The dangers of anonymous ftp

I recently had a problem with my VPS (virtual private server) website going off line.

It turned out that the reason for this was that i had exceeded the storage volume on the server. This was quite strange in that i hadn't added much that week, and certainly not enough to fill the server.
After doing a little bit of research i found 4.4 gb's of data that somebody had uploaded to my anonymous ftp directory.

It would seem that there are a number of sites on the internet that will search for and find websites that have open anonymous ftp ports which can then be used for sharing data in my case a bit torrent stream.

This of course was entirely my own fault, as i had never checked or changed the default settings on the server, but it did cause me a bit of a head ache.

Flock

Part of my responsibility as an IT manager is to assist in the development of our website - which means testing to some degree. So whenever a new browser comes out, I end up having to load it and have a bit of a play to see that everything works on it.

I downloaded the latest version of flock a few days ago and had a quick look at all the relevant pages and everything seemed to work, so i was relatively impressed.

Straight away, you start to see some quite nice little touch like the fact that there are some nice little icons that on the address bar that light up when a page has any kind of useful elements like an rss news feed , searchability or a media stream. In addition there are some cool features like the media stream bar and the web clips which i am loving already.

But it wasn't until i set up my blogger , flickr and magnolia accounts within flock that i started to see the genius of this browser. It makes managing on line resources really easy, as i have signed up to magnolia or del.icio.us i have access to my favourite links, and as it has flickr i can easily upload, download and manage my digital images and with support for a number of blogs i can easily, view, edit and amend my blogs.

I'm sure there are other browsers that have similar functions, but this one seems to do it really nicely.

Setting up the blog

While I work in IT and am familiar with blogs, bloggers and blogging, I guess this is my first really look into setting up a blog of my own.

I've decided what i want to say on my blog, i've chosen a site to set up my blog on, i've created a user account (- well actually i simply added the blog service to my existing google account), i have entered some contact info in the profile settings and chosen a style from the avaialble templates, and now i am creating my first post.

That seemed pretty easy...