EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy, say so, I will respect that. If I don't know that you want your email address published, then I won't. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.

Good Morning. How is it that Monday mornings come just a little bit earlier in the day than other mornings? Anyone figure that out, drop me a line! Really not hitting on most cylinders this morning - and the ones that are aren't in this page, unfortunately. I am thinking about Moshe's note on how to install SSH on Tom's AIX box, Hydras. There are going to be some interesting difficulties along the way - perhaps if I compiled it as a static binary for a PPC target here, where I have all the math and crypto libs installed. But that will only build a 32bit daemon, running in the 64 bit AIX environment... Hmmm.

There's an interesting FreeBSD vs. Linux debate going on in SVLUG list, over the last couple of days. Summary on it after the shouting winds down a bit. I know virtually nothing about FreeBSD. One day, one day. Also, it looks like some interesting article links off the front page of slashdot today, especially the CanCooler project.

As you can see above, the farm is, overall, doing quite well. In the Beta tomatoes we lost one plant (it shrivelled and died - in the middle) so returned and replaced that at OSH. Yay, OSH - take back one dead plant, receive a flat of 6 in replacement, gratis. Additionally, I set up some string for the beans to work with and over on Marcia's page you can now actually see the hanging herb garden, rather than my cute (but functional) chickenwire Conestoga covers

Time to run now - late as it is. Have a wonderful day, looking forward at a whole week of days that start *JUST* like this ... aaeerrrggghh! <SEG>

10:33 - Thanks to Svenson for the lookout... broken 'Last Week' pointers are now repaired. TTFN.


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Good morning. There appears to be a teensy-weensy little problem with accessing OpenMail - it is just a little too easy. So I am looking for another scheme - maybe Postfix and IMAP? Oh. oh. Here's an interesting one - the exchange of mail with PBI from a couple of weeks ago when their mailserver, affectionately known as sims1, was doing the White House Intern imitation.

*** ATTN: PBI SUPPORT *******
I am on a low traffic mailing list maintained at iTool.com. Intermittently, over the last couple of months, mail cannot get through to me from that list, with the results you see at the bottom of this message. This is not acceptable. Please let me know when and how it is fixed (how is important, so that if it fails, I can include that information in my next service request, so that we don't repeat the same mistakes.
Actually, is there any hope whatsoever of getting the sims1 mailserver to work for more than a few days at a whack before dying out? Sigh.

Thanks,
Brian Bilbrey
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
**********************************
Chris Ward-Johnson wrote:
-Trimmed Lines!
> from mail1.itool.com [207.113.118.44]
>
> ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
>
>
> ----- Transcript of session follows -----
> ... while talking to mta4.snfc21.pbi.net.:
> <<< 595 Spammers not welcome here
> ... while talking to mta2.snfc21.pbi.net.:
> >>> QUIT
> <<< 595 Spammers not welcome here
> ... while talking to mta1.snfc21.pbi.net.:
> >>> QUIT
> <<< 595 Spammers not welcome here
> ... while talking to mta3.snfc21.pbi.net.:
> >>> QUIT
> <<< 595 Spammers not welcome here
> 554 ... Service unavailable

Subject: Re :  Re: Returned mail: Service unavail
Date: Sun, 09 Apr 2000 04:07:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]


Hello Mr. Brian Bilbrey,
I have received your email regarding email. We experienced an outage in
California that prevented customers from receiving incoming e-mail.  We
apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
The issue is now resolved.  No incoming messages were lost, and your
current password should work just fine. Again, we apologize for any
inconvenience this has caused.  Please contact us again if you continue
to experience any problems receiving email. Pacific Bell  Internet
Customer Support is available by calling  1-800-708-4638.

Thank you for choosing Pacific Bell Internet Services.

Regards,

Vernon
Technical Analyst
Pacific Bell Internet Services

Try our online help at HTTP://support.pacbell.net
Remember its quick, hassle free, and is always available!

Additionally, Netscrape has locked up on me again, this time in the middle of attempting to send an already written mail to Tom. Big tools that do lots of things break. Big tools that try to do everything break everything, as Tom's Outlook reboot behaviour will attest. Gotta shut it down and go. Have an interesting day - Later, when perhaps I can get to the bookmarks I saved for discussion here.


