The Time Sink

Not as late as it gets, but close enough. Just to set the stage: work is full tilt right now, partly because of vacation prep; home is full tilt, mostly because of vacation prep; and I'm taking what breaks I can, mostly so I don't blow a gasket from either the heat or parts one and two of the above.

I did manage to get Athena disconnected from her umbilicals and Borg-lines long enough to do the same to Wolf and pull his hulk out from under... He's sitting on the kitchen table and she's now back up and running. ...with her case intact for the first time in almost a year<g>. No, I don't remember why. But the sides, top and front-piece were where they were supposed to be. ...so were Wolf's. Now to see if I can figure out which Borg-lines into him were life sustaining...

If you've sent me email since Tuesday noon and received any sort of bounce on it, here's the short version: Mail to the home account is making it; mail to the office is not.

Long version: I auto-forward my home account to work; that's why you're getting the bounce. You shouldn't be, but the Exchange server at the work site and the head geek are locked in a death struggle. Erik controls the fate of the computer in that he can pull the plug if he chooses to; however, the computer can win by default by simply not cooperating. ...and something is telling WorldNet that I don't have a presence at the office.

I've killed the forwarding for the evening; I'll likely resume in the morning. Our apologies...

Okay... I'm off to work. Shelley is feeling well enough to deal with the local installation of Ruggus Rattus Domesticus; the cat's stopped throwing up; and the partridge is back up in the tree.

...and the email problem may be solved. ...and I actually helped! Wowser <g>! I'd called Erik this morning to commiserate with him about the problem. ...and set him back a bit since he thought it was working, "...at least most of them seem to be." Ummm, not exactly, Chemoserape, "I'm still getting bounces to your main address..." It seems Exchange 2000 didn't migrate all the domain information. ...or maybe it did and just didn't want to play.

So I sent, and he watched; and I sent some more and he watched some more. ...and it was quickly apparent everything under '.com' was working as advertised, but all the '.net' stuff was coming back with that 'relay' error you've been seeing. "Relaying"; ah, that was the clue he needed. Evidently the defaults are switched 'twixt NT and 2000? No matter; one bit twiddled and everything was working fine.

Don Armstrong writes in as he usually does this time of year (and again in December) to remind me that the wheel is always turning:

Well, that's that! It's all up from here, as the days get longer and the daylight comes earlier and the birds get noisier and - can we reconsider this? Of course, there's a momentum effect, so it's going to go on getting colder for a while yet, just as it will go on getting hotter for you for a while even as your days grow shorter...

Don hails from the great Down Under and knows it's a never-ceasing source of amazement to me that when I'm working on my sixth 104+/- day in a row, he has a fire going in the fireplace... I mean, yeah, I learned it in school, and abstractly I can more or less grasp it; but until I can afford the plane fare to drop by for a day, it's going to give me pause every six months...

The Exchange server at work is giving us all pauses on a much more frequent basis: we lost connectivity twice more yesterday. Sheesh. It seems everytime Erik fixes one issue, another crops up. I'd call it job security, but if he dies when the server queue explodes from the backlog...

Oh my... Shelley will never read a Daynotes site again and view us in quite the same way. I kid you not: she had a major revelation last night that will change the way she sees many of us.

It all started when I mentioned I was going to spend some time this weekend getting the laptop summerized. I think the last OS I remember working with was NT4 while testing a different Wireless NIC configuration. No matter, I just need to find the HDD from last summer and make sure it's ready to go. ...and see what else I've come up with as a 'must have' to throw on it before we head off to the coast. ...and maybe figure out if I want to play with Linux over there in the evenings. Dunno', I timeshare the machine with Shelley while we're over there and I usually just take a pretty basic Win95 configuration along as a 'known good'.

...and with Shelley posting this year, that reinforces my need for a basic system. I don't have the time to re-configure/test a Linux setup for the dial-up over there. ...and connectivity is king for what we do.

