Ed Buford - Just Another Geek

Firefox

There’s a lot of interest in Firefox these days. I’ve had plenty of people ask me about it. People seem to be in two different camps about Firefox. On camp sings the praises of Firefox and the other camp talks about the security of Firefox.  I’m not in either camp; the fact that I don’t use Firefox is all about history, my history.

I started cruising the web before Windows 95 came out and with the now ubiquitous IE. At that time there weren’t many choices for web browsers. I was Testing a version of Mosaic (which I thought was one step above Lynx) when Netscape came out. After seeing Netscape I demo’d it for awhile and then finally bought it. Not long after Win95 came out and the world began to hate Microsoft for giving us a free browser. Well I always cheer for the underdog and sense I had already purchased Netscape I too hated Microsoft’s free browser. Netscape became my great friend when they too began to give me it’s browser for free. So I battled the Evil Microsoft by using Netscape for the next couple of years.

During those years Netscape and Microsoft appealed to the WWW consortium to get code they were each developing to become the next standard. Unfortunately for Netscape Microsoft decided to implement stuff that was not approved by the W3C and certainly not by Netscape. Soon after I found that websites I would go to wouldn’t work at all in Netscape. So then I reluctantly started using IE, but only to view the those renegade sites. Then soon I found myself going to IE more and more because things would look wrong in Netscape or the sites wouldn’t load at all. Then one fateful day I too was assimilated and closed my Netscape browser for the last time.

Now years later I have scores of people singing me the praises of Firefox. Months after they’ve told me about how great it is they are aghast to find that I haven’t made the jump to this great browser. When I ask them what their overall experience is they say things like “well not every web page looks right in Firefox so I just open IE for those pages.”
Hmmm… sounds familiar!

49 in dog years, 150 in dot com startup years

Google Turns seven today.

I remember using Google from nearly the beginning. I’ve watched it grow from caching half a million web pages to nearly nine billion. Google has been my personal research assistant and has helped me earn a living for many years now. Google has managed to keep a clean straightforward interface without sidebars popups or any other stupid stuff that the rest of the search engines have fallen into. I appreciate the way they have set out to be the best search engine and have done it without accosting me when I come to their site.

Happy Birthday Google and thanks for seven fun years.

More Music than you can shake an IPOD at.

A few weeks ago Jason introduced me to Yahoo Unlimited. Now I’ve been using ITunes for well over a year and I balked at this Yahoo thing. He told me that I could listen to and download unlimited music for just five bucks a month and that I could try it for free for seven days and since Jason really knows a good thing when he sees it and I trust his instincts, so I gave it a whirl. Jason lists all of the positive things in his blog so I won’t re-hash those you can read them here.

First let me tell you that I don’t like the software. I don’t like the fact that in the default installation it loads a butt load of crap on your machine and then wants to change your home page to boot; so if you install it, do the custom installation and uncheck everything.

It took a bit of work to figure out how to navigate and how to add songs without paying extra for them. Once I got past that I was off and running; I found music that I have been trying to buy off of ITunes for a year. I found albums that I ordered on CD because I couldn’t download them from ITunes. I found songs that I was forced to buy the whole album from ITunes because it was the only song on the album worth having and you had to buy the whole album to get one song.

Since I’ve started using Yahoo Unlimited I’ve found many new groups to listen to because of the Explore Similar Artists feature. It’s well worth he money and if you have a portable device that will handle the file format (not IPOD) you can download your music right to it. It’s the biggest bang I’ve gotten out of my buck in a long time. True the software is lame and needs some real help but I can stand a lot of pain for all the music I get.

Gone Home

There are times when there just aren’t works to say, this is one of those times. Doug Coney has gone home to be with the master he served so well. The void he leaves behind will not be filled; he will be sorely missed by all who knew him. I look forward to laughing with him again. Until then I will live a richer life, because I knew him.

Late Night TV

I rebroke my already broken foot, so I find myself on the couch watching TV. Now I know there are many times I wish I could just hang out and watch TV; but I don’t like being forced to do anything… or nothing as the case may be. So here I am on the couch flipping through the channels at 1:00am and I happen upon a documentary of this guy who was tired of body piercing and tattoos (of which he had many) and was going for something new. New in this case consisted of getting shot… no I’m not kidding. He paid this “Artist” $500 bucks to put a round in his shoulder. I was revolted but I just couldn’t seem to turn away; so in disbelief I watched on.

