My aging and well traveled Dell Latitude C800 is up for replacement, so we ordered 3 identical Dell Latitude D800s. Fully decked out, with the kickass video card and the giant monitor (1920×1200 baby), dual batteries, DVD+R burner, etc.
They were ordered with Windows 2000 preinstalled (for the tech support) and a Windows XP license, but I’m considering wiping mine and installing Windows XP and gentoo. I’ve only got a few things installed so far, so not a big deal either way.
Just because something isn’t part of the standard, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to support it. Especially when all your competitors DO support it. Unless of course you are the 900 lb gorilla that is Intel Corp, then you can do whatever you want.
I might just be a tad bitter right now.
Update (9/15/2004): I guess I needed some sleep or something. After some clear thinking, I reset my SMC access point to factory defaults. Slowly turning features back on, I found the one that was making the Intel wireless card angry.
Insight finally told my cable modem a new ip address.
This should teach me a lesson: Don’t run production things on unstable things. Time to move my blog.
Something Awful has a great diatribe about Indiana and corn today. Too bad they didn’t find the Cornjerkers or the National Sweetcorn Festival website to link to.
Day by day report:
I’ll try to get thumbnails of the few pictures I took up soon.
And a parting thought: “Git ‘er dun” is not english.
Yes, I’m still alive. No, it’s not over yet. More details later tonight, maybe even some pictures of the demo derby. Time to go help serving the free, hot, buttered sweet corn.
Every once in a while, while using Firefox, it sits there hung trying to resolve the ip address of something that isn’t in DNS. This happened twice in 10 minutes today, so I went searching bugzilla for an answer, and I found an open bug.
Its gotten about as much activity as the last bug I blogged about.
Wow, I really hope most of this info about the GEMS vote tabulator isn’t true, but it sounds like poor programming and borders on criminal. The best quote:
According to internal Diebold memos, there are 32 combinations of on-off flags. Even the programmers have trouble keeping track of all the changes these flags can produce.
Can you say “spaghetti code” boys and girls?
And I’m ashamed Dennis Hastert is a representative of my state.
I traded working opening Sunday for Friday off and spent the day working in Hoopeston. Finally got my linux workstation moved over to new hardware and RedHat Enterprise Linux. It’s also got many other “duties as assigned”, so it needs Enterprise.
Friday night, as it rained, we played 2 “Luxor rules” games of poker: 300 chips and 10 minute blind increases. After a couple of quick all ins, we were down to 3. I proceded to win that game. Then we played a full game, which I also won. And I won the final “Luxor rules” game. And it kept raining almost the entire time. I’m going to have to start calling that Hawaiian shirt my lucky poker shirt.
Saturday, I took Dad’s Dell over to the school to install XPSP2 since I didn’t think downloading 200MB+ over dialup sounded like much fun. This was the first time I’d actually seen the install in person, so I spent some time playing with it. One thing I noticed is that the installer uses file transfer methods that don’t appear to take advantage of web caching systems, squid in particular. That can’t be good. Spent some time working after that and some time removing spyware and viruses from computers at a nonprofit. Saturday night’s poker games weren’t quite as good to me, but I can’t complain. Oh, and it was raining again. So much so that I was worried about being able to get back to my parents house. I didn’t have any problems, but the next morning the water wasn’t much below where it was in June.
And now I’m watching all the Formula 1 that I DVRed over the weekend.
After spending the last few days watching portsentry logs for repeat offenders and moving them off to the quarantine VLAN, I finally got the chance to analyze an infected machine when one of Housing’s seldom used (and even less frequently updated) laptops was connected and got infected.
While installing Windows updates (MS04-011, MS04-012, MS04-014, MS04-016, etc) , the user saw an LSASS.EXE error and a shutdown counter started. The updates finished installing before the restart, but it was still infected. After rebooting and updating the McAfee virus scanner from 4387 to 4388 DATs, it detected c:winntsystem32bling.exe as W32/Sdbot.worm, which is what we’ve assume it to be all along.
The exe name seems to be pretty random, though one of the more common ones we’ve seen is winsmc.exe. Another recent virus that exhibits similar behavior is W32/Sasser.worm.g, so we are probably seeing some of that as well.
I can pretty much narrow down the exploit to using something that is patched in MS04-011, 012, or 014, as I have another laptop that has those patches, but nothing later and has not been infected. Most likely MS04-011, with the LSASS fixes. Since all these patches are from April of this year, the moral of the story is to visit Windows Update on a regular basis, or turn on Automatic Updates if you are on a high speed connection.