Indemnity83

I find the oddest things Inside computers, and computer peripherals sometimes. My guess is somebody put those beads (which are aroma therapy beads) in that mouse as a joke and then forgot about it.

In the world of computers, language is key. Take the following conversation into consideration.

Client: “I got the new Windows 2010 today. I like it but its way different from the old one. All the buttons are in different places and I can’t ever find anything.”
Me: “I think you mean Office, not Windows…”
Client: “Whatever, same thing.”

To some of you, this is a common occurrence and I think you feel my pain. To others, you might not understand and may even be upset by my correction and although it may feel like I’m talking down to you, I’m honestly just trying to help so that the next time you have this conversation with somebody else they will know what you are talking about.

Let me put a better perspective on it by replacing the confusing factors. Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Windows are two completely different programs, they have nothing to do with each-other other than one can be added to the other. So lets consider a similar pair of nouns: A Chevy Tahoe (SUV) and a Porcupine. To help illustrate my example, consider the following:

* Windows doesn’t come with Office | The Tahoe doesn’t come with a Porcupine
* Office can be installed on Windows | A Porcupine can be put in the Tahoe

So when you say something like our opening conversation this is what I hear:

Client: “I got a new porcupine today. I like it but its way different from the old one. They changed the suspension, and I can’t ever find the cup-holders.”
Me: “I think you mean the Chevy Tahoe, not a porcupine…”
Client: “Whatever, same thing”

I would imagine you’ve come here looking for help in removing said virus? Perfect, because that’s exactly what I intend to help you do! I get this question many times a week and through literally years of trial and error there are some tricks I’ve learned that I’m very happy to share.

Step 1: A good defense is the best offense (yes, I know that’s backwards). I’m hesitant to just throw out numbers without any backup, but its my guess that 99.999% of viruses are self induced. Meaning you did something stupid to get it in the first place. UPS doesn’t send emails out with tracking numbers in a Zip file, your bank won’t ask you for your account information and P2P networks are more filth ridden than “K” street. If you do have anti-virus, know what its called and what its logo looks like. I’ve seen websites pop-up boxes claiming to be your anti-virus program trick people into downloading a virus and actually installing it under the guise of being an “update for your anti-virus”. In summary, be wary, if your not sure about something, stop and find somebody who does know.

Step 2: Get a safety net. Anti-virus programs have sorely disappointed me for years now, which is why I don’t consider it protection. Your anti-virus is nothing but a safety net, if you make a mistake the hope is that your anti-virus will catch you before you hit the ground. But just like a trapeze artist, if you don’t keep your anti-virus in good working order your asking for tragedy. Make sure you know how to update your software and if its sitting down there blinking at you, pay attention. Now is a good time though to re-iterate step 1: If you have “AVG Anti-Virus Free” (my personal recommendation) and a box pops up called “AntiVirus 2010″ telling you there is an update, ignore it, its a trick to get you to do something stupid.

Step 3: Banish the demon. So you boldly ignored step one, lapsed on step 2 and now you’ve got some gremlin inside your computer running a muck. Let me give you some tricks to try to get ride of the thing. Obviously I can’t lay out step-by-step instructions, there are simply too many types of infections and no one way to go about removal. GENERALLY the first thing to do is download and install “Malwarebytes Anti-Malware“. The name is a mouthful, but the software is free, easy to use and has a very good success rate. Just install the program, make sure you update it fully and run a full scan. Typically a full scan takes an hour or more, so go make a sandwich. When its done, click on ‘Show Results’ to see what it found, and don’t forget to click ‘Remove Selected’ to actually remove the infections. Very likely, you’ll have to restart your computer to finish the removal. Even if Malwarebytes doesn’t tell you to, do it anyway and then run another full scan, rinse and repeat until nothing shows up when you do the scan. If the same things keep showing up then you’ll probably want to skip to step 4.

Sometimes though, installing and/or running Malwarebytes is tricky. Below are some things to try (in order of ease to execute) to get the program installed.

