Diary of a Network Geek

I am, in spite of what some shooting buddies may have thought, a Canon shooter, and always have been.

I understand the crazy devotion that Nikonians have to their brand, but I do not share it.  So, for all you fellow Canonites, I have a special Friday treat; Canon Quick Guides.  These are guides right from the Canon mothership on how to use their gear, the right way.  They are, per the website, "a free downloadable resource for EOS cameras and accessories. These PDF cheat sheets are helpful tools to carry around in your camera bag for quick reference, or to read from your computer for step-by-step guidance on specific product features and techniques."  And, they are pretty damn cool.

Incidentally, they were first pointed out to me by Syl Arena of Speedliting.com and [amazon_link id="032171105X" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]The Speedliter's Handbook[/amazon_link] fame.  Trust me on this, he knows Canon!

So, anyway, go print some out to throw into your camera bag before you go shooting this weekend!
And, enjoy the rest of your Friday!

I'm always looking for short-cuts.

No, seriously, there's only one of me and my time is in HUGE demand, especially at the office.  So, I'm always looking for ways to automate stuff so I don't have to do it myself.  Back in 2008, I cobbled together an imaging system that relied on Linux and a whole lot of personal documentation.  (You can read that, in two parts, here and here.)  It worked pretty well and I was pretty damn proud of myself for both figuring it out and saving me a whole lot of time doing each individual install of a machine.

Well, recently, we've started upgrading our engineers and draftsmen to the latest version of AutoCAD and Windows 7.
Naturally, Windows 7 uses disks in a totally different way than Windows XP, so all that work I did is now pretty much useless.  Which, frankly, is par for the course in our line of work.  IT is always changing, so we have to adapt, whether we like it or not.  In this case, I don't mind so much.  Why?  Because Clonezilla pretty much does everything that I was doing by hand, only it does it almost automagically.  Just to be clear, I'm using the Clonezilla Live version and saving the images to my server.  Now that I've upgraded the storage capacity to a little over 4 terabytes, I'm not so worried about saving images there.  Especially because I still have most of the office convinced we only have a single terabyte of storage and that they need to keep their directories on the server lean.  It doesn't help much, but it's enough.

Seriously, if you have to image machines, go check out Clonezilla.  It works and, best of all, it's FREE!
(Also?  It's pretty damn fast on my network, which is a huge bonus!)

Can I call myself a writer, if I'm not writing?

Long-time readers of this blog will remember the days that I used to post virtually every day.  That was, it seems, a very long time ago.  That was before I got divorced and before I almost killed myself through self-neglect.  It was also before I met and dated a dear, sweet woman who will always have a special place in my heart and before I bought my camera.
I couldn't tell you why I used to write so much and why I don't now.  I only know that something changed.  Some elusive thing changed, escaped me, slipped from my grasp.  Maybe it was a lack of motivation.  Maybe it was that everything seemed so hollow and pointless after spending a year doing the horizontal mambo with Death that any words I might spit on the page seemed like a waste of my time and yours, dear readers.  Maybe it was a lack of what every "wanna' be" writer thinks will get them off their lazy butts and in front of a keyboard; inspiration.
I honestly don't know.  But, I've felt the itch again.  I've felt the urge to chew up a bit of whitespace on the Internet and spit out the stuff that makes me choke.  I've also discovered Tumblr.  Yes, another blogging platform.  And, yes, I'm sure I won't stay there long, because this is my blogging home, but until then, I have found my little slice of Tumblr oddly inspirational.  I suppose it has to do with thinking differently about how I do what I do, but all that really matters is that it's gotten me writing again.

The other thing, I think, that compels me is the fact that I'll be 43 this year.
Something changes again when a man feels the fetid, stinking breath of middle-age on the back of his neck and realizes that he has achieved less than the lofty goals he set for himself at 18.  Granted, many great artists of various kinds have come into their own only after having turned fifty, and, given my family's record of longevity, I probably have another good 45 years or more of intelligent, intelligible output left in me, but, still, not having produced even a single work of long-form fiction nags at me.  You see, as good as I have gotten at extemporaneous non-fiction, thanks in no small part to this blog, I seem to have almost completely lost the knack of producing fiction.  And, trust me, as someone who worships the great storytellers of literature, I find that disappointing, to say the least.
It does not help, either, that many of my literary heroes are, in fact, dead.  Most of them, unfortunately, died before they were 50.  And, almost all of them, produced their greatest work before they were 40.
When I was younger, I tried to emulate those writers in many ways.  Unfortunately for me, one of the writers who's work I respected the most was Ernest Hemingway.  Now, don't think that means I purposely drank hard for years, because I didn't.  Oh, I drank pretty hard, but not in conscious imitation of Hemingway.  And, certainly, I haven't run through wives the way he did!  What's more, I'm pretty sure I haven't achieved his level of misogyny.  (In fact, I recently checked with several female friends on just that subject for reasons inappropriate to go into here and they all assured me that, whatever my character flaws may be, misogyny of any kind, much less at the level of "Papa" Hemingway, was not one of them.)  Nor, I hope you will be pleased to learn, do I plan to commit suicide via shotgun at 50 the way he did.  For one thing, I know pretty much everyone who might find the body and I like them, so I won't subject them to that.  For another, I neither plan to give my detractors the satisfaction of my untimely death nor do I own a shotgun.

