S
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Wow, what a lecture we had in MCSE425 (ISA Server 2003) Thursday evening. We were talking about how ISA server deals with filtering encrypted traffic. My instructor started off by saying, "Does everyone know how SSL works?" Everyone nodded... It's basic, it encrypts the data-payload of a standard HTTP packet, and authenticates communication. Easy, right?

Well one student said: "Could you clear it up a bit?" Well, most of the class was thinking... "Gee, this is gonna be a quick lecture on how SSL works, and then we'll be done." Well, that was before we figured out that we didn't have a clue how SSL really worked.

We knew that it had to do with certificates, but we thought it had to do specifically with Public Key Infrastructures... Well, it seems it doesn't (although, Wikipedia says it has more to do with PKI than my instructor said... hmm). From what I got from the lecture, SSL connections (HTTPS in particular) work like this:

Client: I want to go to https://www.secure.com/, so I'm gonna need a certificate... HELP!
Certificate Server: the certificate for https://www.secure.com is {cert101}
Client: Okay! Thanks, Certificate Server!
Client: I want to go to https://www.secure.com, I've got this certificate that says to encrypt my communications in such-a-way... So ENCRYPTION ENABLED! Request secure communication with server, key (randomnumbers910832here)
SecureServer: 'Aight! Communication with (randomnumbers910832here) accepted. So... do you have a certificate for this communication?
Client: Yup! Here it is: {cert101}
SecureServe: 'Aight! That's the cert. Wadda need kid?
Client: I wanna go here, do this, upload this, download that, and spend mucho monies on your site.
SecureServer: Okay!
Client: Alight, I think I've run out of money... I'm gonna go away now and watch my credit debt pile up. Laterz!
SecureServer: Mwahahahaha.... *ahem* I mean, okay. Closing connection.

The problem was really the start of communication... It's still a little foggy to me... The client gets the cert from the cert server... Okay, great. But anyone could do that!

Two, when the client goes "I want to go to https://www.secure.com, and I'll encrypt my communication in such-a-way" -- in what way does it encrypt the traffic? And how does the SecureServer know how to decrypt the traffic? I think the traffic is encrypted using the randomnumbers key, but then how would the server be able to decrypt it? Oiii, this still isn't clear enough for me, but since my instructor was turning a dozen shades of red with frustration, I decided not to ask him about it anymore... I think I got the jist of it anyway.

Relevant Links:
TCP/IP Guide: HTTP Security and Privacy,
Wikipedia: Secure Sockets Layer,
Wikipedia: HTTPS

TCP/IP Seminar!
On a side note, I went to that TCP/IP seminar yesterday... It was informative, although the problem was that it was very "bringing old network professionals up to date" with utilities and what-not stuff... Some of the stuff was replay for my class, where other bits were new stuff that was a bit irrelevant to our class... But then again, the seminar was geared toward network professionals that have been in the field, and want a second opinion or to be brought up to speed on some topics. If you take that into account, it was a decent seminar.

I did work a bit with some utilities (Ethereal is so very cool), but my favorite part of the whole thing was watching him PuTTY into Linux boxes and control them and the trip into the server room, where most of the servers are Linux boxes assembled by Penguin Computing! That is so very sweet. I don't recall what distribution he said he was using, I'll have to ask Royce that later. He also mentioned that he's using SmoothWall as his firewall! Totally sweet.

It just fixed itself.... but no one but me needs to know that fact!

A few days ago, I was running Suzi like usual... I had just started watching an anime video in KPlayer, full screen, when I realized that I had seen the video before. Being lazy like I am, I hit Alt + F4, which is supposed to stop the video, close the video file, and close KPlayer, returing me to the KDE desktop and to the most recent window or application that I was using... Well, for some reason when I do this every now and then, it'll crash KWIN (the portion of KDE that manages the windows and K-bar). With KWIN crashed, there's almost nothing accessible in KDE. The front most window is stuck there, the file menu is usually still there, and the front most windows can be closed, allowing data to be saved (if luck is on one's side...). Sometimes the File menu isn't there, and there's nothing to be done about that, accept try to work around without being able to close that window (and it being permanently stuck in the foreground).

This time, I was able to close several windows, accept one of the konqueror windows (which mysteriously lost it's file menu). An odd thing that I noticed when I was preparing to log out of my session, was that the Gnome desktop manager (Nautilus, I believe is it's name, although that may only be the name of the file browser) was actually managing my desktop -- which looked pretty damn odd. I couldn't click on anything, but my icons and the way the desktop looked was in an obvious gnome look. After a bit of pondering, I decided to keep going with this "emergency shutdown process" -- I was mostly worried about the applications that I wasn't able to shutdown... I keep several apps in the KDE system tray (Gaim, Amarok, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Mozilla Sunbird) -- each of these apps can have a bad experience if they are left running when I log out of the system, especially the Mozilla applications, they can easily get a file-lock on the profile, which can take some work to undo (finding the lock file can be quite the pain at times).

Since there wasn't anyway for me to access these applications, aside from going to a tty session and killing them by hand (which would have had the same affect of doing a log-out without shutting them down) I decided to just go ahead and log out and hope for the best. When I returned to KDE, things were looking good: the desktop icons were in the correct spots (a tell-tale sign of KDE/SUSE problems is when the desktop icons shuffle themselves into the upper left corner of the screen), and amarok, gaim, thunderbird, and sunbird all started without a hitch! Yeah! The deities of Linux were with me that day!

But after awhile of using the OS, I noticed something... Amarok has an OSD that displays the name of the song it just started playing for five seconds, and then disappears. It was now displaying the name of the song before it started playing it... It was quite odd. And then I noticed something else... The songs weren't changing, they were transitioning via a fade! Amarok has never done any fading that I've noticed before! And to top matters off, the spectrum analyzer (the bar things at the bottom of the amarok window -- also in XMMS and WinAmp and others) which has never worked for me suddenly started working. w00t! I'm soo happy, but I find it odd that it just started working out of the blue!

SUSE Baby!
Alright, so I was thinking, Gee, I'm not really happy with that Gentoo machine... It doesn't work the way I want it to, and it's really difficult to use the damn thing... Grrr, I wish I had a decent linux file server! and then I realized that I hadn't tried out the latest and greatest version of SUSE (version 10.1 beta 3)... So, I went to OpenSUSE.org, did a little research, and decided that it would be nice to try out 10.1b3... I haven't messed around with the 10.0 virtual machine in ages (nor have I messed around with the Windows Server 2003 VM in ages either, but I digress), so I figured that it's high time that I update the VM... And if 10.1b3 works out well, it shall be time to say BEGONE, foul operating system! and then usher in SUSE 10.1b3.

