What a morning….so far I’ve had 116 notifications that we’ve received the sobig virus into our mail servers. These are running NAV and delete the attachment and were previously configured to send an email (for historical purposes of the quantity of virus’s) and a Windows Net Send Message to my desktop to notify me of the problem. However, with the amount of notifications and also notifications when the manual scan failed to open certain attachments in emails, I was unable to work as I had to keep clicking ok. Therefore I had to turn the notifications off – must remember to turn them back on again.
There would be major resistance in the company to blocking attachments at the mail server so unfortunately that option is a nogo.
At the same time I’ve had to arrange scans on three remote pc’s that managed to get the Blaster or Welchia worms on their machines as they got infected between us updating at 4am with no patch updates, and the 11.30 manual update we initiated!
One of the laptops (from a remote site) has no firewall, runs w2k and no service packs or fixes. I’ve spent the last couple of hours installing sp4,rebooting and installing all the various hotfixes, ie6 and the multiple reboots needed to do them all. WHAT A MORNING!
Thanks toSOBig was very fast spreading and by 12pm we had at least 8 copies in our mailboxes and our antivirus software was updated at 4am in the morning and nothing was found when the emails came through. Thankfully (that I am aware of) the users didn’t open the emails – I guess I’ll find out when I am in the office tomorrow.
Why would someone who’s paid a fortune for one of those phones with the polyphonic ringtones, stick to the annoying nokia ringtune and even worse take forever to answer it at the breakfast table?
Having played with this a bit more tI’ve found that it produces a sig at the bottom of the email to say that the email has been sent using desknow. I’ve not found anywhere in the documentation that is provided with the system which says exactly what is crippled/changed in the free version as opposed to the licenced version. The information on services that are crippled just says it will stop working “after a short while” – not very helpful.
One good thing is the messaging service that is built in – theres also the ability to send a message to everyone that is currently attached to the server although I am not sure if this would be disabled after the trial period is finished.
This lack of information is similar to a favourites synchronisation program I found on the web the other day – this allowed you to synchronise favourites between browsers and computers (although it didn’t seem to be synchronising my firebird favourites properly). It took me a long time searching on their website to find that the software was timebombed to stop working after 30 days unless you paid $50ish, which is an extortionate amount to pay for synchronising bookmarks! This is rather misleading as the main page trumpeted the free software with no smallprint or asterix’s to say “we wait until you are hooked on our app before making it really clear that you hafve to pay”. Having said that the email they sent welcoming you to the service did mention the time bomb but not on the website, which is where you are first hooked in.
I downloaded a copy of DeskNow a free email and collaboration server that has mail, file sharing, message boards and calendar functionality. If you register for a commercial licence it also acts as an instant messaging server with jabber compatibility. From what I’ve seen so far it looks pretty good and could make a nice cutdown version of exchange server! One of the good things in the email clients is timelimited emails. By appending the date that you want an email to expire to the username part of the address, email sent after this date will be dropped as spam. ie fred.040302@domain will drop emails after the second of March 2004. Filtering is also available on the server, but again its functionality that you need to register the server for. Still worth checking out if you run a small mail server on an office lan or for home users.
I’m using Zempt to compose these entries offline ready for posting when I’m connected again. It would be *really* nice if Zempt detected I was backonline again and offered me the ability to post all composed entries that are currently saved as draft options (or gave me a menu option to do this) – possibly with a listing of draft entries saved with a checkbox next to them to say “post this” – a bit like when you select a post to edit.
Downloaded and installed a new RSS reader today, Awasu and gave it a quick whirl whilst out of the office. It looks really nice but the stupid thing doesn’t save the feeds to a local hard disk so as soon as I had disconnected from the internet and then went to look at the feed, it kept coming up with pages not found. REALLY annoying. It doesn’t look like there is an option to download the feeds either. It’s also meant to autodetect pages with rss feeds but it didn’t do anything when I went to my site or Mike’s
Newzcrawler offers both of these functions – although I don’t think it supports autodetect in mozilla – I must admit I’ve not used RSS feeds since switching to Mozilla as my main browser, but those two events are completely independant, apart from the fact that Mozilla allows me to open multiple pages at once in one window so makes it alot easier to read multiple sites quickly. I must get back into the habit of using Newzcrawler though (and add an RSS category to my MT installation!)
Courtesy of a plaque on my wall in room 45 at the Brook Hotel.
- “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicouokanoconiosis” claims to be the longest word in the English language with 45 letters. It refers to a lung disease caused by ultramicroscopic particles of volcano dust.
- The 45th King of England was James I who also was James IV of Scotland thus becoming the first British Monarch
- Harold Wilson defeated Alec Douglas-Home in the 1963 General Election to become Britain’s 45th Prime Minister.
- The element of atomic number 45 is rhodium (Rh) so named because some of it’s compounds are rose coloured.
- The 45th Pope was Leo I, one of the only three Popes to have earned the sobriquet ‘the Great’
This hotel has a thing for Prime Ministers as apparently it was once owned by Robert Peel – the founder of the UK police force and a Prime Minister for Britain.
Not sure whats going on, but for a few days I’ve found certain sites such as yahoo,google, blog.iloaf.com, ggsearch.blogspot.com and others not working. Pages just don’t load for some weird reason. Initially I put it down to the sites being hosted in america somewhere affected by the power cuts. However in ggsearch’s case I can lookup the ip address in dns, and then take the server ip address into a web page and get the main servers webpage ok. Yahoo seems to be behaving at the moment but there is no response from google, although i did eventually get the favicon.ico loaded but no page. The two sites that I need for banking over the net, Halifax Online and Royal Bank Of Scotland are also unavailable, although both these sites stop on a traceroute when the network gets to bt.net (quel suprise!)
Can anyone else get to blog.iloaf.com or ggsearch.blogspot.com
Someone has drafted up Sco’s version of the 419 scam which is pretty funny reading. Thanks to Koozie for the tipoff.