Mystery host answers for mine

I decided yesterday morning to reflash my home firewall’s version of OpenWRT. This involved rebooting the router, of course, and when the router came up the friendly folks at Earthlink (or Time Warner Cable, depending on who runs the DHCP servers) had assigned my home cable modem a new IP address.

As I worked out a few issues with the new firmware, paring down modules and processes in order to make it all fit inside my modest little router, I decided to test the firewall rules to see whether things were working. From my server hosted outside of my network, I ran a simple nmap test to see which ports were open:

[root@tranquil /home/markt]# nmap -sT -P0 maestro.markturner.net

Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-02-02 11:44 EST
Nmap scan report for maestro.markturner.net (24.40.133.50)
Host is up (0.035s latency).
rDNS record for 24.40.133.50: user-0c2h19i.cable.mindspring.com
Not shown: 955 closed ports, 40 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
587/tcp open submission
993/tcp open imaps
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 6.86 seconds

That’s about what I expected, so I turned my attention to other issues, including running another test twenty minutes later:

[root@tranquil /home/markt]# nmap -sT -P0 maestro.markturner.net

Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-02-02 12:04 EST
Nmap scan report for maestro.markturner.net (24.40.133.16)
Host is up (0.028s latency).
rDNS record for 24.40.133.16: user-0c2h18g.cable.mindspring.com
Not shown: 991 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
135/tcp filtered msrpc
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
587/tcp open submission
593/tcp filtered http-rpc-epmap
993/tcp open imaps
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 38.88 seconds

For the second test you can see I’ve got a few other ports showing up (TCP 135, 139, 445). These are supposedly filtered by the ISP somewhere down the line (probably the cable modem-level) to block clueless Windows users from exposing their networks to teh Internets.

You can see that these tests produced different results. It what was the same about these results, however, that caught my eye!
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The dark of winter

It’s not been a fun few weeks for me after losing my job before the holidays. I’ve been feeling pretty low, actually, with only my knowing that there will be better days ahead to hang on to. It sucks feeling like I’m not contributing when all I want to do is contribute.

Home life hasn’t been a happy place, which is kind of ironic since when things began going south at work I started to realize how the stress I was feeling could become hazardous to my marriage. Now I’ve the stress of needing to look for work. Things will get better, though. The darkest day of winter begins the return to light.

At least Mother Nature has conspired to give me company in being at home, since the entire City of Raleigh took the week off for last Tuesday’s snow. While sledding with the kids at my neighborhood park on Wednesday, I remarked to my neighbor how awesome the sledding conditions were.

“No kidding,” he answered. “It sure beats a day at the office.”

Well, maybe if you’ve got an office to be away from it does. Sledding is fun but not working is anything but fun.

It’s up to me to make something happen and that’s what I’ll do. And while I know the sun will rise again, I won’t soon forget these dark days of winter.

Obama, Who Evidently Has Not Read the Controlled Substances Act, Denies That He Has the Power to Reclassify Marijuana – Hit & Run : Reason.com

Wow.

Apparently Obama forgot too. Obama often speaks as if he is an outside observer of his own administration—condemning excessively long prison sentences while hardly ever using his clemency power to shorten them, sounding the alarm about his own abuses of executive power in the name of fighting terrorism, worrying about the threat to privacy posed by surveillance programs he authorized. Now here he is, trying to distance himself from his own administration’s refusal to reclassify marijuana.

via Obama, Who Evidently Has Not Read the Controlled Substances Act, Denies That He Has the Power to Reclassify Marijuana – Hit & Run : Reason.com.

H1N-What? Wading Through the Alphabet Soup of Flu Names | Molecules to Medicine, Scientific American Blog Network

Judy Stone of SciAm explains the alphabet soup that describes flu viruses.

Muddled about all the new flu viruses?