Either way, it should be fun to experiment for a while. I think the downloads should be done by tomorrow evening... Although, next week is pretty busy (8 extra work hours, plus a TCP/IP suite seminar in Ithaca on Friday -- going to that instead of work).

Miki-ni Update...
Last Friday, I was playing around with creating a copy of a DVD in Linux, and I was having a minor issue, so I decided to head over to Miki (my Windows 2000 Pro machine) and see if I could get the files off using Windows... When I KVMed over to Miki, I was greated with:
KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR 0x00000000 (0x00000077, 0xC000000E, 0x00000000, 0x01AB0000) Oh joy... A BSoD. I noted the message, and restarted my machine.

Upon reboot from a BSoD, there's one thing that every computer user should do: look at the Event Viewer. So I rebooted my computer to do just that. The reboot was successful... There's some possible risky situations to keep in mind when rebooting from a BSoD:

Risky Situation 1: after blue screen, OS or hardware failure prevents booting...
[ status: avoided ]
Risky Situation 2: after rebooting from a blue screen error, OS is not usable for troubleshooting due to other errors thwarting usability of the OS
[ status: my computer made a "spin down" sound followed by a "spin up" sound. The sound of hard drives powering off and on... Quite the bad sign, wouldn't you say? ]

When the first spin down occurred, for a moment my computer lagged. I had lost control of the OS as one of the drives had spun down and, after only a moment, spun back up... But at least the system came back up. Maybe it wasn't the hard drive? Just some odd sound? I knew better, but it was a thought that would keep me from freaking out that my anime/file server had crapped out on me... And the OS had returned to my control anyway, so it could have been a fluke... Although, an error like an HDD spin-down isn't something that just happens for no reason.

So I clicked on Event Viewer, and as I was moving my mouse to click on the "System" subfolder (where any HDD errors, possibly page file errors, and other major system faults would be reported, and might hint to a reason for the BSoD error I received) - that when it happened again!! One of my HDDs spun down again, locking the system where it was at. This time, when the drive spun-up again, there was no recovery. My screen was locked in the same spot that was was... Keyboard and mouse were unresponsive.

I waited for about five minutes, without regaining any type of control. But when I heard the drive spin down for the third time, I could only think that this was no fluke, there was either a very hardware fault on one of my drives (*gasp!*) or that my power supply wasn't able to power all of my devices at the same time

The PSU being a FOUR year old, a no-name-brand (Nobilis), low wattage (230 watt, I believe), and suffering though nearly continuous use since 2002, I figured that it may be the PSU (power supply)... If it was, it may explain all the odd errors in the system, including page file errors, odd BSoD errors, and worst of all, if it is the PSU, it could eventually lead to damage to other components to the system... Since I figured that the most sensitive part of my system is the PSU, I decided to replace that!

A fix was in immediate need, but with Andrew still sleeping it wasn't possible... Rebooting to see if the error persisted was foolish (such obvious PSU trouble could easily cause more damage to the system if I power-cycled the machine). The best thing to do was to power off the machine, get back into bed, and deal with it after work. So, that's what I did (surprisingly, I wasn't worried about Miki-ni, and put the computer out of my mind shortly after I turned it off).

Later that evening, I was able to get to work on the machine. A PSU transplant:

For some reason, after a long day under near-zero conditions of sleep, I always seem to have trouble staying asleep. But, after a short two-hour nap, I felt refreshed enough to attend to Miki-ni. The plan of action was simple: do a power supply unit (PSU) transplant from Experiment8 to Miki-ni.

Notice: any type of hardware modification to any computer is potentially dangerous, and may void your warranty.

Miki-ni being so old --and custom built by a small-time computer shop in my home town, it had no warranty. And doing a PSU transplant is analogous to doing a heart transplant in surgery... Everything needs to go perfectly, since the PSU supplies the "blood" (DC current energy) to the computer's internal organs (components).

Since Ex8 was just sitting around doing nothing (it has gentoo installed to it, but without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse, it wasn't being of any use -- not to mention that I wasn't able to setup my "gentoo file-server" like I wanted...) I decided to work that that machine before Miki-ni... Ex8 had a relatively new PSU, a 400 watt baby that I installed when Ex8's PSU died about four months ago --at the time, I was having trouble with Miki-ni's PSU, and thought about replacing it, but wanted to try out this "ALLIED" PSU [image] before actually installing it in Miki-ni... And now was the time for the testing to be over, and the full blown installation to be underway.

The removal of the Allied PSU from Ex8 went as easy as silk. Opened the case, undid the molex connectors [image] from the drives [image], the motherboard connector [image], and all other remaining connectors, removed the PSU from the case, and sat it aside. (images from google image search, and not from my personal machine)

The removal of the Nobilis PSU from Miki-ni wasn't as simple. Undoing the molex connectors, and all most other remaining connectors was simple, but the connector for the motherboard was placed in under my hard drives in a spot that is inaccessible without removing my "drive cage" - a total pain to get in and out... But possible.

Once the cage was out, I had to pull the 20-pin motherboard connector, which after being seated for four years was nearly impossible to remove. The securing latch on the connector actually broke away when I removed the connector from the system!

The easy part was installing the Allied PSU, but there is a scientific methodology to dealing with power supply units...

1. On the first boot, never hook everything into the machine and attempt to boot it... If anything should go wrong, a limited number of components in the system would be at risk of damage. Although knowing this, the last time I reconfigured my system (just over a year ago) that it wouldn't boot the OS without all the harddrives hooked in together, but at least keeping the drives to a minimum would allow me to see if the system would run (or fry) itself.... PASSED: Due to having all the HDDs unhooked and none of the input devices (Keyboard, Mouse) or output devices (Speakers, Monitor) all the system did was beep.
   
2. Test Two: The big test: would risk all of the system, accept for my CDRW/DVDROM, 250 GB anime drive and my 100 GB storage drive. A necessary risk. So, with my system laying on the floor, with it's guts plainly exposed, I hooked in the one required item to the computer: the power plug (risking the monitor, keyboard, and mouse was again unnecessary). Pressing power produced the expected results (no smoke, error beeps for having no keyboard or monitor). This is a good sign, I thought to myself, time to go to the next stage.
   
3. The final test is a boot-up of all devices: And once again the system began to successfully start up, I cheered with delight! The computer was booting, with all components successfully loaded. I was abled to access all of my drives, read and write information, and all looked good. It was time for some stress relief: once I had determined that the system was doing well (no odd system failures or error messages) I played a song for my computer - "Oingo Boingo: Weird Science" [ Lyrics ], it seemed appropriate ^_^

Fast Forward: One Week Later
There was one thing that I noticed about Miki-ni while I was in there working on the hardware: the system was getting really dusty. I hadn't had the time in ages to actually dust out the system, so it's about time for that. I managed to get my hands on a new can of compressed air today, and that's what's going to be happening to Miki-ni as soon as that last download finishes.

