I'm wading through my email and saw a recent announcement about the miniconfs that have been accepted for linux.conf.au 2009, and Debian was conspicuous in its absence. That's a bit of a shame.

We're heading off on a vacation, the first real "put our feet up" kind of vacation since our belated honeymoon a couple of years ago.

Our ultimate destination is the Seychelles, a tiny set of islands off the east coast of Africa, near Madagascar. Sarah's aunty and uncle live here. Her uncle's the deputy commissioner for the United Nations Indian Ocean Tuna Commission.

Getting there is pretty heinous. We're flying to Houston, then to Dubai, then to the Seychelles. Originally we were leaving tomorrow, but Sarah noticed that we only had an hour to transfer in Houston, and when she checked with the airline, they agreed (despite them booking the entire trip in the first place). So now we've changed to a flight today, with a night in a hotel in Dubai. Emirates only fly to the Seychelles a couple of times a week, so we really don't want to miss the Dubai-Seychelles leg. The flight from Houston to Dubai is 15 hours. That's worse than San Francisco to Sydney. Not looking forward to sitting on a plane for that long.

Flying on September 11 is an interesting experience so far. It seems that the airlines are "randomly selecting" all passengers who aren't US citizens for secondary inspections at the security checkpoints. I was vaguely aware, but had largely forgotten, that if they print SSSS in the bottom corner of your bording pass, then you've been randomly selected. The TSA guy was very apologetic, as he proceeded to completely dismantle our carry-on luggage.

The other fun aspect is that hurricane Ike is busy making its way towards Houston. It's not supposed to make landfall until Saturday, but since they've already evacuated some cities south of Houston, I'm really hoping it doesn't bugger up our flights.

We're in the Seychelles for 10 days, and then we're going to spend 3 days in Dubai on the way back. It'll be during Ramadan, which is apparently an unpopular time for Westerners, so all of the hotels are nice and cheap. It looks like it's going to be pretty hot as well.

I saw that the inimitable Steve Kemp has cranked out an RBL for hosts that do brute force SSH attacks within seconds of thinking about doing it.

As I have a passing interest in such things, and discovered that his sample submission client is really more geared towards people using iptables with the LOG target (and I use the ULOG target), I cranked out this moderately flexible Python client for logs written by ulogd this evening.

If you use Netfilter rules like mine, you can use my script after /var/log/ulog/syslogemu.log gets rotated with:

$ ./report_iptables_ulog.py --log /var/log/ulog/syslogemu.log.1 --prefix SSH_brute_force

It's hard to believe, but it's a year ago today since the worst day of my life.

In so many ways, it feels like so much longer, yet the memories still haunt me.