course, that wasn’t always the case, so I’m not sure what makes some personal memories more interesting than others. If anyone has any ideas about that, please post your comments here.

I’m thinking I should go to shorter, more frequent entries for this blog. I’ll see if I can do that, so come back and check for new posts regularly, or subscribe (if there is a way to do that).

Introduction to my blog: sol!ursa!ari

Welcome to my blog. I’ll start with an explanation of the name of the blog. That was my Email address when I first joined Bear Stearns back in the late 1980’s. Yes, that was before most people knew what Email was, and before most people consider the Internet to exist. Back in those days Email was delivered from computer to computer via UUCP (Unix to Unix CoPy) over the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) or standard dial-up phone lines, mostly at night when the long-distance costs were less. (Yes, in those old days telephone calls were charged for by time of day, length of call and distance from caller to receiver). Each computer only contacted a small number of other computers, so you needed a path from your computer to the recipient’s computer when sending Email. To simplify the process there was a UUCP mapping project which collected the list of computers and which other computers they exchanged Email with. Using the path mapping information and programs like pathalias you could find the path from your computer to any other computer which was listed and then create the path. In the case of sol!ursa!ari, sol was a well-known computer at Columbia University which our computer at Bear Stearns (ursa) called nightly to exchange Emails. Thus, I only needed to start my Email path with sol for most others to be able to find me. I was the user ari on the computer ursa which exchanged Email with the well-known computer sol.

More about this, and lots of other things, in future posts.