What’s going on?
opm.tornevall.org is still going strong
dnsbl.tornevall.org has been the primary subname for blacklists several years now. However, it still seems that our 13 year old subname opm.tornevall.org is still going strong. The new DNSBL wasn’t supposed to support that part, however since there’s still quite a lot of resolvers running this check it has been reinstated in the API. The DNSBL has only been running a few days so the loss is probably not even notable, but if there’s time for it there might be built a blacklist validator, to see how many hosts missing this opm-part.
DNSBL for WordPress 2.0.7 CHANGELOG
Release Notes – WP_DNSBL – Version 2.0.7
Bug
- [DNSBLWP-60] – False positives shown with fraudbl
Task
- [DNSBLWP-52] – wp5 error
- [DNSBLWP-56] – Code inspections
- [DNSBLWP-59] – Spinner at “delist” click
- [DNSBLWP-61] – Admin can without captcha
DNSBL 5.0.5 – Introducing advanced whitelisting
In DNBL v5.0.5 (API release) an advanced whitelisting system is introduced. At first, this whitelist system was implemented in a leaf-application (the honeypot system) but since it’s better to implement it directly at the blacklist entry, this has been done instead.
For example, if we’d like to whitelist Telia mailservers in the DNSBL, we could simply add their SPF inclusions in the system. By adding _spf-a.telia.net, _spf-b.telia.net, etc the DNSBL will check each added ip address if it matches against either a IPv4/IPv6 address that belongs to the SPF pointer or if it is located within a CIDR-based range in the pointers. So if we whitelist _spf-a.telia.net and a blacklist request contains an address in the range of 81.236.57.10/32, that address will be considered whitelisted and throw an exception.
In the primary whitelist the only SPF-exceptions is _spf.tornevall.net and _spf.tornevall.se. Other addresses that also will be whitelisted is the following (that will prevent internal server blacklistings):
127.0.0.0/8 172.16.0.0/12 10.0.0.0/8 192.168.0.0/16
Important patch for DNSBL
The prior weekend our mail server was moved to a completely new place, so we also decided to shut down the old mailserver.
However, the old server contained important files that handled the blacklist functions (methods that automatically updates and changes the zone data in the zone tornevall.org). As this service has been shut down, an update for the DNSBL API has been deployed since we have been unable to rewrite zone data since then.
This also means that all removals from the removal interface should be instant if everything goes as planned (tests has been successful) – and not hourly.
Just remember that even if removals are instant, your blacklisted IP may still be present in caches around the workd, and won’t be updated instantly.
Reshaping the community portal.
I know! It may be a bit excessive to both run a WordPress-info-portal AND a community forum-portal in the same time, as WordPress have quite ok tools for running forum-ish stuff from there. However, I’m not entirely pleased with that, especially since I like the old community-threaded non-Facebook-forum form. vBulletin 5 left this concept for a few years ago, but it really is possible to reorganize things and make them work quite well. And this is what I’ve done the last day.
Once upon a time, there was “Tornis”. It was a realityshow based forum that had Big Brother Sweden as the primary target. However, when Facebook took control over forums with the group-concept many forums went into a graveyard of dead forums. Some of “us” (me) still appreciate the simple overview of threads instead of the compact Facebook view where everything is mixed up in 2 sublevels of comments and all text exposed in the same place. So the decision to reorganize this place have been there for several years. I still feel there might needs of some other kind of privacy than Facebook monitoring all your information. Besides, you still can be reported for practically nothing and get banned.
The purpose over time has therefore changed. There are ongoing projects that has been planned to be placed in this forum. The first problem to fight was to clean up the forum without being forced to delete everything. This is now finished. There is a Facebook-group mirrored to this portal (Making internet a better place), where I was supposed to support and update information about the API that should have been making internet a better place. This project has been delayed for a long time now, but since the reorganization FINALLY have taken place, the future might be a bit more brighter. However, there’s a few things left to do before we can go all in on it…
https://www.tornevall.net/portal/articles/1062744-reshaping-the-community-portal