• Rename the installer and/or the program (mbam.exe) to iexplorer.exe and try it again.
• Log in to the computer with a different user and try again.
• Start the computer in safe-mode (without networking if you can) and try again.
• If you are comfy at a command prompt, safe-mode with command prompt can be handy since explorer.exe never gets executed and can often mean that the viruses core never gets loaded.
• For advanced users only, check HKLM>Software>Microsoft>Windows>Current Version>Run for suspicious entries, delete them, restart and try again.

Step 4: Psalm 23. If you’ve run Malwarebytes over and over only to have the same viruses pop up then really your best choice is to make a backup of your data, format your computer and start over. This was the hardest lesson to learn for me, I don’t like to give up on something but frankly, there comes a point where you have to pull out the big guns and drop a nuke on civilization to get rid of a problem. If you have me come over (professionally or as a friend) to remove a virus, I’m going to spend not much more than an hour trying to get Malwarebytes to install and run, and If a virus isn’t gone in two scans I’ll ask you to backup your data. Its not worth anybody’s time to screw around with.

So that’s it folks, my 4-step virus protection and elimination plan. The goal is to never get to step 3, but if your reading this you’re probably already at step 4. My condolences.

Until next week!

So one of my clients showed me some rejected mail she got when trying to send to a user whom she knew she had the right email address for.

The return mail was a “451 4.7.1 message delayed” error and had a link for http://greylisting.org. So I went to check it out thinking we were on some sort of deny list (IE, a blacklist).

Turns out, greylisting.org’s policy is to deay/block ALL incomming mail the first time from any source. They rely on the user trying a second time to allow the message through … I’m not making this up:

What happen is that each time a given mailbox receives an email from an unknown contact (ip), that mail is rejected with a “try again later”-message (This happens at the SMTP layer and is transparent to the end user). This, in the short run, means that all mail gets delayed at least until the sender tries again.

What the fuck? This is ludacris. If things keep going this direction then SMTP is due to become a proverbial paperweight, and we’ll go back to the days of faxes and carrier pidgens.

Furthermore, whoever came up with his “greylist” idea needs to be drug out into the street, shot in each join and told to walk to a hospital, where they’ll be rejected the first time and have to try again later.

May God have mercy on the soul of the internet.

“OMG! Did you hear about that April Fools Day anti virus, Conficker. Am I protected from that?” I’ve heard this question or something like it at least a dozen times today and my answer was the same every time. What have YOU done to protect yourself.

Let me start by saying from what I’ve seen, the conficker virus that was featured in a CBS news story today is no better or worse than the rest of the virus’ that have been around infecting computers for the past 5 years. For those who missed the news, conficker is a worm that will turn your computer into a zombie, doing more or less whatever its creator wants it to do, usually send out spam.

While I admit I am not a typical computer user, I don’t think its all to hard to avoid these problems with some simple common sense and a little thought about what you are doing and what you expect your computer to do in response. And before anybody makes any comment about Apple computers being “immune” to viruses, save your breath. You are not immune either so pay attention.

First, and this is so obvious I hate to put it to paper, but get an anti virus program. If you are a home user (IE, your computer is in your house) then you have some free options at your disposal. To keep things simple, I generally only recommend AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition. It is far and away the most popular of the free anti virus applications. It is a simple, but thorough anti virus application, exactly what you need in your home. And unless you still use Dial-Up Internet any modern broadband Internet uses a service called NAT and a network masquerading that keeps your computer hidden on the Internet like a firewall would.

If your a corporate user, chances are you already have anti-virus on your computer, and a full hardware firewall and if you don’t you should call your IT department to ask them what they are getting paid for. Don’t have a support department? Find a local consultant group (like Airtop) that can get you on track.

