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2003/09/14
 00:51:56
Friday was busy as usual, although it's starting to fade off. It's still jumping around doing tons of different things, but towards the end of the day I started getting gaps in there while waiting where it was either just wait or start a big project, which was a welcome relief. Lunch was Eddington's, which is always a fun one. The ResNet scanning was still going well, with the number of patched computers rising at a pretty decent rate, and the only message back from someone saying they were patching right then. After work I went over to Dave's place for a movie night. The movie of choice managed to be Breakfast Club. I think we laughed at it more than watched it though. Betsy brought a working Nintendo (Dave's had been disassembled since it wasn't working well, and that didn't help much), so there was a bit of a Dr. Mario tournament even though Dave and brooke were pretty much the only ones any decent at it. Saturday I slept a lot, and then went and looked at some more houses. Then I watched Signs. It started off pretty decent, but the ending sucked. I mean, their skin eats away like that when water spills on it? They wouldn't survive very well with even our atmosphere or brushing against things. It was done pretty well technically, so I was sorta disappointed. Oh well, that's why it's NetFlix and not one I bought.
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2003/09/12
 01:37:21
RPC updates went very well. All the servers we directly maintain (can dictate downtime for) were patched within about 18 hours of release. The desktop group patched somewhere around 700 machines last night as well. It looks like people actually sorta listened to us this time on ResNet too - a preliminary scan at the end of the workday showed 161 (I think) machines patched out of around 500 which it was able to scan at the time. I set it up scanning resnet repeatedly. Since the tool can show Win98 and ME machines as unpatched, I told it to key off the previous RPC patch (I figure anyone who's vulnerable got welchia or blaster with what's been going on), and if the machine has that but not the new one send a net send message to the IP telling them to visit windowsupdate. It takes about 20-25 minutes to scan resnet, and it's a while(1) loop. We'll see how many of the machines show as patched tomorrow... :) I also got paging hacked together for now again, and at least most of the server side of the nursing handhelds done. After work I spent some time and played with program called Gallery designed for managing photos online. It's cool because it's all server side and php scripts, and seems to be very quick. After poking with it and throwing it on one of my machines at home, I decided to do a more real-world test and threw a pretty big test up on a box I have sitting around for testing. Turns out the firewall rules from this fun windows issue caused it to not be available to the world so I had to hijack my laptop's wireless IP until it gets it's own. It seemed to handle both local and http batch importing pretty well for a couple smaller albums, although individual had problems on that machine (I think it may have more to do with the connection speed though). I'm currently doing a mass import of over 300 pictures through http to test how it handles a big load. Seeing as the server is a rather low-end pentium and it's doing image manipulation and is a significant way through, I'm rather impressed. We'll let a few people pound on it tomorrow and see what they say.
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2003/09/10
 23:47:41
OK, so I haven't really been keeping this up to date. I prefer sleep. It's been sorta busy at work the last few days, and then today this new RPC vulnerability comes out so it's test and install on lots of machines, and decide what to do about resnet. Gotta love a couple thousand machines sitting with a 10 or 100Mbps link to you and each other, and most of them with owners who don't care about security patches. I've ended up staying later than I really wanted to every night this week I think. After work I've been busy with other stuff, which unfortunately hasn't been as much fun as I'd hoped but I guess isn't too bad either. I'm starting to get behind on these netflix movies though - I have 3 sitting here I haven't really even touched yet. And all I can think about is how much I need to start getting a decent amount of sleep...
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2003/09/08
 00:41:28
Today was interesting, although I was way too tired. Got up and managed to stay awake through church though. After church was shopping as my brother needed to buy food for 200 people for some party thing. I found a new source for dew in bulk though, and they even come on the pepsi bottle racks. I thought people looked at me odd carrying in 4 six packs to by office, but carrying a bunch of six packs on the pallete stacking trays gets different ones. After that I decided to watch Con Air. It's a lot better than I sorta remember it. Lots of stuff blowing up, decent plot. Has Nicolas Cage and John Cusack which is an interesting combo, as well as some other bigger names. After that I went to go look at houses again. We'll see how that ends up. Then went over to my sister's dorm and fixed her microwave since it apparently was dropped. That was easier than I had guessed, since I was basically told "go fix her microwave, here are the security torx bits you'll need" so sorta feared the worst. Got to see her place though, which was good since I'd never been over there before. Ended off the night looking through stuff from the previously mentioned house looking. Finally time for bed though. I'll be glad when stuff stops being quite so busy...
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2003/09/07
 00:51:06
Friday was interesting. Spent the morning dealing with roaming profile issues. Apparently something with the XP image (at least on the laptops) has some weird issuse if they get their profile from that and try to go to a W2K machine. Or if their profile was created under NT4 and they now go to XP. I think it's time to start dumping out a template profile in their home directory when the account is created. I think part of the issue may also be due to caching/inconsistencies when the network is unavailable. I think we're getting ethernet hubs or switches to replace all the physical switches between the permanant machine and laptop cable on the instructor stations, which should solve some of the problems. In the meantime I've disabled offline files and all caching of credentials for previous logins - if the switch is in the wrong position it won't allow a login. Sometimes the whole way the windows profiles and settings works annoys me. It's nearly impossible to not copy large amounts of data around and none of the settings that really would help work without loosing stuff since user data and application data is so integrated (well, without user education that's followed and can have real penalties in data loss if not followed - try that one in an academic environment). Oh well. Got a "break" with the usual rush of random stuff for the afternoon. I'll be glad when the rush dies down and stuff is back to normal. It seems like all the good ideas for changes always come up during this time too, but are forgotten by the time there is time to do them. Or if they were tracked with Incidents it's "this thing where we talked about all the details in person". I have to say email can be much better than talking to people for most things work related - probably why most of our team's conversations beyond greetings and what's for lunch are on email (although the lunch mailing list is a funny twist on that). Anyways, after work a bunch of people came over for Two Towers. That's a good movie, although there seemed to be a couple glitches in encoding. It was annoyingly hot in the room though, which could have caused some of that I guess. The biggest thing was something I noticed in the theater too though - film needs something better than 24fps. For anything that's motion and especially stuff like LotR, 48fps would be really nice - pans with large amounts of change look jerky on 35mm (it seems to become really easy to see every frame), and with MPEG compression more fun stuff is added... Anyways, after the movie I flip over to email to discover that I have a few dozen emails from some spammer who went through Bethel's email list again. It looked like it was quick and over, but then I got some more (it's times like these I realise too many different addresses end up getting back to me) so it was quick track it down enough to blacklist the sender on all of the publicly visible mail servers. While I was up to modifying access files I also finally decided to reject messages from this one IP who still wants to send me 30+ sobig messages a day. I figure at 100K each it's better to reject them on the frontend... Saturday was sleepin time although it was a little sticky. I basically sat around most of the day, and eventually watched Ransom. Good flick, although it looks like it was shot on grainy film too (similar to minority report in a way, but much more brightly lit). Not quite what I was planning for the day, but oh well...
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2003/09/04
 23:31:23
Nothing two interesting the last couple days. Work has been pretty routine, and have just been relaxing the last two nights at home rather than watching movies. Tomorrow night is Two Towers night though. Last night I did "get to" patch a windows server that we suddenly became responsible for after it got Welchia. Oh well, I guess at least it's maintained now. I definitely like the fact that I don't have to worry about homework anymore - every night I can just go home and do nothing or anything I want. So relaxing. :) And now all my friends who are still in school are gonna want to kill me for that last comment...
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2003/09/02
 23:59:03
Yesterday was a nice relaxing day for a while. Woke up sometime in the afternoon but didn't really get up for a long time. Then I quick scanned through the MTV Video Music Awards. I was mainly looking for Evanescence since Betsy had asked me to record it, and I'm a fan of them too. I watched that intro segment that everyone has been talking about. I don't really see the appeal of any of it. Some people just don't act normal if it'll attract attention... Anyways, Evanescence only presented, no performances. :( What really upset me was they lost two different awards, one to Linkin' Park, and the other to 50 Cent. While I occationally listen to 50 Cent, I don't think he is anywhere close to Evanescence, and Linkin' Park is just crap... Then I ended up watching The Pianist which was a decent movie, but rather long. It seemed to just drag on an on... I didn't end up watching any more because by then it was time to fill out way too many forms. Tuesday was the first day of school, and some classes were enjoyed, others were hated. I'm just glad I'm done with them... :) First day with new students at the Help Desk, and they definitely aren't used to stuff yet. Lots of routine stuff, people needing access to things, etc... We had a meeting to figure out why people keep needing to go back into the black hole when we take them out. We pretty much agreed that it was extremely unlikely that spyware was generating the average of 120 pings/sec that infected machines were hitting, so they get to sit in the black hole until they figure out how to get it off. Also decided on a schedule to start registration for all machines on campus in stages by building. Should be interesting when it startks kicking in. I got Nimda modified to find existing Incidents for users who have been BlackHoled and then cleaned and update them rather than create a new one if they need to go back in. It keeps the history a bit better, and means that people are a little more careful about whether the user is likely to actually be clean. Finally left a little late, and discovered another DVD-A arrived. I spent the weekend enjoying the Eagles Hotel California disc, so was looking forward to it. The disc is Missy Elliot's Miss E...so addictive. While not my favorite musical style, it does show the format very well - very clean. I'm gonna have to watch the volume levels for the sake of my hearing (because it's so clean it's hard to get a good sense of volume - it can be loud enough to hear on the other side of the house through walls and floors, but still not sound that loud in the room). Now they just need to release more stuff in the format.
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2003/09/01
 01:47:47
Saturday didn't feel like a Saturday. It's just not normal to wake up and go to work at 9am on a Saturday morning... Although there were two boxes of Krispy Kremes at the end of the hall which Dave and I put to good use (we stopped before a half dozen, each...). I discovered that apparently Dell Poweredge machines when they go to sleep and don't have a console hooked up, don't like to wake up if you plug the console back in. And because of the weekend it was doubtful that the company's tech support would be available if something went wrong when we power cycled their database server, so that's what Tuesday is for - they can figure out what to do then. I did a bunch of little things, and ended up starting to put together the new email list server. No software yet, just hardware. Lunch was Chipotle, which is always good. Joel Calhoun stopped by for the end of the day, and I hadn't seen him in a long time so Dave and I chatted with him a bit. After work a bunch of us went over to Betsy's place, apparently to watch brooke and Betsy play Nintendo, and try to get them to eat the remaining Krispy Kremes. Watching Nintendo isn't too entertaining, and although I somehow managed to end up with a controller in my hands for a while and it was better than watching, that bubbles game (don't have a clue what it was called) just doesn't do much for me. After that I went to Noodles with Dave, Joel Calhoun, and brooke. That was good, although I don't think any of us were that hungry. Then we all went over to brooke's place and a ton of people joined us to watch Grosse Pointe Blank as long as one could stay awake. Missing Saturday sleep-in time is a bad thing... Of course then I had to get up for church in the morning, which I managed to stay awake through, partially because I remembered caffeinated mints. Then lunch with the family at J.Cousineau's, even though I was still not hungry because of Saturday. I think I chatted with people for a while, but was tired and don't remember a lot. I did end up upgrading my mythtv install to 0.11 to fix some bugs, and the hardware encoder was a little goofy putting vertical blue and yellow stripes in the picture, so had to shut down and power cycle the box. Works great now though. Watched Die Hard 2 which is another great movie in the Die Hard series. It even had DTS which sorta puzzled me, since DTS wasn't invented yet when the movie first came out... After the movie I found out that Jeff and Dave were looking for me as they were both bored. After chatting for a while about what to do it was finally decided that they'd come over and bring Nate with, and we'd all watch The Transporter. Upon commenting within the first minute that the composer must have liked bass, I was informed that he is a bass player. So yea, the music had as much bass as the explosions, which isn't bad I guess, just unusual. Overall it's a pretty good movie, lots of action, decent plot, although a few continuity issues. Then chatting, and eventually watching the previews of the extended version of Two Towers and the preview of Return of the King. Too much fun on too much caffeine... And I'm in a linking mood, as you've probably noticed if you made it this far. The scary part is I'm too tired to actually look anything up (other than the specific movies and like 2 clicks into the dell site since I started with good intentions), so those are basically the links off the top of my head (yea, I'm way too much of a geek - I did type most in to make sure they hadn't changed though).
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2003/08/29
 23:44:38
Well, as of now I think there are 174 machines either in the black hole or on their way to the blackhole. Nimda (the monitoring machine) caught 27 in two hours tonight, and has flagged over 100 since the new logging format was put in place a couple days ago. The Help Desk is still swamped. Other than that, there's the usual rush. Everyone wants things changed or fixed before school starts... The Sobig.F load doesn't look quite as bad as yesterday thankfully. Lunch today was C1, which had 2 sorta big groups end up going. It was very spicy today, which was good, although they were out of chopsticks (the shipment didn't come for some reason), which was sorta annoying. After work the family went out to Davanni's which was fun too. Although I feel like I've eaten enough for a week. The thought of working tomorrow still doesn't sound very fun. At least we get Monday off though so it'll still seem like a weekend. Oh well, hopefully it won't be too bad.
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2003/08/29
 01:09:27
Busy day as usual. Started off the day with a nice discussion about filtering to the list server. The announcement lists got a nice pile of bounce messages, all of which the list server of course holds. When I set up the new server we're gonna try to filter them before they get to mailman. If you are curious as to just how much mail this Sobig.F thing is generating, feel free to take a look at a screenshot of what came in to the MAILER-DAEMON on the backup smtp servers (the stuff going through the primary doesn't even make it to the client side on this box). And that wasn't even the biggest folder... :) Today was also movin day for most students. The Help Desk was swamped with people wanting to know what to do with the viruses on their machines so we'd let them back on the network. brooke complained about it as usual, and seemed to be happy to get out of their as soon as she could. And that was with 5 people working instead of the usual 2. And then there's just the putting people in the blackhole. I think Nick spent almost the entire day dragging around icons in VLAN Manager, and left running out saying "I have to be gone before my email says I have another new message" After work I hung out at the Help Desk a bit, which by then was quite a bit quieter. Paul seemed to be barely awake and not quite thinking straight, which was sorta entertaining. And Betsy said the MTV Music Awards have Evanescence, so that's in the process of recording right now (it was too late to catch the first run - gotta love the repeats every other hour). After work I discovered that my Two Towers DVD arrived, so watched the special features stuff. Lots of cool stuff - turns out there were 16 TV spots. Unfortunately you can tell they were mastered for TV and not DVD. Probably gonna have a movie night next week to watch it. After that I watched 2010. That's a good movie, and it doesn't seem like it was made way back in 1984. Even though I haven't seen 2001 for a few years, I now get a lot of the story in the first one I didn't understand before (he sorta assumed you'd read the books). It all makes sense now. I amazingly stayed awake without caffeine (and am even awake enough to notice that the IMDB URL format changed since yesterday), although who knows how much that is due to the soundtrack, and how much to the insane amount of water I drank. Oh well, enough for tonight. Tomorrow is another long day of work (as is Saturday :( ).
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