@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t think it’s your code. As you said in one of your commit comments, the internet is a hostile place! That’s partly why I reacted the way I did: all things considered it’s usually better to react quickly and clean up the mess later, then it is to wait and risk further damage. Anyway it sucks @xuu@txt.sour.is got caught up in it. Hopefully it’s all good now.

@xuu@txt.sour.is I hope everything is sorted out with your ISP. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. I sincerely did not mean to cause you any trouble.

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @xuu@txt.sour.is @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org “Not cool”? I was receiving many broken (HTTP 400 error) requests per second from an IP address I didn’t recognize, right after having my VPS crash because the hard drive filled up with bogus data. None of this had happened on this VPS before, so it was a new problem that I didn’t understand and I took immediate action to get it under control. Of course I reported the IP address to its abuse email. That’s a 100% normal, natural, and “cool” thing to do in such a situation. At the time I had no idea it was @xuu@txt.sour.is .

The moment I realized it was @xuu@txt.sour.is and definitely a false alarm, I emailed the ISP and told them this was a false positive and to not ban or block the IP in question because it was not abusive traffic. They haven’t yet responded but I do hope they’ve stopped taking action, and if there’s anything else I can do to certify to them that this is not abuse then I will do that.

I run numerous services on that VPS that I rely on, and I spent most of my day today cleaning up the mess all this has caused. I get that this caused @xuu@txt.sour.is a lot of stress and I’m sincerely sorry about that and am doing what I can to rectify the situation. But calling me “not cool” isn’t necessary. This was an unfortunate situation that we’re trying to make right and there’s no need for criticizing anyone.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, I can do that.

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @prologic@twtxt.net my /tmp is also fine now! Thanks for your help @prologic@twtxt.net!

@prologic@twtxt.net I unbanned a few IP address I had blocked before the bugfix. I wasn’t being careful and just blocked any IP I saw making a large number of requests to my pod. That slowed the problem down but I think I blocked your and @stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no ’s pods in the process, oops.

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no Sweet, thank you! I’ve been shooting myself in the foot over here and want to make sure the situation is getting fixed!

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @prologic@twtxt.net testing 1 2 3 can either of you see this?

Hmm, I wonder if I banned too many IPs and caused these issues for myself 😆

twts are taking a very long time to post from yarn after the latest upgrade. Like a good 60 seconds.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t know if this is new, but I’m seeing:

Jul 25 16:01:17 buc yarnd[1921547]: time="2024-07-25T16:01:17Z" level=error msg="https://yarn.stigatle.no/user/stigatle/twtxt.txt: client.Do fail: Get \"https://yarn.stigatle.no/user/stigatle/twtxt.txt\": dial tcp 185.97.32.18:443: i/o timeout (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)" error="Get \"https://yarn.stigatle.no/user/stigatle/twtxt.txt\": dial tcp 185.97.32.18:443: i/o timeout (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)"

I no longer see twts from @stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no at all.

@prologic@twtxt.net Have you been seeing any of my replies?

It shows up in my twtxt feed so that’s good.

This is a test. I am not seeing twts from @stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no and it seems like @prologic@twtxt.net might not be seeing twts from me. Do people see this?

@prologic@twtxt.net I am not seeing twts from @stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no anymore. Are you seeing twts from me?

@prologic@twtxt.net

./tools/dump_cache.sh: line 8: bat: command not found
No Token Provided

I don’t have bat on my VPS and there is no package for installing it. Is cat a reasonable alternate?

@prologic@twtxt.net Try hitting this URL:

https://twtxt.net/external?nick=nosuchuser&uri=https://foo.com

Change nosuchuser to any phrase at all.

If you hit https://twtxt.net/external?nick=nosuchuser , you’re given an error. If you hit that URL above with the uri parameter, you can a legitimate-looking page. I think that is a bug.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hitting that URL returns a bunch of HTML even though there is no user named lovetocode999 on my pod. I think it should 404, and maybe with a delay, to discourage whatever this abuse is. Basically this can be used to DDoS a pod by forcing it to generate a hunch of HTML just by doing a bogus GET like this.

