evilrouters.net

Today is (was) Patch Tuesday.

I’m glad that I’m not using [MICROSOFT PRODUCT]. The latest [VIRUS/WORM/TROJAN] exploits a [FLAW/BUG/BACKDOOR] in [MICROSOFT PRODUCT], and it [DOES/DOESN'T] use Outlook and the stupidity of users. Luckily, I’m running [FREE ALTERNATIVE TO MICROSOFT PRODUCT], so I’m not at risk. In fact, [FREE ALTERNATIVE TO MICROSOFT PRODUCT] has protected me from [ANY INTEGER OVER 200,000] [VIRUSES/WORMS/TROJANS].

And just look at the [HUNDREDS/THOUSANDS/MILLIONS/BILLIONS] of dollars that we’ve saved.

Today, once again, I got annoyed by someone complaining about Microsoft “not including” a telnet client with Windows Vista, so here I am.

Most people will simply use another telnet client: PuTTY, TeraTerm Pro, or — my personal favorite — SecureCRT. The truth is, however, Microsoft actually did include a telnet client with Windows Vista. The problem is that it simply is not installed by default. Below is a step-by-step guide detailing how to install it:

• Start by opening up the Control Panel by clicking the Start button, then “Control Panel”
• Once in the control panel, click on “Programs”.
• Under “Programs and Features”, click on “Turn Windows features on or off”.
• If you get a “User Account Control” popup asking for your permission, click “Continue”
• In the “Windows Features” window that appears, scroll down and click the checkbox next to “Telnet client”.
• Click the “OK” button.
• Windows will then make you wait a random period of time while it installs the telnet client.
• Close the “Control Panel” window.

At this point, you can open up a command prompt (click “Start”, “All Programs”, “Accessories”, and “Command Prompt”) and start the telnet client by typing in “telnet” and pressing the Enter key.

See, wasn’t that simple!?

a parody of the mac vs. pc commercials with south park characters. created as the final project for a multimedia production class at california state university northridge (csun).

taking a page from the doctors at the moses taylor hospital, i.t. staff at the scranton, pa., facility last year diagnosed their messaging system and came up with an effective treatment that’s turned out to be a life saver.

the patient in this case was an aging microsoft exchange 5.5 environment that couldn’t support increased message loads and was going to cost a bundle to upgrade.

i love hearing stories like this.

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i originally wrote the following on 23-may-2007:

i installed red hat enterprise linux 4.5 on an hp dl365 yesterday to test out iscsi.

we carved out some space on the san to use for the testing, 500gb to be exact. the dl365 has a qlogic fiber-channel hba in it, connected to the hp san at 4 gbps. the 500gb of storage shows up on the rhel box at /dev/sda. no partitions or filesystems were created on the device.

as far as i can tell, rhel does not include support for being an iscsi target, which i did not find out until after i had it installed. fortunately, i came across the iscsi enterprise target project on sourceforge. their wiki led me to martin’s “iscsi target howto on enterprise linux (rhel4)“. by following that, i was able to get the iscsi target up and running, exporting the 500gb on /dev/sda.

the next step was to connect to that storage space from a windows box. this test is sort of a proof-of-concept to see if we can get things to work the way we want — which means windows “clients”, or initiators, will be used. i found anze vidmar’s “going enterprise — setup your fc4 iscsi target in 5 minutes” wiki page, which details setting up an iscsi initiator on windows. i grabbed the microsoft iscsi software initiator version 2.04 and installed it on my windows xp workstation (a vista version wasn’t available, or i’d have went for that).

following anze’s instructions allowed me to get the windows xp client configured as an initiator in just a few moments, and i had a p: drive showing up as a local disk, with an ~500gb ntfs filesystem on it for all my storage pleasure. excellent!

unfortunately, we need some access controls in our environment. if or when this goes into production, all iscsi traffic will be on an isolated, private network. i’m a big fan of the layered security approach, however, so while an isolated, private network is a good start, i want to implement the authentication that iet and the microsoft initiator are supposed to support.

enter problem. =)

anytime i try to set up some credentials on the target side (using “incominguser username password” in the /etc/ietd.conf config file) and use those same credentials in the microsoft iscsi initiator, i get a simple “authentication failure” dialog box on the client/initiator side. unfortunately, there aren’t any log entries on the server/target side (that i noticed, anyway) to help provide any insight.

anyone ran into this before and have any suggestions? tia.

update: seems i didn’t have any credentials listed in the “global” section of the /etc/ietd.conf file, which is needed if you try to do authentication during the discovery phase (i was). added that in and now have authentication working across the board.

on season one, episode 9 of “house“, the was a conversation between john henry giles and dr. gregory house that went like this:

“i know that limp. i know the empty ring finger. and that obsessive nature of yours, that’s a big secret. you don’t risk jail and your career to save somebody that doesn’t want to be saved unless you got something, anything, one thing. the reason normal people got wives and kids and hobbies, whatever, that’s because they ain’t got that one thing that hits them that hard and that true. i got music. you got this. the thing you think about all the time. thing that keeps you south of normal. yeah, makes us great. makes us the best. all we miss out on is everything else. no woman waiting at home after work with a drink and a kiss; that ain’t gonna happen for us.”

