Please indulge me while I reminisce about the U.S. space program in the wake of the Columbia disaster.
The day after the Columbia
We just lost the Columbia
Turn on your TV if it’s off. About 17 years after the loss of the Challenger, the Columbia broke up on re-entry this morning.
We lost the first teacher in space on the Challenger, and the first Israeli in space on the Columbia.
I’ll probably reflect on it more later. But it occurs to me that there aren’t many commercial airliners the age of the Columbia in use. I’m no aerospace engineer, but I’d love to hear the opinion of one on what the operational life of one of these craft ought to be. This is one of those where-were-you-when-you-heard? moments in history, like the Challenger and the WTC disaster.
Confessions of a SQL 7 junkie
My name is Dave, and I’m a Microsoft junkie. So are the people I hang out with every day at work. We’re all junkies. We’re addicted to the glamor drug of Microsoft SQL Server 7.
I’m still trying to recover from the nightmare that is Microsoft SQL Server.
You see, I have a problem. My employer and most of its clients rely heavily on SQL Server. SQL Server is a touchy beast. We have some servers running completely unpatched SQL Server 7, for fear of breaking a client’s application. No, I absolutely will not tell you who my employer is or who those clients are.
That makes us, in Microsoft’s eyes, socialism-loving pinko Commies, since we won’t migrate to SQL 2000. Unfortunately, SQL 2000 isn’t completely compatible with SQL 7. So we’re forced into being pinko Commies.
Part of the reason SQL Slammer hit was because of the touchiness of the service packs and hotfixes, and part of it was the difficulty in installing them. The hotfix that would prevent SQL Slammer requires you to manually copy over 20 files, mercifully spread out over only two directories. But it takes time and it’s easy to make a mistake. So Microsoft released a SQL 2000 patch with a nice, graphical installer. But the pinko Commies like me who still use SQL 7 have to manually copy files.
Now, SQL 7 isn’t vulnerable to SQL Slammer, but it has plenty of security flaws of its own. And there’s one thing that history has taught us about viruses. Every time a new virus hits, a game of one-upmanship ensues. Similar viruses incorporating new twists appear quickly. And eventually a virus combining a multitude of techniques using known exploits appears. A SQL Slammer derivative that hits SQL 7 in one way or another is only a question of time.
Someone asked me why we can’t just leave everything unpatched and beef up security. The problem is that while our firewall is fine and it protects us from the outside, it doesn’t do anything for us on the inside. So the instant some vendor or contractor comes in and plugs an infected laptop into our network–and it’s a question of when, not if–we’re sunk. Can we take measures to keep anyone from plugging outside machines into our network? Yes. We can maintain a list of MAC addresses for inside equipment and configure our servers not to give IP addresses to anything else. But that’s obstructive. The accounting department is already supremely annoyed with us because we have a firewall at all. Getting more oppressive when there’s even just one other option isn’t a good move. People in the United States love freedom and they get annoyed when it’s taken away, even in cases that are completely justifiable like an employer blocking access to porn sites. But in a society where sysadmins have to explain that an employer’s property rights trump any given individual’s right to use work equipment for the purpose of seeing Pamela Anderson naked, one must be picky about what battles one chooses to fight.
In a moment of frustration, after unsuccessfully patching one server and breaking it to the point where SQL wouldn’t run at all anymore, I pointed out how one can apply any and every security patch available for Debian Linux at any instant it comes out with two commands and the total downtime could be measured in seconds, if not fractions of a second. And the likelihood of breaking something is very slight because the Debian security people are anal-retentive about backward compatibility. The person listening didn’t like that statement. There’s a lot more software available for Windows, he said. I wondered aloud, later, what the benefit of building an enterprise on something so fragile would be. Jesus’ parable of building a house on rock rather than on sand came to mind. I didn’t bring it up. I wasn’t sure it would be welcome.
But I think I’ll keep on fighting that battle. Keeping up on Microsoft security patches is becoming a full-time job. I don’t know if we can afford a full-time employee who does nothing but read Microsoft security bulletins and regression-test patches to make sure they can be safely deployed. I also don’t know who would want that job. But we are quickly reaching the point where we are powerless and our lives are becoming unmanageable.
Such is the life of the sysadmin. It’s a little bit of a rush to come into crisis situations, and a lot of my clients know that when they see me, there’s something major going on because they only see me a couple of times a year. In the relatively glamor-less life of a sysadmin, those times are about as glamorous as it gets. And for a time, it can be fun. But when the hours get long and not everyone’s eager to cooperate, it gets pretty draining.
More Wikipedia adventures
The Wikipedia marked its 100,000th article this past week. It celebrated by getting Slashdotted. And when I checked this morning, its count stood at 101,999.
