Month: January 2004

Quick round up.

Apparently the bagel virus is spreading fast with reports that it’ll probably spread even faster today when Americans get back to work.
There’s a Security vulnerability in outpost which is worrying as I’ve recommended it to several people.It’s an escalation of priveledge problem so shouldn’t really be an issue for home users – it could be in the corporate side of things, or if a virus managed to use it to escalate it’s own priveledges (not sure how though)
Ultr@vnc also has the same problem – although this is likely to be installed on more corporate systems as a way of providing support to end users. No comment on whether it would effect other vnc clones….
MBSA 1.2 released – the application that analyzes your security configs. (thanks Chris)
Blogjet looks like an alternative to zempt or w.bloggar (looking suspiciously like the latter). Will download and try this one out too.

GPS clothing

A quick visit to Matalan was very profitable this afternoon. I got a waterproof jacket, with inside pocket for mobileGPS, another one for headphonesPDA and other pockets for the pens, paper, mobile and goodies. As it was only £17.50 it will keep me warm and I won’t have to worry too much about damaging or getting it dirty. I also got some waterproof tracksuit bottoms so I can wear them alone or over my work trousers and go caching without worrying too much about getting muddy. Just need a portable shoe/boot cleaner now and I’m set!

GPS Rebate.

Just spoke to the Where’s my Rebate helpline on 1-800-390-2344 to see where my $50 rebate is for the GPS that I purchased on the 24th November. Apparently it’s been approved and will be sent out on the 25th Febuary….now call me cynical but I don’t remember signing up to be a bank for Magellan for three months….now let me see – $50 at 19.7% APR for three months is…… (I’ve no idea)

Personal Firewall Day

Yesterday was apparently Personal Firewall Day which is weird that I only heard of it today (as I didn’t read my rss feeds yesterday). I would have thought this would have kicked off before the actual day….Anyway – yesterday I was asked to go to a friends who told me they had welchia or blaster on their pc. When I got there I did a quick check of the startup folders and registry and saw nothing suspicious. That and the fact they were running 98 did make me wonder HOW they got infected (as these are nt platform virus’s) Needless to say they had no real a/v software on the machine. PC-Cillin98 which had never been updated – so probably 6 years old. NAV was “installed” on the machine – the cd was copied onto the hard disk – so that wasn’t helping much 🙂
I ran through my various fix_virus.exe files downloaded from symantec, found nothing and then installed the free Computer Associates firewall/AV combo on their machine. All went well until it told me I HAD to update the definitions, reasonably enough, except for some reason it was coming up with 550 errors on the ftp. But a manual download of the file, from the same url worked fine! A standard home user would have had NO idea what to do and would have been left with an annoying popup every time they booted and no a/v protection.
After scanning there were no virus’s found but 50+mb of windows updates (not including WMP9 etc) and I wasn’t going to download them via dialup!

High CPU usage – or not?

Anyone got any theories on this? One of our customers has a box where task manager icon is showing a high cpu usage, the bottom of taskman shows 67% used, yet the cpu usage on the processes window shows 97% idle at the same time. Screen shot shown. If the server is rebooted the problem goes away for about a week before it starts to happen again. tl_server is our telnet server application so it is normal behaviour to have lots of copies running.