But other than the dust, there have been no odd errors... ShareScan crashed a few times, but I think that was just the application, and had nothing to do with the PSU, or anything else that is related to hardware. Only time will tell if this was the right decision, or if I was just looking in the wrong direction, but so far, things are looking good.

That's one odd IT Failure, after a long weekend....

Preproduction
Computers

• Miki-ni (a.k.a. "the Desktop"): OS Windows 2000 Pro, SP4. Relevant Software: ZoneAlarm 6 (Trusted Zone).
  
• Miki-chan (a.k.a. "the Laptop): OS Windows 2000 Pro, SP4. Relevant Software: ZoneAlarm 6 (Trusted Zone).
  
• Suzi-lnx: OS SUSE 9.3. Relevant Software SUSE Firewall (Internal Zone).

Network Setup
DHCP offline (college reasons, details superfluous to this entry)
Physical CAT5e connection to college network removed in the process of troubleshooting early on

The Network That Wasn't
When I got back from my brother's wedding, I wanted to do one thing: transfer some anime (kyou kara maou) over to Miki-ni. Since the network was down anyway, I unhooked my link to the college network and reconfigured my computers to have statically assigned IP addresses (since Miki-chan can't get a DHCP address on campus), and with the DHCP server inaccessible to us anyway, it seemed like the logical thing to do.

Miki-ni: 172.16.5.10
Miki-chan: 172.16.5.9
Suzi-LNX: 172.16.5.8
I added Suzi-LNX in there because I wanted to show episode one to James (who was over visiting at the time).

I was able to transfer episode one from Miki-chan to Suzi-LNX without any problem, and after we watched it, I wanted to transfer all the rest to Miki-ni, so I wouldn't have to keep my laptop on all night transferring files from it to Suzi... Doing one big download to Miki-ni seemed like a better idea, Miki-ni is my fileserver anyway.

And that's where all laws of IT-physics seemed to break down. Miki-ni and Miki-chan could not see one another on the network. The ping command didn't work at all...
C:\>ping miki-chan
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
C:\>

And worse:
C:\>ping 172.16.5.9
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
C:\>

And the same was true for pinging Miki-ni from Miki-chan. I just couldn't get the two machines to work together. Eventually, I set them both to DHCP (knowing that they would get an APIPA address, which should allow them to communicate over the network) I figure that I must have done something wrong -- like configuring the IP settings wrong, or maybe even having the firewall set wrong, so I turned off the firewall, and with their new APIPA addresses, communications should be easy as pie.

But it wasn't. Miki-ni and Miki-chan couldn't see one another nor could they ping one another. They were on the same subnet and had valid APIPA addresses, but they couldn't ping one another. At this point, I was desperate. I restarted both machines, swapped out their CAT5e ethernet cabling for different CAT5e wiring... To no avail. Both machines still couldn't ping one another, let alone get files transferred... You would think that a 5 year college veteran like me, with an associate degree in CIS, and with nearly a dozen Microsoft Networking classes under his belt, I would be able to get a laptop and a desktop (running the same OS, without a firewall) to be able to access one another... But no. Andrew (my roommate) suggested that I use my USB flash drive - but that would have been a lot of work (I wanted to transfer 5 GB of data, and the USB drive is only 512 MB, not to mention that Miki-chan and Miki-ni both have only USB 1.1, so they are pretty limited when it comes to USB).

Eventually, I decided to switch back to a static address (a 192.168.1.z) on all the machines to see if I could get that to work... But once again no... By this time, James had long since left... There wasn't much point in staying around when I'm trying to fix a problem like this, because I'll stay there and work it right into the ground before I give up on it. And that's exactly what I did. It took me a while but eventually I was able to get Suzi to see Miki-chan, and I downloaded all of Kyou Kara Maou over to Suzi (and started watching, as a reward to myself).

What was really odd about this hole situation was that in the beginning, Suzi and Miki-chan could access one another, but never could Miki-chan and Miki-ni see one another. And, as soon as I put Miki-ni on the network with a static address, I couldn't access Miki-chan from Suzi either... I'm not sure if that was a fluke, or if there was something from Miki-ni that was interfering with CIFS/SMB connections. Another oddity was that throughout this entire process, it seems that Suzi was able to access Miki-ni the entire time!

I did notice something odd, that may have been why some of my connections were being so odd... At the end, when I would ping Miki-chan from Linux, the first 7 to 10 ICMP echo requests would not be responded to, I'd see something like this:
indigo@Suzi-lnx:~> ping 172.16.5.9
PING 172.16.5.9 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.16.5.9: icmp_seq=9 ttl=245 time=236 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.5.9: icmp_seq=10 ttl=245 time=175 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.5.9: icmp_seq=11 ttl=245 time=171 ms

--- 172.16.5.9 ping statistics ---
11 packets transmitted, 3 received, 73% packet loss
indigo@Suzi-lnx:~>

And even when I used Suzi to access Miki-chan, there was a noticeable delay in communication... At first, it took a while between the time I hit "Okay" at the login prompt and the directories were displayed, and then again, when I hit copy on the files of anime and pasted those files over into Suzi, there was another delay... Each seemed to be right around ten seconds long too... Mystery... Maybe, there wasn't a problem with Miki-ni, but maybe there was some type of delay in communication with Miki-chan that caused the default way that windows works to not be able to communicate with it (note that windows has a default maximum ICMP echo request of 4, where as Linux has no default maximum (on any distribution that I've used at least... and SUSE 9.3 is no different).

But, after over two hours of work on this, with only a round-about solution, I decided to at least reward myself for my efforts... I watched episode two of Kyou Kara Maou... And now I'm addicted! Eeaakk! ^_^

The Installer That Wasn't

Some of you may know that Thunderbird 1.5 was released yesterday, and I decided to install it (in SUSE Linux 9.3). Yesterday, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get the Thunderbird 1.5 installer to update my Thunderbird 1.0.6 files...

Mozilla wasn't much help... Their readme file directed me to http://getthunderbird.com/releases and the Get Thunderbird site listed:

Other Platforms
Extract the compressed archive and run thunderbird

as the installation instructions for "Other Platforms" (which seems to be *nix systems

I even restarted my computer (thwarting my uptime at right around 5 day - such a small number!) to no avail. It seemed almost as if the installer wasn't actually installing anything... Or perhaps, it wasn't installing it to the same path that SUSE installed Thunderbird 1.0.6 all that time ago... I decided to give up; playing around with this was only going to lead to a broken SUSE 9.3 system, and a weekend spent fixing it (causing undo stress all weekend long). I ended up just going to bed...