I visited this evening to try to find some information about Studebaker. In typical Internet fashion, I didn’t find what I was looking for. And then, somehow, I found myself researching for and writing Wikipedia articles about AMC, its Rambler nameplate, and its successor, Eagle.
How’d I end up going from Studebaker to the maker of the Jeep and the Rambler? Well, that brings up the useless trivia question of the day: What four U.S. automakers intended to merge in 1954 to form American Motors Corp.?* And the bonus question: Which of those two companies fell through?**
So now I’ve written about baseball players and New Wave bands (both too numerous to mention), computers and CPUs (I made a number of revisions to some of the articles pertaining to the 8-bit computers of my youth), tycoons (Mark Hanna and a hastily written biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who interestingly, despite founding a university, himself dropped out of school at age 11), my dad’s occupation and his religion, and now, cars.
* Nash, Hudson, Studebaker, and Packard.
** Studebaker and Packard, who merged with each other. Packard would supply engines and transmissions to AMC for a time, but the combined company ceased building Packards in 1958. The combined company merged with a number of other companies and ceased making automobiles in 1966.
Windows 98 CD-ROM drive not working? Try this
Occasionally, a PC’s CD or DVD-ROM drive will stop responding for no known good reason. Sometimes the problem is hardware–a CD-ROM drive, being a mechanical component, can fail–but as often as not, it seems, the problem is software rather than hardware. Here’s what to do with a Windows 95 or Windows 98 CD-ROM drive not working when the same drive works just fine in another OS.
If Windows has both 16- and 32-bit CD-ROM drivers, it can get confused and disable the drive to protect itself. The solution is to remove the 16-bit driver, then delete the obscure NoIDE registry key to re-enable the 32-bit driver.
Microsoft’s Slammer pain is good for everybody
SQL Slammer hit where it counts, including HP–historically, one of the biggest Microsoft supporters around–and Microsoft itself.
This is good. Really good.
Microsoft is one of its own biggest customers. Part of this is due to one of the worst cases of not-invented-here syndrome in the industry, and part of it is marketing. If Microsoft can run its enterprise on mostly its software, its argument that you ought to be able to run all of yours on it is much stronger.
When Microsoft feels our pain, that’s good. Problems generally get fixed. Not necessarily the way we want them fixed, but fixed. When Microsoft for whatever reason doesn’t feel our pain, things languish. Witness the development of Windows 9x late in its lifecycle, after Microsoft was able to run everything internally, including laptops, on Windows 2000. While Windows 98SE was fairly good, all things considered, Windows Me was so horrid that one of my magazine editors wrote me and asked me the least painful way to escape it. Windows Me was fast, but it was less stable than 98SE.
What happened? The patches were difficult to install, poorly tested, poorly documented, and it was extremely difficult to know when you needed them. Microsoft’s inability to keep its own servers sufficiently patched illustrates this.
Several things are likely to happen now. People will take non-Microsoft solutions more seriously and, in some cases, deploy them. A not-as-homogenous Internet is good for everybody. Meanwhile, Microsoft will be cleaning up its act, making it easier to ensure that their patches actually work and can be deployed with reasonable ease.
I still think we’ll have disasters like SQL Slammer again. But this is a good step in the right direction.
Update Expert is something for your NT power toolbelt
Now that most of the fun of SQL Slammer has died down, let me present you a tool that might have prevented it: Update Expert.
Basically what it does is query all the NT/2K/XP machines on your network, then query its own database, and tell you what Microsoft patches are available to you. Then it’ll help you download them and push them out. It even figures out the order to install the patches (important) and knows which ones can be installed together to minimize the number of reboots. It’s a lot better than running Windows Update on every PC on your LAN.
I have no connection with St. Bernard Software. My former boss used it and swore by it; when I changed jobs, I introduced it to my new boss. I recommend it because I use it myself.
Go back in time at open-video.org
I found another source of public domain video: Open-video.org. Whereas the Prelinger Archives is a collection of industrial films, this site is a general effort to archive video of all types.
If, for example, you’re curious about Thomas Edison’s short films from the early 20th century, you can find them there.
At the moment, the site is probably of more interest to historians, die-hard film fanatics, and aspiring moviemakers than to people seeking free movies to watch instead of heading to Blockbuster. It’ll be a while before it’s practical to download It’s a Wonderful Life in its entirety, and modern viewers are spoiled by recent video technology. I’m sure that Edison’s films had plenty of ooh-ahh factor in 1905, but by modern standards, the camera was shaky, the lighting inadequate, and defects in the film media itself jump out like the pops on an old vinyl record.
Most of the films are public domain, and it’s easy to find the usage terms on the site for each film available there. I’ve already got some ideas for things I can do with some of the footage from the site.
