diehn.net/blog

Head on over to Dan Miessler’s blog for the latest on heavy duty web site protection with ROT26 encryption.

Hey, I’ve used a lot of calendering systems in my life. I think I’ve got one that works well enough and I actually like it.

Google Calenders – platform independent calendering accessible from anywhere. Love it.

CalGoo – picks up where Google Cal leaves off – let me work on my calender off-line and work with it faster because I’m using my system in real time and my slow, slow, slow network later to sync while I’m doing something else.

I especially like that CalGoo runs on my Mac Tiger 10.4.x at work, my Ubuntu Feisty laptop, my wife Windows 2000 (yep, still) laptop and my Win XP desktop at home. And it’s exactly thttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifhe same everywhere.

Now, getting ahold of CalGoo is a little confusing since their approach to distributing software is very streamlined – they’re stuff is completely (as far as I know) platform independent. So, no lists to choose from, no confusing questions, etc.

Register at their web site and hit the Upgrade link in the upper left. Install what arrives. During installation, you’ll tell the program your credentials at CalGoo and also your credentials at Google Calander. It will do the rest – happy day.

When I saw this, I thought of a colleagues recent experience with his client’s servers being taken over through a weakness in VNC. It was a pretty scary experience for him and his client – everyone in our Upper Valley Freelancers group tried to help and the mail flew fast and frequently for a few days there.

The Daily Cup of Tech folks wrote an article I wish we’d had before that hack. There are some good tips in here and links to other good articles on the subject of tightening up security for small business. Here’s a link to the article:

How Jared Was Hacked

Hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend and that NONE OF YOU READ THIS UNTIL MONDAY! 🙂

I installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (version 7.04, an alpha release) on my ThinkPad T43 last week. I have a model 2668-97U and it’s had Windows XP on it every since I bought it January of 2006 – I thought it was pretty nice with Windows….

I really like Ubuntu. Everything, and I mean everything worked right “out of the box.” I was amazed. Windows can’t do that. There’s usually at least a dozen reboots involved in getting a new Windows XP installation up to ready-for-use. There were only two reboots for installing Ubuntu – one to get started and one to finish.

In addition, everything I needed for general office work plus a lot of graphics and entertainment was already installed and working. Open Office 2.2, Gimp, A slew of other apps. And how much did I pay for all this?

Nothing.

That’s right – no money down, no payments for the first… oh, ten thousand years. Or so. No, really – every piece of software on my laptop is free and open source. And what price do I pay for this if not in money?

Well, it did take me a few hours to get the system installed. But that was mostly because I took lunch halfway through. In another town. While the system finished installing.

Now, 7.04 is new, new, new and I wouldn’t put it on a clients machine – it’s a little shaky for an Ubuntu version: but hey! It’s an ALPHA release – there are hundreds of updates a day in this branch and everyone that uses it knows what to expect. Still, it’s more stable than XP was – no kidding.

And here’s a real kicker for you, this entire installation, with all the software I installed, and it’s pretty plush right now, takes a very mere six GB – yep, that’s a single digit less than seven. Hell, when I’d completely stripped my old Windows XP installation to the very barest of bare OS, minus all of my own data, it was still over 35 GB.

OH, YES! I almost forgot – Startup, shutdown, sleep, resume, login, logout: those onerous tasks? Only onerous in Windows – in Ubuntu they all take about two to three seconds. Yes, seconds.

You wanna try it out? Download their LiveCD and stick it in the drive and boot the system. You’ll be running a full OS off the CD so it’ll be a little slow – like my LiveCD ran at about 1/4 speed of what I’m seeing now. And it was still impressive.

Enjoy.

Took apart a Dell Inspiron XPS (or Inspiron 9100), Model PP09L to replace a failed video card. Here are some things I found while doing it.

Never believe youself when you think the warranty has expired – check with the vendor. We were sure this one had gone, but Dell thinks not. Upshot? Free video card replacement and a tour of the internals for me!

The Dell Service Manual for this unit is quite good.

There are two removable fans and the small heat sinks through which they blow air clog thoroughly and easily. Probably they should be blown out and cleaned a few times a year.

Memory, wireless card, harddrive and fans are easy to remove, more or less. The F2 fan (the screw holes are labeled) has a third screw inside – heads up. Also, the F2 fan has the audio output jacks built into it – odd design.

