Had a premonition this was going to happen back in about '78

Sprint saves Radio Shack from extinction  Uhm, why?

No, not the saving part...the bankruptcy part.

Back in the days when a Western Auto catalog was your prime competition during the Christmas shopping season, selling crap was a viable business model.

I recall being in a Radio Shack in the dawning days of personal computing when Commodore,  Apple and Tandy computers were the heavy hitters.**
Tandy computers being sold by Radio Shack seeing as they were part of the Electronics, computer and Leather? conglomerate.

I bought quite a bit of leather from Tandy as well. I miss the days when you could get a half cow hide for 90 bucks. But, I digress.

The premonition came when I walked up to the counter in a Radio Shack, Tandy computers displayed expensively around me, to pay for whatever the heck it was I was buying at the time.

The clerk pulled out a ball point pen and an invoice pad, replete with carbon paper, to write up my purchase before it was punched into the cash register.

Innocently, I stated, " I find it odd that you don't use your own computers for invoicing"

Time froze.
I heard a pin drop a hundred yards away out in the mall food court.

The manager and two clerks behind the counter expressed such a hurt look on their faces.
I, expected upon such observation, to feel "bad".  Surprisingly, I did not.

That experience, and having bought three electronics kits from them previously convinced me Radio Shack was headed down the tube.

By the time my Daughter was born in 1989, Tandy was out of the computer business.

How they survived this long escapes me.  When I'm thinking of purchasing electronics of any type, Radio Shack is not a name that even remotely shows up on my radar scope.











** Mein Got, were they expensive back then.  Particularly if you factor in inflation since, say 1983. $2500 for an Apple IIe with 64k of ram and a squirrel speed walking in a rodent wheel for a processor. No such thing as a hard drive. Storage was two external 5 1/4" floppy drives. But, it was cutting edge technology and I effing paid the price tag to get it. Booyah.

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All Your Security aRe OuRs

Kaspersky*, the computer security folks, have unearthed "The Equation Group".  This group is apparently so good at writing malware that it cannot be erased by reformatting the hard drive.

I'm posting this mostly to give the ever 'puter security savey Borepatch a heads up so he can 'splain what this truly means to highly educated and licensed rednecks like me.

After reading the article, plan "A" for the BAR Corp HQ infrastructure is to store the family vacay pics on an off network storage device, buy some spare hard drives and keep the Ubuntu install USB drive handy.

All dumbassery** aside, the Equation Group periodically filters down spy tools to lesser mortals like the guys that created Stuxnet.  Stuxnet was no kiddy script. This was the malware used to disrupt the Iranian Iranian Nuclear program.  Eventually, this is going to get down to flannel shirt and stretch pants wearing parent's basement living malcontent-ed hackers.

There was some quote attributed to the Rothschilds long ago, something to the effect of, "give me control of your currency, and I will control your country."

That has been trumped. "Currency" has been replaced, for the most part, by numbers in computers.  If you have control over the correct computers, and need more money, just add a few zeros to the balance.

Ah, I remember the internet. I really enjoyed it. Between these Equation folks and the FCC deciding they need total control over the internet, fax machines and paper are looking pretty good again.


* Kaspersky Lab and their virus and malware proteciton software is highly spoken of by the outsource IT folks I've used over the years.  However, Kaspersky is Ruski.  Edward Snowden, of NSA whistleblower fame, is currently in Russia.  The bit trail of this "discovery" is pointing towards the NSA.

** I learned that word from my Uncle Jay.

My theory about why linux exists

The dudes that write virus programs need something to program in that won't get infected with their own work.

Case in point - analogy:

Gray hair and computers do not mix well

Actually that is a misstatement.
People and computers do not mix well...from a security standpoint.

Anything a human hand touches will get fucked up to some degree. That is more absolute than taxes or death.

One of my very senior partners emailed today to tell me he ran the computer "cleaner" program my part time IT guy put on his computer and now it was asking him for money to "clean" his computer.
He was on the intertubes and clicked the pop up that told him his computer was infected.
Similar name to the malware program we do use, so he clicked away.*

My gray haired users fuck up their computers because of ignorance.

My twenty something users fuck up their computers because of stupidity, and "OH! A Shiny Thing!"

I see all kinds of quips on the net about how adept the younger generations are with computers. Hell I can't figure this out, I'll get my ten year old to fix it.
It is a lie.  Yes, they know how to get this app and that app and how to stream music on their iphone.
Yet, they still have to find the email with the link to click for their timesheet so they can get paid.

