Diary of a Network Geek

No, this is not a euphimistic post.
My new server hardware arrived today. The whole thing, including the half-height rack with the pullout monitor and keyboard. I was also surprised to find that I’d been smart enough to get a server-grade UPS. I thought I’d forgotten that, but, luckily, when I started getting these quotes so many months ago, I’d been smart enough to get that added in. Yea for Jim’s hind-brain-server-ordering-autopilot! Yea!
So, tomorrow, it’s jeans a day early so I can run the cables through the dropped ceiling to where the rack will live. And, it’ll be taking everything out of boxes and getting it into the rack and configured. If I’m lucky, my software will arrive tomorrow. At least, it would be nice to have my Novell Open Enterprise Server and SuSE Linux to install. The backup software, from Syncsort, and the network attached storage devices that I’ll be backing up to would be nice, but they’re not as important as the operating system. I hope, for obvious reasons.
After that’s done, all I have to do is figure out how to migrate everything from the cranky, old Windows NT install and still have all the Windows XP machines and Apples talking to the server. No problem.

I hope.

Damn mailservers.
Okay, look, I know that e-mail as defined in the original RFCs is not the most reliable service in the world, but this is getting pretty ridiculous. I know that I’ve missed several automated e-mail from my blog notifying me of incoming comments, but I have no idea what else I’ve missed. At least one person wrote a comment on this blog that mail she’d sent me bounced back, but I don’t know how many other e-mails haven’t made it to me. And, no, it does not help that I fix things like this for a living because I don’t have access to the servers that are misbehaving, not to mention all the various points of failure between me and the sent mail.
Anyway, if you sent me e-mail and didn’t get a response, please, send it again. Or, leave a comment on the blog. If your comment/e-mail is private, just add that to the start of the comment and I’ll keep it hidden from the rest of the world. I moderate every comment on my blog, so no worries about something accidentally rolling live that shouldn’t. Just be sure to mark the private stuff “PRIVATE:”, okay?
We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog obsession.

Attention:If you are not a professional geek, the following announcements may bore you to tears!
Right, now that it’s just us boys, let’s get down to brass tacks. First, there’s that pesky Windows Meta File vulnerability. It’s been patched. At least, according to this article on AustralianIT, the overlords at Redmond have stepped outside their rigid, lockstep patch routine to address this vulnerability. All I can say is “About time!” Though, this has been a known problem since November, kids. The only difference now is that the media got ahold of this during a slow news week. The vulnerability wasn’t as big a deal as most news sources were making it.
Second, according to Groklaw, SCO has asked to amend their complaint against Novell. Why? Well, the evidence points quite clearly to the fact that Novell hasn’t violated a copyright, but SCO’s revenue model is such that they have to sue someone for something. So, toward that end, they want to change their suit to, essentially, a breach of contract against Novell. All I can say is, why has this been allowed to go on this long? Someone spank McBride and make him apologize for being an ass then let’s just drop this and move along with the rest of the industry. M’kay?

Finally, this is a little more personal. For years, I’ve been hearing about how the mythical “web services” concept is going to save us all tons of work and money. For just as long, I’ve been saying that it’s not going to work. It’s slow, resource intensive and damn hard to implement. Folks, trust me on this, I’ve been with companies that have tried this again and again. It’s a great idea on paper, but it just ‘aint gonna’ work. Now, it seems like people are finally starting to come around. At least, if I’ve read this ad for a TechRepublic webcast on this topic correctly. Why doesn’t anyone listen to me?

Well, I feel better now. Please, resume your Friday and enjoy your weekend.

I’m sure most of you know this already.
However, I have a lot of less technical readers here lately who might not have quite as many subscriptions to security mailing lists as I do, so, I thought I’d post a quick warning. There is a significant security hole in all but the absolute most recent version of Blackberry server, and possibly even there, too. Apparently, if someone sends you a specially crafted TIFF or PNG graphic file and you read it with your Blackberry, the attacker can compromise your Blackberry server. By compromise, I mean download and run executables on it. As in, so long and thanks for all the financial data you might have stored on any Windows-based server. Yeah, it could be that bad, due, in part, to the way Windows handles security and the level of access that the Blackberry server wants to that Windows network. So, all you Blackberry readers out there, including you Mystery Reader, be careful with attachments until your IT staff gets the upgrade done! (And, go ahead, bug them about this. Don’t be put off by their scowls and catcalls and rude hand gestures. Network Geeks love to get these little interruptions in our day!)

