Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Samspade Problems

I wonder if I am a good story teller. I hope I am, 'cause I am going to tell you one.

Late evening today, when I was too tired to do any technical work, I was browsing around the web when a firewall alert, alerted me to the fact that my web browser wanted to accept connections from 70.167.151.46:5004.

That having piqued my curiosity, I immediately proceeded to www.samspade.org to find more about this IP address. It is another story that this IP address belongs to Cox Communications and that I still have no clue why my browser wished to connect to it.

At Spamspade.org another story was unfolding. As you might know the site has been experiencing some difficulties lately. It was down for some time and then came up with limited functionality.

I was quite surprised to note that my query for the IP address lead to a strange error message from Samspade. The error message being:

============
"ERROR: Unable to connect to for Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=f8a38150b440dab4e5aa41b8e373d75a X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.78 [en] (WinNT; U) Subject: mushrooms have more cc: fioday@aol.com cc: lacutepoet@aol.com cc: k0enig@aol.com cc: misstress22@aol.com cc: livvybird@aol.com cc: dinotto2@aol.com cc: catrice351@aol.com cc: sportstar3tk@aol.com This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --f8a38150b440dab4e5aa41b8e373d75a Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Type: text/plain pickle cured and coated in yellow cornmeal. his variation is also known as = peameal bacon, because in times past a mixture of ground yellow peas was us= ed for coating to improve curing --f8a38150b440dab4e5aa41b8e373d75a-- . for 70.167.151.46 ... Aborting"

============

I went back to their main page and again ran the query which again resulted in the same error message. I happened to notice that although I was querying for the 70.167.151.46 IP address, the results page on Samspade would have a different IP address in the title.

This can be seen in the image below.


I ran the query 3-4 times and every time I would get the strange error message and the title varied as follows:

Whois tr12g05.aset.psu.edu
Whois mailgate5.sitestar.net

Some sanity returned and now I started receiving an error message:

============
"ERROR: Unable to connect to this7587@samspade.org for 70.167.151.46 ... Aborting ..."
============

while the title on the results page varied as follows:
Whois 74.6.74.44
Whois 205.188.116.139
Whois 72.236.205.249
Whois 72.236.205.249
Whois 70.167.151.46

You would note that the last title in the list is the right one and that is what should have been displayed right from the beginning.

Wonder what is going on with Samspade ?

============
PS: Due to some bug in Blogger, after the first usage of any html tag, the line spacing goes for a toss. Thus after the first time I used the blockquote tag, the line spacing went for a toss and did not default back! bugs...

, ,

No comments: