Looks like there is a running theme behind the batch of failed Housing GX270s: failing capacitors. Dell Forums post, and another.
Dell Optiplex GX270 failures
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Yearly Archives: 2004
Lots of portscans this morning
Looks like there’s a new worm afoot on campus this morning, lots of probes at port 445 and 135 to our portsentry hosts. Maybe this new RBot variant or this Agobot variant.
And we were down to less than 60 open tickets.
Update (11/18/2004): Looks like at least some of these were recently reinstalled Windows XP without all the patches. Most commonly found virus was Korgo.worm.v. But, this mini-outbreak reinforces the usefulness of being proactive with network monitoring and using the quarantine vlan.
The sad state of the Democratic party
When former party honchos turned gasbag talking heads are smashing eggs on their faces and making cracks about gay governors on national television, something is wrong. I just hope that no one was actually watching the sunday morning gasbag shows.
And, isn’t it suprising that the rats are running off the ship like it’s sinking? Hmm, can anyone say “lucrative consulting jobs with goverment contractors and think tanks”? Maybe Gen. Powell is just looking for a way to get his self respect back.
Josh Marshall, over at talkingpointsmemo has some good thoughts on all this.
We’ll Miss You Stinky
Stinky passed away this afternoon. We didn’t keep the house warm enough for her, and she developed pneumonia. It was great while it lasted Stinky, we’ll miss you.
And people wonder why I hate sweaters
There just aren’t any attractive ones. This gallery is full of some real winners. (via BoingBoing)
Wow
That took some time, I got my first email today about the spongebob related image/spam. It’s not too informative, just a link to the image and the auto-appended footer from Hotmail, in german.
Not sure what exactly I was expecting.
Another land yacht
After failing to win the Wayne Newton Caddy, I think I’ll now pursue the Audrey Hepburn Chrysler 300. Or not. (Via Jalopnik)
gentoo profile updates
Taking my brain away from the election boondoggle this morning, after an emerge --sync, I was greeted with this:
!!! Your current profile is deprecated and not supported anymore.
!!! Please upgrade to the following profile if possible:
default-linux/x86/2004.0
To upgrade do the following steps:
# emerge -n '>=sys-apps/portage-2.0.51'
# cd /etc/
# rm make.profile
# ln -s ../usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2004.0 make.profile
Searching the forums led to one post in german about this. Since I’ve got the luxury of more than one non-production test machine, I went ahead and followed the instructions. All seems to be fine.
A little more poking around in the gentoo documentation, and I found some pretty good advice on this upgrade, seems to be just a file system layout/naming convention change.
Go Vote
Following the theme of everyone else, go vote today.
Update:
One small observation from my polling place this morning: Unless you are personally willing to volunteer as a poll worker, don’t complain that things are moving slowly. In my particular precinct, we’ve had a good sized population increase in the last four years, but no one is ever sure of how good turn out will be until the day comes. So, preparing for the rush of voters before work, at lunch, etc is hard to do. 40 minutes out of this one day seems pretty small compared to the impact it could have over the next 4 years.
Also, if you are unsure of your polling place, you should have looked before today, but if you didn’t don’t get mad at the volunteer for sending you someplace else.
I’m still mulling over some other observations, but for now, that is all.
Linux Firewalling
Since I’ve been helping Jim try to setup a simple firewall for a class, this presentation from the last time I helped him out is quite apropos.
I’m sure there are errors in it, but hey, it worked.