A guy tried to sell me his wife’s cousin today.
At least, that’s how it felt. He was thanking me for working on his laptop, which is personal, but used for company business. I have to admit, it was a real bear considering all the spyware and junk on it. So, he said that the next time he’s in Brazil, where his young wife is from, he’d get me something and bring it back. Then, we got talking about a project I’m working on and he starts showing me pictures. Of course, all his pictures are mixed in together, so we see a bunch of family shots and he comes across a bunch of pictures from the beach. He laughs and says he could bring me back one of “those nice, little Brazilian girls, but my wife and yours would probably be unhappy.” I laugh and tell him that I’m divorced, so it’s all good. That’s when it happened. He pulls up this pic of a girl in a bikini and tells me she’s his wife’s cousin, or something, and she’d love to meet an American man.
“She’s even nineteen already, so it’d be no problem.” Right. Sure. I’m thirty-seven and he’s going to convince a ninteen-year-old who, at best, speaks English as a second language, to move North and marry me. Yeah, that’d be great for everyone involved. I mean, look, she was pretty and I’m all for people emigrating to this country and getting citizenship and all, but, uh, not that way and not with me that way.
That happened before 9:00am, and the day just got stranger from there…

Better late than never!
Okay, well, hopefully, you didn’t have any major IT problems with your company this holiday season, but you might next year. Think about it. The holidays are a great time to attack an IT department. For one thing, so many people take extra time off around the holidays that everyone’s working a skeleton crew. For another, even those of us at work are slacking pretty badly. Add in office parties to that and, well, you get some good opportunities to make a run at an unsuspecting victim.
Thankfully, the good folks at Techrepublic have prepared a little article about dealing with holiday disasters. It’s a good read and, hopefully, will alert you to some issues that might come up during the holiday season. Share it with your Helpdesk/Network Engineers/Whoever, if you can get them to focus long enough.

Woo! That’s a lot of acronyms!
So, let’s break this down… What I’ve got here for you fine computer geeks who read my sad, little blog is a link to the National Security Agency Central Security Service computer Operating Systems security configuration guides. Clear as mud now, right? Okay, so what this is, in a nutshell, is a listing of guidelines from the NSA about how to configure and run server and desktop operating systems to their security standards. Or, at least, to the standard they release to the public. The latent paranoid conspiracy theorist in me can’t shake the feeling that the NSA doesn’t generally have an outward flow of information. And, they list four versions of Windows there, as if they can be actually secured. Surely, that must seem suspicious to my readers. Of course, they also have info for Macintosh and Solaris systems, so, you never know.
Anyway, it’s fun information from the NSA, so go have fun with it!