It’s hard to keep up with the changing names in the news. H1Nwhat? Bird flu. Pig flu. MERS. SARS. Here is a quick overview of this dizzying, dyslexia inducing array, with what you need to worry about, even if some aren’t yet in your backyard.

via H1N-What? Wading Through the Alphabet Soup of Flu Names | Molecules to Medicine, Scientific American Blog Network.

Davos to Detention: Why I Hate Coming Home to America

‘Murrica is broken, folks. Our lovely little security state has gotten out of control.

After a 14-hour trip, I wanted to stretch my legs. So I stood up, anxious to find myself back in the room, especially after having written to the DHS. “Take a seat,” the officer at the door sternly said to me. I told him I wanted to stretch my legs after the long flight. He told me I wasn’t allowed to stand up. You are also not allowed to use your phone or electronic equipment. I was also slightly surprised to find as many children in the room as there were cameras.

“Sir, I’m a U.S. citizen who wants to stand while being detained. Am I not allowed to stand?” I said, pointing to the Asian man and Pakistani woman standing with their toddler strapped to the man’s chest. Anyway, there were only two empty seats in the room with a capacity of 60.

“Sit down!” he repeated for the sixth time, and came and confiscated my phone, which I was using to try to text my coworkers who were waiting to share a car home.

via Davos to Detention: Why I Hate Coming Home to America | Ahmed Shihab-Eldin.

Atlanta Snow Storm – POLITICO Magazine

Two inches of snow caused massive gridlock and laid bare the governmental fault lines of the Atlanta region. It was Raleigh 2005 all over again. I know I took a dig at the Wake County Public School System for its Tuesday closure but it’s certainly better than gridlock.

As an Atlantan, I’m concerned that this storm revealed just how unprepared we are in case of real disaster. If Atlanta, the region, wants to get serious about public safety, its mayors, county officials, and state officials will need to start practicing regionalism instead of paying lip service to it. And whether threatened by a dangerous pandemic, a major catastrophe, or just two inches of snow, we need to have ways to get around—and out of—the city other than by car.

via Atlanta Snow Storm – POLITICO Magazine.

Kevin Smith describes Prince World

In my reading about Prince’s latest lawsuit faux pas, I found a hilarious video from filmmaker Kevin Smith from his appearance at Kent State University last year in which he describes a week he spent with Prince working on a documentary. Smith spices his talk with plenty of profanity but the story he tells is hilariously funny and quite bizarre.

Smith is an unparalleled storyteller. It’s thirty minutes long but well worth the time!

Prince Sues 22 Fans For $1 Million Each For Linking To Bootlegs In Laughably Confused Complaint

Is it safe to say that Prince is pretty much the music world’s version of Dennis Rodman?

There was a time, not even that long ago, when it seemed like Prince might have been the first musician to actually "get" the internet. He had done a few things that seemed really focused on embracing the internet, spreading his music more widely, and making revenue from alternate streams, such as concerts, sponsorships and fan clubs. But… it quickly became apparent that he was going in the other direction, and in an extreme manner — in part, because it seemed like for all of his ideas, he failed at following through on most of them. Then, rather than blaming his own lack of execution, he seemed to lash out at the internet in almost every way possible. He insisted that the internet was over and that he’d never put any of his music online. He even claimed that digital music was bad for your brain.

via Prince Sues 22 Fans For $1 Million Each For Linking To Bootlegs In Laughably Confused Complaint | Techdirt.

Update: The lawsuit has been dismissed.

Validating email alerts about school closures

I just got this emailed alert (allegedly) from Wake County Public Schools, announcing that school was closed tomorrow (we have an inch of snow tonight with another six possible by daybreak):

From: notify at …
Subject: Wake Schools Closed Wed, Jan 29
To: notify at …
Reply-To: webadmin at …

All Wake County Public School System schools will be closed on Wednesday, January 29, due to inclement weather. Athletic and extracurricular events are also canceled. The safety of our students, parents and staff remains our top priority.

Make-up dates for this missed day of instruction will be announced as soon as possible.

(I’ve replaced the wcpss.net domain in the above email addresses to thwart spammers)
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