Now, you may ask why, in a post about inspiration and motivation, I would dwell on Hemingway's death.  Good question.
You see, last night, I queued up a quote from Hemingway on that Tumblr I recently started.  By the time you read this post, in fact, it should be up, so feel free to pause for a moment and go read it.  It's one of my favorites.
The thing is, though, this morning, I got my regular e-mail from the Writer's Almanac, which lists today's literary events of historic note.  Today, as it turns out, in a weird bit of synchronicity, is the anniversary of the day when Hemingway, suffering from cancer, did himself in with his trusty, manly shotgun.  Killing himself as he might have killed one of his heroically tragic characters.
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China, or anywhere else?
It's a reminder.  A reminder of how many times I have almost given up.  A reminder of how many times I have, in true Hemingway hero fashion, faced death, or, worse, my own internal demons, and, rather than giving up or giving in, set my jaw, dug into the mud and just kept plowing forward.

You see, I forget, sometimes, who I am.
I forget that there is more to me than who I see reflected in the vision of others.  In my own insecurity, I forget how strong I can be.  I forget that love is the answer to all my problems.  Not being hard and tough, like I think Hemingway thought men, especially himself, should be.  I forget that it takes great strength of character to care, and I do care, about so many things and so many people.  I forget that what I see as my weakness is, in fact, my strength.  I forget that I have gotten up, as the saying goes, one more time than I have been knocked down.
And, so, as I imagine many of my dead heroes have done, I do my best to set aside doubt and fear and the perceived  judgement of others and do what I was taught as a child; I simply am trying again.  Trying to learn from the mistakes and failures of my past, not forgetting them, but not letting them get in my way, either.
And, as you can see, if you've stuck with me this far, I'm starting to write again.

How far can you get on a tank of gas?

You know that when the little, red light showing that you're out of gas on your car comes on, you have a couple miles before your car dies, right?  Oh, well, I know none of my readers have ever let their tank get down that far, but, you know, theoretically.   But, how far can you get?
Personally, I try never to get lower than 1/4 tank before I'm pointed at a gas station, but, well, with it being payday today, it occurred to me that, sometimes, people don't have a choice!  As cash-strapped as I've been over the years, sometimes, I've had to think about whether or not to drive someone and spend money on the gas.  Thankfully, that's not quite so true any more, but, I do worry about adding in some padding to my budget to allow for suddenly inflated gas prices.

Still, it is an interesting question, isn't it?
When you're down to that last little drop of gas, how far can you get before refueling?
Ponder no more!  Instead, go to Tank On Empty, find your car, and find out.  Or, at least, find out a fairly good estimate.  And, of course, if you are one of those people who like to, or have to, push their luck, add your results to the site to help others!
(If you're interested in specifics, check out how far a gas guzzler, the Crown Victoria, like I'm currently driving, does!)

Geek smells must be on my mind lately.

So, two weeks ago, I brought you Eau d'BBQ.  This week, it's fantasy role-playing game cologne.
And, no, I'm not even kidding.
From the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab website:

In most pen and paper fantasy RPGs, three of the primary attributes that you must choose for your character are race, class, and alignment. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s RPG scent series was designed to emulate the character creation process, and are meant to be layered in order to create a character concept. In short: you layer your class, race, and the two fragrances that compose your alignment to construct your character scent.

Okay, I hate to perpetuate a stereotype, but, well, I've hung out with gamers.  Lots of gamers.  And, I've got to be honest, for most of them, smelling nice was just not a big priority.  On the other hand, the genre may have changed in the 20+ years I've been away from it and now regular showers and healthy eating habits are all the rage.  It could happen, I suppose.  In any case, I applaud these folks for tapping into a virgin market, if you'll pardon the pun.
Also?  The whole idea of having to buy several scents to "layer" them?  Marketing genius!