Really? That's how you get to your timesheet?  Let me show you how to make an icon on your desktop with a quick link that will get your right there.

We are still cavemen, we just have higher tech clubs.

My network would be pristine and perfect if the "users" did not have to touch it.

* Years ago, pre-pentium days, when we first got Winders, he clicked the excel icon and it did not open right away.
So he clicked it again, and again...and again. He called me and said his computer was not working right.
As I arrived at his desk, I witnessed about twenty-seven instances of excell cascade across the screen.
PIBCAC
"May I have your chair?"
click "X", Click "X" twenty-seven times.
" if the program does not open right away, wait for a minute"
"ok, thanks Kx"

google has muted me

For whatever reason I find myself unable to comment on blogs.
I am logged into my google account. I am able to post on blogger, but when I go to comment on another blog and hit the publish button, my text disappears and my comment does not post.

srsly?

Two is one, one is none

Sometimes two is none.
Warning: computer geekery.

I got a call last night from one of my partners. The electrical power to our entire building went down for about 9 hours yesterday. This resulted in a less than graceful shutdown of a dozen servers.

We office in a very upscale part of town.  The electrical infrastructure is almost third world. :(

When access to the server backup image requires access permission authentication to the server that is toasted you have what is known as a conundrum.

I have a backup image of the server.
I cannot get to the image of the server.
This is because the device storing the server image wants to check my access credentials with the server that is missing*...the server for which it holds the backup image.  Therefore, backup storage device is inaccessible.

Fortunately my redundancies have redundancies.  Were it not for the secondary domain controller, we would not have been able to work today. This would have been very bad. North of $10k per hour billable lost.

We have expensive high fallutin' backup software.  I have seen this software fail to make backups frequently. So, I have a backup backup, aka as an MS Dos batch file that launches via the task scheduler and has yet to fail.**

I see now that I need to add the domain controller backup image files to that MS DOS Batch file routine for events like this, so it is somewhere that I can get to under almost any circumstances.

 If you can't get to your backup, it might as well not be there.



* for those that know of such weirding ways, it is was a virtual machine that is now listed as "inaccessible guest" or some such helpful information on the host server.
** The MS DOS xcopy command is your friend.  Believe it or not, MS DOS still exists in Windows 7. I'm not sure about Windows 8. If not, I'm never down upgrading to Windows 8.

I have a Sad

My update manager informed me that Ubuntu 11.04 is no longer supported.
Now I'll have to upgrade to the next version.

I also have a scared.
Hopefully the majority of the bugs have been worked out. Those on the bleeding edge of version 12 were not happy campers a while back.  I subscribe to the maxim; "if it ain't broke don't fix it".

So a quick click to the Ubuntu upgrade information web page and what do I see?
"We recommend you backup your existing Ubuntu installation before updating".
uhhm?

I was perfectly happy with 11.04. It has worked flawlessly on my laptop.

Ah well. Time to backup the crappy pics from the laptop and jump in with both feet I guess. I think I'll just go ahead and hose Windows 7 this time.

I only boot into it by accident these days.  If you've ever heard a faint scream and cussing way off in the distance, now you know what it was.

FCC says No Double Dipping to Verizon

So you've got an unlimited data plan on your swoopy smart phone.  To tether and use it as a wifi hotspot, you have to pay an additional fee (assuming you haven't rooted your phone) to access data you've already paid for.
Irritating, no?

Verizon recently got spanked by the FCC for doing this.

More in the article by Stephen J. Vaughn-Nichols at ZDNet

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There's some good news...

"The model number can be found on a sticker on either the bottom or rear of your product. The location of the label as well as letter and number sequences will vary by model and product type."

Lord I hope it's on the rear of my product. That UPS weighs eleventy gazillion pounds.

Time to go spelunking in the server room. If I'm not back in an hour, send in the search and rescue dogs.

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Time to Change the Password Again

If you have a Yahoo account, Yahoo got hacked again.