The Next Day
Alright, so I kind of woke up in the middle of the night, with only four hours of sleep (half because of all the trouble I have sleeping and half because I had a bit of a stomach ache -- ¾ of a pot of coffee, 2 cups of earl grey, and 4 beers with minimal food throughout the day can do that to a guy) so I got up. I noticed that Suzi-LNX's LCD was still powered on (to a black screen) and not in power save -- which it should have powered off after 10 minutes. So, I decided to go check it out. I couldn't find any problem... Annoyed, I decided to proceed onto my next issue of annoyance... Thunderbird.

I started the task with a new concept, but I already fully believed that there was no way in hell that I was going to be getting TB to work, there was obviously something I just didn't understand about the installer script that was preventing me from accomplishing my goals... It could even be something along the lines of SUSE using a non-standard installation directory, but theoretically, to fix that issue, I would just have to point my TB links to the default location, or reinstall TB to the SUSE location. Either way, I wasn't too confident, but I did have my "new concept" that I was going to try out... The concept was:

1. Use KSysGuard to find the executable path of Thunderbird 1.0.6
   
2. Close Thunderbird 1.0.6
   
3. Under user, execute the Thunderbird 1.5 installer
   
4. When Thunderbird 1.5 attempts to run, check KSysGuard, and note the executable path of Thunderbird 1.5
   
5. See if there is someway to use that path instead of the one for Thunderbird 1.0.6

Well, KSysGuard listed:
thunderbird /bin/sh
thunderbird /opt/MozillaThunderbird/lib/thunderbird-bin
I was pretty sure that /opt/MozillaThunderbird/lib/thunderbird-bin was what I really wanted.

I then closed Thunderbird 1.0.6 and started 1.5 (by going to the uncompressed installation files and executing ./thunderbird) and I checked KSysGuard again, this time seeing:
thunderbird /bin/sh
thunderbird ./thunderbird-bin
waa! I could have nearly cried right there! The one path that I really needed wasn't listed! But the ./ gave me an idea... It may be pulling the thunderbird-bin from the installation folder! WAA! Could it be so simple?!

YES! I checked /opt/MozillaThunderbird/lib and compared it to the "uncompressed installer folder" - and to my surprise, they were nearly identical! I shutdown my current instance of the Thunderbird 1.5 installer and decided to take the risky path... I was going in as root, renaming /opt/MozillaThunderbird/lib to lib.old and moving the installer file in there (renaming it "lib" instead of "thunderbird")... And then, I'll just execute one of my links to Thunderbird to see if it actually worked...

DUN DUN DUN! It worked! *yatta*
Thunderbird 1.5 now installed!

What Was the Deal?
Well, it seems that there was one little thing I missed,

Downloading Thunderbird 1.5
...
Linux: GTK2 + XFT (no installer)

I interpreted the "no installer" part as "not provided in a package" -- meaning that I'd have to compile the software... It turns out that it meant something entirely different. Although this was my fault, I think the Mozilla site (GetThunderbird is part of the Mozilla site) should have listed that fact.

So, what I thought was an installer wasn't an installer at all, it was just a folder full of binaries... I'm glad I figured it out ^_^

My iPod's Back! w00t!
So it does seem that it was the file system and partitioning that was causing all that hell. After I deleted the partitions, and formatted the drive as Fat32, the iPod Updater worked just fine.

I was a little worried; as the formatting was nearing the end, I got a message, "Windows was unable to format the drive." I was dreading that I would attempt to use the iPod Updater only to find that it would get another "Could not mount iPod" error. I was so glad when I saw that blue progress bar slowly inching its way across my screen.

Ever feel like today just isn't your day for technology?
I think today is one of those days for me...

Since that last post, I've had TWO technical issues... One was small, and I just averted the issue, the second was major, and I spent an hour researching and troubleshooting.

My first problem, the easy one, was the fact that my HTML code in my previous post was funkie... Blogger sent me an error message: "Cannot post: tag < center > has no closing tag." Now, there was only one center tag and one following center-closing tag. There's no reason that I can see that my tag was open, but I just added another center-closing tag, and it posted right away. Problem averted.

My second problem was a problem that has persisted me between different operating systems and have (now) even had different solutions. Sticking to the most recent incident, I when I earlier decided to reboot Suzi-LNX into XP, I forgot to shutdown Thunderbird before actually shutting down. I usually don't have a problem when I do this, but this time I did. When I opened Thunderbird, I was prompted "Please select a profile." The only profile listed was "default," and selecting default and selecting "Start Thunderbird" would cause Thunderbird to respond with Cannot use the profile ''Default'' because it is already in use. Please choose another profile or create a new one.

Upon searching mozillaZine, I found a lot of talk about making sure that there isn't any remnants of Thunderbird running in memory (mostly a Windows error, that I have had before, and is a simple to fix with an "end task" command) or delete the file "parent.lock." I looked though everything, but there was no parent.lock or even a parent. file... I was getting quite frustrated. After reading 8 pages of mozillaZine, I finally found a link that was quite useful: mozillaZine: Profile in Use.

To summarize, there is one key point that was neglected from the majority of the forums:

The application may have shut down abnormally, leaving the lock in place. To fix this, delete the file named "parent.lock" (Windows), "lock" (Linux), or ".parentlock" (Mac OS X) in your profile folder.

Grrr, that seems like something they would have mentioned... Although, I only found one Linux guy having the same problem as I (out of the posts that I read).

iPod
Currently, it is still formatting. Damn USB 1.1. It's getting closer to the end of formatting, but it still has a ways to go. And the sad thing is, I don't have a clue if this will work or not.

Sound The Alarms!
I'm having technical difficulties... With my iPod.

Alright, so maybe it wasn't the best idea to try to install iPod Linux to it when I was pretty sure that it wouldn't work, but I was adventurous, and now, for the past two hours, I've been trying to undo what I did.

My iPod, Saji, a 5G iPod with video 30 GB, was quite the christmas gift from my parents. I totally loved the thing, although in the infinite wisdom of Apple, it's difficult to play video on this iPod with video. As a matter of fact, of the 6 or so file formats that I tried to transfer to the iPod, none worked. I was quite annoyed by this fact, so I looked for a solution on the internet... And what did I come across you might ask? One thing: iPod Linux.

I decided to follow the iPod Linux Installer from a Linux Computer instructions, which was a lot of work, and when I rebooted the iPod, I found that the iPod didn't detect Linux nor Apple's iPod OS. At this point, I hooked the iPod up to my old Windows 2000 box (via a USB 1.1 port... oohhh, so slow) and used iPod Updater to reinstall the iPod OS.

It was at that time when I decided to follow a different set of instructions: iPod Linux Installer from a Windows Computer - but once again, at reboot, the iPod showed an error message saying that it cannot find the OS and I should go to http://www.apple.com/support/ipod: the iPod serious error message. I, having seen this error before (with the previous installation attempt), didn't think much of it, accept that the iPod didn't have a working edition of Linux installed to it.