...and I haven't tired to get the camera interfaced with a Linux box as yet, so I think it will be back to the old HDD. ...unless I can clone that one onto one of the larger one's from work. Oh, and find a floppy or two and the Zip stuff...

..and somewhere in that 'thinking out loud' conversation I was having with myself and Herself, she asked what happened to the laptop we had last year.

"Same laptop, different config: this winter you were posting wireless from a different OS and a different browser than we had at the coast last year."

"Why? Was it broken?"

"Ummm, no, honey; that's what I do for recreation: test and play with computers. Like most of the Daynotes Gang; we tear things down and re-build them just to see what we will see."

"You mean, every time I read that Tom or Brian is rebuilding something it isn't because it's broken?"

"Ummm, no. Well, other than it's not tweaked just like they want it to be tweaked."

"You mean it's not broken and you guys take it apart and redo it anyway?"

At this point you can insert a routine that loops to the start of the conversation. Run it about four times...

It's cool: she understands the recreation part. ...and she knows where I am in the evenings. But the part about reworking something that's not broken?

Good morning! Usually my Saturday posts are later in the day and decidedly non-tech; today will be an exception.

Earlier this month, I posted a few references to the DDoS attacks Steve Gibson was dealing with. A few days ago, he upped the ante by posting a list of the servers being used in a flood attack against his site. It was an interesting list and I decided to take a look at a few of the sites...

Things got real interesting real quick and I have one word of advice for anyone who follows my act: don't go dinking around looking at those listed sites unless your AV sigs are up to date or you are on an isolated machine: about the sixth or eighth machine I checked in on tried to slip a backdoor virus past me.

Just swell. Right through the firewall and network protection software we use at work and right up against my local Norton AV install. ...where it was stopped short.

Too much fun. ...and not a game I should be playing at work since I don't handle IT any longer. ...but I was glad I'm a paranoid and have another layer of protection independent of the corporate system.

If you want to hit that machine, email me and I'll send you the address; it was still on the un-fixed list as of Friday. ...and the machine was sporting a splash screen the owner is probably not aware of. ...one that is "R" rated for language. ...and if you've seen the one I mean and didn't get a flash from your AV, you may now be the proud owner of a zombie!

But I wouldn't recommend this as a hobby. ...and I'd have Norton on board and up to date before you go spelunking.

One of the people following things and helping Gibson is a guy by the name of Robin Keir; he's posted an analysis of the latest attack and has links to the patches for this particular exploit here. He also has a link to a SANS Institute report on one of the backdoor trojans.

The thing that is bothering me about this particular chapter of this story is the relative ease Gibson's attackers had in locating machines open to Baron Samedi. One-hundred ninety-five machines from a quick scan of the 216 range?

I spent most of yesterday trying to unwind from the past week. That involved trips to the pool, the recliner and the kitchen table. ...and not much time spent in the library. Still, I actually managed to get most of a major Gotta Do out of the way: the laptop prepping for the vacation season.

The usual process works like this: finish the travailing <g> season; remove HDD and play with 'leventy-seven' different distro, OS, and software configurations; learn to use new tools on the main machines; realize traveling season is fast approaching; find old HDD ('cause it's really to late to figure out where everything is to put on one of the others); make sure machine works; offload everything no longer in use; find and load new tools so I can work with what's current on the main machines; test dialup number (oops, find modem); pack up current ancillary adjuncts (is that redundant?); and cage up the partridge for the summer.

Oh, and since this is a P-120, don't even think of loading newish stuff. I did find that the dialup number had been changed... I'm glad that's part of the process; I'd have been hamstrung for a bit guessing what was wrong. New addition: the 800 number that really costs money, but would let me discover the new number.

...and NoteTab is out for this year; CoffeeCup is working way too well. The newer Adobe low-end stuff wants Win98 now as a minimum so that's out until I reconfigure a HDD. ...but that cheapie, PhotoDeluxe Business Edition, still works well enough for my level of ability. ...and yes, I packed a Linux HDD or two.