WebProp is broken

Many of you will have seen these propagation banners on many ham web sites. They are generated by a script on the G4ILO's Shack website.

WebProp propagation banner

It appears that NOAA changed the format of the wwv.txt solar data file with effect from I January . When I turned on the computer I was greeted by a pile of "bad data" messages from the PHP script that processes wwv.txt and turns it into an intermediate data file which is used by WebProp (and also VOAProp) to display the current solar data.

Unfortumately I cannot fix iy. My vision is too confused to read  type very well and my brain is too befuddled to deal with technical compouter stuffany more. Even typing a blog post is a trial for me at the moment. I have hade to make dozens of corrections even to get this far (one reason for the dearth if blog postings recently.

Is there anyone who knows PHP who would be willing to take a look at the script and fix it so tyhat it will work with the current bersion if the wwvntxt file?

I foolishly thought that if I just left erything as it is then it would juat carry on running without any work from me. Unfortunately things get updated and require changes to be made. Maintaining this website has become  burden I could do without right now It causes me a lot of stress and upset that I can't manage to do things i could easily do before. The easiest solution might be just shut down g4ilo.com for good.

Website woes

The tranquility of my morning was disturbed by receiving an email "Disk Usage Warning" from the web hosting service for the g4ilo.com website.

This was worrying as I had not made any significant changes to the site for several months. I was concerned that hackers might have found a way to upload files to the server so that it was serving porn or some other equally objectional stuff.

After a look around using the disk management tools in cPanel the public_html directory seemed to be excessively large.

I FTP'ed in to the server with FileZilla  and found that the error_log file was astronomically large. I took a look at it and the file was full of warnings about a deprecated PHP function:

PHP Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /home/g4ilo/public_html/lib/classes/class.contentoperations.inc.php on line 881


A sI hadn't changed anything my suspicion was that the web host had changed some global PHP setting. When I submitted a support ticket they didn't admit to anything but with a bit of help I was able to turn error logging off. This seems to have solved the problem so I am crossing my fingers that 's  the end of it.

It was fine maintaining and supporting a website when my mind was sharp and my eyesight good. But I don't find messing with this kind of thing very easy nowadays and I could do without the hassle and stress of things like this.

A little bird tells me

@G4ILO is on Twitter!  You can follow me from the widget in the left hand column of the blog.

Visitors Book gone!

They say that to err is human, to really foul things up you need a computer. And I have been fouling a lot of things up recently. The latest thing that I fouled up is the G4ILO's Shack visitors book.

On the site I also have a contact log. This runs from a backup of my KComm (MixW format) log file. KComm automatically backs up my log to the web server, in order to create an off-site backup of my log. As a bonus, I have a PHP script that reads this backup file and displays the contents in a human-readable format.

What I stupidly did, when re-configuring KComm after my computer troubles a couple of weeks ago, was put the guest book file name log.dat for the backup file name, instead of what it should have been: g4ilo.log. So when KComm uploaded my contact log backup it overwrote the guest book data file instead. I only discovered this after wondering why the contact log on the site wasn't updating.

I looked back in the site backups maintained by the hosting service but they only go back a couple of weeks.  I must have made the error before then. All I have managed to salvage is the most recent 3 entries. I'm rather upset about that, because the guest book contained comments made over many years from the early days of the site, which I had painstakingly preserved over various versions of guest book script.

At least I didn't lose my contact log going back to 2001. That would have been a disaster!

A new review

I have just added a review of the Nevada WH3080 Solar weather station to my G4ILO's Shack website.

The website gets a lot more visitors than the blog so I will be adding new content over the coming months.

WebProp hiatus

Some time on the afternoon of 21 May WebProp stopped updating. The first person to notice it (actually the only person to notice it) was Mirek, OK1DUB, who sent me an email.

This is a screenshot not a live instance of the program

I SFTP'd into the web server to check and sure enough the files containing the propagation information extracted from the WWV 3-hourly bulletins had not been updated. They were updated when I ran the script manually so my script was OK. The likely explanation was that cron, the Linux job scheduler, had stopped running. I filed a ticket with Hawk Host's support department.