I’m seeing GETs like this over and over again:

"GET /external?nick=lovetocode999&uri=https://vuf.minagricultura.gov.co/Lists/Informacin%20Servicios%20Web/DispForm.aspx?ID=8375144 HTTP/1.1" 200 35861 17.077914ms

always to nick=lovetocode999, but with different uris. What are these calls?

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no I used the following hack to keep my VPS from running out of space: watch -n 60 rm -rf /tmp/yarn-avatar-*, run in tmux so it keeps running.

The vast majority of this traffic was coming from a single IP address. I blocked that IP on my VPS, and I sent an abuse report to the abuse email of the service provider. That ought to slow it down, but the vulnerability persists and I’m still getting traffic from other IPs that seem to be doing the same thing.

@prologic@twtxt.net There are a lot of logs being generated by yarnd, which is something I haven’t seen before too:

Jul 25 14:32:42 buc yarnd[1911318]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 14:32:42 (162.211.155.2) "GET /twt/ubhq33a HTTP/1.1" 404 29 643.251µs
Jul 25 14:32:43 buc yarnd[1911318]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 14:32:43 (162.211.155.2) "GET /twt/112073211746755451 HTTP/1.1" 400 12 505.333µs
Jul 25 14:32:44 buc yarnd[1911318]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 14:32:44 (111.119.213.103) "GET /twt/whau6pa HTTP/1.1" 200 37360 35.173255ms
Jul 25 14:32:44 buc yarnd[1911318]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 14:32:44 (162.211.155.2) "GET /twt/112343305123858004 HTTP/1.1" 400 12 455.069µs
Jul 25 14:32:44 buc yarnd[1911318]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 14:32:44 (168.199.225.19) "GET /external?nick=lovetocode999&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.palapa.pl%2Fbaners.php%3Flink%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.dwnewstoday.com HTTP/1.1" 200 36167 19.582077ms
Jul 25 14:32:44 buc yarnd[1911318]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 14:32:44 (162.211.155.2) "GET /twt/112503061785024494 HTTP/1.1" 400 12 619.152µs
Jul 25 14:32:46 buc yarnd[1911318]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 14:32:46 (162.211.155.2) "GET /twt/111863876118553837 HTTP/1.1" 400 12 817.678µs
Jul 25 14:32:46 buc yarnd[1911318]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 14:32:46 (162.211.155.2) "GET /twt/112749994821704400 HTTP/1.1" 400 12 540.616µs
Jul 25 14:32:47 buc yarnd[1911318]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 14:32:47 (103.204.109.150) "GET /external?nick=lovetocode999&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fampurify.com%2Fbbs%2Fboard.php%3Fbo_table%3Dfree%26wr_id%3D113858 HTTP/1.1" 200 36187 15.95329ms

I’ve seen that nick=lovetocode999 a bunch.

@prologic@twtxt.net Inspect? What’s sift? What would you like to know about the files?

@prologic@twtxt.net 10 Gbytes has accumulated since I made that last post. It’s coming in at a rate of 55 Mbits/second !

@prologic@twtxt.net I think there’s more to it than that. I’ve updated, yet hundreds of gigabytes of junk is still accumulating.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m still getting this crap:

abucci@buc:~/yarnd/yarn$ ls -lh /tmp/yarnd-avatar-*
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 863M Jul 25 14:19 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-1594499680
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 7.8G Jul 25 14:19 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-2144295337
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 9.8G Jul 25 14:19 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-2334738193
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci  10G Jul 25 14:14 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-2494107777
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 9.5G Jul 25 13:59 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-2619243454
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci  11G Jul 25 14:04 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-2922187513
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 7.5G Jul 25 14:14 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-349775570
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci  10G Jul 25 14:09 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-3640724243
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 901M Jul 25 14:19 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-3921595598
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 9.5G Jul 25 13:59 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-609094539
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 9.3G Jul 25 14:04 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-755173392
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 7.9G Jul 25 14:09 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-984061000

Something like 100 Gbytes of this junk has accumulated since I updated and re-started the server. I’m now running the latest version of yarnd, so the update did not fix the problem. Something else is going wrong.

