If you have plug encrypted removable media into a recent GNU/Linux distribution it will probably try to automount it for you.

So far, so hoopy.

However a recurring class of bugs in the hot plug logic is failure to tear down the encrypted device mapper when the media is removed without unmounting it first.

It results in a message something like this:

Naturally this is a bug in your distribution but it is one that sends to regress as the desktop stack is developed so knowing how to workaround will do you no harm at all.

I generally use:

sudo cryptsetup luksClose udisks-luks-uuid-d9fb9d0d-74e6-49b1-94d3-7edc083f04c0-uid80377

Note: gnome-shell-3.2 will prompt you for a password but doesn’t issue an error message if the automount fails. If you want to see the error message (and hence the name of the mapping) open the file manager and try to mount the encrypted partititon from there instead.

Although I couldn’t really be bothered you could easily write a script to automatically identify encrypted device mapping that aren’t being used and undo them by getting a script to look at the output of ls -al /dev/mapper. Probably it would be best to look for devices that have a mapping but are not mounted.

Since first opening this blog one of the things that surprised me was the number of spam comments it attracted. Its hardly a high publicity site so I guess I was supprised how quickly the spam robots started to target my blog. Thankfully the first few spam comments were pretty obvious:

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After reading a little more on the subject of spam comments I quickly learned two things. The first is that spam comments are a fact of life if you want to allow anonymous comments (and doubly so if you don’t like CAPTCHAs). The other is that the part that always gives away the spammer is that the comment doesn’t contain any information related to the actual content of your article. This is because the spammer has to write one text and then post it to many different sites. Philosophically speaking if the spammer wrote bespoke comments for each site they would not longer be a spammer. Perhaps an artisan spammer who wrote bespoke comments would wind up being called a fillet-steaker.

Anyhow even with no obvious motivation for the comment the following messages did rather give away their true nature, especially when you remember that many bloggers only moderate the first comment from a user so if you let them through assume they will be back.

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[From a person in "trading strategies"]

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[From a SEO company]

The next two posts represent the most sophisticated spam comments I’ve received so far. Both avoid flattery and instead try to latch onto technical paranoia instead. The first one is particular clever for the question in the middle and its assumption that other humans really need to read this message. Whilst I’d prefer spammers to find some more productive line of work you have to admire someone at the top of the game like this:

I don’t know if it’s just me or if everybody else encountering problems with your blog. It seems like some of the text within your posts are running off the screen. Can somebody else please provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to them as well? This may be a issue with my browser because I’ve had this happen before. Cheers

[From a fake Burberry scarves salesman]

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[From a pornographer]

It’s getting towards time to finish this post so I’ll introduce one of my favourites here. It’s not because of the quality of the prose, although one does have to admire the excellent spelling together with correct use of capital letters, commas and full stops (even on the last line). The reason it’s my favourite is this transparent attempt to flatter me into accepting the spam was attached to a pictoral joke. The “astonishingly thought-provoking” words that inspired such gushing praise numbered only ten.

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[From a fake ugg boot salesman]

So to close I shall leave you with this comment and sincerely hope you share the sentiment.

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[From a fake ugg boot salesman]