Digital Choke Daynotes

"Daynotes" are popularized by a Internet Web site called the "Daynotes Gang" (www.daynotes.com or www.daynotes.org), a collection of the daily technical and personal observations from the famous and others. That group started on September 29, 1999, and has grown to an interesting collection of individuals. Readers are invited and encouraged to visit those sites for other interesting daily journals. You can send your comments to us by clicking on any mailbox icon.

Sunday, as you regular readers (both of you?) might recognize, is the day that we change around the look of these pages. Today was no exception.

I made some minor font changes with the style sheet that is used here. This font is supposed to be Arial (first), with a size of '-1'. I think the font looks a bit 'fat', though, and not quite clean enough. But it may look different in your browser.

So if you have any recommendations for a lighter-looking font, but one that is available to various browsers/systems, I'd like to hear them. Click on the mailbox icon above to send me suggestions.

Another beautiful day here. Sunny, around a 65F high, a very light breeze. While living in California has it's challenges (goofy governors, record setting state budget deficits, high tax rates, high energy rates, etc.), the weather here makes up for most of it. But what about earthquakes, you say? Well, let's see....hmmm...occaisional ones, but not here in the Sacramento valley. And they certainly don't happen near as much as massive snowstorms with power outages. It's not too bad in the summer, either. It gets a bit hot (high 90's, low 100's), but the humidity is usually pretty low (15-20%, usually lower). And we usually get a nice cooling off breeze at night down to about 65-68F (as mentioned in the "Digital Choke" story, which is set in a location near here -- geographically and web host wise).

Our story's hero (well, you get to decide on that by the end of the story) really enjoys the weather around here. Being somewhat of a nerdy-geeky kind of guy, he usually spends a lot of time in the computer room. But he sometimes sits out on the front porch with a glass of Kool-Aid (cherry, usually, although he's been known to also like lime) and some oatmeal raisin cookies while he ponders a problem.

Which reminds me. Here I sit in the computer room, and it's a great day outside. So, that's where I am going. I might take the laptop with me and do a bit of writing out there. Or, I may just watch the day go by.

Busy day at work monitoring the anti-spam machine. We are blocking quite a bit of mail, but there is some that is getting through (like those pesky Nigerians). So I spent a bit of time tweaking the rules to get more.

I also talked to the tech support guys at SurfControl (they make the anti-spam mail server). There are a few things about the program that need to be changed to make it easier to administrate. There is a new version due in two months. It is a good product, though you do have to spend quite a bit of time with the rules to tweak them for your volume and mail patterns.

Just before going home, my heart did it's atrial fibrillation thing. It's more bothersome than life-threatening, although there is the potential for that. My doctor had wanted me to go to the ER during an 'episode' so they could get an EKG while it was happening. It took about 4 hours this time to get back to normal. When it's all done, you are pretty tired.

So we came home and relaxed a bit. I started watching the History Channel and the show about the World War II P-38's that were buried in about 250 feet of ice in Greenland. The show was interesting, but I was too tired to finish watching it. I'll catch the rest of it when they run it again. But if you are channel surfing and see it, I think that you will find it quite interesting.

And those of you in snow country will recognize the scenery -- it's all white snow and ice up there.

Still no word on the house sale, but don't have high hopes. Looks like a bit more upgrading around here, with a resultant increase in the asking price. Might make it a bit more sellable as people start looking again.

Although the housing market is strong around here, I have some worries about the current world situation causing some slowdowns. It's hard to judge; housing interest rates are really low, so you would think that would help. But it may be that people are worried about making a jump up in an economy that is a bit slow and sluggish. And nobody seems to know how an US-Iraq war will affect things.

Other than that, just preparation for the SANS conference. That should be interesting. I've got to back up all important data on the laptop, just in case of improper hacking attempts. I don't think there is much risk at this conference, because it is a bit expensive for any individuals. Now, DEFCON, on the other hand, would be a bit more risky. This one should be OK.

Today was "get ready to leave day". Some miscellaneous tasks needed to clear off the desk so that it is semi-neat when I leave for the SANS Security Conference San Diego tomorrow.

I watched the anti-spam server most of the day, making sure that the rules were working properly. I don't have any firm numbers yet, but we might be blocking 2500-3000 spam-type messages a day. That number includes the offensive material that comes in (and goes out, with people sharing the latest adult jokes). Our mail system gets about 50-65K messages a day (total), so we are making a dent in things. I've got an assistant keeping track of the daily stats of blocked/held messages, so next week will have some more accurate numbers. But I've gotten some good comments from the users, who have noticed that the amount of spam they are seeing has been reduced.

We have also found a few instances of the "so-big" virus inside the network. We have pretty good virus protection (but not good enough, obviously). I think that this one got inside before the anti-virus update file got passed around. Someone got the message with the viral attachment, and opened the attachment (yeah, I know), infecting their machine. That virus tries to copy itself to other shared C drives (which we are not supposed to have either). We've verified about 5-6 infected machines.

Our virus protection includes scanning all mail with WebShield (Network Associates/McAfee). Every workstation also has McAfee VirusScan installed, with automatic updates. And all file servers also have McAfee installed. Theoretically, that protection should stop all viruses, especially since we don't use Outlook as the corporate mail client.

But we don't have a good settings enforcement. That's another product from Network Associates, and it would cost about $40K for our company. The powers that be haven't approved that expenditure yet. So it is possible that we have a workstation with improper anti-virus settings. And we don't do a regular scan of workstation files.

One of the IT support guys in another department actually looks at his server logs, and started noticing some login attempts from workstations that shouldn't be doing that. It took a while to track down the culprit.

So, over the past few days, we've been using a batch file in the login script that checks for the existance of the viral files. If they are found, it writes the workstation and user name to a text file. We've been implementing that as a quick scanning solution. If any workstations show up in the text file, that computer gets a full scan, and even a re-Ghost.

It remains to be seen how many we will find. But it shows that our virus protection, while good, is still not perfect. There is a bit of work to be done, and it might cost a bit of money to do it.

I also started reading the new Microsoft mini-book on protecting Win2K systems. (I don't have the link here at home; it will have to wait until next week, but it's an EXE that contains a PDF file of about 200 pages.) It talks about using profiles to protect systems based on their function. They have included some more stringent profile files. It looks quite interesting so far. That will be a major project when I get back from the conference.

On the home front, no news. We got a bid from a contractor on replacing the siding, insulation, and windows on the house. Looks like about $10K. It will be a good investment, whether we stay or sell. The house is a bit leaky, and doing all the work should reduce our electricity bill. When it is all finished, with the new paint job, the 'curb appeal' of the house will be much better. And, of course, the asking price will increase. Assuming the economy doesn't tank, there will be a better chance of selling. But, even if we stay, it will be a good investment.

Off to pack for the trip. I'll be posting from the conference; might even try a bit of semi-real-time posting from the conference.

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Digital Choke	an action that is sometimes needed for your computer; also a short techno-story available here.	Send us email