How are temporary files growing to 10 Gbytes in size? The name of the file is “yarn-avatar”, but why would avatars be so large?

@prologic@twtxt.net Alright, running yarnd 0.15.1 now. I stopped my hack so we’ll see if the VPS gets clogged with junk 😆

@prologic@twtxt.net

abucci@buc:~/yarnd/yarn$ make preflight
Checking Go version ...                 [ ERR ]
Go 1.16+ is required, found go1.22.5
FATAL: 🙁 preflight failed
make: *** [Makefile:33: preflight] Error 1

🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Aha, got it. Thanks for looking into it. I’m updating now and we’ll see if that stops it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Sure, but why would this start happening all of a sudden today? Nothing like this has happened before. Is this a known bug?

https://anthony.buc.ci/info has the deets!

@prologic@twtxt.net 0.15.1, looks like.

@bender@twtxt.net I hope so too. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Whatever it is, it’s strange.

Hack of the day: running watch -n 60 rm -rf /tmp/yarn-avatar-* in a tmux because all of a sudden, without warning, yarnd started throwing hundreds of gigabytes of files with names like yarn-avatar-62582554 into /tmp, which filled up the entire disk and started crashing other services.

This is completely insane!

abucci@buc:/tmp$ du -sh /tmp/yarnd-avatar-*
564M    /tmp/yarnd-avatar-3024946878
7.2G    /tmp/yarnd-avatar-3122347915
11G     /tmp/yarnd-avatar-3533381443
445M    /tmp/yarnd-avatar-441914658

I’m going to have to shut down my server soon. This looks like some kind of DDoS. Whether intentional or not it’s filling up the disk at an unsustainable rate.

There are also a bunch of log messages scrolling by. I’ve never seen this much activity in the log:

Jul 25 01:37:39 buc.ci yarnd[829]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 01:37:39 (149.71.56.69) "GET /external?nick=lovetocode999&uri=https://pagez.co.uk/services/your-own-100-fully-owned-online-vi>
Jul 25 01:37:39 buc.ci yarnd[829]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 01:37:39 (162.211.155.2) "GET /twt/112135496802692324 HTTP/1.1" 400 12 826.65µs
Jul 25 01:37:40 buc.ci yarnd[829]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 01:37:40 (51.222.253.14) "GET /conv/muttriq HTTP/1.1" 200 36881 20.448309ms
Jul 25 01:37:40 buc.ci yarnd[829]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 01:37:40 (162.211.155.2) "GET /twt/112730114943543514 HTTP/1.1" 400 12 663.493µs
Jul 25 01:37:40 buc.ci yarnd[829]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 01:37:40 (27.75.213.253) "GET /external?nick=lovetocode999&uri=http%3A%2F%2Falfarah.jo%2FHome%2FChangeCulture%3FlangCode%3Den>
Jul 25 01:37:40 buc.ci yarnd[829]: time="2024-07-25T01:37:40Z" level=error msg="http://bynet.com.br/log_envio.asp?cod=335&email=%21%2AEMAIL%2A%21&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.almanacar.c>
Jul 25 01:37:40 buc.ci yarnd[829]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 01:37:40 (162.211.155.2) "GET /twt/111674756400660911 HTTP/1.1" 400 12 545.106µs
Jul 25 01:37:40 buc.ci yarnd[829]: time="2024-07-25T01:37:40Z" level=warning msg="feed FetchFeedRequest: @<lovetocode999 http://alfarah.jo/Home/ChangeCulture?langCode=en&returnUrl>
Jul 25 01:37:41 buc.ci yarnd[829]: [yarnd] 2024/07/25 01:37:41 (162.211.155.2) "GET /twt/112507964696096567 HTTP/1.1" 400 12 838.946µs

Something really weird is going on?

