Collins’ Onovia

I’ve been maintaining a Ventrilo server for sever for quite some time now. Lately, there’s been a ton of “connection spammers”. These people will use an annoying phonetic and connect to the server over and over again causing tts (Text to Speach) to speak over and over again. Surely you could just set a password on the server to avoid this, however I like to allow anyone into my Ventrilo server. This is really a shitty thing for someone to do. Not only does it lag the server out, but also causes some clients to lock up and error out. There’s no connection throttle built into the Ventrilo server, but fear not, there IS a solution.

Ventrilo allows you to create a channel, and move each connecting person into that channel automatically. Go ahead and create a “Welcome” channel. Call it what you want. Open the admin interface, and set the ‘Default Channel’ option (Circled in red in the image bellow) to the channel you just created. This will force all connecting users into this channel automatically. Next, you will need to set a channel spam filter. Click the ‘Channel’ button (Circled in blue in the image bellow) in the Spam filters section in the admin panel. Set the Action to ban, Interval to 2000, and the Times to 3.

What this means is that if a client changes channel more than 3 times within 2 seconds (2000ms), the user will automatically be banned. This ban will show in the ban list, and be listed as an auto ban. I hope that this solution is a quick fix to your problems. It’s been active on my server for a month now, and I’ve already got 9 bans.

Over the past few days I’ve noticed a lot of “botted” friend requests. These are requests that are not made by a person, but by a program. Apparently, the creator of this bot was gearing up for today. Around 10:18AM EST, I started getting these friend requests.

But this time, they were coming in one every 40 seconds. I thought, wow… imagine, with the amount of profiles on MySpace.com, all the friend requests happening right now! I proceded to the website to delete the requests. Itry to log in, and there’s a timeout. I try again and it times out again. So, I wait a minute and try again. This time, I’m presented with a generic “Sevice is to busy” message. This tells me that MySpace is being flooded with friend requests, logins, and outbound emails! After 10 minutes, the crew at MySpace finaly disabled logins, and put up this prety message for it’s users.

I was praying for catastrophic hardware failure and an electromagnetic bomb to wipe out the backups. But, as usual my prayers went unanswered, and they will be back in a while. Boohoo.

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed that GMail’s spam filter has been missing these spam emails sent from officials in foreign countries. In particular, South America. Anyone that falls for these emails is a fool. Take a look at this form letter that I just got overnight.

First, the email is not addressed to anyone. Surely, if you have $850,000 for me, you’d address your email to me. Second, within the 10 seconds it took for Mrs Amina Abiola to copy and paste her spam message to me, her secretary went from a lady to Mr Eddy Douglas. Third, I’ve received at least 50 of these over the past few months. If I was to tally up all the money I’ve inherited, I’ve be richer than Bill Gates.

Anyways, dont fall victim to one of these scammers. Thy will eventually ask you to send just a few hundred dollars for “processing fees”, and run with it.