The “Artist” is a guy in this clean looking garage with a large Craftsman Toolbox (full of guns as it turns out). He talks to this “customer” (if you will) about where he’ll place the bullet and what kind of gun he’ll use. After they decide on .38 special, then they decide to go for a hollow point round to help make a larger exit wound.

He positions the “customer” in an old barber chair, gives him eye and ear protection and tells him he’ll shoot him at the count of three. The “customer” agrees and “Artist” counts one and then fires (which I think is a brilliant idea). Then the put him in an awaiting ambulance and pays the driver.

The “Artist” returns to the camera laughing, and tries to stop laughing in front of the camera and talks about his “Art” and that someday his “Art” will be accepted.

I wish I had words to express how sad watching this made me feel. I could not help feel that this one young man represented a greater sector of our society who feel they need to express themselves in such drastic ways. It’s really sad because the hole they think they are filling up can’t be filled with stuff, tattoos, piercings, or bullets.  There is a God size hole in each of us and we can’t fill it with anything but God or we’ll never be satisfied.

Really Slick is Really Cool

For the all time best screensavers check out ReallySlick. Here's a screenshot but you really have to see it run to appreciate it

Not so Golden support

I’ve long been a Dell fan and my Director is a Dell fan as well. For the most part when you add the Next Day Business Support, you have a winning combination for the most part. With that said let me tell you about some GX270’s we bought last year.

About 3 months ago we started having power supplies go bad on these units. I’d call Dell and they’d send another one. I noticed these would die after they had been unplugged for moving or whatever reason. I assumed there was a bad batch of power supplies and questioned the Dell techs about it.

After replacing 5 power supplies, one of the computers that had a new power supply in it lost a second power supply; THIS tipped me off to another possible problem. I opened the case and started to inspect the motherboard, and there it was… bulging capacitors.

I looked at another computer which we had robbed the power supply out of and sure enough there were bulging caps on that unit too.  I called Dell and told them I needed one power supply and two motherboards along with a Tech to install them (it’s part of the Gold Support). They told me that would the Tech would call the next day and schedule an appointment to install the parts (standard operating procedure). However the next day I get a call from a Dell automated phone attendant saying the parts were delayed and it would be three to four days before we’d hear from the Tech to install the parts. To make a long story short it was two weeks before we got the boards replaced.

I currently have one machine down waiting on the Tech to show up with a power supply and a motherboard.  This Tuesday I plan to go through all the GX270’s and inspect the motherboards. I won’t power them off, I’ll just open them look at the motherboards for bulging caps. Then I’ll call Dell and get more motherboard on order. Stay tuned and I’ll let you know how many we have total.

My Present Paranoia

Dustin, uber-geek and personal friend came back from Tech-Ed with a video by Jasper Johansson that changed me. It changed my stance on security, ownership, paranoia and my sense of responsibility as a network admin.

In the video there was a firewall with only two ports open 80 and 443; these are common for web-servers. Behind the firewall is a DMZ that has two machines in it, a web-server and an SQL server that feeds info into the web-server. Behind that there is another firewall and behind that is the LAN for the rest of the company’s network. All of the machines in the example are hardened to military spec’s with exception of the SQL server for which military spec’s do not exist so it is hardened to Microsoft’s best practices spec’s and all machines were fully patched. All in all I would have said this was great and gave it my seal of approval prior to seeing the video, and for the most part I would have been right. This configuration would stop viruses and script-kiddies, but it didn’t seem to slow Jasper down a bit.

To begin with the firewall was never the target, yeah he did do a port scan on the firewall to start with but that just let him know what ports were being passed through the firewall and then he set out to use the open ports to crack the network. Using SQL injection as his starting point he was crack the boxes in the DMZ in a matter of minutes. From there he had some other specialized tools to begin taking control of the rest of the network. It was, to say the least, most upsetting to see how easily he took control of this “well protected” network.

I am now at a point where I’m looking to start re-evaluating every chunk of my network. I know this will be a long slow process, because there is no way I stop working on all the rest of the things which need attention on my network. This is however changing the way I see the tasks at hand, and also the way I spend free time while not working. I was so moved by Jasper’s presentation that I ordered his book and I’m spending my off-time developing a test plan sure up my network. I will be posting my plans as I go so stay tuned.