So that covers the first base, but is probably the least important part. The next portion of safe computing is all about you, and your computer habits. I don’t mean to say you have to be paranoid all the time, but pay attention to whats going on. One of the more mischievous tricks I’ve seen lately (related to the Vundo virus) creates a web site that mimics a scan of your computer (it’s basically a pre-recorded video) telling you that you have some number of viruses and should download their “free anti virus software” to get rid of them. In this case, the program it wants your to download IS THE VIRUS. If you just pause and think about what you are doing before you panic you likely will realize that on your own. You should get to know your anti virus program. Know what its called so that when a window pops up and claims you have a virus, you know if its legitimate or a farce.

While “think before you click” more or less covers everything I want to point out that there is one area of the dark underbelly of computing that nobody talks about but nearly everybody knows about. Peer to Peer sharing is a means of sharing data between multiple people anonymously and is synonymous with applications like Napster, Limewire, Bearshare and others. This is a lurking beast in the peer to peer system though. If you have one of these programs just un-install it. There is little you can do with it that’s legal anyway, and likely nothing you’ve done with it was such. But the bigger problem is that its full of more viruses than a Chicago alley of hookers and crack addicts. If you do a search for anything, you’ll notice that nearly immediately you get 5 or so results with names that match what you searched for (go ahead and try it, I’ll wait). I would venture to guess that every one of those initial results is a virus with a name that’s dynamically created to match your search results in the hope you download it. But even the results that take longer can, and often are, viruses that people have knowingly, or unknowingly downloaded and now are sharing out into the P2P networks. Coupled with the legal implications of using the P2P networks with the higher than normal chance of doing something dumb just make theses programs a cesspit that I personally want no part of.

If you think you already have a virus or you know you do I typically use the trial version of a tool called Malwarebytes Anti-Malware to do a full scan of the machine for anything and everything unwanted. As soon as the scan is done, and you’ve removed anything that was there, you still need to install an active anti virus program like I recommended above.

In summary, get anti virus software and think before you click. I remove viruses from clients computers on an almost daily basis and nearly every time they either didn’t have any software to protect them and/or they did something they realized was dumb when it was to late to go back. Finally, don’t let old ladies on CBS scare you away from using your computer. Its a machine like your car, take care of it and it’ll serve you reliably for a long time.

So a few days ago the Windows 7 beta went public. If you haven’t gone and dowloaded your copy I suggest you do it now even I’d you are not planning to install it right away. From what I hear there may be a limit to the number of keys microsoft is planning to give out.

I’ve installed it on both my laptop as a fresh install and on my media center of as an upgrade to vista ultimate. And at first glance it looks like miceosoft could box and ship it how it is, and they probably could. I am sure that a lot if the code is taken from vista and simply refined.

It is noticably quicker, but that could have something to do with quite a few of the standard windows applications not being included. And that brings us to my first gripe. There is a serious lack of applications here. It might just be because it’s beta and the apps haven’t been tested in-house, or maybe it was a way for microsoft to cripple it’s use as a replacemt for actially buying their retail operating systems. In any case it makes it difficult for me to use on my laptop and has stopped me from upgrading my desktop at home.

The key pieces that are missing are the mail and calendar applications. Although I noticed that windows movie maker wasn’t here either.

The upgrade on my media center went without a hitch, except that it took rather a long time. The fresh install on my laptop on the other hand was shockingly fast for having dumped nearly 9gb of data on the disk. Drivers were generally not a problem although I am not running any lthimg special on either computer. I am having a problem with the video driver on my laptop. It has a standard intel chipset video system, but I can’t get the driver to load so I don’t have any resolution choices besides the generic choice.

Initially I hated the task bar. It is setup by default with huge icons and no text so applications get lost. But after checking the taskbar properties I found I could make everything a decent size and get my text back. I also “unpinned” all the applications from the taskbar. The way I work this space is for running application, and nothing else.

There is one very new idea in the start menu to help speed up finding documents and quickly moving around the is that I feel is worth every word I can give to it. Recent documents asbota own menu is gone (good riddence in my opinion, it never seemed to work right) but in it’s place now is a recent documents flyout for each item in the start menu. For example after using the computer for a few days there is now a flyout on Internet explored that list the pages I’ve recently been to. Similarly the note I created is in the flyout on the sticky notes item.

