Digital Choke Daynotes

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Reports

Sundays are for relaxing, which is what we did today. Quietness abounded throughout the day. Until about 5pm, when the grandkids (and their parents) came by for dinner. The kids are great to have around. We played with some toys, read a few books, and then had dinner.

Tonight's feast was a simple turkey dinner. Not the big Thanksgiving Day production type of dinner. Just a turkey in a roasting bag (a great way to get a juicy bird), some mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and jello salad. And the best thing about having turkey is the leftovers, which will turn into turkey sandwiches (just a bit of mayonnaise, and some cranberry sauce). I actually think I like the turkey sandwiches better than the turkey dinner.

The spam filter at work has been working hard with the new anti-virus rule I put in place last Thursday. It's been catching a lot of the PayPal scam that you read about in last week's post. That particular virus mail seems to be the most popular one that is being caught by that new rule.

The big news around here (at least, the story that the media are getting all excited about) is the inauguration of of Arnold as the "Governator". What will be more interesting is what he does afterwards. The California state budget is in a mess (our deficit is bigger than all the other states combined), the legislators are not serving the people (way too many special interest groups), and all the other problems we got around here. And, as you might expect, it will be a big media circus. All of it occurring about three blocks away from my office. But I think that I'll be able to keep away from all of the crowds and traffic.

I spent most of the morning tweaking and analyzing the anti-spam rules. I decided to rearrange them a bit so that rules that would mostly affect incoming mail would be higher on the rules list. Since we get a lot more incoming mail than outgoing, rules for incoming messages should be first on the list. That should make rule processing a lot faster, although it's pretty fast, considering that each server is a dual-processor Xeon system with lots of memory.

There are also the users that get a bit excited if they think that they aren't getting all of their email. Some of that complaining is valid; you don't want to block a lot of valid email. They complain, however, that sometimes they don't know that they aren't getting their mail. Our rules don't notify a recipient that an incoming message is blocked (they do on outgoing messages). With about 40K messages a day, and 30% of those as spam, it would be a lot of blocked messages going back to spammers. Which would just verify their email addresses as valid, so they would get more spam.

It's sort of like complaining to your postman that you aren't getting enough mail. And when they ask you what mail you are missing, you don't know -- you just know that you are missing some mail. That sort of thing is hard to track down.

The anti-spam servers are catching a lot of junk. It's just a delicate balance trying to block the spam, without blocking valid business mail.

A note that the "PayPal" virus scam has a new variant. This one has a second screen that asks for your full name, address, driver's license and social security numbers. I guess that additional information makes it easier for identity theft. I don't think that this scam is going to be successful long-term, since it emails the info back to only four email addresses, which are easily blocked. I could think of a few smarter ways to get that information back to the virus writer. In fact, I write about a similar way to anonymously gather some information in my Internet fiction story, available very near these posts....www.digitalchoke.com . You might find the story entertaining. (/shameless plug)

A quiet day at work today, catching up on some odds and ends. I updated and added some informational pages to the Security pages on our Intranet. I did the paperwork for a renewal of a maintenance agreement on some security software.

After work, Pam and I went over to the Jensen's (daughter/husband/two kids) house. Christine (daughter) was a bit under the weather, so we brought along dinner from the local KFC, along with a few groceries to help out. It was a nice visit; the grandkids get really excited when you appear at their door.

We got home in time to watch "24". Not sure if this season's episodes are as interesting as the last one. I watched it while playing around with the format of these pages. The new look (just a minor change) is not quite ready yet, so you'll just have to wait.

And if you are interested in the business of spam, there's an interesting analysis of the problem and some solutions here (as usual, all the links here open up a new window, so you won't get lost). My Canadian readers (both of them) might recognize the author -- Andrew Leung of the Canadian telco firm Telus. He says that a spammer only needs 50 responses from a mailing of one million spam messages to make a profit. You can buy 70 million email addresses on a CD for under $150. With a response rate of 0.005%, that will get you 3500 new customers. If you make $10 on each customer buying whatever you are selling, that's $35,000. Just one of those campaigns will cover your startup costs. It's easy to see why spam is going to be hard to get rid of. Interesting facts in Mr. Leung's analysis.

Things were quiet this morning, until a minor change somewhere screwed up the anti-spam mail server. That happened about lunchtime, just after my turkey and cranberry sandwich. I took about 2 1/2 hours of phone support with the vendor before we figured out that one of the controlling databases got damaged. The only way to fix that (since I hadn't gotten around to backing up that database) was to uninstall and reinstall the software on one of the servers. That got the databases happy, and then I had to rebuild all the rules. It was more time-consuming than difficult. Mail processing got going a bit before 4pm, and a look at the processes this evening shows that all is well. Which is important, because users get really cranky if they don't get their email.

Even with all of that, I was able to leave at the usual time. Pam had to work late, again, but she is on the final few days of the fiscal year-end push. So I made a "run for the border" for dinner. No, that's the old slogan. "I thought outside the bun" for dinner.