I tried to rerun the installer to check a few things, but this time, it said that it couldn't access the iPod. And this is where my problems started to take form. I tried to run the iPod Updater to revert to the original iPod OS, but it said that it couldn't mount the iPod. This is bad. I returned the iPod to linux, only to find that linux couldn't mount it either. I decided that it may be in my best interest to install the iPod Updater to my Windows XP machine (which has never been connected to the iPod, nor did it have any Apple software installed to it). When I hooked the iPod up to the XP box, I was able to get the iPod to mount *w00t!* or so I thought.... I told the Updater to revert to the default OS, but as the iPod Updater worked on installing the iPod OS, it once again got the "Could not mount iPod" error.

I again returned the iPod to Linux, this time, realizing something, the reason that I couldn't access /dev/sdb, the iPod device, is because the iPod wasn't on /dev/sdb... It had changed... This connection, it had become /dev/sdd -- it seems that each reinstall of the OS prompted the device to mount under a different device... With this, I decided that I would delete all the partitions and hook up the iPod to my best machine: Suzi-XP. Yes, Suzi-XP (not Suzi-LNX). Suzi-XP is the same computer as Suzi-LNX, just booted into XP instead of SUSE. But even in Suzi-XP, I was getting the same thing as my older XP box, it would allow me to revert, but as it tried to install the original OS, it once again got the "Couldn not mount iPod" error. This is getting annoying.

At this point, I was actually starting to ponder if I could return the iPod to the store to get another one or not. I was thinking, this may be beyond what I can repair... And to me, that is quite odd! A software error is always fixable... Rewrite code, use new code, reinstall the program, etc... There's always a way to fix broken programs, as long as you have the program or the source code, it's possible. But this was just baffling me... And I knew what it was too, something happened when I used the iPod Linux Installer from a Windows Computer... I wasn't sure what it was, but something happened with that installer that freaked the iPod out. I wasn't getting an error that made me think, "Awww hell, the hardware has failed" or anything like that, it just seemed like the iPod was having some serious OS trouble, and I just needed to restore to the original OS to at least get the MP3 abilities back... I didn't even care about the videos anymore... I just didn't want a $300 paper-weight.

I was desperate... But I thought that I really needed access to both a Linux computer and a Windows machine, so I returned to SUSE, and began working with the iPod. A thought occurred to me as I was working with the iPod... What if those Linux partitions are still bothering it? I took a look at my sick little Saji under fdisk, and found three partitions... One marked as none, one marked as Fat32, and the other marked as Linux.

Haha! I thought to myself, that first partition, that's really small, is thwarting the iPod OS reinstall! I figured there are two possibilities... 1) The iPod Updater was trying to install to a partition that was too small or 2) the iPod wasn't reformatting the partition, and wasn't able to mount a partition that was of some "odd Linux format." So, I did what I thought would be the quick-and-dirty way to get my Saji back up and running: trash all the partitions (in Linux) and attempt to run the iPod Updater again.

When it once again received the "Cannot mount iPod" error, I was confused and peeved! The damn thing was still not working. But I quickly came up with another possible solution: what if the iPod needed a file system? The iPod Updater doesn't seem to actually be formatting anything, so I decided to try out installing Fat32 to the iPod in Linux, and then returning the iPod to Windows to see how it worked out.

This time, I got an odd message from Windows: "Drive I: is not formatted, format it now? [YES][NO]" I logged in as admin and told it to format it... Fat32... All one partition. Full format.

It's currently somewhere around 25% and it's been going for about an hour now. There's still a lot of work to be done on this iPod, and I'm still worried about it, but at least it's doing something. More about the iPod coming soon, hopefully good news.

Pleeds with the IT, Apple, and iPod gods

24 Hours Later...



Is Love
Welcome to KDE! w00t. It's still 3.4, but that's okay, although annoying... 3.5 was released two weeks ago, and should have been in portage by now! But, 3.4 works.

I only had one minor problem with KDE, I was having some odd issues modifying my .xinitrcd file (it should be noted that this problem had nothing to do with KDE itself)... I'm not sure why I was having trouble, but the file just never created... It's like I was trying to save to a write protected directory or something. I eventually got it, and things moved on well from there.

After KDE finished emerging, I emerged amarok and fluxbox. Quick and simple installs. From there, I decided to go ahead with Gnome, and that's what the system is currently working on. It should be another day or so before that's done. And even then, I think I didn't have the right USE flags in for Gnome, so I may have to go and fix that --which would cause me to have to recompile Gnome (best case) or have to recompile the entire system (worst case). Either way, it'll be awhile before I am able to do much with the system.

But, I have actually started KDE, and it works just fine. I found out that it's got some audio issues (which I'll have to figure out) but it seems to be stable, although it also seems to be fairly empty right now... There's not much software installed on it. I should get that up and running here soon though, but it may be a bit before I can do that (gotta wait for Gnome to finish!).

Updated:
Specifics for Today!

• [DONE] Get Xorg up and running, specifically the damn mouse.
  
• [INPROGRESS] Get a desktop manager installed, and then the other two (total: KDE, Fluxbox, Gnome)
  
• [ ] Update portage (first, find the instructions on how to do that)
  
• [INPROGRESS] Get specific software installed (alsa, amarok, gtkpod, OOo 2)
  
• [ ] Configure the system for appearance

Multipart sections have completed projects marked in italics and the INPROGRESS tag.

Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug...
Well, I got Xorg configured on Raku - w00t. I also found out what was wrong with my display manager... (that was what my angry post was this morning) the new nvidia driver doesn't support (among other versions) the Riva TNT2 cards anymore. When I told Gentoo to use the nvidia driver instead of the nv (bare-bones nvidia driver) the driver threw an exception -- right out the window. There may be a way to fix this, perhaps by using an older version of the nvidia driver, or something. I'll have to do a lot more research on that before I get a decent answer though.

Still, I feel that using the nv driver is more of a "workaround" than a solution... I really want that nv driver up and running.

On a side note, I have no clue if closing the SSH session will cause gentoo to stop compiling KDE... It's been going for around four hours now, and it seems a little pointless to leave SSH open. But, I remember having some odd issues with KSSH and VNC connections... Once the session for KSSH or VNC were closed, they would lose all the data that I was working on; quite annoying, and I definitely don't want to risk that on an compilation of KDE (btw: I did an emerge kde command, so it should be getting all/most of KDE at the same time... This could go on for a day or two).

Updated Specifics for Today

• [DONE] Get Xorg up and running, specifically the damn mouse.
  
• [IN PROGRESS] Get a desktop manager installed, and then the other two (total: KDE, Fluxbox, Gnome)
  
• [ ] Update portage (first, find the instructions on how to do that)
  
• [ ] Get specific software installed (alsa, amarok, gtkpod, OOo 2)
  
• [ ] Configure the system for appearance

I hate gentoo
and I just remembered why... it sucks.