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It's been a Bad Day for Computers

Question: Who would write software that produces copious log files, that appears to have no means to purge said log files?
Answer:  Microsoft.
More specifically, The Microsoft Exchange development team.
Eventually, the hard drive completely fills up and the email server arrives at the point of fuckitIquit.
If your third party backup software is functioning correctly, it clears the log files. (why do I need a third party application to clear log files?)
So the email at work puked its guts last night.  If I wasn't the lightning rod for this event, I'd have been quite amused today.  I haven't seen this much "I have to pee pee" dancing and hand wringing in quite a while.

kx59:  "Yes, I know, the email is not working.  Do you have a personal email account you can use while we work on getting this back up and running?"
peepeedancer:  "No"
kx59: "NO?"
peepeedancer:  "No"
kx59: "Really?"
peepeedancer: "No."
kx59: "K, if you go to google you can create a free gmail account in 5 minutes or so. Do that. This may take a while."

So after working with outsource IT guy for a few hours, the email is back up and running, just in time for me to leave early to go get fingerprinted.

For my CHL.

I arrive at the rundown electronic fingerprint location for my scheduled appointment a few minutes early and walk up to the receptionist's window.  No humanoid is present.  So I occupy the window and wait.
Finally underpaid receptionist arrives to inform me that their fingerprint server died of electronic bloody flux and, "You weren't notified by a phone call or email?"
Well of course I was.  I just left work early and drove way the fuck over here so I could stand at your receptionist's window for 15 minutes until you came back from your potty break and look really irritated at you!
Now my day is complete.

Malware - July 9th draws closer

I ran across this little reminder regarding July 9.

"The FBI has run an impressive campaign for months, encouraging people to visit a website that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet"

There is a link in the Fox News article that will take you to the DCWG site where you can test your computer for the malware.

"Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet's domain name system"

Don't procrastinate. Finding yourself in the situation of needing the internet to figure out why your internet doesn't work is a bit of a conundrum.

Winders 7 Hell

I am in Winders 7 hell.  Normally I boot into Linux Ubuntu. It's sweet. Orange background comes up, Ubuntu logo comes up. Five dots appear and light sequentially. By the third dot, the OS is up and running and the happy little notification immediately pops up to inform me that I am connected to the BAR network. A click on Chrome for linux and I am up and running blog reading and blogging.
Winders 7 on the other hand loads Seaport (appropriate in one sense, this OS has the 2 mile turning radius of a super tanker), Mom.exe (really? Mom?What's mom doing? making sure I don't get hairy palms?) 50 other processes that probably have no relationship to what I'd actually like to do with my 'puter,  my virus protection, which of course needs an update that takes 15 minutes, finishes the 27 Windows live updates that downloaded last night when I shut the computer down, loads the HP assistant which I cannot for the life of me find out how to make it effing go away and never load on boot again.  So I close it in the middle of the boot process which seems to add another 3 minutes.  While I was typing this, the HP assistant popped up again to gleefully inform me that it needed to download a major update. Every time I've clicked the OK button on this, the wheely icon appears, HP assistant thinks about it for 4 or 5 minutes and then informs me there is a problem. So I X out of it,  Winders 7 dutifully informs me there was a problem with one of my apps, and would I like to report it to Microsoft? Clicking the send button usually results in a pibkac response; problem is between keyboard and chair. Politely informing that it is my fault.
Twenty minutes later I am up and running in Winders 7, surfing the net at a blindingly slow speed.
I"ve run on so long, I've forgotten why I booted up into tise POS OS. Be back shortly, time to restart and boot into Ubuntu.

Design Flaw

It's called a laptop computer right? Which indicates to me that it is intended that you would place said computer on your lap.  So, which moron thought it would be a good idea to put the intake ventilation slots on the bottom of the computer? I mean, it's not like the vent holes might get covered or anything.
I've seen high end laptops at work overheat sitting on a desk. Processor says, "My. but it is wahm in heah" and the computer shuts down. Solution was to get an aftermarket vented pad so the 'puter could breath.
(I'm looking at you Sony and your...snort, snarfle..ptooey, vaio laptops)
I know shade tree mechanics that could do a much better job of designing the cooling system. Now that I think about it, they don't have this type of problem with their laptops...probably take a drill to the bottom side of the computer and put a lift kit on the back end to improve air flow.
Belle's wireless connection keeps dropping out on her laptop. It's not a Sony.  The nubs HP substituted for feet provide upwards of 1/16" of clearance off a flat surface.  The bottom side of her 'puter gets pretty warm.
So we've got the back edge propped up this evening doing some empirical testing to see if the wifi loss is heat related.  As for me, I've learned the precise position in which to place my laptop on my lap so that it vents properly. It's a yoga pose similar to standing on one foot, holding the phone over my head and squawking like a chicken, but it does the trick.
Personally I think this is part of the Uber Corporate Conspiracy known as planned obsolescence.
More heat means a shorter life for the ' puter which means you'll go buy a new one sooner.
They don't know me vewy well, do they? You'd be surprised what  you can do with a rubber band, a paper clip and some duct tape.
And, if Belle's wifi drop out problem doesn't abate, we'll just ventilate her computer  by other means.