No, this is not one of my infamous religious posts.
Actually, this is a technical post. Thursday this past week started like any other. “Jim, do this, ” and “Jim, I need that” and “Hey, Jim, should this computer be smoking this way?” A standard day in the life of a stand-alone IT department. Then, things turned ugly. Every call became “Hey, Jim, is there something wrong with this network share?” And, I finally put two and two together to get five and, sadly, discovered that the Linksys EFG-120 Network Attached Storage device had curled up its toes and died.
Luckily, the important stuff is all backed up, but not everything on that drive is “important” enough to hit the limited backup we have. So, it was time for the Network Geek to go into action. I started, as always, with a reboot. Nada. Well, I thought the NAS was Windoze based, since it was a mapped drive on the crusty, old Windows NT server I’ve been limping along here, so I reboot it again. Still nothing. So, thinking at a moderate pace, I decided to try and reseat the drive in the device. One small problem: the NAS is locked and no one has a key. Luckily, a little thing like a locked door has never been more than a temporary impediment to me, so I start banging away at the lock with my LEATHERMAN Pocket Survival Tool. After a few minutes, I managed to bust the drivetray out of its slot without damaging the case and reseat the drive. Crank it up and… Still nada. Damn, I thought to myself. Gonna’ be one of those days.
So, I tell the Boss about it. Boss says, do what you can and let me know. Great. I try getting the drive into an external drive case and hooking it up to his firewire hub on his Mac. Can you guess what we got? Yeah, nada. Right, well, I’m not ready to give up because, well, I’m a tad obsessive about this kind of thing. Sure, that makes me a little hard to deal with in the World, but in my job, obsession is definately a trait to be desired.
Next, I try hooking it up to my machine and seeing if Windows 2000 can see the partition and fix what’s wrong. What’d I get? Nunca nada. Not done, yet, though. I dig out a copy of PartitionMagic. I make the disks and boot into that freaky, specialized operating environment to see if I could fix the broken disk partition. See, I’m figuring that it’s just the File Allocation Table that’s decided to take a vacation. PartitionMagic is totally scoop at restoring those kinds of things, which is why I gave it a whirl. Sadly, nada. Well, not quite nada, since I was at least able to see that the damaged partition seemed to be a Linux partition of some kind. AhHa!
So, now, I install the drive into a Linux machine I keep under my desk, just in case of emergencies. I duck in and tell the Boss what I have in mind. He gives me a funny look and says,”Well, that’s a bit of a Hail Mary, isn’t it?” Well, yeah, it was, but isn’t that what I get paid for? To come up with and implement “Hail Marys”? And, if it works, who cares what crazy thing I have to do? Anyway, after the update to the Boss, it was off to the Linux machine to attempt a partition recovery, the hard way. Whoops! I had forgotten I canablized the drive in that machine to fix another problem weeks ago! Damn. So, I install Ubuntu on it, mainly because I have the ISO downloaded and can quickly burn an install CD. Well, Ubuntu goes to the Internet to find an archive server to download the install files, so that takes all night. Still, I figured, I’d come in early and bang this out in no time. Well, my head-shrink says I live in fantasy too much, so, it shouldn’t surprise my readers to know that it was far from easy. For an hour Friday morning, I ran every disk repair or recovery program I could find that came with a standard install of Linux. Guess what I got? Yeah, bubkes. (That’s Yiddish for nada.)
So, after all that, I still ended up formatting the drive and letting the restore run. Oh, did I mention that it was a Maxtor? For you non-geeks reading this, Maxtor 80 Gig drives have the highest fail-rate I’ve ever seen in the field. Everyone has problems with them. Well, this was a Maxtor 120 Gig drive, but I’m afraid that the same luck holds true to them, too.
Hmm, sounds like it’s time to order that new server I’ve been asking for, doesn’t it?

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it."
   --Eric Hoffer

A primer from Patrick Norton.
Yes, that’s right, Patrick Norton of TechTV and The Screen Savers fame. Pat’s written a little article in his blog over at Extreme Tech about switching to Linux for “free”. I put “free” in quotes like that because, frankly, nothing is free. There are some things that just don’t work or don’t work as well in Linux as they do in Windows. And, there are programs that simply don’t run under Linux. Oh, sure, you can try to use an emulator or whatever to make it happen, but I’ve never, ever really trusted those suckers. Especially not with my financial data. To me, that’s what will “kill” Windows, a Linux-version of Quicken.
Anyway, Pat has a good overview of the pros and cons of switching to Linux and it’s worth taking a look.

A funny thing happened to me while searching for tools.
I found them. Oh, okay, this might not be all that shocking, but, really I didn’t expect to find so many good utilities so quickly, even with Google. So, here you go, you poor, blighted souls that must manage and maintain Windows systems, here are your utility links:

Microsoft Resource Kit Tools
Windows Utilities at LabMice
Utilities at MajorGeeks.com(Not all free, but most are pretty cheap if they aren’t free.)
Freeware Files Windows Diagnostics (Now, these are ALL free.)
Doc Memory RAM Tester (Free for a limited time, so grab it quick!)

Ironically, just after I started this search, my need for these utilities mysteriously went away. Funny how often that happens after a reboot, isn’t it? Argh! Users! Can’t live with ’em and can’t make a living without ’em!