Generation Next, Generation Next... Generation!
Okay, so that was dorky. But it gets worse...


Yesterday, I got bored. So I decided to do something... Mwahahahaha. GENTOO LINUX! I realized that I had a spare system just sitting around that I kept saying, "Ya know, one day, I'll install my MS Windows Server 2003 Enterprise to it and play with it." But, once I got VMWear running on Suzi-LNX, there was little point in doing that. But there was one thing that I didn't want to do in VMWare, and that was the installation of Gentoo.

Now, there has always been this love/hate relationship between Gentoo and I... Gentoo is a pain in the ass to install. It's not just "text based" - oh no, text based installers I can do, Gentoo is "install from source" and "customization centric" which basically means that it's not only a pain in the ass to install, but it also takes forever to install.

Yesterday, I spent the entire day getting my base system installed. Thankfully, I was able to use SSH for most of it, and just sit at Suzi-LNX watching anime and building the system at the same time. Today should be even easier, since I'll be compiling a lot of stuff, which means "no user input" for a while... As long as I didn't screw up the base system, things should be fine. But if I did, I might not notice the problems until well into the compilation process.

Specifics for Today

• [DONE] Get Xorg up and running, specifically the damn mouse.
  
• [ ] Get a desktop manager installed, and then the other two (total: KDE, Fluxbox, Gnome)
  
• [ ] Update portage (first, find the instructions on how to do that)
  
• [ ] Get specific software installed (alsa, amarok, gtkpod, OOo 2)
  
• [ ] Configure the system for appearance

Not all of these tasks may get done today, probably not even half, since I'll have to compile all that crap, but I should be able to get some of it done.

Miki-ni, where are you!?!
Alright, even though it is a bit of a mystery as to how this all happened, but when I rebooted Miki-ni from the chkdsk and Avast boot-time scan, the system restarted just fine, as if there was never any problem at all.

I couldn't even find evidence of any problem with the system in the Event Viewer… Nothing at all! There were probably half a dozen errors listed in there from the times I attempted to boot the system and got a BSoD, but each of those errors were all "such-and-such a service failed to start" errors, that basically mean that something happened to the system that the computer didn't notice, but is causing other stuff to fail. Grrr, I suppose that I may never really know the cause of the failure, but one of my friends on LiveJournal said that it might be a harddrive failure, although I don't see any of the other typical symptoms of an HDD failure, such as having chkdsk errors, or CRC errors or corrupted files, or something along those lines.

Linux?! Why have you forsaken me?!?
Just a day or so ago, I posted about how "Linux shall inherit the Earth" because the OS has been treating me so well for the past while. Well, today I go in there, unlock the machine, and guess what? Nothing was working! KDE still looked normal, but actually using the OS was nearly impossible. At first, I was fooled, I didn't really think much of the trouble, I had started OOo Writer and was typing up an entry for LJ when I found that Amarok wouldn't start. Upon troubleshooting the problem, I found that it was a problem that couldn't be resolved easily:

1. amaroK repeatedly wouldn't start
   
2. amaroK was in memory about six times over, using KsysGuard I ended all the tasks, but amaroK still wouldn't start
   
3. Attempted to save my LJ entry (that was being edited in OOo Writer) but wasn't able to bring up the save dialog box
   
4. Attempted to access the KDE calendar, it appeared, but wouldn't close
   
5. Attempted to close Thunderbird, but wasn't able to get it to close
   
6. Logged off the system, which took longer than it should have but was a success
   
7. Attempted to logon to the system, but the logon failed. I let it run for about 5 minutes before giving up on it and using TTY2 under root to execute shutdown -h now
   
8. After the shutdown, I left the system off for about two minutes before powering it back on. The file system wasn't clean and had to replay a few items, but other than that, it seemed to be okay. Logon to KDE was successful and amaroK played the my playlist just fine.

Hmmm, another mystery of the computing world.

On a side note, I still haven't got Sims2 Nightlife to work in Linux… I'm not sure why… I can't seem to get the thing to allow me to install The Sims 2 (it can't find CD 2 once I insert it) and for some reason, the game just stalls if I just execute Cedega for my copy of The Sims 2 Nightlife that I copied over from my Windows directory. So, for now, it seems that I'm out of luck with playing Sims 2 in linux. Maybe I'll eventually figure it out (probably by spending a day or two looking though forums and what-not).

And Linux shall inherit the Earth…
Well, a while ago a friend of mine was telling me about the benefits of using Cedega TransGaming in Linux. The whole conversation came about from talking about uptime, and how my uptime is lower than what it could be in SUSE just because I have to reboot to play video games (which I rarely do play, but I do play them enough that I have had to reboot my machine for it once or twice a month). So, I got talked into getting Cedega.

I'm working on getting the Sims2 to work in Linux, but I like to use mounted ISO images to play my games, and I just happen to only have NRG images of Sims2. Grrr. After a few hours of working with Nero, and attempting to create a new image, this time an ISO, I gave up. All I could make was NRG images. I was about to give up and use the disc, but I though: "Hey, haven't I seen and NRG to ISO converter in Linux?" and yes, I did. It was in KPackage (apt-get GUI), and I installed that right away. I'm going to experiment with that here pretty soon.

But, before I did all of that, I tried to run Sims2 by just using cedega, and it seemed to have worked. It didn't start all the way, but it did bring up the "Sims2" logo to start the game. I think it is working correctly, I just need to get a CD going for it, and maybe a few other minor elements configured before I can really test out my games.

And what the heck is up with Miki-ni?
Well, I'm still working with Miki-ni… Miki is still down for repairs, and is currently running a boot-time anti-virus scan (avast!). I also ran a chkdsk on C: which returned a clean file system, accept for a single 4k cluster that was bad, and I believe that it was repaired.

It will still be a while before I can tell what is wrong with the system, but I'll keep working on it. I talked to Andrew earlier today, and he said that there was a problem with a recent update that he did to ZoneAlarm… That his mom had told him that when she got on the computer that morning the PC had said that "Windows has recovered from a serious error" - and when he sent the data into Microsoft, he got a response saying that the problem was a recent update from ZoneAlarm. Oddly enough, I also have just recently upgraded ZoneAlarm on that machine, and each time the computer has crashed (accept for the first time) the computer has crashed as it was being logged on.

Possible solution? Perhaps. But, we'll have to wait an see about that. More on the ongoing story of Miki-Ni's KMODE_EXECPTION_NOT_HANDLED blue screen fiasco to come!

Wow, it's been over a moth since I last updated. Well, I guess it's a bit understandable, since in the past month, there hasn't been much going on in my IT world... Until today that is.