I deleted them all right before I sent my previous message, and already, a few minutes later, there are two more:

abucci@buc:~$ du -sh /tmp/yarnd-avatar-3*
1.8G    /tmp/yarnd-avatar-3122347915
2.4G    /tmp/yarnd-avatar-3533381443

What is this?

@prologic@twtxt.net This is weird, but today, out of nowhere, yarnd filled up the disk on the VPS where I run it. It’s never done anything like this before and I have no idea why it would start. But it threw almost 700 Gbytes of data into /tmp in files like this:

yarnd-avatar-1087570772  yarnd-avatar-1599127133  yarnd-avatar-2042956376  yarnd-avatar-2562946212  yarnd-avatar-3274766535  yarnd-avatar-3931929859  yarnd-avatar-553201529
yarnd-avatar-1089125452  yarnd-avatar-1606826819  yarnd-avatar-2089122560  yarnd-avatar-2611944556  yarnd-avatar-3310922372  yarnd-avatar-3938996661  yarnd-avatar-556240195
yarnd-avatar-1101228867  yarnd-avatar-1618755765  yarnd-avatar-2104107259  yarnd-avatar-2641384948  yarnd-avatar-3326285269  yarnd-avatar-3939402047  yarnd-avatar-559344463
yarnd-avatar-1112165824  yarnd-avatar-1650827505  yarnd-avatar-2142824779  yarnd-avatar-2680659340  yarnd-avatar-3340682113  yarnd-avatar-3998621883  yarnd-avatar-570292705
yarnd-avatar-1119886894  yarnd-avatar-1656673647  yarnd-avatar-2160786463  yarnd-avatar-271923479   yarnd-avatar-3374584613  yarnd-avatar-4005102536  yarnd-avatar-595490106
yarnd-avatar-1131417623  yarnd-avatar-1685698239  yarnd-avatar-2165405940  yarnd-avatar-2793562275  yarnd-avatar-3380606954  yarnd-avatar-4016872095  yarnd-avatar-679251850
yarnd-avatar-1160959085  yarnd-avatar-1746759128  yarnd-avatar-2171489899  yarnd-avatar-2842068287  yarnd-avatar-3416352997  yarnd-avatar-4110048378  yarnd-avatar-679950970
yarnd-avatar-1231649265  yarnd-avatar-1752278279  yarnd-avatar-2251317422  yarnd-avatar-2843868670  yarnd-avatar-3468636088  yarnd-avatar-4116552474  yarnd-avatar-737874628

164 files. Some are empty, some are 7 or even 10 Gbyte.

Any idea what would cause that? And why now, after running yarnd for so long with nothing like this happening?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This outage did affect me, though not much, via the university where my wife teaches and where I teach sometimes. They actually sent out an alert in their emergency alert system (the one they use to alert people of extreme weather events and bomb threats, mostly), telling people that all IT systems were down.

A friend of mine elsewhere pointed out that they pushed this change on a Friday, which of course no software developer with any experience would ever, ever, ever do. I have to assume there’s some toxic management at CrowdStrike, but who knows. Even more reasons to sympathize with the poor folks who are probably going to be working nights and weekends to clean up this mess.

@prologic@twtxt.net One of these days I’ll turn off registrations

@prologic@twtxt.net Hello!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Somewhere or another, I think in a William Byrd talk, I heard it suggested that the best ideas in computer science should fit on an index card (ah yes it’s this one: https://paperswelove.org/2017/video/will-byrd-most-beautiful-program/ ). He was referring to the basic principles of LISP/the lambda calculus, which have sometimes been called the Maxwell’s equations of computer programming (by Alan Kay). Simple, short, elegant, but very densely packed with meaning–generations of people have spent their whole careers unpacking what those simple rules can do.

Much of modern software feels like the polar opposite of that. Not only can you not write it on an index card, you never will be able to because people who write software don’t seem to aspire to try. I wish more people thought this way though!

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net No.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net It’s insane that a single botched software update can have worldwide impact. We’ve messed up badly.

@support No.

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