They claimed that cron was still running, though the evidence of my own eyes showed that it wasn't. It took me a while to convince them that there really was a problem but we got there in the end. This morning when I logged on to my computer the latest propagation information was being displayed again. Hopefully my cron jobs will now stay running.

Good or Evuln?

A few weeks ago one of our websites was hacked. We didn't notice for almost a week due to browsers caching the pages. The consequence of the hack was that every page accessed returned a 404 error meaning that the page was not found. During that week Google's spiders visited with the result that almost the entire site was lost from the search engine.

I discovered the hack just in time to be able to restore from my web host's oldest backup. It was a real hassle as well as a stressful time and I wanted to find a way to alert me more quickly if it happened again.

My first thought was to use ChangeDetection.com, the site I use to alert me when a change occurs to the IBP Beacon Status page. That was no good as both sites contain dynamic content that changes frequently.

A couple of days ago I was visiting some ham sites and I came across one with a badge stating that the site was scanned and malware free. I clicked on the badge and it took me to evuln.com, a site containing a lot of information about how to secure a website and offering tools to detect an attack.

Tools include a malware scanner that will check your site to see if it contains something bad. You can have this check run daily for free if you display a badge on the site. This appeared to be just what I was looking for, so I registered with the site and added the badge to both G4ILO's Shack and ham-directory.com.

Evuln.com also offers a service to clean and fix websites. This is something I might well have used a few weeks ago if my web hosts's support hadn't been helpful in assisting me to identify the hacked files. But the cynic in me rang an alarm bell. It would be in evuln.com's interest to claim that my site was hacked and then offer to clean it up for a fee. What a good scam! In fact the owners of a couple of sites that had been told they had been hacked thought it was a scam and that their site had been hacked by evuln.com!

So is evuln.com good or evil? I did a lot of digging. I think that if it was a scam I would have found a lot more evidence of people who had been scammed. Evuln.com has been running for several years and contains good information. The owner replies quickly and promptly to enquiries. There is an address and contact information on the site. I believe that evuln.com is a genuine attempt to provide a useful service.

I have since found other similar services such as ScanMyServer which do not offer a site cleanup service. Come to your own conclusion.

KComm updated

I have just made available version 2.1 of KComm for Windows, my logging and digimode program for Elecraft transceivers (K2, K3, KX3).

There are no major changes in this version. I have added a couple of modes (JT9 and DV) on the logging side, and fixed a handful of very minor bugs.

The latest Linux version remains at 2.03 until someone makes a new binary for 2.1.

Is it just me?

For the last few weeks, when I browse the pages in G4ILO's Shack using Google Chrome browser, they start displaying in a plain text sort of mode.

How pages look in Google Chrome

How that page is supposed to look

I think what's happening is the CSS style sheet isn't being loaded. So the pages are appearing without any formatting. But why? This doesn't happen in Firefox. It didn't used to happen in Chrome. And it doesn't happen in Chrome after I clear the cache. After that the next few pages display OK until it eventually happens again.

Is it just me, or is this happening to everyone who visits my site using Google Chrome?

Hacked off

This is not much to do with radio. But I know that many of you have your own websites and will probably find this of interest.

A couple of days ago I discovered that one of my websites had been hacked. Not G4ILO's Shack, but the other one which still continues to earn us a little bit despite receiving only the barest maintenence in the last two years.

I opened one of the pages and instead of the expected content a server error message appeared. My first thought was that the hosting company had changed some setting so I fired off an urgent support ticket. They responded saying that some of my files had been "compromised". Sure enough when I looked at one of the files there was some code I didn't recognize. This code referred to a file that had been added which was zero length, and that was causing a 500 server error. I deleted the file and every access now caused a 404 "file not found" error. Eventually I found that the .htaccess file had been hacked and some code added which was being executed for every single file access.

The timestamp showed that the .htaccess had been modified a week ago on 19th March. Because of the web browser caching we had not noticed the error messages any earlier. Google had visited the site in that time however, and had received a server error for every page it tried to access. So now the site had dropped out of Google. Thanks a lot, hackers.

Further investigation revealed that the hackers had modified almost every .php file on the server. They had inserted some code at the beginning of every file, apparently meant to disable error reporting. They had inserted some other code into one .php file that was included in every page. However, something in what they had done had the effect of disabling PHP processing with the result that the PHP code was sent to the browser instead of being executed.