SQLSlammer takes its toll on the ‘Net
If the ‘Net was slow today, it was because of a new worm, called SQLSlammer, that infected vulnerable Windows servers running Microsoft’s SQL database.
The exploit it used was old, but it was made possible because Microsoft’s cumulative hotfixes not being cumulative, and one of the patches not included, if applied afterward, reverted the server back to its vulnerable state. This was not mentioned clearly in the documentation for the hotfixes. Probably Microsoft didn’t know–until it was too late.
But in some cases it’s not Microsoft’s fault. Try getting a pointy-haired boss to give you 15 minutes’ downtime per server so you can roll necessary security patches across your enterprise. Since many people who ultimately make IT decisions never actually administered a Windows server in their careers, a lot of bad decisions get made and servers stay unpatched, as a matter of policy, either out of fear that a patch that closes a security hole might create a new bug, or that some remote VPN user in Kenya might be trying to work during that proposed scheduled time.
Linux got a bad rap in the security press last year because it allegedly had more security vulnerabilities than Windows did last year–never mind that a vulnerability in, say, BIND would get counted several times because it’s included in every Linux distribution, so whereas a vulnerability in IIS would get counted once against Windows’ total, a vulnerability in BIND might get counted 8 times.
We’ll ignore that. Fine. Linux has a larger number of security problems and vulnerabilities than Windows does. Fact. Undeniable. Fine. Answer this question then: Has any worm affecting Linux ever had the devastating effect that SQLSlammer had? That Nimda had? The most notorious worm that affected Linux was called Slapper. Do you remember it? More than 60% of the servers on the ‘Net run on Apache. A worm affecting Apache should have been huge. It wasn’t.
Statistics are, well, statistics. Just because I can find you a set of numbers that suggests the sky is pink doesn’t make it any less blue.
Why anyone, anywhere, has a Windows server on the ‘Net with anything more than port 80 exposed is beyond me.
Trustworthy Computing? Nice buzzwords. Billy Gates has yet to put any meaning into them.
And incompetence rises. Managers didn’t learn from Nimda, so they won’t learn from this either.
Great combination. What does it mean? History will repeat itself. Something like this will happen again. Probably sooner rather than later.
Quieting a noisy PC
Just as PCs seem to (or sometimes really do) get slower as they age, PCs also tend to get louder as they age. Considering many of them are plenty loud when new, that’s not good.
When a PC is loud, it’s due to one of two types of components: hard drives or fans. The key is to isolate the noise. To do that, your best bet is to open the case, then power the computer on. Running your PC long-term with the cover off isn’t exactly good for your computer, but running it that way for a few minutes won’t hurt anything.
But before you turn the PC on, blow the dust out of it with a can of compressed air. Resist the temptation to just use a small vacuum cleaner attachment; those are static magnets. In some rare instances, just blowing the accumulated dust out will quiet the PC. In nearly all instances, it will make the PC run cooler, and it’ll make you feel better to not have all that crud accumulated inside your expensive equipment.
Loud buzzes are usually caused by failing fans; clunky noises are usually caused by a loud (and often not long for this world) hard drive.
Oiling a fan will usually quiet it and dramatically increase its life expectancy. As long as the fan hasn’t completely died, this is a good bet. It’s certainly cheaper than replacing a fan, and sometimes it’s easier. Don’t ever try to replace the fan in a power supply–oil it, very carefully, and if the noise doesn’t go away, replace the power supply. There are voltages inside power supplies that will throw you across the room, if they’re in a good mood. If they’re in a bad mood, they can potentially kill you, and I really don’t want that.
You can test a fan by stopping it with a pencil or a similarly shaped object. If the noise goes away, you’ve found your culprit.
There’s not much you can do if the hard drive is loud. I’ve heard of people taking hard drives apart and oiling them in efforts to quiet them. Don’t do that. You might well quiet the drive. You also will certainly prevent it from ever working again.
Instead, replace the drive. Modern drives run pretty quietly. Most retail-boxed drives come with free software to copy your old hard drive to the new one, making the upgrade painless. If you’ve never done this before, buy a drive at retail–an OEM drive from a clone shop or mail order outlet may be a little bit cheaper but won’t have any instructions or software–and set aside a Saturday afternoon. Even if you’ve never undertaken anything like this before, it generally doesn’t take more than a couple of hours. As of this writing, a 20 GB Maxtor drive costs $69.99 at CompUSA. The OEM version of the same drive costs $68 at Newegg.com. As you get into bigger drives, the price gap tends to increase, but for many people, 20 gigs is plenty.
Once you’ve oiled or replaced the fans and/or replaced the hard drive with a newer, faster, and quieter model, your formerly loud PC ought to run pretty quietly.