travis' brain dump

Hopefully no one should notice from the outside world but those of you logging in to post comments, etc will for sure. I’ve upgraded WordPress to the latest version. It’s a little odd, but I’m getting used to it. Now I have to upgrade 2 more, lol.

** Also just realized that the subscription plugin has been offline since the upgrade to 2.3.3. Oops! 🙂 Should be fixed now.

You know what I love? Hardware vendors that have ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE about the items they sell or have sold to you…

So to give some background. My first out of town trip for the company I work for sent me to Rock Springs, WY. Nice little spot if you’re into a seriously slow/small town. I have no complaints. The people here are pretty nice and well, despite the fact there is nothing for an out-of-towner and the fact it’s not a vacation spot by any means, if you’re stuck in a place for work, it’s not *that* bad. On this first trip I am to meet a tech from Quantum who is supposed to help me put in a new tape library here… no biggie right? (can you tell I just set myself up?) We get the unit all ready to rock and roll to discover that our vendor had not a) sent out a new SCSI card for the system and worst yet b) hadn’t sent cables to connect it up. So we do what we can, get the old unit working on the new server and call it good. I’ll come back when the right parts are in…

Parts are shipped… I schedule some time to come back out here and take care of it and here I am…

Guess what? Right SCSI Card, WRONG CABLES!

So I almost feel like this was a wasted trip. It was but wasn’t… the wrong cables at least allow for the old SCSI card to be used just not the new one… but we still will have to have someone plug in the right cable when/if it comes in… Well here it is… 3pm and I wanted to be gone by now but this server is being a pain in the rear-end.

Anyway… Trying to wrap this up and it looks like it’s moving again… Time to finish and get on the road… 5 hr drives suck.

You know… I’ve come to a conclusion that “script kiddies” are getting dumber and dumber by the minute. For those of you that don’t know I routinely (daily) check over the security output for the server that hosts all of my websites, email, etc and add entire C blocks (that’s a /24 network or 254 addresses to those of you who don’t know) from other countries to a complete IP traffic ban when they attempt to access the network. Who in Korea or China needs to use anything on my server anyway? I don’t host any Chinese or Korean sites, right? 🙂 The hosts from the US are easy to deal with, which by the way makes up less than 0.5% of the attempts. I simply turn over to their ISP’s or the authorities if they rough up my server too bad. Honestly the ones under 25 requests I pretty much ignore from the US… I figure it’s some lil kid trying to learn the ropes and maybe will move on to learning something better once they can’t get in so why bother em? 🙂

Well anyway… back to my original thought here… Some of these logins are ridiculous… To name a few:
letmein, myspace1, monkey, link182, password1, iloveyou, cookie123, miss4you, clumsy, f*#{you1, baby  etc…

I was humored by the porn guy a couple weeks ago, those were almost comical. These are actually in order:
love, hate, f*#{, image, photo, video, webcam, magic, dorms, slut, b!+ch, cock, sh!+, porno, lesbos, swinger, playboy, etc…

Even better are the ones that try command names or OS names:
more, less, grep, ifconfig, ls, ps, mv, suse, mandrake, debug, kernel, windows, netstat, etc…

I swear IQ’s have dropped sharply. If anyone even allowed some of those logins they’re pretty retarded honestly. It defies all common sense I tell you. Honestly, I’ve been hacked before and it didn’t bother me this much. Someone with some real talent can acquire access to your system and 90% of the time you have no clue they were even there. They pop in, do their thing and pop out but this spamming of logins and passwords is really quite pathetic and annoying. My personal favorite are the ‘root’ and ‘admin’ attempts as they make me laugh since there is no way you’re getting in with a root login on the server unless you’re sitting on the console physically…

Sadly what is even more pathetic is that some of those attempts actually work on some systems because the people in charge of those systems are either a) incompetent themselves or b) unaware that someone incompetent installed a vulnerable OS on their network. I do however think people need to be a little more proactive.  

Anyway… I’ll end my rant here. 🙂

Sorry if anyone who subscribes saw a reminder for my last post twice… playing with some new options and such so it tossed out a couple on the previous post. 🙂

Just finished a round of upgrades (some more to follow tomorrow) on the wordpress software and some of the plugins… pretty cool stuff coming down the pipeline.

In other news… I figured out some round-about ways of getting Nimbus MySan working on my Small Business Server. It requires a good chunk of a few hours but it’s working quite well. 🙂 (this info for all those following the whole xbox360 media center server 2003 stuff). It actually wasn’t too bad.

1. Uninstall SP2 (ignoring all the warnings *eeek*)
2. Install SP1
3. Ensure you’ve got .NET 2.0 installed
4. Install MySAN
5. Reinstall SP2
6. Reinstall all the updates hanging out there (including the .NET service packs)
7. Run MySAN and setup your drives. (make sure to give your VISTA machine exclusive rights to the drive)

The only catch is it will need for format the partition you’re intending to use, so you’ll need to backup your data first… I luckily had a drive big enough to hold all the data temporarily while I did this little manuever and now it’s working quite well… I’m currently in the middle of copying some 39,000 files over to the ipSAN drive but it’s working quite nicely without a hiccup and the stuff that has copied over already shows up in the population in media connector and in media center. 🙂

I might post up some screen shots tomorrow or something if I can find some time. I’ve been trying to get all the software for the blogsites updated, new pictures uploaded, two new sites created and manage getting my household duties completed as well. Lot’s of fun. Anyway… I’m getting the look from Amanda… it’s time for bed. 🙂