Digital Choke Daynotes

"Daynotes" are popularized by a Internet Web site called the "Daynotes Gang" (http://www.daynotes.com or http://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.

Reports

Email: not absolutely positively delivered

Anti-Spam Server

What I Did On My Summer Vacation (July 2003)

Another pleasant valley Sunday. Actually, a pleasant Sacramento valley Sunday. A bit warm, in the upper 90's today, but not much humidity. And the air conditioning in the house works well. So, I stayed inside most of the day.

It's our last weekend with Stacy, our youngest daughter home from college during her semester break, and for her 19th birthday. We had our parents over (both sides) for dinner. I threw some steaks on the "barbie", while Pam made some great fresh fruit salad (cantaloupe, grapes, watermelon, pineapple, strawberries to go with some corn on the cob and french bread. It was a nice family get-together.

The grandkids watched a bit of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", but they are a bit too young to pay much attention to it. So we had a nice visit, looked at some old family pictures, and generally had a good time gabbing around the table. Everyone left a bit before 9pm, so it was just Pam and Stacy and I. We watched most of the "Count of Monte Christo" (one of their favorite movies), which we all enjoyed again.

Tomorrow is the "Labor Day" holiday. Pam will be taking Stacy off to the airport so she can return to school, then she'll go into the office a bit. I'll stay home and putter a bit, and perhaps do some homework here. Hope your holiday is also pleasant, wherever and however you spend it.

Happy September. And, for my two U.S. readers: hope you had a nice day off on Labor Day (insert your own joke about not working on Labor Day).

We spent the morning getting Stacy ready to leave town. On my part, that involved carrying a very heavy suitcase down the stairs and into the car. It was interesting to note that she came here with a smaller suitcase, and left with that one plus a big one that was very heavy. There was a bit of shopping done while she was here, obviously.

So Pam took her off to the airport, the plane left, and Pam went into work. I stayed home and did some homework, along with sweeping and mopping the kitchen floor. Got a few things done, and was able to watch the "Bonanza" and "Gunsmoke" shows most of the day. I did step outside a bit to rinse off the patio, but it was too hot (upper 90's, but low humidity) to do much else outside.

Pam got home about 4:30, and then took a short nap, then we went to Panda Express for dinner. A short side trip to the Safeway grocery store on the way home. Stacy called later to tell us she arrived OK. I watched "Fast and Furious", and generally relaxed.

My ISP is having some authentication problems, and a minimal support staff on this holiday, so this posting won't happen until tomorrow morning. It looks like a full week and interesting week at work is on tap.

An early post today, just to confuse you (and because I have a few minutes before I need to leave).

I was quite busy today, working on the notes from a 'post-mortem' of our worm infection. I got that out to the participants. Now we need to get a group together to discuss how to implement the thoughts of the post-mortem group, and to put together a better incident response plan. That will be an item of discussion at the company-wide network administrator meeting tomorrow. We have those monthly: we discuss common issues, and make recommendations and policies on various issues, including configuration standards. The group has a tendency (in my opinion) to agree to various standards, but they never get around to implementation in the various departments. That was shown by those that found that they had some workstations on the network without virus protection, or that were not properly configured for total protection. I suspect that will also be a topic at tomorrow's meeting.

I spent most of the afternoon installing "Win2K3" on three servers. It's mostly a click and wait routine, similar to how Windows 2000 or XP installs. You fill in a couple of forms, then files are copied and configured. So I did some reading while I was waiting (and worked on three servers at a time). But I screwed up a bit, not configuring the RAID arrays properly. It will be easier to start from scratch tomorrow. It was a useful experience though, I am now more comfortable with the setup process for the HP/Compaq servers we use. There is a Compaq setup routine to do first, then the embedded setup for the operating system. It's a pretty good installation routine. They have tools to create customized installation routines, which are useful if you are setting up a whole rack of identical servers. But the 'one at a time' routine is not hard to do, especially if you can do three at a time.

So tomorrow, in addition to getting ready for the network administrator's meeting, I'll try to get the three servers (two mail servers, one MS-SQL server) configured. Then I'll take a look at the security settings, and perhaps do a self-audit of the servers. I hope to get all three configured by the end of the week. Then I can start on the Linux-based mail servers.

Hmmm...missed a day. I am sure I had a good reason. Just can't think of one right now.

Yesterday was the company-wide network managers meeting. In this meeting, the group discusses standards and policies, then decides to approve and implement things like standard configurations of virus settings. The details on how to do it are distributed, and all agree it is a good thing to do. Then we all return back to our various departments, and get involved with other things. And the approved standard settings are never implemented. A really important group.