wow… that really struck a cord with me.

see, i got that one thing. for me, it’s computers. as i write this, my girlfriend is at work and has been for about the last 10 hours. i came home when she went to work and i’ve pretty much been sitting here in front of a computer since then.

i’ve caught up on some work e-mail, read up on some bgp stuff, creating and set up some mpls vpn labs in dynamips, checked myspace and facebook, etc.

it was a beautiful day outside, if the weather widget on my dashboard and the kids playing up and down the street are any indication. i wouldn’t really know though, i haven’t stepped outside since i got home about 10:30am this morning.

when the girlfriend gets here after while, she’ll have my full attention and i won’t even touch a computer until after she leaves tomorrow, but, for me, computers — networking, to be more specific — is “the one thing”.

kinda makes me wonder if i shouldn’t re-evaluate things…

windows toaster

the windows toaster looks great, but sometimes it just won’t make toast. it either comes out burnt or raw, and you have to unplug the toaster and plug it back in again each time you want to try and make some toast. for every loaf of bread you buy you are forced to buy a new toaster to go with it.

linux toaster

the linux toaster looks absolutely awful: it has wires crimped together, things are just hanging out of it. the first time you make toast with it the toaster burns it; the next time it’s raw. you read the man pages and invoke the command line “toast -verbose -breadsize 50132 -eject -o z3321 > /dev/toast” and it makes perfect toast ever after.

mac toaster

the mac toaster has no settings or controls. it looks very stylish, but will only accept proprietary-sized bread which can only be bought from apple dealers at ten times the cost of regular bread. the toast is fine except that the size of the bread is so odd that you can’t actually eat the toast it produces, although it does look very good.

today is february 1 and, as promised, microsoft office 2008 for os x has been made available on mvls for volume licensing customers.

w00t! downloading it now…

while watching the nfl playoffs today i seen a new “pc vs. mac” ad. i immediately checked the apple site, but it wasn’t on there. “wtf?” i thought.

anyways, the new mac ad, “referee” has been posted. “you’re ejected!”

A few weeks ago, eWeek ran an article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols entitled “Cheap Laptops Bad for Vista, Good for Linux“. In the article, he talks about the number of cheap laptops that people are buying up that aren’t capable of running Vista — but are quite capable of running Linux just fine.

Working in IT at an .edu, this is something I’m all too familiar with. I wish our Help Desk had kept count of how many students had come to them for assistance with their cheap laptops running Vista. I remember just a year or two ago and we were aghast at people who were running XP on laptops with only 256MB of RAM. Now it’s Vista laptops with just 512MB of RAM that we’re seeing.

Last Friday, someone poked their head into my office to let me know that a man and woman I knew wanted to talk to me. When I went out to talk to them a few moments later, it was the same thing I’ve heard countless times before. They had a laptop running Vista and were having issues. Besides the usual “it’s slow” routine, they said it had become completely unusable after the latest round of Windows Updates (the neverending “reboot, BSOD, reboot, BSOD” cycle). The laptop had came with Vista and they suffered through it up until this point. I knew what was coming and I tried to avoid it, but I finally gave in. I told them I’d blow it away and install XP for ‘em.

I learned a long time ago never to accept payment from friends because when their laptops screw up again, they’ll expect you to fix it again — for free, of course. Since this was late in the afternoon on a Friday and I had plans for the evening, I gave ‘em the “I’ll do it, but I can’t promise when I’ll have it done” spell. That was fine with them; the laptop was useless anyways.

When I finally got around to working on it, I watched it boot up and was surprised — I don’t know why — to see it was a 1.7GHz Pentium Mobile sporting a whopping 512MB of RAM. Who in their right mind would try to run Vista on that!? Anyways, long story short, I blew away Vista, reinstalled XP, got it back to ‘em and they’re happy as hell — the laptop is running faster than it ever has.

Now, back to the eWeek article… Vaughan-Nichols goes on to talk about how any modern Linux distribution (such as Fedora) will run great on these laptops, and he’s right. Every since I started using Linux over 10 years ago, it’s been possible to run it on hardware that Windows would choke on. I get better performance from my much slower Linux machines than I do from my better equipped XP machines, and I’m much more demanding of the Linux machines.

I’d love to convince these people to use Linux instead of Windows, but I just can’t. To do that would be to volunteer myself to be their first line of “tech support” and I just don’t have the time for that. These people aren’t interested in tinkering with their PCs, they just want ‘em to work.

Ironically, that’s one of the reasons I’ve never been a big fan of “Linux on the desktop”. All that tinkering is great for a while, but it gets old pretty quick. I used to love to constantly tweak my Linux machines, always downloading, compiling, and rebooting into the latest kernel just moments after it was released. Once I started having real work to do, however, I cut that out. Now, like most consumers, I just want my computers to work so that I can get my work done.

That’s one of the reasons I just ordered a MacBook…