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Morning. Once again I have completed my transformation from something sleepy and in drastic need of evolution to a vaguely mammalian creature in search of caffeine. Also, the 120 new emails overnight, on a variety of interesting topics don't help matters. One thing about writing and working is true - the hours suck. That's alright for the time being, but it won't end up becoming a way of life (That is - I hope that writing will, while the hours won't).

The links I was talking about yesterday - here they are. From rootprompt.org, an article by Lance Spitzner called Auditing Your Firewall Setup. Lance writes clearly, with lots of outlinks to various related resources. Then there's another couple of Spitzner articles I found on his site, Armoring Linux, and for the NT crowd, just to keep things fair, Armoring NT. While these are not security bibles, there are lots of good, solid tips and tricks for system security. Check'm out.

Lastly for now, Roger Clarke's notes on CFP, which ended last week. CFP? Computers, Freedom and Privacy, the conference put together by some very top-notch people - it's been running for 10 years now. Have a look about, in a spare hour or so.

The farm still lives, although the birds ransacked Marcia's Thyme - guess it makes the nest smell better or something. All the tomatos are shooting up like weeds, and they should start fruiting in about 3 weeks. Wheeeha.

Have a lovely day - Happy Wednesday. Later.


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One in the IDG hopper, another near to launch position... we shall see. A little progress is a heartening thing. Good morning and happy Thursday to ye all. It sprinkled a little bit intermittently yesterday, then actually streets-wet rained last night. It's snowing in Michigan (where we're visiting later this summer) and in Saskatoon (Heh heh heh) - what weird, weird weather. The birds are singing outside, I understand their song, "Give ME a vocal-cord-ectomy, Give me a vocal-CORD-ectomy." At least I think that's what they're singing.

Last night, after an abortive attempt to communicate via ICQ, Shawn and I hooked up telephonically, initially that I might assist him in... in... what the heck were we working on ... Oh, right, a place to enable IP Forwarding on boot. I thought of another, Shawn, look at the services list in linuxconf. We ended up parking the echo "1"=/proc.. line in on the tail of /etc/rc.d/rc.local, but that's not the right place, just a place that ensures that it runs. The drawback to putting something there is that it runs regardless of runlevel. There's always more to learn.

Our second little project was to run Nessus against Grendel. As I noted to Dan Bowman last night, it was Christians and Lions all the way last night, and Grendel is a Lion. Shawn reported that after the longest run that he has seen Nessus make (delays explained momentarily), all that was reported is that Nessus could do a traceroute on my IP. The reason for the long run is that once the scan was detected, Portsentry not only blocked Shawn's IP with TCP Wrappers (by putting his address in /etc/hosts.deny), but also added a route reject line to the IP routing table. Nessus would call, and instead of getting back a no joy answer and going on to the next port, would get nothing. Had to wait for timeout on each attempt. Outbound packets to Shawns box routed to /dev/null. Heh.

Of course he broke his access to my box - no Web, no nothing. My messages.log experienced rapid inflation (no problem there, /var is large-ish, and on a separate partition), and I had to peel 4000+ lines out of hosts.deny, because every scan added a line. You know, I see room for improvement there. Hmmm. Oh, and manually unrouting the route rejection. Heh. Doesn't mean I won't get hacked someday, and when I do, I will just rebuild. But it's a little harder for the bad guys.

More catalog work, at work today. On the road with me. Later.

20:15 - Well, some catalog work, anyway. An interesting day where I spent most of my time drawing lines in the sand, daring customers and vendors to cross them. I think that I am trying to fill in for a missing Director of Sales. I sure hope we get one soon.

On da buk, reviewed some chapter work, found a hole in one - gotta write that and fit it into the correct chapter, then back to commands some more. Took a break to make dinner myself - four shredded mild italian sausage, 3 cloves of garlic, 1 diced onion, 1/2 green pepper diced, 1 tablespoon olive oil, sautee til lightly browned, then drain. Add about 36 ounces of something liquidy - I use a jar of Barilla and a 12 oz. can of tomato sauce, 1-1/2 teaspoon of italian seasoning, 1/4 teaspoon fresh cracked black pepper, 1 bay leaf, salt to taste and simmer. Cook to al dente then drain one pound of pasta (I like Penne Rigate) - mix with the sauce and let sit for 5 minutes, allowing the sauce to absorb into the pasta. Plate and serve, garnished with a little parmesan or romano. Yum.