All in all I am impressed by this beta. I haven’t had any gripes about vista, so I wasn’t really paying attention and either missed that windows 7 was this close to release or microsoft did a pretty food job keeping the lid on things.

I am now an official Apple product owner. Last Christmas, I bought an iPod Nano for Kerry and this year, her parents got her an iPod Touch, leaving the iPod Nano in my hands

When the iPod originally came out I had a lot to say against it, however of the years and generations, Apple has made changes in all the right directions. Battery life was one of my biggest concerns with the original iPod. I don’t mean the time between charges, but the overall life of the battery sucked and from what I understood was not covered under the warranty (although I can’t find any evidence of that now). But battery technology has made leaps and bounds in the past 5 years and while the battery in my iPod Nano isn’t technically “user-replaceable” its not impossible to do with some know how.

I had, and still do to some extent have a gripe with the price. Since this particular iPod was sort-of free. But there are some things the iPod has that justify the price. The internal memory seems to be really high quality and fast, which is a nice plus. I’ve owned a couple creative devices and transfer times (particularly of encrypted content) were horrendous.

So far it’s one of my favorite Christmas presents, and it’s inspired me to do some cleanup of the 35Gb of digital music I’ve had lying around, removing the crap I dont own or listen to and organizing all my data.

Saturday, I tackled a beast.

It wasn’t anything of insane epic porportions, and in reality it only took a couple hours but I felt like sharing.

The picture on the far left is of a clients data rack (after I removed the non-functional and abandonded equipment). Long story short, this is what happens when you don’t have a clear plan, or a single person to make decisions.

There were more problems than the obvious mess:

• Troubleshooting connectivity problems with this tangled mess can make a grown man cry.
• With so much extra cable in such a tangled mess, your chances of Alien Crosstalk goes up, which ultimately means poor network performance.
• The weight of the unsupported cable puts kinks in the cables at the plugs, as well as can damage the connections resulting in poor conductivity (again, ultimately poor network performance).
• Its not apparent (and took me nearly an hour to fully navigate) but the switches on this rack (and there are 5 in use) are daisy chained together, which means that the network had severe bottlenecks, as well, if a device in the middle of the chain were to fail, everything below it would stop working.

The simple solution, get the right sized patch cables for the job. In my case, I was able to layout the equipment in such a way that I could do just about everything with 1′ patch cables. I also re-structured the topography into a star with the switch at the very top of the rack acting as the center of my star. It does unfortunatly mean I still have a single point of failure that could take down the network, but if any one of the other switches fail only devices connected directly to that switch will go down, so I see it as an improvement. Rebuilding the topography also means I don’t have the same bottlenecking problem I had before. Internal traffic now has a maximum of three hops, as opposed to the potentially 6 hops in the prior design.

I’ve asked the client to keep an eye on things, see if the improvements are actually noticable or not. They han’t had any serious problems before so I won’t be supprised if the changes are not readily noticable to the end users. If they do though, it’ll be in the voice quality of their VoIP phone system. At the moment on busy days they get a noticable degredation of the voice quality, and without QoS capable switches there isn’t anything I can do besides hope the drop in packet loss due to the rebuild is enough to subdue the problem until I can get new switches.

I know what your thinking. Kyle… why the hell are you buying a new phone when you’ve just lost your job. Well, if I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t. But I don’t actually own a cell phone, nor have I had to pay for service for quite some time. EDC owns the phone, and paid for the service and along with my termination, comes the termination of my benefits.

So why a blackberry curve? Quite simply because it was the cheapest phone I could get that would still allow me to send/receive email and do the general PDA functions that I’ve found are invaluable when your out on the road with different clients all day.

I should be getting the phone hopefully by the end of the week. I’ll have a new phone number, as it was the only way to get a free phone with a new plan. When I get the number I’ll let everybody know. If I miss you, just post a reply and I’ll give you a call/email.