To cut a long story short, after trying to repair the hacked files individually, I decided to restore the site from the oldest backup the hosting company held. I had a little bit of luck: the oldest backup was taken on 19th March, the day of the attack, but it had run before the attack occurred so I was able to restore the site with every file as it was originally. A day later and that backup would have gone and I would have been unable to restore the site without a lot of manual work. But the damage had been done as far as Google was concerned.

If you are expecting a lesson to be learned as a result of this story, I don't have one, other than if you want a quiet life stick to blogging, don't try to run your own website. If you do, visit your site every day and check for changes.

I have no idea how the hacker managed to gain access to the files on my shared web server. If they did it once they could do it again. I don't believe that my passwords were compromised as they are randomly-generated, but I changed them anyway. Altogether this episode lasted for several stressful hours - time that I would much rather have spent trying out the latest WSJT-X program.

RSGB Centenary

It's fashionable for British hams to knock the RSGB. But I have never been much influenced by fashion.

The RSGB will be 100 years old in 2013. No doubt there will be all sorts of celebrations, a special event station and so on.

To mark the occasion I will display the RSGB centenary badge on my blog and my website until the end of 2013. I think it would be a good idea if more RSGB members who have blogs and web pages did the same.

Here is a snippet of code to make it easy for you to add this to your website:

It's an image not text so you can't cut and paste it - Blogger kept interpreting it as HTML code so this was the only way I could find to include it!

Beacon monitor back online

For the time being I have put my IBP Beacon Monitor page back online. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is really something that needs to run 24/7 to be of most value. I note that I am not the only beacon monitor who states that monitoring runs only when not otherwise using the radio and antenna. So perhaps I will manage to keep it going for a bit longer than previously.

I updated the list of other beacon monitoring stations at the bottom of the page, deleting those that did not appear to be active. The official NCDXF/IARU International Beacon Project beacon monitors page has a lot of dead links on it.

It's interesting to take a look and see what propagation is like in other parts of the world. It's a pity there aren't more beacon monitors in the USA. And is propagation really that good in VK-land?

I like the additions F4CWH has made to his beacon monitor pages. I wonder if he would share with me how he has done it? I would particularly like to indicate which beacons are off the air. Three of them. including the one on the east coast of the USA (New York) are not operating at the moment.

KComm is 2.0!

I have taken advantage of the poor propagation conditions - the WSPR application waterfall has been blank all day and just two stations have spotted my 10m beacons, while APRS on 30m is only just beginning to receive any other stations - to make available a new version of my logging program for Elecraft transceivers, KComm, which is now version 2.0.


The main difference in the new version is that the Elecraft KX3 is supported (though it could be used in older versions by pretending it is a K3.) I have also added an option for specifying alternative URLs such as QRZCQ.com for looking-up callsigns, so you can now say goodbye to logging in to QRZ.com every five minutes if you want to.

The other changes are all minor bug fixes and small improvements that probably no-one will notice.

My regrets to Linux users but I no longer have a Linux system available so I cannot provide a Linux archive of the new version. I really need a Linux user to install Lazarus and compile the source code then send me a new tar.gz file to put on the web site.

Poor conditions

Propagation is really poor at the moment. Never has my WebProp propagation widget been quite so accurate. On 10m WSPR I am hearing nothing and no-one is hearing me. On 30m APRS it's just as bad. I'm not picking up a single packet.

I opened WebProp's page in Google Chrome and noticed that the small format widget had a vertical scrollbar on the right hand side. I thought I could remove it by adding a few pixels to the iframe height attribute but it didn't seem to make any difference. I think a bug in Chrome might be causing this. The presence of the scrollbar reduces the width of the table causing several lines to wrap and making the table taller.

I found that the scrollbar was eliminated by adding the attribute scrolling="no" to the iframe definition. If you are using WebProp on your website I recommend you do the same. If you aren't sure exactly what to do then go to the WebProp web page. The code examples have all been updated with this extra attribute.

I recommend you to do this even if you don't see the scrollbar in Google Chrome. That will prevent it from appearing in any web browser.

Is my web site down?