No, I'm not kidding.

So, you think you could love a geek, ladies?  Really?
Oh, sure, we seem all cute and soft and fuzzy and all, but, let's face it, geeks get some weird ideas about what's cute and is acceptable behavior.  Take, for instance, these adult Marvel Underoos for women.  Now, I think they're adorable, but the writer who put this up on IO9.com thinks that the ladies will find them, well, less than okay.  Frankly, they look comfortable, to me, and fun, albeit in a very geeky way.  And, yes, I'm pretty sure I've dated or known several women who could have actually worn these and been okay with it.  More than okay, actually.  I'm pretty sure I've known women who would have thought these were adorable and fun, just like me.
Sadly, I did not marry them. *sigh*

So, what do you think?  Are they over the top or cute, harmless fun?

Did you know that they make "musk" from pig testicles?

For real.
So, you know, if you're a manly man out there trying to attract a future mate, why not skip the "middle man" and just wear a little Barbeque Cologne Que?!
No, seriously.  It's cologne that smells like fresh bacon and barbeque.  For real!  Frankly, it sounds delicious!  Though, it does kind of sound like it might be more attractive to guys than to girls.
Also?  You may want to make sure when you wear it that the girl you're about to hit on isn't a vegetarian!

Can someone "reimagine" Ulysses in 140 character bursts?

You James Joyce fans know that June 16th is "Bloomsday".  The day that Joyce famously detailed in his epic novel [amazon_link id="1617203475" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Ulysses[/amazon_link].  Well, one fan is planning to reformat and reinterpret that famous novel via Twitter this coming Bloomsday.  She's looking for volunteers to help with the effort, so if you're interested, hit the article and follow the link there to her project site.  Or, if you just want to follow the action yourself, follow the @11ysses Twitter account before 8:00am (Dublin time) June 16th and see how well they make this happen.  It could be an interesting effort, or a total train wreck.  There's no telling really.

But, I have to admit, I wonder about this.
The novel is, as you may be aware, a long, challenging literary experiment, of sorts.  And, it's as famously challenging to read as it must have been to write.  So, I wonder, is dumbing down a classic like that to 140 character intervals really so fantastic?  I should mention that I've never actually read the book, though I occasionally feel the urge to attempt it, like some kind of pseudo-intellectual daredevil, attempting to jump a cultural canyon.  So, I wonder, will this project make it more accessible to the unwashed masses, like me?  Or, will it marginalize the work more than modern society already has?
Or will any significant portion of the modern world even notice?
(And, should any of that matter at all?)

I'm seeing traffic about this, so I thought I'd write up what I found.

I tweeted about a strange DNS-based network/malware attack that I saw on Friday, but, at the time, I didn't see any interest, so I didn't go into any real details.  Besides, I may be a hardcore geek, but I do have a life and was going out.  But, now, I'm seeing search engine traffic hitting my blog apparently looking for details, so I thought I'd describe the attack, as I saw it.

First of all, let me mention that I've seen a higher-than-usual occurrence of malware infections the past couple of weeks.  I mean, it's a hazard of my business that, sooner or later, people are going to get infected, either through bad behavior or by accident, but the past three weeks or so I've seen way more problems like that than is even remotely normal.  So, bearing that in mind, I've been on a kind of high-alert status looking for any malware problems, but this was something new.

It started with someone from another location, who's on a totally, physically separate network which uses a different internet service provider to connect to the Internet, calling me with a problem.  It was, apparently, a recurrence of a virus he had previously that we cleaned.  He described being taken to a webpage that featured a maroon graphic background with a white icon of a policeman holding up his hand to indicate "stop".  The text on the page gave a message that said the user's browser was not the correct version to access the page and that an upgrade was required.  Helpfully, it provided a button to press to receive the "upgrade".  Obviously, the "upgrade" was an infection.  (You can see an example of the graphic here.)  Thankfully, I trained my users well enough to be suspicious of these kinds of things and no one who reported this actually clicked on it.

About the same time this happened, I noticed that my iPhone wasn't connecting to the wifi hotspot I have setup in my office.  I checked the configuration and noticed that the DNS servers listed were wrong.  In fact, they'd all been replaced with a single DNS server; 188.229.88.7  Obviously, that seemed suspicious to me, so I opened a command prompt on my PC and did a tracert to see if I could figure out where this server was and, from that, why it had become the default DNS server on part of my network, despite my having very carefully configured totally different DNS servers that I knew were safe.  It looked like the tracert results showed me a network path that led out of the country somewhere, which was, to me, very suspicious.