The wireless (WLAN) card in this model is labeled “Broadcom BCM94306MPSG” and the Broadcom chip is labeled “Broadcom, BCM4306KFB, HT0415 30, 717973 M”. The large silver (shielding is silver) rectangle on the front is labeled “TW-0M4479-68240-465-7324” and also “Made in Taiwan, DW1350, REV A00”

If you have trouble with the hinge covers, try placing a dull flat screw driver in the vent like you would a chisel and lightly tapping it to jar the cover towards the back of the machine and it should easily pop open. BE GENTLE.

Getting the center hinge cover off is a bit tricky. When you have the lid closed, you want only to disengage the tabs in the back, not lift the cover. Then when you have the lid open all the way, Work the back edge of the cover off first and the front edge, nearest the keyboard, will lift free easily. Again, BE CARFUL, there’s a ribbon cable connecting the cover an main board.

The right keyboard screw was very difficult to remove for me. It appears to seat into a metal post rather than a plastic one as does the left screw.

The screws labeled “D” in the pictures in the section about removing the display assembly aren’t labeled “D” on this unit – but they’re pretty easy to find from the picture.

I like the pull tabs and cable connectors in this unit. They are strong, well placed and easily grasped.

Interesting, these units use heat pipes to draw the heat off the chips and move it the periphery of the case for discharge through heat sinks and fans.

The forth screw on the video card, in the back left corner, is very easy to miss. There’s a Torx screw in that position also that I mistook for the forth removal screw. That’s not it. Look down between the smaller, rear heatsink and the video card itself.

OK, here’s a good tip: don’t screw down the video card until you are sure the heat pipe and heat sink are laying well in their places – the pipe bends easily if you need to move it or the sink, but you’ll want to be able to pull the card out to do that bending and reshaping.

Putting the system back together was easy. All in all, I enjoyed working on this computer – it’s well designed and roomy, and Dell wrote a good service manual for it.

The Barca mail client has been good to me. In fact, it’s the only mail client I’ve ever paid for myself. But, I’ve been using it for about two years now and I’m getting a little tired of it. There are a few bugs that have worn on me and it’s slowed down quite a bit as I’ve accumulated mail over the years.

So, now I’m looking for a replacement and Evolution is looking good right now. It runs on any platform I could want: Windows XP, Linux, Mac OS X. It’s good looking. It’s e-mail, calender and contact manager all in one – like Outlook and Barca. It’s a little slow starting up on Windows, but once it’s up it seems to go go go so far. So, I think I’m going to try it out.

My task right now is figuring out how to get my mail storage from Barca into Evolution. And for that, it seems that Aid4Mail is a good solution. But it’s pay-fer. And I’m cheap. I mean, “frugal.” More on this line later.

Plagued by these messages in your Linux server’s kernel log – kern.log? Finally tracked down a reasonable explanation this morning. Seems a bug was introduced in the kernel back in 2.6.8 and it causes, among other troubles, this error message:

Jan 17 12:30:13 iml kernel: TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer 134.48.120.88:3832/80 shrinks window 3881756777:3881761622. Repaired.
Jan 21 12:43:14 iml kernel: TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer 134.48.160.49:3589/80 shrinks window 3470163299:3470170199. Repaired.
Jan 21 12:43:16 iml kernel: TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer 134.48.160.49:3589/80 shrinks window 3470163299:3470170199. Repaired.
Feb 21 10:55:31 iml kernel: TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer 129.63.210.68:1698/80 shrinks window 689079013:689079178. Repaired.
Mar 6 12:15:52 iml kernel: TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer 129.3.26.40:1169/80 shrinks window 1137168861:1137173706. Repaired.
Mar 6 12:15:52 iml kernel: TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer 129.3.26.40:1169/80 shrinks window 1137168861:1137173706. Repaired.
Mar 6 16:42:13 iml kernel: TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer 129.3.26.162:1160/80 shrinks window 795072392:795074477. Repaired.
Mar 6 16:43:19 iml kernel: TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer 129.3.26.162:1160/80 shrinks window 795072392:795074477. Repaired.
Mar 6 16:44:24 iml kernel: TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer 129.3.26.162:1160/80 shrinks window 795072392:795074477. Repaired.

