Wireless

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So this last weekend I got to thinking, I know scary, when I was living in the apartment, there were many, many, MANY wireless networks around. Many of those were unsecured. I've been in this house for a bit over a year now and I haven't taken a single war driving excursion yet. So Sunday I took a little drive. I drove around just my little neighborhood. Maybe 100-120 homes or so TOPS... I found 24 wireless networks. All with some sort of vulnerability showing. Of the 24 found 14 of them were 100% open. Free to connect and browse their networks, use their internet, and whatever else. I also found 2 devices that I believe to be wireless cameras but I'm unsure of those at this point. A little more time on those and I'll figure it out. Anyway... That was my weekend. :P Exciting, huh?

See, I’m not the only one.

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Quote from zdnet " Vulnerabilities in IE have become so common that some security researchers are recommending that people adopt alternate browsers. The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team, the official U.S. body responsible for defending against online threats, also advised security administrators to consider moving to a non-Microsoft browser among six possible responses." See I don't seem so crazy for using obscure browsers, now do I?

Cool Toy

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So at work I have this cool new toy. It's a spam filter for the exchange server. I built one a year or so ago for the house and it worked pretty well. This is a spam appliance that is a little more slick and user friendly than mine was. It's scans for virus, scans for spam, and then passes the email on to the exchange server. So far I've had it in for about 5 days. Looking at the stats 82% of all email coming into the server is spam. Currently we are blocking or tagging about 79%. Right now the filter is in the learing process. Hopefully next week I'll have some real stats and graphs and such. Anyway.... spam on!

New PC

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So I got my PC yesterday. That was pretty quick. I ordered it on Thrusday about 5pm and I received it yesterday morning about 11am. Yeah, I know it's a Dell but you know, so far I've been pretty happy with it. It's a 3.0GHZ P4 with hyperthread, 1 GB of ram, 120GB Serial ATA Hard drive, 128MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card , 17 LCD flat sceen monitor, THX Certified Altec Lansing 5.1 Dolby digital surround speakers plus a lot more. So it's pretty rockin right about now. I'm still in the process of recovering my data. I'm having some issues because the new PC has XP home on it, which I'm starting to hate, and the old one had XP Pro so I'm having some security hurdles to over come in the recovery process. I recovered my taxes, checkbook, and music so I guess that's the important stuff. If I only had my bookmarks I'd be set. Anyway, that's coming along nicely and a couple more days and I'll be all set.

Ack….

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Well it's offical, today my computer died. And it died a spectacular death too... Plenty of smoke and bad smelling stuff. No flames or sparks though. So it's off to the Dell web site. I decided that I didn't even want to mess with fixing it or building a new one, so I just bought one. It'll be here in a week. I'm sure it'll be a long week at that. Luckily, I think the drives in it are good, so I'll be able to save the data. My Win2k Server is still working good, that's what I'm on now. And I still have a Red Hat server that's going strong, tuxbert, that I'll use until the new one gets here. Anyway...

Micro$oft is EVIL

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So in the past, I've always been of the mind that you should pay for any, or at the very least most, of the software you use. There are just a couple of exceptions to that rule, for instance, shareware cuz, well most of them are crap. I've always kind of liked to at least think about paying for software that I use. Well after my little conversation with "Maryland" at the Micro$oft authentication department today, my whole view has changed. See I really don't care which auth code goes one which computer. All I want is for it to work. Well little miss Maryland must have had a stick up her ass cuz she could not cooperate to save her life. So form now on my attitude has changed. If you can get it for free.... Be my guest. Those greedy bastards will never get another penny of my money that's for sure....

Testing, Testing, Is this thing on?

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So I'm doing a little testing on the website lately. Since most of the web site is already PHP I guess there might be a chance that I might screw things up. I'm still playing with the php and mysql combination. I'm putting all my test things in the test menu so hopefully they won't cause any problems. I've currently got three different guestbooks there I'm re-coding to get to work. I haven't decided if I'm going to use any of them yet. Right now they are making my head hurt.

