The Other Don Kelly

Every end is a new beginning.

— Captain Cloud

So my old printer finally bit the dust. It was an HP PSC2175, a combination color printer/scanner/copier that I got in probably 2000. It was pretty snazzy for its time, and even until it finally broke it was extremely useful. (The only technology it really lacked was Wi-Fi, though it did have a bunch of weird, semi-proprietary camera memory chip ports, and a USB connection that made Linux-early-adopter me learn a few things.)

The printer started having trouble a few months ago, then finally went belly-up in early June: whenever it was turned on it would just start making sounds like a ratchet or gear was slipping. The Internet told me that this was because some internal parts needed cleaning, but neither I nor any repair place I called would do it. So, I started looking for a replacement.

I finally replaced it last week, with a Brother MFC J1010DW, essentially the same printer/scanner/copier I had before, except it now also has Wi-Fi connectivity (and it’s not Hewlet-Packard, my only other criterion).

I’m surprised that I feel a little down about getting rid of the old printer. It really owed me nothing at this point, but I had it for so long and it had been a reliable workhorse all that time, I feel like a part of my life has slipped away. It’s still up on the desk for now though, I can look at it any time I want until I finally recycle it.

By the way, this is what I was writing twenty years ago, and this is what I was writing fifteen years ago.

I have no idea how this happens (or, if it’s nefarious, what is supposed to be accomplished by doing this), but I discovered, about a week ago, that some other domain was aimed at my IP address — as in, you type in their website name, and it goes to my site.

I found this out when I was doing a little security check-up, and noticed the other website name (which was, basically, almost-random-string-of-letters-dot-com) among the logs. I Googled it and the results showed snippets from my site. Hacked!!

Well not quite: some further Googling explained what was going on (but not why). I also found that when I tried to actually go to the other site my browser refused to load it, because the SSL credentials (for my site) did not match the bogus website’s hostname. Thank you SSL!

According to my Googling there was nothing I could do to prevent someone from aiming their site at my address, short of contacting the bogus site and asking them to stop (fat chance), but I could configure my site to throw a “Forbidden!” error at anyone coming to my site from any other hostname but mine. So now my site won’t load from that host, even if someone decides to ignore their browser’s security warnings.

What did the trick was a little snippet added to my site’s root htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^donkelly.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F]
</IfModule>