Have a look at this page:

http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2006-03/msg03750.html

These folks seem to have found that a bug in the kernel is causing these messages rather than an attacker. If that’s the case, our adding rules to the firewall to block those IPs will cut off users of our sites that probably aren’t doing anything wrong.

Best,
Mike

A friend asked me today if I know about DNS Servers. “Yeah, I do. Can I help with something” I wrote back? She wrote this:

For example, in my browser I can type in www.espn.com and when the DNS server does not work, an error message states that the web site could not be found. If I hit refresh on my browser, the web site then loads as normal. This happens randomly. Sometimes the web site loads as normal, sometimes it does not load. Hitting the refresh button one or more times fixes the problem.

She asked it well and I was pleased to read such a clear question. Here’s what I wrote back and maybe it’ll help you understand this problem too:

When you put a URL in your browser, this happens:

1. browser asks computer to connect to www.host.com
2. computer asks local DNS server for the IP address of www.host.com
3. if the local DNS server has that IP cached it responds immediately (hundredths of a second) but if not, it has to ask other DNS servers and the answer to your computer may be delayed by tenths of a second, possible even seconds.
4. local DNS server sends the IP address to your computer
5. your computer opens a connection to that IP address on port 80 (HTTP, 443 for HTTPS)
6. your computer reports to the browser that it’s ready
7. your browser sends a request over the connection (GET / HTTP/1.0) to the web server
8. the web server sends an answer to your browser over the same connection
9. that answer likely contains a large number of other URLs, for images, CSS style sheets, external Javascript files, etc., requiring this cycle be repeated many times for each page.

If the DNS server’s delays too long in responding to your computer’s request for an IP address lookup, your browser will tell you that, albeit in code, by showing you the “host not found” page.

So, there you are. The next question is probably going to be why would there be delays in getting an answer from the DNS server? Ahhh… well….

Best,
Mike

Sooo, Dan chewed my ass for leaving my blog alone for so long. Here’s a brief update: I have Gout. Lovely. Turns out that it doesn’t have anything to do with diet, though some things are thought to increase or decrease the severity of attacks.

What else? Well, I’m still at the IML as a system administrator and I’m enjoying that. Tallis is learning guitar and Luca is still very interested in what ever Tallis is doing.

We had a lovely visit over the holidays from my parents and Jacob, my brother David’s son. Tallis and especially Luca were gaga over Jacob – he’s seven, they’re four and two respectively. Mom and Dad and Andi and I build a loft for the boys in their room.

I’m happily loosing weight and getting healthier. The anniversary of the date I quit smoking is approaching: Feb 24th (8:30 PM EDT). I no longer am constantly aware of the minutes from that date to now. Which ignorance I regard as a good sign that I’m succeeding this time. After more attempts than I can count, something like 150, I very pleased to be making it this time.

Diehn Consulting, LLC is still going. We cut back to one ongoing client and three or four occasional clients. Very happy with them and the results. Andi’s car is dying and the microwave died, so it may be time to take on another client….

Paul Landry and I go to lunch pretty much every week now, for the last year or so, actually, and I’m glad to have that routine. Paul’s a good guy and I wish I had more time to spend with him.

I seem to have made a new friend in Dan B (from above). He wrote me about my work with FINOWEN, asking about Wireless WANs and we’ve been IMing daily since. Nice guy, really interesting. I admire their commitment to sustainable living: if you visit his site, you’ll see that he and his wife built a homestead off the grid. They use nothing but wind and sun for power, etc. So, that’s cool. Maybe I can learn something from them we can use at home. Wind is unlikely for us but solar is a good bet, I think.

So, that’s all I have for now.

Andi sits down with a set of notes: “Wanna hear an adorable exchange between me and Tallis today?”

So, she’s taken notes on this one – it’s gotta be good, right? Just wait:

Andi and Tallis are sitting at the dinig room table, she’s swinging her feet, tapping his from time to time….

Tallis: Mommy, please don’t kick my feet. That hurts my feelings.
Andi: Tallis, what are feelings?
Tallis: They are things that protect your heart!
Andi: Oh. What is a heart?
Tallis: Oh, Mommy! You know what a heart is. It goes like this (draws half a heart in the air) and like this (draws the other half).
Andi: And everyone has one? Where do we keep them?
Tallis: (thumbs over his shoulder) Out in the road!

Hmmm…