August 2003 - Posts
So I decided to upgrade my RAM today. Little did I know it was going to be an ALL DAY EVENT.
Today RAM stands for the Ridiculous Amount of Mileage I put on my car trying to get the right sticks First I got 1-512 MB PC2100 stick. That wasn't right, cause my stupid motherboard needs it in pairs. So I take it back and try to get pairs... they don't have 2-256MB PC2100 sticks for the price I want. So I drive 30 miles to a Best Buy in Ahwatukee to get them, but not before I call to check if they are there (waiting on hold nearly 30 minutes in the process), and ask them to MAKE SURE they're the right ones. I get there, and there aren't any more. so I drive 15 miles to another Best Buy, and find 2 sticks of 256MB PC2100 RAM for $50 total after mail-in rebate. Killer deal, huh?
I get home, and the sticks don't work because the stupid motherboard on this stupid 1-U, rackmounted, loud as all get out server takes REGISTERED, ECC, 2.5CL PC2100 DIMMS, IN PAIRS. It's like, I can't go out and just buy a bottled water. I have to buy the water that flows from a fountain at the top of the highest mountain, and only a really fat man can be the one to put it in a flask made of a reinforced titanium alloy, while standing on his head singing the opening number to “Guys and Dolls“. WTF??!?!?
Not only will I seriously reconsider ever going to Best Buy again, but I will never buy a proprietary computer again either. What a waste of a day. What a waste of a week. Forget staying home, I'm going to Cali after all. I need to relax and forget about all this trash for a few days and enjoy a trip with the best friends a guy could have.I'll see you guys on Tuesday. PEACE!
You know, this really pisses me off. It gives young adults like me a really bad name. The guy is an idiot, and now he could face 10 years in prison for being an idiot. I would say “serves him right”, but look at the damage he helped inflict. He helped cost Microsoft millions of dollars. He forced MS to ask hundreds of employees to give up their free time to help out customers with the fix. This cost MS not only in having to employ extra staff, but also in lost development time. He helped cause thousands of people significant headaches.
Why is it that intelligent people can't find better things to do with their lives? The kid is obviously smart and could be extremely productive in the industry. Instead, now he's gonna be the next Kevin Mitnick... rotting away time in jail (probably at Ft. Levinworth)
Well, if he's lucky he'll be out in time to beta test Blackcomb.
In this post, I talked about what I want to see in Yukon.
This picture says it all:
[ .NET Magazine (via Phil Weber) ]
That's even better. It tells you what those really cool built-in stored procedures do. How awesome is that?
As I add this killer stick of RAM, and my computer turns on but won't POST. I'm like, WTF??!?. So I dig through my closet for the manual on my motherboard.
“Memory must be added in pairs.”
What the hell? I thought they eliminated this architecture with DIMMS. The last time I put RAM in my old Celeron machine I didn't have to use pairs. Why the hell do I have to add it in pairs? Now I have to go BACK to Best Buy and trade my 1-512 for 2-256's. Oh well. It looks like they're on sale so I might save $50. The downside is all my slots will be full. :-(.
Sometimes computers suck.
Wanna know why? Because the new Junk Mail Filtering system is amazing. Honestly, it catches about 99% of the junk mail I get. I don't mind if it misses a few, but so far, it has not sent good mail to the junk folder EVEN ONCE. It great. I'm to the point where I'm almost comfortable with it just deleting the junk mail automatically. We'll see how it's track record goes after it goes RTM.
In other news, I just picked up a 512MB stick of RAM from Best Buy. $160.... not bad. It was going to cost nearly that much after shipping at Buy.com so I figured I might as well get it today. This doubles the RAM on my Dual Xeon 2.4GHz monster, so I'm looking forward to seeing a performance increase. Hopefully I'll be able to run more than one VMWare virtual machine at a time (the reason I got more RAM in the first place). I'm going to try to set a up a virtual network in VMWare to mimic my web farm for testing purposes. I'm taking advantage of the three day weekend to blast my web servers and significantly increase security. I'm already extremely stable (server-wise anyways), but I was going over my security logs, and there were over 500 unsuccessful hacker attacks by 6 different individuals within a 48 hour period. At least no one got in, which is a credit to my architecture and the robustness of Windows Server 2003. And fortunately for me, Windows tracks IP addresses with logins, so the punks will be hearing from The Man soon.
So I'm going to re-implement my VPN, rebuild my DNS entries, re-lockdown my IIS, and add ICF with some advanced port rerouting. I'm also going to redo my users scenario so that each of my major services runs under it's own restricted login. That way I can track in my security logs which service is trying to access what. It should be a tedious weekend but a lot of fun. I must be one sick bastard if I think that reconfiguring three servers in Nebraska from my house in Arizona on a holiday is fun. Oh well.
On a similar note, Brady Gaster is building me a system to dump Windows Event Log data into SQL server to generate reports from .Specifically, it's job will be to parse the Security logs, and build reports. Right now I'm specifically looking for reports that will show a general attack timeline, then broken apart by IP address, then IP specific reports on user names tried , failure times, and number of attempts. I think it would really help network admins do threat modeling and tracking, and it would help organizations like the FBI in their investigations. Brady rocks, so hopefully he'll have something for me in the next day or so.
Time to install my RAM. *excited*. L8r.
shutdown /r /f /m \\computername
Reboots a computer of a given name on a network without notifying the user. Came in real handy when I was VPNed into my remote network and I was having server issues. I couldn't log onto an interactive session, but I could issue commands through the VPN. Cool huh?
UPDATE: If you look at some of the local security policies, you'll see that you have to be a member of the Administrators group by default to be able to execute this command successfully. This can be overriden by policy of course, but nonetheless, you probably cannot wreak havoc on your network with it.
Hey, I'm gonna be in Anaheim / Los Angeles this weekend. Anyone want to get together for some kind of weblogger event? Maybe a beach party. That would be awesome. Drop me a line at robert@interscapeusa.com. I'll be in the area Saturday afternoon to Monday evening. It would be really cool to meet some of you guys.
Unfortunately for me, I am unable to go now. I have some issues with my servers I need to deal with.
I just spent the last 20 minutes cleaning up Jesse Ezell's Dialog code. It's pretty cool. The only problem was, the way he posted it on his blog, it was extremely difficult to cut and paste into VS.NET. Well, and I'm not a C# guy, so it was hard to understand until I could see it properly indented and so forth. Fortunately for you, I turned it into a class file that I'm going to post on my personal site tomorrow. Oh yeah, and I ported it to VB too, so all you VB guys can understand how it works as well.
I'm also playing around with encapsulating automatic page redirection into a reusable base class. I'm trying to wrap it up in a package that you can use by just setting properties in the Property Box. I'd really like to add it to the “Add New Item“ dialog in VS.NET. I should be finished with it early next week.
Typing IEXPRESS.EXE in the command box launches IExpress 2.0 wizard to let you create an installation package.
I wonder if I'm the only one that didn't already know about this...
[Update] This exists in Windows 2000 as well as XP. I don't know anyone with win98 that can check for IExpress there.
[HDConsultants.us]
Awesome. I'm still trying to figure out what this thing does... maybe I can use it for a quick and dirty .NET installer?
Hey Yukon / Whidbey Teams:
Can I please have IntelliSense in my Stored Procedures when editing inside the Whidbey IDE? If I type a table name or alias, I should be able to get a list of all the fields in the table. If I type an @ sign, I should be able to get a list of parameters that I declared at the top. If I type @@, I should get a list of all the really nifty identifiers that no one knows about.
If you could to that, that would be great.
Sincerely,
Another SQL Fan.
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