My website G4ILO's Shack is currently down. It appears to be down for everyone, not just me.

Sometimes a site appears to be down when it's really a problem at your end. There's a really useful site you can use to check if the server is down or not. It goes by the memorable name downforeveryoneorjustme.com. It's worth bookmarking, especially if you have a website of your own.

I've opened a support ticket with the hosting service. Hopefully my site will be back up by the time you read this.

Site changes

I've just spent half a day when I could have been working 10m DX updating the website and blog templates. The main difference is that I have made all the text about 10% larger, which should help those - including myself - who find small print increasingly hard to read.

I have also made the main content section wider so it makes better use of the screen. Most people have bigger monitors than when I first started G4ILO's Shack, from which the blog inherited its template. I dare say there will be a few using older, smaller screens who will find this change annoying. Sorry.

I have taken advantage of this change to include larger pictures and screenshots. Another benefit - though some may question that - is that I can use a wider ad format, which Google has been pestering me to do recently. I'm sure that some of my readers would have liked me to get rid of the ads altogether. However, they make far too much money to simply forgo it - not enough to live on but certainly enough to pay for my hobby and G4ILO's Shack's web hosting.

I wouldn't advise anyone on the basis of this to start publishing Google ads on their own ham radio sites or blogs - not unless you have G4ILO's Shack's level of visitor traffic. The ClustrMaps widget at the bottom of the left hand column will give you an idea how much that is, if you're interested.

QRP Web Ring

For more years than I care to remember my website G4ILO's Shack has been a member of the QRP Web Ring. Web rings are a tool dating from long before search engines came on the scene and were set up to help web surfers locate sites of similar interest.

In order to be a member of the QRP Web Ring I include some links to other web ring sites on my home page, plus a banner.

Clicking some of the web ring links from G4ILO's Shack and other linked sites today I found that many of the links were broken and most of the rest were pages of extremely poor quality. So I am considering removing the QRP Web Ring code from my site.

Whether you still use the QRP Web Ring to find other QRP-related sites, or if you have never used it and have no intention of using it now that you know about it, I would appreciate your comments.

On the move

Due to the eventual closure of our website business the server on which my website g4ilo.com runs will be unavailable before long. I am now in the process of moving the site to a standard shared hosting account. It is possible that the site and even my blog may become unreachable or seem to be down during the transition. If this happens, don't worry!

For information, my sites are hosted and g4ilo.com will continue to be hosted by HawkHost which I have found to be an absolutely first class hosting service with support staff who really know what they are doing. If you are looking for high quality hosting for your own website I can wholeheartedly recommend them.

Hacked!

I looked at the G4ILO's Shack website this morning and with a sinking heart saw this:

It appeared that my site had been hacked and an image inserted that said KZ.AM/STOP SOPA. (It was bigger than my screen so I couldn't capture all of it.)

Upon further investigation it appears that the site toplisted.net has become defunct and an image from amateurradio.toplisted.net has been replaced by the one shown in the screen grab. So solving the problem turned out to be a simple matter of removing the links to toplisted.net. Big sigh of relief!

I don't know whether the hacked image contained any other payload. I wonder how many other ham radio sites are affected?

Because of things like this, running a website is a hassle compared to the blog which is maintained and updated free of charge by the blog host such as Blogger. I'd prefer to just concern myself with the content of the site not the technical aspects.

It may be time to review the future of the website, especially considering that some of the software it contains (such as VOAProp) is gradually being made obsolete by changes to the Windows OS and third-party data files.

Hitting a century

I have just noticed that this blog now has 100 followers. I'd just like to say thanks for reading my ramblings and I hope you continue to find them interesting.

Yesterday I heard about a new web service called about.me. It's a site that lets you build a personal profile page with links to all your online content: websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and so on. Your profile has a URL like: about.me/your.name so in order to grab my name before someone else does I set up my own profile page at http://about.me/julian.moss. It only takes a few minutes to do so if you are interested in making it easier for people to find you on the web it's worth the effort.

There aren't a lot of links on my profile as I'm still not into social networks. I can't see the point of Facebook, though I guess that's just me as I know it is very popular. And I don't know that people would be interested in my tweeting what I'm doing any more often than I do in my blogs already.