Tom's Insights - Week of 7/16/01

Week of July 16th, 2001

Last Updated: July 19, 2001 07:59

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Monday July 16, 2001

It rained today until late afternoon. Good for the farmers, who, in some areas, are having to plow crops under due to a late of water. Bad for us city dwellers, as the rain didn't drop the temperature much (hovered around 26 most of the day), and now the sun is out again the humidity is fierce.

Nothing earth shattering in my life today. Typical Monday. I spent most of the morning trying to tame my Inbox (having been away from the computer most of yesterday) and getting a handle on what the heck the industry is going to get up to this week. Microsoft quietly putting forward a new settlement proposal to the DOJ, conceding rip and DVD capabilities under XP (albeit for a price). Mmm. Interesting times all right. Oh, and Robert Morgan wrote this morning to pass along some news regarding e-smith -- seems they've been bought up by Mitel (story here). No idea how the deal will affect their firewall/server product.

Going to be a busy week for us. Thursday we leave for Vancouver. Holiday and visiting for the wife and kids; working holiday for me. Then I leave from Bellingham on the 31st for a three day business meeting in Indianapolis. Hopefully I'll get my notebook before we leave Thursday; if not, I'll have it shipped to Vancouver. So there will be a service interruption for at least two days while we're in transit. Hopefully I'll have something to post with Saturday -- it might be Monday, though. We'll see.

In the meantime, we're scurrying around doing all those last-minute-before-you-leave-for-two-weeks kinda things. Service the car, cut the grass, give keys to friends and neighbors, pack clothes, pack toys, make sure Hydras is fit for unattended duty, etc., etc., etc. Oh, and for some reason Leah just had to wash all the walls in the house today. Dunno. Woman thing I guess...

Later.

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Tuesday July 17, 2001

Morning all. Another day in paradise -- sunny, warm, and humid. The rain we got yesterday certainly did wonders for my grass, but unfortunately it was too little too late for the farmers. I talked to a friend last night who reaffirmed that most acreages he had contact with were already either plowing their fields under or cutting them for feed (as opposed to cutting in late August/early September for grain).

All services at Syroidmanor are now humming away on Hydras again: CommuniGate Pro 3.5b1, Apache 1.3.19 (never did get '20' to compile without errors), Samba 2.2.1a, and NAMED 9.1.3. The error logs are clean and the chatter being logged to the messages file indicates all is working as it should. It was a long haul, but worth it in that I have a system that is better tuned, a consistent set of user profiles I'm happy with, and all recent firmware updates in place. I moved NAMED off Donovan because when I leave Thursday I'll shut everything off except Hydras. No point in generating a bunch of unnecessary heat in a sealed house when I have one system capable of handling the load without even breaking a sweat.

Be careful out there folks! There's a bogus Microsoft Security alert (MS01-039) circulating this morning, as reported on Bugtraq. Note the header:

Microsoft Mail Internet Headers Version 2.0
Received: from mail.gmx.net ([194.221.183.20]) by hexch01.robhughes.com with
Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.2966);
	 Mon, 16 Jul 2001 21:07:01 -0500
X-Proxy: fwall.robhughes.com protected by Firewall
Received: (qmail 19842 invoked by uid 0); 17 Jul 2001 02:06:58 -0000
Received: from 252.fwsgrp27.als.att.net (HELO bleh.bleh.com) (12.44.146.252)
  by mail.gmx.net (mail01) with SMTP; 17 Jul 2001 02:06:58 -0000
Message-ID: <bleh1234567890>
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 1337 13:37:37 +1337
From: secnotif@MICROSOFT.COM
Reply-To: secnotif@MICROSOFT.COM
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.75 [en] (Win95; U)
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: rob@robhughes.com
Subject: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-039
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Return-Path: deathsdoor@gmx.co.uk
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 17 Jul 2001 02:07:02.0181 (UTC)
FILETIME=[2B2B0550:01C10E65]

They've taken an actual MS bulleting and used the text, including a pgp key, and incremented it from the previous bulletin. According to the poster, "The first thing I noticed is that the entire message is double-spaced. Not a lot, but it was different from every other bulletin I've gotten. The obvious give away is the address they've used to for the fix, as well specifying a particular file to download. The bulletin page of course is 404."

Careful what you download -- even when it appears to come from an authoritive source.

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Wednesday July 18, 2001

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Thursday July 19, 2001

Sorry folks. I really tried to find time to put up a post yesterday, but I worked heads down until almost 1:30 am getting an XML project to compile, then packing and putting the house in order.

So we're off like a herd of turtles.

The trunk in our Malibu is finely packed by an ex-trucker. Trust me, it's full -- you couldn't fit a cereal box in it unless you wanted to crush it.

We'll be in Vancouver Friday sometime. I'll be in touch over the weekend and bring you up to speed.

Cheers,

/tom

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Monday July 16, 2001

Tuesday July 17, 2001

Wednesday July 18, 2001

Thursday July 19, 2001

Friday July 20, 2001

Saturday July 21, 2001

Sunday July 22, 2001