To bring everyone up to speed, during the last two weeks, I've been prepping for classroom exams (not Microsoft exams) - which I seem to have passed my classes, but I'm not quite sure what grade I'm getting yet. that'll probably be sometime next week.

I have also started to review some material for the 70-270 exam that I want to take sometime here. But, I've only been watching some 270 prep videos, and even that is pretty sparingly.

But, all of this has been going on for a while now... So why would I be posting now? Well... I was working in SUSE and I saw that my HDD activity light on my Windows 2000 machine (Miki-ni) was solid. Figuring that it was just a virus or spyware scan, I let it be. But, after about an hour or two with no change, I decided to VNC into the machine and see what's up. However, I couldn't VNC. I got a "Unable to connect" error. I decided to just KVM over there, but all I got was a black screen (power save wouldn't disengage) after trying and trying to get a signal --and only getting that little blinking green light, I decided to do hard reboot of the machine. Windows was starting normally, I even started to log into the machine, and that's when it happened:
STOPl 0X0000001E (0xC0000006, 0x77FAA4C2, 0x00000000, 0x77FEABA0)
KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
If this is the first time you've seen this....
I did a little research (using SUSE) about "KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED" errors, and the first link that came up was a Microsoft Knowledge Base article about a virus that was cause KMODE blue screen errors. There were other articles, almost all MS-KB articles, but since almost all of them had to do with a driver update failure or virus, I'm pretty worried, especially since I haven't touched my drivers sine the installation of "Ni" almost a year ago.

I'm also a little worried because when I booted into safe mode, and started working, I kept getting "Unknown Hard Error" and haven't been able to launch any applications. I think I'm going to have to boot into safe-mode command-prompt to see if I can get this one fixed.

*cries* (more updates coming soon on this topic)

Update [ Dec. 13 @ 7:45 AM]
After I booted into safe mode - command prompt only, I was able to work just fine. And since I was running an antivirus scan on my HDD, without error, I think that the "Unknown Hard Error" may not have had anything to do with the hardware on the system at all.

Moving right along though... I ran a full Avast! scan of the system, and used compmgmt.msc to run some basic checks on the system, like defragmentation (just an analysis, I didn't actually defrag the drive).

Avast! did report something odd... A few of my compressed files are marked as decompression bombs. I had herd of this term in passing before, but I've never encountered one on my system -heck, I didn't even know the details of a decompression bomb until I did a google on the term.

To keep this short, it seems that a decompression bomb is a sort of primitive "pandora's box" - what happens when you open pandora's box... A hell of a lot of bad crap pours out, and that's exactly what happens with a decompression bomb... An archive that's only a megabyte or two decompresses into gigabytes and gigabytes of data. How is this possible?
5.5*10^8 = 5,500,000,000
Now, it's easy to see how something like that would work out.... I've got 5,500,000,000 characters, all Xs... My file, which is just a few KB in size can quickly decompress into a file size that is impossible for the operating system or antivirus to handle.

The only problem with me having these decompression bombs, is the fact that they are OLDER FILES... One is the kenshin movie that I downloaded years ago, another is one of my MCSE training videos that I downloaded a few months ago... All of the files are video files, but at different dates. I may just be noticing this now (when the OS BSoDs, it's easy to notice the little things that I've ignored many times before) or it could be that a virus did infect my system and modified those files (this would be unlikely).

So, for now, I'm running chkdsk /x /r on the three harddrives (C 40gb, D 100gb, E 250gb) and once I reboot, I'll be running a boot-time antivirus scan (BTW: the scan on C will take place at boot, instead of with the scans of D and E).

Well, I can be fairly certain of one thing... it really doesn't seem to be a hardware problem, and that is good. But there's still a lot of software issues that I have to check before I can even begin to fix the machine.
chants:
O, Almighty Lords of Computers,
please fix my computer at the next reboot!
[ End of Update ]

The Close Call...
Have you ever had one of those errors that were just baffling but also so severe that you decided to reinstall your operating system?

I just had one of those. You see, I decided to reboot my system - I was going to back up one of my DVDs in Windows XP (since I don't yet trust K3b to do that... yet). Everything went as normal over there, and I rebooted back into SUSE 9.3 - that's when the problems started.

First, I got errors along the lines of "unable to access I/O device" when I tried to use OpenOffice to open my "A Different World" paper and "unable to open file - out of disk space" when I tried to open my USB flash drive --which I thought was really odd, since what does disk space have to do with my USB flash drive?!? Also, I haven't done anything that would take up much disk space on my flash drive. So, I transferred my flash drive over to my Windows 2000 machine, and deleted some files, and moved it back over to SUSE. Once again, I got "unable to open file - out of disk space." I decided that I had no time left to troubleshoot, so I decided that I'd just lock the machine and proceed to my other planned task.

When I returned, I was with new resolve... I would reboot and I knew that HAD to fix the error... I could only think of something failing to start with the OS had to be the problem... Although, SUSE should have reported that to me.

To my disdain, I now had even more error messages. Several regarding an inability to load configuration files, and even firefox messaging me about how it's "not the default browser" anymore. I was using my very limited knowledge of Linux to attempt to figure out what would be causing all these errors. That's when I noticed that one of the errors said something along the lines of "could not write to file /tmp/...." Couldn't write... I'VE HAD AN ERROR LIKE THAT BEFORE!! I was overjoyed... Back in Mandrake 9, one of my directories in my /home folder somehow ended up becoming the owner of root... Meaning that I couldn't write to it in the necessary ways required for Linux to modify my configuration files (that it has to do at each boot)... The fix was easy, just change the owner back to "indigo" and restart the machine. But in SUSE, would it be the same for the /tmp directory?

Unfortunately no. I attempted to use tty2 to run my chmod commands... That way, I would be sure that I knew was *exactly* happening. But I found that I couldn't do a "Ctrl + Alt + F2" (or any other F# key). There was no way to switch to a tty... Half of the system was locked into a state of idle, and I couldn't seem to find a way out of it. I, in my infinite wisdom (italics to add sarcasm) decided to once again reboot the system.

Upon loading, everything looked normal, but I know that I could do a "Ctrl + Alt + F2" to get to tty2 at the login prompt normally, but it wasn't working now for some reason. I decided to log into the system, and just use Konsole to do my chmod commands. I got so many error messages when I logged in, that KDE just sort of "attempted to turn over" (think old car in the middle of winter) but just failed right back to the log in prompt. As did Gnome. Nothing was working... My errors were getting worse, and I just kept thinking that it had something to do with this /tmp directory.