Guestbook1
Guestbook2
Guestbook3

PHP/MySQL

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So I've been thrust into this mysql thing at work. I've always wanted to learn more about sql but not under fire. I think I have most of the sql thing hammered out. At least the admin side of things. Well whats the best thing to talk to sql from a linux box, php of course. So php has been kickin my ass this week. Most of it isn't very tuff if you know any kind of programing at all. But those fargin iceholes didn't tell me that MANY things changed between php's last major versions. I think every tutorial I've read so far was written on old versions of php which have changed, greatly. Anyway, even a blind squirrell finds a nut once in a while. I think I finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel. A couple more days of this and I should be ready to actually do something. Be prepared for me to goof up this site if that should happen. Anyhoo....

Yeah, Tivo!

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So the other night I came home and my worst fears were realized. My Ultimate TV was dead. In case your unfamiliar the Ultimate TV is something similar to Tivo. Well I guess it had died in the day sometimes cuz when I jumped into bed to watch a little “Most Extreme Elimination Challenge” (The greatest show on earth) I pressed the pwr button and nuthin, no light, sounds, smells, nuthin. Well it had been flaky for a while anyway. It was so bad I had already purchased a second Tivo to replace it and while I was at it I got the insurance on all of the receivers. I had sort of prepared for this day by keeping an extra receiver active and ready to go at a moments notice. So I pulled that one out and plugged it in and cranked it up. No go! It was goofy as well. This one was one I knew I could fix anyway. I called up Direct TV and asked them to put the paddles to my card and jump start it. They did and it came right back to life. I then remembered my insurance. I asked them who I needed to talk to in order to handle the dead UTv. They transferred me and soon I was talking to a tech. A few troubleshooting steps later and he too knew it was dead. He had bad news and he had good news. The bad news was that they weren’t making UTv’s anymore. That’s actually a good thing cuz compared to the Tivo the UTv sucked. The good news was he could replace it with a Tivo. I told him to go ahead with the exchange. He said it wasn’t even really an exchange. They didn’t want the UTv back so they just sent me a free Tivo. It should be here in the next day or so. At that point we will be a 3 Tivo family. It’s always good to have spares. There may be starving children in Africa with no Tivo’s at all, but I got three. They can come visit them if they want….

Decisions, decisions

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Life is full of decisions, diet or regular, to live or to die, scooby doo or spongebob. These are just a few of the easy decisions we have to make. I'm presented with a decision on the magnetude of mount everest as compared to these little ant hill choices. My decision is to stick with my current wireless ISP or to bail for the evil SBC and dsl service. One one hand my current ISP has really great tech support but they do have pretty slow access of 650k or so. I also have a problem with many dropped packets between me and the other side of the wireless bridge. Not the end all be all of high speed internet but still not bad considering when I moved here there was NO other high speed access. There is now a local cable serive available but I have heard nothing good about them so far. Now on the other hand there is SBC dsl. Sure they are the evil giant with ZERO tech support and they only get that cuz it's tuff to have negative tech support. But with that said I had sbc dsl in the apartment for two years and only had one outage that I remember and always had good steady connections. It'll cost me more with dsl for a static IP but in the long run I think it might be better and maybe a little tiny bit cheaper. It my current ISP could just fix the timeouts I think I'd be happy and a little more willing to stay but I dunno. They are just getting ready to do a pretty big peer change and hopefully that will change things. From my troubleshooting on my end it won't but I'll give them the benifit of the doubt.

Grrrrr

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So it's been a hell of a week at work. Going about 500 MPH it feels like. So in order to reward myself I bought me a new hard drive today. I need to rebuild this piece'O'crap. So I figured since I was running outta disk space I'd get something a little bigger. I got a 160GB maxtor for $119. That's not a bad price. Currently I have about 200GB of total drive space on here. It's about 75% full so this new drive will give me a little room to breath. Some of these games now a daze are huge. Flight Sim, X-Plane, and Halo are all over 1GB each. Many others are in the 500-600MB range so it adds up in a hurry. I also got enough connectors to get my 4 port KVM switch hooked up. I've been using a 2 port for quite a while. I liked it but I have 4 PC/Servers to deal with. I have another older 4 port but it's really klunky to switch and it doesn't support my mouse which is a bad thing. Anyway, tomorrow I start the rebuild so the web cams might be down for a while.

