05.10.2003
Blasted Colds
Why as the years roll on, the yearly cold and flu fun and games seem to get worse? This years has not been a lot of fun for most people and it has seemed to hang around for a very long time (ie still coughing and spluttering after a month seems average). I had thought I had almost survived the winter without anything - silly, silly me.
So three weeks ago on Sunday, I woke up feeling crap (no sniffing, no cough) but just headache and run down. Ended up having to take most of the week off from work ( although I ended up working a lot from home on various bits and pieces). I thought it was over then and went back to work the next week. That passed ok until (again) the Sunday when my throat started to burn. End result - cough/splutter/cold all week. Only ended up at work on Wednesday and Friday. Feel better now but have a nasty chesty cough 
It was an interesting week at work for all the wrong reasons. We have a couple of managed platforms that I look after (there are also a whole lot of others) and in particular, one of these is Windows2000 sp0 or sp1. Hello, I hear you say, no patches, no updates?
Exactly - and someone(s) has machines on the work WAN with the bloody blaster worm - end result - we lost one entire site when it stopped RPC on the three DCs and everyother infrastructure server in that site. Don’t know what it did to workstations - luckily I don’t have to care about them. The funny part (well, not so funny) is once we rebooted them, kicked some other domain controllers in other sites and made sure replication was happening again, the business still won’t let us patch the machines - something about “too high risk” and “not tested”
Considering they have never let us apply the patches/service packs and have never attempted to test, I have no sympathy for them. We have explained that if whatever machine(s) decided to scan that set of subnets again, they will lose the site again and they still won’t agree, stuff them. They can live with the consquences.
In other more interesting news, I’m currently monitoring 30+ domain controllers with my little linux server at work (amazing how usefule a p3/450 with 128meg ram/6gig hdd is when you don’t run windows on it) and am adding more servers as I install snmp on them (damn shame it wasn’t part of the base build). People love pretty graphs and stats and it is interesting to see how many like what can be produced.
It has been a bad few weeks for openssh such that i am going to have to move to manual re-compiles again on my gateway (currently have ssh blocked from the outside) because Debian sarge hasn’t updated in a bit (although both woody and sid have). Also need to look at spamassassin and upgrading to 2.6.0.
Interesting network security website/blog: http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/
And a nice looking backup program for win32 and linux - http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/index.html.
My find of the week has been phpwiki - talk about making things easy to document and update. I’m using it at home and am thinking of installing it on the webserver at work to allow doco and notes updates.