I wondered if I could use the SUSE installation CD to do a "rescue system" that would allow me to reconfigure all of the config files... It was a shot in the dark, but at least it was something. Unfortunately, I know so little about the SUSE system, that I wasn't able to figure out exactly what to do... It looked a lot like the rescue that MCSE people are familiar with, and as any MCSE person can tell you, there's not a whole lot you can do in there without knowing what you really need todo. So, after trying to figure out exactly what I should do, I surrendered and decided to reboot. I was going to reinstall SUSE 9.3, there was just nothing else I could think of to do. But I was going to try getting into SUSE one last time... Who knows, maybe just loading into the Rescue console caused it to reset something that would allow the system to start working normally again.

I was surprised that I was able to log in, but I was extremely happy about it. There were signs of sunshine on the horizon. But I still got a lot of "unable to load file /tmp/..." and "unable to open file - out of disk space" -- this time, I decided to check my partitions. I did it earlier, but it was in a utility that was difficult to read... This time, I was going to use KDiskFree, a utility that had easy to read columns:
Device, Type, [Partition] Size, Mount Point, Free (space remaining), Full %, Usage
Usage was really useful, it's a horizontal bargraph that is green when things are in the acceptable range, light green as they get worse, and eventually red when there's nearly no space left on the partition.

Well, here's what it looked like:
/dev/sda6 reiserfs 20.0 GB / 0 B 100% [||||||||||||||||||||]
/ (root) was at 100% capacity?! Good G*d Man! That's why the system wasn't working correctly. I knew that I had to get some things off there, but that was the cause of all of my troubles. But how did the system fill up so quickly? I kept wondering if SUSEWatcher automatically downloaded something that maxed out the partition, or maybe it was something that I did when installing an application... But the system usually has integrated space management utilities in each of those areas to inform me how well each partition is doing... In fact, that's why I never started KwikDisk, the system just monitors itself so well, that I just didn't really need it.

Either way, I was in a difficult position... I needed to get something uninstalled, and what would be on root that shouldn't be anyway? I decided to uninstall some of the stupid games that I put on there ages ago, and never use. It wouldn't be much, but at least it'd get me some space back. In the process of using ncurses YaST, I suddenly thought, "/tmp!!" That had to be it... There must be something in there!

I quickly accessed the directory and was browsing it... That's when I saw it. You see, before I started dong all of my DVD copying stuff in Windows, I was trying to work with an application in Linux to do it. Unfortunately, the Linux application isn't the greatest, and would always end up in failure. So I just abandoned the projects in Linux and proceeded to complete those same tasks using my DVD-ROM in Windows 2000 - and then transferring those files over to Windows XP and burning them using Nero.

But what I didn't think about, was that when the Linux application fails, it had already put some stuff in /tmp, where it would sit, waiting for me to return to attempt to restart the project. After attempting to copy three DVDs in Linux, I was using up nearly 14 GB of space in /tmp alone! My root had been maxed out, but everything was working normally, until my system files (which are stored in root) needed to be saved and later reloaded from root... Which was already at capacity.

I simply deleted all the DVD files that were in /tmp and restarted the system, and everything was normal again.

To think, I nearly lost my OS over this one... It makes me sad.

On a side note though, it has taken me twice as long to type this blog entry as it did for me to actually troubleshoot through all of that... And I have started KwikDisk.

indigo@Suzi-lnx:~> sudo modprobe dazuko

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Password:

From SUSE Linux 9.3

Isn't that just the greatest message to have displayed? I mean, having a little warning like that really does get you to think, I'm really going to be using root privileges here for just a minute, and I could really screw this computer up if I'm not careful.

The reason I was running modprobe dazuko, was because I've been trying to get KlamAV's (part of Clam AntiVirus) to work... Ever since I heard about a new linux worm going around, I thought that I'd make sure that my firewall (SUSE Firewall2) and AntiVirus (Klam) was up to date and running to perfection... Well, Klam wasn't autoscanning files, because dazuko wasn't loaded into the kernel... And for some reason, I just can't get it to load in there! Grrr.

Side Note: Sorry about not posting for the past week... Classes have been going from midterm to midterm and now I'm rushing into a project that I have to have done by next Thursday (that gives me 8 days to write 15 pages) so I'm likely to be absent again ._. Sorry!

Interesting Tid Bit from Microsoft... (paraphrased)

Antivirus software is required for all client computers, no matter what. Even when you don't have a budget for it, find an antivirus solution.

Tony Northrup, "70-298 Designing Security for a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network" © 2005, Microsoft Press.

This is so very true. It's not everything though. Five years ago, I had my own web site running on a little Dimension L933r machine under Windows 2000 Pro and IIS 5 (I believe it was) -- all via a cable modem and IP address for the URL. It hosted a simple website and that was it. I didn't keep it running for very long, since when I moved up to college, hosting a web site was not permitted.

So, I disabled IIS, but left it installed. That way, when I went home for break, I could just start up my website again. Within a month of living on campus, I was hit with some virus (Code Red or Nimda... It's hard to remember anymore, but it as some big name virus/worm at the time). The "virus" got on to my system, which was regularly updated with a virus scanner at the time. The school itself was protected by a firewall or two, but the computers had registered IP addresses (in the 158.x.y.z range).

The virus I got was contained by my antivirus (Norton, I believe it was at the time) - but it got into the system because of some aspect of IIS -- since it was still installed, just not running. So, I uninstalled it, keeping my IIS folders, including the "wwwroot" folder - so I could install IIS later, and just resume my website activities.

Over two years later, several HDDs, and transportation to a different computer - I was hit with another virus! This one infected some of my IIS scripts that were saved when I uninstalled IIS -- and got past my new antivirus software and my firewall. After getting rid of the virus, I went and deleted all non-website related files that I didn't really need installed. So far, so good. But even with antivirus software installed, a running client side firewall, a corporate firewall, and all the Windows Updates - it was still quite easy to get infected.

Now - I run Linux. Less updates, less viruses. Gotta love the good life.

Now, I just need to figure out what to talk about for my security class "midterm presentation" that I have to do.

This is Confusing...
My last post was regarding groups in the forest...
A
D
-----U----forest line
GL
P

But my book says:
A
G
-----U----forest line
DL
P

I'm a little confused about this now... I'm hoping that I just wrote it down wrong, but it may be that my instructor did, and then his entire explanation may have been skewed because of that! And that would suck having to re-go through all of that again.

BTW: My MCSE instructor canceled Thursday's (tomorrow) class already - yesterday evening he told us that he had to go to Florida to fix an AD network that was destroyed in the recent hurricane... And this happens so close to exam week too.

Start of the Week Catch-Up
Alright, since the start of the weekend with filled with OS troubles, I forgot to post an Acronym Update...

A
D
----U----forest boundry----
GL
P

Accounts
Domain Local
Universal Groups
Global Groups
Permissions

The Universal group has a copy in each forest (on each side of the line)

Now, I could get into the arrows that Tim put on the board, but then this would look like some sort of football game plan (yes, it was that bad).... Besides, arrows would mean an image file, and I don't want to go there today. For now, it's just the acronym.