Nobody is immune

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No, really... NOBODY is immune. When it comes to safe computing I'm one of the safest. I don't open any attachments that I'm not 100% expecting, no matter how much I want a CD Key for my favorite program I don't go to my local warez site located in the deepest, darkest corners of the net, I update my OS and my AV at LEAST once a week and I have a big, bad ass, hardware firewall between me and all the baddies. Even with all of this it's still possible for me to get a virus and it's happened. I was lucky enough to notice the viral type activity pretty quickly and it was more of a harassing virus rather than a damaging virus. Evidently during some of my internet travels I visited an infected site. Thanks to Microsoft and their sifter known as windows (lots of holes) this site was able to execute hostile code on my machine. Unfortunately during my troubleshooting and attempting to determine the issues on my machine I cleared all my temp inet files as well as cookie and history. With out this history I can't remember which site I may have gone to in order to get infected. I don't really know what else to do short of just unplugging from the internet. I have moved away from IE and am now using Mozilla in a hope that it'll be safer, which it is. I'm going to move most of my Internet options to my favorite Linux box tuxbert, and If I can find some Linux web cam software and support I'll move everything to that and this machine will become a gaming box only. Pretty sad it has to come to that, but thems the breaks.....

Earthlink

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I don't know what kind of IQ reqirements you have to have to work for earthlink tech support, But I'm pretty sure that a three toed sloth is over qualified. Today I spent almost 3 hours on the phone with them to attempt to fix a dailup account we have. Don't tell me to empty my freakin cache or delete my cookie any more than twice much less 5 times. I can't tell you how many "supervisors" I talked to. I'm thinking that who ever gets in the office first in the morning gets to set in the supervisors chair. Cuz they were morons just like the rest of them. If I ever worked at someplace like that and then tried to get another job in the computer biz, I'd rather claim I worked at McDonalds. I have much more resepct for the burger flipper at Mickey D's than the guy on the phone at earthlink. So anyway, after being on hold for a supervisor for over an hour, I called back and got right in. I ripped this guy a new ass and immediatly got his supervisor. Then I made him go find the @#%#in' phone that was ringing and answer it. At that point I talked to him and told him how much of BS these little nerds with flow charts were feeding me. 24 Hours to change a password is total crap. I told him so and also told him that if it took me 24 hours to change a flippin password I'd be outta a job. After I finally got in touch with someone that had the brains to click "Change Password". After we changed the password everything was fine. I told him that if I were a normal user, Id have just canceled them.

Yay!

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Things may be starting to fall together. The last big hurdle, even biger than spending $130,000 for a house, is broadband internet in a town of 2250. I was pretty much set on losing my dsl. But I didn't give up that quick. I found a company that does point to point wireless to a network with internet access. This is huge deal. This very site is ran off my dsl. I have a hosting service but they won't give me access to run things like this journal, the messageboard, and even my ftp stuff. This wireless is only 512Kb where as my dsl I'm getting about 1.3Mb right now. You may thing that this would slow down the site when/if it's moved over to it. But it won't. Currently I'm getting the 1.3Mb but its Dsl so It is being capped at 128Kb. The wireless will be 512Kb both ways. This will mean my access to you will be slower, but your access to me will be 4 times as fast. Although I don't want to lose any speed I think I can live at 512Kb. That's a mile away from dialup. It's a little expensive to get setup but the cost is about the same as Dsl from that point on. Anyway, from here on out... smooth sailing!

Marty

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I was just reading this on The ScreenSavers web site about why Martin Sargent is not allowed back on the show. This is call #3.....

April 17, 2001:
Me: Orlando, Florida, let's go to Sheila. What can I do for you?

Sheila: Hi, Martin. I just bought a new Apple iBook and I can't seem to connect to the Internet.

Me: What color is your iBook?

Sheila: Orange.

Me: OK, what you want to do is reinstall Windows.