You might suspect that I am a bit wary about that group. They are a good group of people, mostly technically competent, but other projects get in the way of doing things right. But I think that they are slowly getting the message. The recent worm infection of the network got their attention. The technical guys probably spent about 800 people-hours fixing a problem that should not have happened. Even though we have standards that say that virus protection is required on all computers, there were some in each department that didn't have the program installed. And I suspect that even more are not configured for full protection and keeping the virus detection files current.

They have been sent messages indicating the importance of installing patches. The vulnerability for the Blaster worm was known back in July (June?), with a patch available shortly thereafter. And they were all told that it was important to install the patch. Last year, I built a Microsoft server to hold and distribute operating system patches. And sent out instructions on how to set up workstations for automatic updates. (It's called the Software Update Server, and it works like the Windows Update program. It stores update files locally, which saves bandwidth, and you can determine how, when, and what patches to install. The software is free; it only requires a Windows server and a bit of time to set it up.)

And we got hit with the worm anyhow, resulting in 800 hours of having to visit every computer. A full day (at least) of network downtime for most users.

At the meeting, I discussed the whole worm thing. How the worm got into the network (from a traveling laptop, in case you were wondering). How it quickly absorbed all the network bandwidth, and all the work involved in patching and checking all the systems. And what needs to be done to prevent future attacks. Can you say "update"?

The group decided that perhaps automatic updates were a good thing, and should be installed on all workstations. It was decided to build an enterprise-wide software update server (the existing one is in a departmental area). The project to build the server got bumped up a few notches on the priority list.

It remains to be seen how committed the various departments are to this concept.

Not much happening on the home front. The weather has been hot lately, hovering around 100 degrees. We had some thunder-boomers yesterday, so there was a bit of humidity, but not too bad. It's cooling off today, with temperatures moving down into the upper 80's by the weekend. Tonight there is our 'delta breeze', which is the valley's air conditioner, which gets our overnight temperatures down in the mid-60's.

I got a new toy today. It's a wireless network sensor made by Kensington. About the size of a credit card (and not much thicker), it senses 802.11 wireless networks. It's got three LED's on it: the more LED's that light up, the stronger the signal. The cost is only $30; I got mine from Best Buy, but you can find it in a lot of places. It's a useful tool for the security dweeb in a company that needs to look for unauthorized wireless networks (a big security risk). And it's much simpler than dragging out your laptop to see if there is a WAP (wireless access point) nearby. It will be interesting to see how it works as I wander around the company and other places (like retail places).

I got it late last night, due to being attacked by several tons of Roma tomatoes.

Our church operates a cannery as part of its member assistance program. There are many of these types of operations around the country (and the world) who make products available to members that need some help. The products are also used in for humanitarian assistance to disaster areas all over the world.

The cannery in our area provides, among other things, all of the canned tomato products for the entire program. Tomatoes are a big product in the California valleys. If you drive the major freeways this time of year, you'll see lots of two-trailer trucks going down the road from farm to cannery. Each trailer has a big open fiberglass bin that sort of looks like a big bath tub. And the tub is piled high with Roma tomatoes.

And there were three trailers of tomatoes outside the cannery. And I was part of about 40 people that volunteered four hours of our time on the production line.

The trailer is driven on to an inclined rack, and three guys use water to float the tomatoes out the 'drain' into a water bath. A conveyor belt grabs them out of the water and puts them on another belt, where they green and mushy ones are pulled out by hand. The bad ones go down the drain, and the good ones go into another cleaning tank. From there, they go into a tank of hot water where the peels are removed. The naked tomatoes then go to another belt line, where people hand trim them to remove bad spots and any bad ones are removed. Then they go into the canning machines, which put them in a metal can, and a lid is applied. The cans are then placed in a hot water bath to cook and sterilize, then removed and cooled and packed in cardboard boxes.

My job was on the initial sorting line, grabbing the green and mushy ones. For about 3 1/2 hours. It was hard work, and I got a sore back out of it. A Motrin took care of that, so the muscle stiffness was gone by this morning. But it was a good thing to do.

We did about two "bathtubs" full on our shift. The next shift was there ready to go at 9:30pm. They will do their four hour shift, and then the cleanup crew will finish up. That's quite a group of people, almost all volunteers (there are about 10 full time employees supervising). And this happens for many nights during the tomato harvest season.

I was relieved about 9:30pm, so didn't get home until about 10:30. All I was able to do was to take off my shoes, grab a muscle relaxer, and sit in front of the television while the medication did it's stuff.

This morning, I did a bit of cleaning while Pam went to work for a bit. Someone was supposed to meet me to look at the travel trailer we have for sale, but he never showed up. So I came back home (the trailer is at the in-law's house) and did a bit of organizing in the garage.

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