Before I could really pursue that, though, I got another call from a user at my location reporting the exact same error message and graphic, but going to a totally different website! I went to his computer and checked the IP configuration and found that his DNS servers had been replaced by the rogue server as well.  I refreshed his network config, several times actually, and the DNS servers reset, but, when I thought to check some other people in the same area of the building, his configuration set itself back to the rogue DNS server!  So, I reset the local network equipment to clear the DNS cache, and whatever other caches may have gotten poisoned by this attack, and the problem seemed to go away.  Unfortunately, whatever had caused the compromise was still active and seemed to poison the DNS cache and the DNS configuration again.  It did seem sporadic, though, as if the ISP was trying to correct the issue at their end.

As far as I can tell, the attack actually seemed to be network-based in some way.
At least, I couldn't find any computer on my network that was infected with anything that AVG, Norton Anti-virus, or Malware Bytes could find.  It is, I suppose, possible, that this attack was so new that no of those programs had an updated detection pattern for it, but, based on the lack of detection, and the fact that it happened on two physically separate networks almost simultaneously, leads me to believe that this was a network-based attack.  I suspect that an ARP cache or DNS cache or something similar was attacked and compromised on a major network router somewhere.  Possibly one of the edge routers at a trans-continental connection somewhere.  From the tracert results I had, it looked like it was the East Coast somewhere, leading to Europe via London to France, though I could be wrong.  It's possible that was a blind alley meant to throw researchers off the trail in some way.
Also, as of this writing the rogue DNS server seems to be out of commission, though that might change, too.

The Internet is a wild and wooly place, ladies and gents, and you can't always count on your friendly, neighborhood Network Geek to watch over you and keep you safe!  So, be careful out there!
(And, if you're a fellow professional who's seen this, too, leave me comments and tell me what you found!)
UPDATE: Looks like the server is still active, but my ISP has blocked DNS traffic to it, to fix the problem.
Also?  I hate the bastards that do these things.  I hate every last one of the little rat bastards!

UPDATE/FOLLOW-UP: So, it seems like a lot of people have been effected by this problem!
Check the comments for what other folks did and tools they might suggest to help with the problem.  Frankly, I wish I'd had known about those tools when I started my day!  Yes, I was *totally* wrong when I said it looked like it was coming in from outside the routers.  It was, in fact, *several* PCs that were infected with whatever it was.  I found it, much like at least one commenter, by checking the results of "ipconfig /all" in a command prompt.  I noticed that the DHCP server listed in the config was NOT my actual DHCP server!  So, as I went from machine to machine, I saw several PCs that kept coming up as DHCP servers.  I used Malware Bytes to scan the infected PCs and it seemed to clean them off.  At least, for now.  I'm not sure what I'll find in the morning.
Apparently, Friday, when it looked like the problem was getting cleaned up, it was really just people shutting their workstations down early for the long weekend.
In any case, as at least one commenter has mentioned, it looks like updates for the various scanners should be coming out this week, so keep updating your antivirus and antispyware programs and scan your networks!  Well, scan them more completely and carefully than you already have.
And, as always, if you have any new information or suggestions for tools to clear up the issue, please, leave them in the comments!

Are you on Twitter?

Most of you who read this blog probably get here via Facebook or Twitter these days.  Yes, I am one of those attention whores that has their Twitter setup to post status updates to Facebook when we tweet.  And, I've taken that a step further by setting my blog to tweet when I have released a new post.
But, sometimes, I just tweet regular, random stuff, just like every other attention whore on Twitter!  I may not tweet photos of what I've eaten for breakfast, but, occasionally, I tweet something that's intended to be funny or insightful.  So, in any case, I know what it's like to try and keep those tweets fresh and interesting.  And, I know, it's not easy!  So, you'll be relieved to know that there IS help!  Help in the form of the website "Yes, that can be my next tweet!"

The web-app will look at your Twitter feed and use programattic magic to analyze patterns to your tweets and mash them together to suggest similar tweets.  Then, of course, you can send them right to your hordes of faithful Twitter followers who are just waiting for your next brilliant tweet about how the stupid traffic made your yummy fast-food breakfast cold!  Or whatever.  No judgement.  (Well, maybe a little.)