Now, with all the working hemoglobin in my body busy with digestion, it is clearly time to get back to writing. Later.


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Very brief. Hi, howy'alldoin'? I blew off my morning time on interesting email and must hit the road now, more in a little while. Sigh, it's raining again - I thought I woke to the sound of tires on wet pavement. TGIF & later.

14:00 - Crash and Burn (the sequel to Spin City), staring Mr. Bill "Netscape engineers are weenies!" Gates as himself... Heh. Lots of links, lots of information to be garnered online about this one, but somehow, some way, there's a major hole in some 4 year old code that just surfaced, afflicting IIS users. I understand that if you (A) Use FrontPage 98 extensions on your server (or your ISP uses them for you) and (B) you don't use the InterDev products (whatever that is), then (C) delete the file called dvwssr.dll. Here is a link to a post from the individual that outed this ... security problem (thanks, Shawn). And thank you, Tom, from whom I first heard the news - he called me at work to warn me, knowing that ETS is on a hosted site and might be at risk. THANKS!

Of course, I never know what's true, except things that I find myself, or that I have reported to me by people (not organizations) that I trust. I trust the Daynotes Gang, especially to do the homework necessary to not go off half cocked. Also, I look for disclaimers and reasonable hedges ("this is what happened to me...") versions. So much of what I find on this sort of issue is so polarized. Either you love Microsoft or you hate the evil empire (gotta have some enemy, what with the wall down and the Russians broke {What was that about warheads???}. I like shades of gray, I love playing with computers, I will use the right software (tool) to get the job done. What more is there? Oh, life, sun, beaches... ? All over-rated. Feh.

.sig of the moment (from the email of another Brian):

"Daddy? Do all fairy tales begin with 'Once Upon A Time'?"
"No, some begin with 'If elected I promise'."

On that note, I am off into the wilds of nascent authordom, attempting to slay one dragon and stalk the next. Wish me luck. Oh, and a good thought or two for my nephew Robert Michael, who will be christened tomorrow. Later.


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Happy weekend. Now to work with ye! Crrrrrrrrrrrrrraack (of the whip). It's not Tom's fault, so don't blame him - I was born this way. Marcia even sort of knew it. A redlined chapter to cleanup and finish the style feedback from IDG, then into Tom for touchups and fixing the bits I broke. Final submission to publisher on Monday. Cool.

Gotta slog on this one though, since we are departing at 11:45 local to head towards Sacramento for the christening. My brother and his ladyfriend (whom we have not met) are going to be up, should be a wing-ding of a good time. Since it's a christening, water balloons are OK, right?

In the mail, this downloadable book on Parsing Techniques was featured. Also, there was a message from DanB (from about midnight), wondering if I was still up. Heh. Caffeine just beeped, so I will sign off for now. Later.


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From Dan Bowman, who thought I might still be up around midnight on Friday...

NP, I'd wanted your thoughts on Friday's post. Went with it anyway. 
Hope you had a safe trip and a good time at the Christening (you 
didn't wear that garlic necklace again, did you ?).

dan

Now to it...

On the weird stuff front: This 'article' from IT-Analysis.com, OFFICIAL: Linux is the fastest growing O/S, sponsored by . . . Microsoft??? Then there's BrassRing.com, which I needn't link to, I just want to talk about it. BrassRing was known until last week as Incpad.com, a tech jobs website run by Westech (the career faire people). Incpad was burning an impre$$ive amount of $$$ on brand building (something about computer mices worshiping an attractive Eurasian woman in metallic business-wear: thus absolutely true to real life). Having been at it buying billboards, glossy and pulp ad space, and radio spots galore about the Bay Area, they appear to have pulled the plug. I really don't understand this "rebrand 4 times a year philosophy." I mean, you have to spend the money all over again, don't you?

Robert Michael Ellison is now baptised and we had a nice time. I am going to work on pictures for a little bit, perhaps post some tomorrow, more will be on Marcia's site, you may be sure. Take care and have a safe week - I'll be right here, spouting off about something or other. Later.


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