Wait...a....minute. I've fallen into the trap haven't I?

Power outage at work today - work outage tomorrow

Quite a show. A transformer said goodbye cruel world and burned blue and white hot. We could see it from the tenth floor.  This caused the first outage, which of course shut down all the computers in the office. A few minutes later, the power came back on, abruptly, for a few minutes. The next closest transformer, a half block away, was so grieved by the loss of its neighbor that it threw in the towel as well and the power went down for an extended period.
The UPS in the server room worked perfectly. I had plenty of time to start shutting down servers gracefully.  I was near done when the power came back on, so I waited a bit to see if we'd lose power again, and started rebooting servers. They all came back up just fine.  Except for the two most important to the network, the domain controllers. Oddly, these never went down, were not shut down, nor rebooted. As an analogy, imagine all the traffic lights in your entire town defaulting to blinking red at once. Traffic comes to a grinding halt. Such is the result of a network domain controller going down.
 The power surges, in spite of surge protectors and massive UPS batteries in line, spiked the VM Ware, upon which the domain controller virtual machines reside.
This all transpired near the end of the day. I realized where the problem lay pretty quickly and called my outsource IT folks stat.  A tech arrived reasonably quickly but that's pretty much where the quick service ended.  The abridged version is that he had no effing idea how to deal with the virtual servers that his company built.
I pulled the plug on him at 9pm.
So, it's off to work at extra dark thirty in the morning to meet a different tech that knows our system better.  I'm praying for a quick resolution, otherwise I'm going to have 50 people twiddling their thumbs. Then will come the hand wringing and gnashing of teeth because there is no internet or email.
After this little crisis is resolved, I'm going to have a little church chat with my outsource folks as to why they put both the primary and secondary domain controllers on the same host server.
I've always had a thing about putting all the eggs in one basket.  IT guys seem to just love virtual servers, stacking them up on a host machine to max out the processor and available RAM.  This is efficiency in their eyes I suppose. Even with full backup images of the servers, it's a recipe for disaster in my opinion.
Today is a case in point. All the physical servers are doing just dandy.  Two of the virtual servers are virtually....dead.
So, tomorrow, I have this melt down to deal with plus a full day of meetings prepping for a major presentation to make the cut for a major project.  Said presentation occurs at the end of the day.
  Sucks to be me right now.
When I started this post, I was pretty sure it was going to be an abject four letter word fest.
Perhaps blogging is a form a therapy. Or, perhaps I'm maturing...nah, that couldn't be it.
What I'd really like to do is ream out the owner of my outsource IT company at full vocal volume.  It won't be necessary however, I have a meeting with one of his competitors a week from Friday.

Damned if you do...Damned if you don't

Windows updates. If I don't update, I may have one of  a zillion security holes, but if I update I may get hacked, but if I don't update I may have a security hole, but if I update I may get hacked....(X infinity.)
Related to "The incredible fraglility of Internet Security" , which Borepatch posted yesterday, I find this:
"Comodohacker: I Can Issue Fake Windows Updates"
Of course the rocket scientists engineers at Microsoft say there's nothing to be concerned about because we all know that Windows security has always been rock solid pretty good mostly squishy.

"Attackers are not able to leverage a fraudulent Windows Update certificate to install malware via the Windows Update servers," Microsoft engineer Jonathan Ness wrote in the blog. "The Windows Update client will only install binary payloads signed by the actual Microsoft root CA certificate, which is issued and secured by Microsoft. Also, Windows Update itself is not at risk, even to an attacker with a fraudulent certificate."

Way to go guys. A statement like that is like crak to a hacker.
I bet that's a challenge that will be taken up in short order. 
So after reading that article, my brain starts to veer its way to an infinite loop, preceded by the thought that perhaps I should turn automatic updates off until I find more about this. Fortunately I managed to execute the Taskill command in my brain and didn't overheat the processor.
Welcome to the Asylum, or perhaps it's Hell.