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lnrWoken up 10 minutes early this morning, but as this was by the arrival of my computer bits it was really not such a terrible hardship. Got them all out of their packaging, ooohed over the pretty box the CPU came in (like the sort of box expensive brooches come in), and at the pretty CPU itself. No time to start putting it all together then though, and we won't have time tonight either if we're out to dinner. Pub tomorrow too, though I don't know if rjk's planning on going. So maybe Friday before we get started on the complicated data shuffling needed. Oh well. No sign of telly yet, but that was expected to take a little while.
Garage to Board Room in 13 minutes flat, which was really quite hard work, but it did mean I was only 2 mins late and wasn't the alst to arrive for our meeting. Which I followed by actually joining people for the Graun crossword over coffee, and by som miracle actually guessed 3 of the clues before the assembled masses did. And one of those was while everyone else was considering it too, instead of just sneakily concentrating on one while everyone else hasn't got to it yet. I am suitably boggled.
Pretty quiet day. Realised the reason why the data our admissions office got from BoGS (Board of Graduate Studies) is missing middle names is because the forms were badly designed and had a box for "first name" rather than "other names" but that we want to record full names for our records, and have found them where possible from various other supporting bits of paperwork (or which there are usually many, especially for foreign students). Since the CS (Computing Service) get their data from BoGS rather than us they'll all have short CRSids I guess. It does make it harder to match them up though.
Lovsan/Blast still causing chaos. People are emailling each other the patch, just as an exe file with an explanation as to what it is. No doubt some of the people receiving it are fool enough to run it. We are busy discouraging the former, since we don't want to encourage people to run unexpected attachments even if they're apparently from trusted sources. This is *exactly* how we got Mimail infections last week, because people *thought* the file had come from admin@eng and therefor it had to be OK right? It's not like viruses haven't been pretending to be security patches for other viruses in the past! How the hell to we make people learn?
Thankfully, despite my own machine not being fully patched for every microsoft advisory going, it's an NT workstation and hence less vulnerable, and does have an updated every morning McAfee virus scanner installed, so I seem to have escaped any trouble. Have applied the patches which are vaguely relevant and will check for any more later in the day. The constant need to reboot after installing each one (and the fact that it's really not a good idea to install more than one patch at once, since sometimes they break each other - there are cases of Lovsan on machines which have had the relevant patch!), makes it a singularly unappealing prospect in the middle of the day.
I'm vaguely pondering the fact that I may have to reinstall if I want a working windows install at home, and that if I'm doing so anyway now might be the time to buy myself a more recent version of windows (instead of using rjk's copy *ahem*). I wonder which flavou I should go for though? And in the light of recent stuff is it safer to be running a really old version no-one bothers writing exploits for or better to try and keep up-to-date. It'll only be booted into windows very rarely. Mind it is behind a firewall that won't let it talk to the outside world much at all, so it should be relatively safe even if it does take a while to get the patchlevel up to scratch each time I use it.
Garage to Board Room in 13 minutes flat, which was really quite hard work, but it did mean I was only 2 mins late and wasn't the alst to arrive for our meeting. Which I followed by actually joining people for the Graun crossword over coffee, and by som miracle actually guessed 3 of the clues before the assembled masses did. And one of those was while everyone else was considering it too, instead of just sneakily concentrating on one while everyone else hasn't got to it yet. I am suitably boggled.
Pretty quiet day. Realised the reason why the data our admissions office got from BoGS (Board of Graduate Studies) is missing middle names is because the forms were badly designed and had a box for "first name" rather than "other names" but that we want to record full names for our records, and have found them where possible from various other supporting bits of paperwork (or which there are usually many, especially for foreign students). Since the CS (Computing Service) get their data from BoGS rather than us they'll all have short CRSids I guess. It does make it harder to match them up though.
Lovsan/Blast still causing chaos. People are emailling each other the patch, just as an exe file with an explanation as to what it is. No doubt some of the people receiving it are fool enough to run it. We are busy discouraging the former, since we don't want to encourage people to run unexpected attachments even if they're apparently from trusted sources. This is *exactly* how we got Mimail infections last week, because people *thought* the file had come from admin@eng and therefor it had to be OK right? It's not like viruses haven't been pretending to be security patches for other viruses in the past! How the hell to we make people learn?
Thankfully, despite my own machine not being fully patched for every microsoft advisory going, it's an NT workstation and hence less vulnerable, and does have an updated every morning McAfee virus scanner installed, so I seem to have escaped any trouble. Have applied the patches which are vaguely relevant and will check for any more later in the day. The constant need to reboot after installing each one (and the fact that it's really not a good idea to install more than one patch at once, since sometimes they break each other - there are cases of Lovsan on machines which have had the relevant patch!), makes it a singularly unappealing prospect in the middle of the day.
I'm vaguely pondering the fact that I may have to reinstall if I want a working windows install at home, and that if I'm doing so anyway now might be the time to buy myself a more recent version of windows (instead of using rjk's copy *ahem*). I wonder which flavou I should go for though? And in the light of recent stuff is it safer to be running a really old version no-one bothers writing exploits for or better to try and keep up-to-date. It'll only be booted into windows very rarely. Mind it is behind a firewall that won't let it talk to the outside world much at all, so it should be relatively safe even if it does take a while to get the patchlevel up to scratch each time I use it.
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no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 08:34 am (UTC)I'm afraid it's futile - we had users screaming today about what turned out to be the Jdbgmgr.exe file hoax, like "whee, I have to delete this file, NOW, help me!" *sigh*
no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 08:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-14 02:21 am (UTC)My favourite of these was David St.Clair [I think he had a second middle name as well] Moore, who wound up as DSTM1.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 11:26 am (UTC)I guess W2K was as bad when it was new, but I think the place I was at back then made a sensible base install package for company machines so it wasn't as painful.
My home Windows machine sits safely behind the firewall, I think most of its internet access is back to the Hell of Gates for updates, I did treat it to SP4 the other day. Linux seems so much easier to use and has far less problems with malicious attacks.
D
no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-17 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-17 02:23 pm (UTC)a) Mimail relied on idiots unzipping it and running it, rather than any email client insecurity
b) Lovsan/Blaster doesn't spread by email at all
There are still plenty of viruses out there that do rely on software being crap, but I'm not sure they're definitely in the majority.
The fact we're fairly sure we're safe does mean we don't tend to have any AV software installed too.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-17 06:46 am (UTC)I get the impression that Rapunzel is very happy to have been on holiday last week, you know...