Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 13 Sep 2005 17:31:16 GMT
So pretty much nothing worked yesterday.
It started with an 8:00 phone call over VoIP that only had one-way audio. Then my 11:00 phone call gave a potential client an “all circuits busy” instead of ringing through to my VoIP phone. I’ve been using Asterisk for almost 18 months, and this is the first time that I’ve ever seen either of these, so I spent a while trying to reproduce the problems and sending support email off to two different VoIP providers.
After that, I finally started in on The Evil Thing–I bought a copy of XP and I was planning on installing it on a spare PC so I could test Typo with IE 6. How hard could it be, right?
I gave up on it at 8:00 PM.
Here’s a short list of things that went wrong:
I couldn’t find an old Windows CD to use to make the upgrade test on my XP CD happy. I should have CDs for ‘98 and 2000 sitting here somewhere, but I couldn’t find either. I had to borrow one to make XP’s installer happy. It would have been easier to download a cracked copy then to use the legitimate version and fight with its copy and licensing protection.
Once I got past the upgrade test, the installer refused to format my hard drive. No matter which options I picked (full disk or small partition, NTFS or FAT, quick format or full format), it would always die out within 5 seconds with a “Setup was unable to format the partition” error. The error suggests that I check the power on my external SCSI drive. Since I’m installing onto a completely standard 80 GB internal IDE drive, the error isn’t very helpful. Digging around a bit, bad IDE cables and bad CD drives seem to be the most common causes for this error. Since this is an old box that I put together from spare parts, the system is using old 40-pin IDE cables; I need to swing by a store and pick up a couple 80-pin IDE cables. Maybe that will help.
For the fun of it, I tried booting my borrowed XP disk (the one that I was using to pass the upgrade test), and *it* partitioned the drive without any problems. Unfortunately, it refused to take my license key. The nice hologrammed one that came directly from Microsoft. Apparently my key is just good for XP Pro Upgrade CDs that come with SP2 pre-installed or something. Rebooting with my CD put me right back into formatting limbo.
I swear, I should have just downloaded and installed a cracked version–I would have been done early yesterday afternoon.
Tags broken, hardware, voip, windows | 3 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 08 Jun 2004 21:45:06 GMT
Boing Boing has a link to a Bruce Schneier story in Computerworld that talks about the ’Witty’ worm from March 2004. This was the first that I’d seen about Witty, but it sounds freakishly scary: it was targeted on ISS’s BlackICE/RealSecure intrusion-detection systems. It was released under 48 hours after the vulnerability in BlackICE was made public. It infected 100% of the vulnerable systems on the net in 45 minutes. It was launched from a coordinated set of ‘drone’ machines. And it slowly destroyed the systems that it infected by overwriting random blocks of their hard drives.
Fortunately, there were only 12,000 vulnerable systems on the net. This time. The problem is that the code for Witty is out in the wild now. It’s only 700 bytes long, and it should be easy for an attacker to modify it to fit the next UDP exploit that shows up. Can you imagine what would happen if this blew through 20 million Windows boxes?
This might be a good time to run backups.
Posted in Computer Security | Tags security, virus, windows | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 04 May 2004 21:54:40 GMT
You know, this error message might just make it worth it to go through the incredible hassle required to install Kerberos.
Posted in Computer System Administration | Tags funny, kerberos, windows | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 19 Apr 2004 03:10:32 GMT
I saw a prototype FlipStart hand-held PC today. One of my friends is working for them and was showing off a prototype. I only had two or three minutes to play with it, and I didn’t have a camera with me, so I don’t have a ton to say here. All in all, it seemed decent–it’s clearly a small PC, not a big handheld, but the formfactor is okay. It fit into my shirt pocket with a millimeter or two to spare. The display seemed decent; it wasn’t outstandingly bright, but it I was right next to an open window, and it was still readable, which puts it about on par with my old Clie. The touchpad is on the right side of the unit, above the keyboard, where you can reach it with your thumb while holding the system. The mouse buttons are on the left. I was surprised, but the touchpad/button layout worked well for me. There was also a scroll wheel and a few other buttons, but I didn’t have a chance to see them in action. The keyboard is way too rubbery for me, but my contact says that it’s going to be replaced before it ships. I didn’t have a chance to test any peripherals or networking on the box; I barely had time to watch XP boot and then play around with it briefly.
The specs on the website seem to match was I saw, except for the USB ports–the specs list one USB 2.0 port, while the model I held had two mini-USB ports.
If it was shipping today, would I buy one? Probably not; I’m mostly a Mac person these days, and I wouldn’t have a whole lot of use for a pocket-sized PC. On the other hand, if it was a Mac, I’d be jumping up and down–I’d drop my Palm in an instant for it.
I was using Windows instead of OS X as my primary desktop, I’d be sorely tempted with this, because it seems to be small enough to be pocketable, while still being big enough to be usable. The keyboard’s around half-sized, which isn’t big enough to touch-type on, but it’s big enough for 3 or 4 finger typing. It’s a lot bigger then any of the built-in Palm/PocketPC keyboards that I’ve used, although the tactile feel wasn’t really any better.
Posted in Computer Hardware, Handheld and PDA | Tags flipstart, hardware, windows | 8 comments
