By Bob Plankers on Jun 1, 2009 in Featured, General Rambling, Outright Rant | 1 Comment
Q: What’s the easiest way to get rid of malware on Windows[0]?
A: Not to get it in the first place.
A couple of other observations I made while cleaning a friend’s computer:
1. The malware was detected by my friend because it was closing windows. Any window that could be used to fix the infection was closed by the malware. That doesn’t seem to be a very productive strategy for staying installed.
2. The Avast BARTPE CD creator rocks. Luckily, a part of my organization that does more desktop support for customers has a license for it. It’s really nice to boot off a CD to fix everything.
3. I started with the Avira free antivirus scanner. It is worth what you pay for it. I couldn’t get it to switch to the right screen resolution so I could see the buttons to trigger a scan, the English edition is in German, and there are no command-line utilities that work (or documentation to indicate what I should be doing). In the immortal words of Maddox: Terrible. F.
4. I really like how malware authors are taking out ads for antivirus products on Google. Search for “avast” or “avira” and the sponsored links at the top of the results are not reputable sources…
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[0] Pre-emptive snarky comment: “Windows sux!” or “Linux wouldn’t have this problem” or “Apple r00lz!” — yes, we know, in a perfect world you’d be the benevolent emperor and would require everyone to use some other far-superior OS.[1]
[1] All OSes suck.
By Bob Plankers on Apr 8, 2009 in Featured, Outright Rant | 4 Comments
Quick quiz: What’s really annoying at 5:30 AM?
All computers.
Other acceptable answers include all humans, all software, and/or everything.
By Bob Plankers on Apr 4, 2009 in Featured, General Rambling, Outright Rant | 4 Comments
In the last few days, since April 1, my RSS feed subscriber count on FeedBurner has plummeted, now just a little over a third of what it has been for a long time. It looks like lots of people are having this problem, as well as email subscribers not getting any email.
Perhaps Google should apply the “beta” designation to FeedBurner, too. I’ve figured that this was some sort of reporting problem, because a 60% change in readership numbers is a huge error, and catastrophic for people who have ad deals, apply for funding and grants based on statistics, etc. In typical Google style there’s just one little mention of this on their blog:
Issue: We are observing reduced subscriber totals reported by Google Feedfetcher for many feeds. This number represents subscribers you may have via Google Reader and iGoogle. These lower totals have occurred over the past two days. We’re working closely with the Feedfetcher team to determine when a resolution might be possible.
Workaround: None. Please bear in mind feeds are available as usual and subscribers (feed and email) are receiving any updates you may be posting. This is a reporting issue only.
It’d be nice if they fixed the problem, and doubly nice if they’d let people know what was going on, with a banner or something on the site itself. Google is terrible with anything approaching soft skills, like customer support, UIs, or even telling people they know that there is a problem and to chill out. If they want to continue making money off of people using their services they need to be more forthcoming about stuff like this. Maybe hire someone who played with stuffed animals more than Legos.
This also means we need a competitor to FeedBurner. Badly. At this point I’d put my blog in both.
By Bob Plankers on Dec 7, 2008 in Featured, General Rambling, Outright Rant | 3 Comments
Would you join this guy in a marketing company?
Sure, English is probably his second language, but still.
By Bob Plankers on Nov 19, 2008 in Featured, Outright Rant | 4 Comments
Does anybody else think we’re living in Atlas Shrugged?
When can I get bailed out? I’ve made several bad decisions in my life and I’d like to be compensated for them. And by “compensated” I mean “massively compensated, like dump trucks full of cash.” After all, why should I be responsible for my own actions and decisions?
If I were Honda or Toyota I’d be getting my lawyers ready to sue a lot of people.
By Bob Plankers on Nov 18, 2008 in Featured, Outright Rant, Virtualization | 6 Comments
Update: Symantec has altered their support documentation so that VMotion isn’t unsupported anymore. That’s a good move. As you read the rest of this post keep that in mind.
I second the vinternals commentary on Symantec. The security software vendor joins the ranks of the clueless with their wonderful support document:
Question/Issue:
Is ESX server VMotion supported with SAV and SEP?
Solution:
Symantec does not support ESX server VMotion at this time.
Vendors are shameless. They charge you a ton for support, then they’ll do whatever they can to point the finger at somebody else when you call. It’s one thing to put a disclaimer in for performance issues. Virtualization sometimes exposes weird performance issues, and if it’s a performance issue you’re having you might need to do some work to troubleshoot it on your own if it isn’t a blatant, completely reproduceable problem with the vendor’s software (like CPU-sucking spin locks).
It’s another thing to say that their software isn’t supported at all, or to say that a problem must be reproduced on physical hardware. Most of the problems I’ve ever called a vendor about are explicit functionality problems (bugs). Physical hardware, virtual hardware, it doesn’t matter: their software just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. A vendor’s support staff should be competent enough, and professional enough, to sort out a bug report from a performance problem and act accordingly.
Oracle doesn’t support anything in VMs (as per an Oracle employee last week to me). Lyris doesn’t support anything in VMs (last time I checked, a few months ago). Symantec doesn’t support anything in VMs (technically they said VMotion, but for an enterprise VMotion goes hand in hand with VMs). What other vendors are as clueless as these three? I think I’m going to start making a list.
By Bob Plankers on Sep 30, 2008 in Featured, Outright Rant, System Administration | 2 Comments
It’s a rare day when I get to see operating systems fail in ways I’ve never seen before.
I’ve been having the strangest problems with a virtual machine I’m trying to deploy. It boots but won’t come up properly on the network. Services will start but complain about the network, or just be unresponsive. I can’t ping it, either. I’ve deployed several other virtual machines today from this same image, so it isn’t the image. Regardless, I redeployed it. Still messed up. I double-checked the network settings, /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf, gateway devices, netstat, route, everything. Nothing is wrong. I changed the IP address to something else, and it works great. I checked with my NOC to see if the IP I’d been using is firewalled, blackholed, or otherwise administratively unusable. Nope. I switch back, and it goes back to failing. OMFGWTFBBQIAMSOFRUSTRATEDWTF.
Turns out my hostmaster had set the A record to 192.168.77.74, rather than 192.168.74.74. Not surprisingly, a lot of stuff seems to care about that. The IP looked right, though, so I didn’t notice it until after a few hours. A few hours of my life I’ll never get back, that is.
By Bob Plankers on Jun 26, 2008 in Featured, Outright Rant, System Administration | 4 Comments
“What, you just sit around all day browsing Wikipedia?”
“Excuse me?”
“What are you looking at in Wikipedia?”
“The article on X-Men.”
“Tough day at work, I suppose.”
“Um, I’m trying to figure out a naming scheme for the 10 new servers I’m bringing in. That okay with you?”
“Oh, sorry.”
Just because you think I’m not doing work doesn’t mean you’re right.
(also, great site for naming schemes: namingschemes.com)