We talked to Stacy (in college in Idaho) this evening. She's doing well, but looking forward to the turkey-day break when she gets to go off to Houston to visit her aunt. But she is not escaping the cold weather that is rolling in. The forecast for Thursday calls for a high of 15 F and a low of -7 F. Yes, Brian C (up in Canada), you're probably saying that's not very cold, but Stacy is a California girl. If it gets below 30 F around here, it's big news. That doesn't count up in the mountains, but here in the valley. She is getting a bit acclimated though. Today the high was a bit above 40 F, with snow on the ground, but she said it was "really nice outside".

A quiet day today. The spam servers are happy, there have been no complaints about email from the users, and I was able to work on a few projects.

One of them is the 'as-built' security settings for Windows servers. By creating some policy files, I can easily run a comparison of security settings on the server. That will be helpful for auditing new and existing servers. The plan is to create a set for Win2K servers (we still have a lot of those), and Win2003 servers.

There are also a few things I need to do to prep for some meetings tomorrow afternoon and next week. Some other departments are planning some new projects, and (wisely) they are thinking about the information security aspects of these new projects. This is a good thing; it shows that the security education efforts over the past year as I've been doing this job are taking hold in other areas. Of course, the Blaster worm incident we had a couple of months ago got their attention. Whatever works.

The morning was taken up by a couple of meetings. One was a presentation to all of the big bosses about what to do when an employee leaves. There's issues like paychecks, benefits, returning stuff, etc. It's never been all in one place, so a group from several different departments got together and built a formal policy to do everything correctly.

The other meeting was a preliminary meeting before putting out a "Request for Proposals" to get a software solution to a departments partially automated process. Their current process is being overwhelmed by the transaction load, so they need a new solution that is a bit more scalable.

Then I worked on the anti-spam server a bit, checking up on the configuration and tweaking a couple of new rules. We're catching most of the spam that is being spewed at us.

I watched "The Flim-Flam Man" tonight. Great movie. Great actors in it (George C. Scott, Harry Morgan, Slim Pickens, Strother Martin), and a nice car chase. If you find the movie on one of the movie channels, or at your local video store, grab it for an enjoyable evening. But don't watch it on a station that chops it up. Go for the whole thing in one shot (letterbox would be nice if you can find it).

Pam's working again tomorrow. Maybe I'll do that electrical work I talked about last week. And I've been thinking about building some shelves in the office closet. We'll have to see what happens.

I managed to get quite a few things done from my list today. I started out with the normal shower cleaning job, then had breakfast (today was a "Snap-Crackle-Pop" day). I cleaned up the kitchen, and got the dishwasher going. Then (without any sudden electrical discharges or breakers popping), I replaced one of the electrical outlets in the kitchen.

Then I decided to take a look at the wiring of the front porch out garage exterior lights. There are two switches by the door. One should control the outside lights (front porch and exterior garage), and the other the inside entry light. But the inside entry light switch also controlled the garage lights, which was not right.

So, after finding the right circuit breaker, I took off the switch cover and got the switches out of the box. Then I sat down with my pad of paper and made a drawing of the wiring. There were five sets of wires coming in the box. All of the white wires were connected together. Three of the black wires went to one switch, and two went to the other switch.

So I figured that there were two 'source' wire sets, and the other three wire sets went to the inside light, porch light, and garage lights. (Although now that I think about it, I suspect that there is only once source wire set. I think that the other one goes to the exterior plug.) So I figured that I just needed to move one black wire to the other plug. I had a 50-50 chance of picking the right wire.

So, I picked one. I made a short 'pig-tail' wire, since the one I picked wasn't long enough to reach the other switch. A couple of wire nuts to fasten everything together, and a final inspection for loose wires, and I was ready for a test. I flipped on the breaker, and the switches are now controlling the correct set of lights. And I was quite proud of myself.

Then I made a short run down to Home Depot, and picked up two 'dusk-to-dawn' light sockets and a spring-loaded door hinge. I put the two light sockets on the front garage lights, so that the front porch and garage lights will turn on at night, and off during the day.

Then I put the hinge spring on the door to the garage. The old spring hinge was a bit weak, but the new one closes the door tightly.

A bright clear but cold day today; it didn't get much warmer than 60 degrees (F), but there was a cold wind blowing that made it quite brisk outside. But the wind made the air quite clear; I could see all the way to the coast mountains, which are about 80 miles away.

Since Pam was working all day, I was in charge of building dinner. A simple recipe, but quite good. Put four chicken breasts in the bottom of a crock pot. Add 1/2 cup milk to a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup, mix it well, and pour it over the chicken. Then take a box of stove-top stuffing, mix it with 1 1/3 cup water, along with the stuffing seasoning mix, then spoon that on top of the chicken. Put the cover on the crock pot, set the temperature to low, and let it cook for 6-8 hours. Quite tasty when it's done.

After dinner, we plan to go to a movie, then to the grocery store afterwards. And while I'm waiting for Pam to get home, "MacKenna's Gold" is on TV. Another good (not great) movie, recommended.

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