26.01.2004
Yes, I am still alive
Last weekend was spent sleeping a lot trying to get over this bloody cough/flu thing. Then went back to work on Monday to find “emergency, emergency” what with this silly new worm. As part of a server support team rather than a desktop team, you would assume that this shouldn’t matter? And in these days, everything should be automatically updated (ie virus sigs)? And who would run a mail client on a server so it would get infected?
Wrong 
Politics kick in and before you know it, you are having to patch a legacy Win2K forest (actually two of them) which are used by about 70 users total. Out of interest, the number of servers actually outnumber the users Still, status reports, severity 1 problems (although no-one on this particular platform actually reported anything) and me being the silly bunny who still knows anything about this legacy setup got the job.
Still, it kept me busy all week - I now have the test environment completely patched with AV, doing daily updates and scans with the RIS servers doing weekly scans (no user data on them), so it wasn’t all wasted time and effort. Lots of batch files and use of windows scheduler. Luckily I monitor all of them via mrtg/snmp so a quick glance at the graphs every morning shows who did and didn’t behave.
I’ll do some work on some perl sripts over the week to pull the signature data out from all these servers and pump it to a html page (so I don’t have to go through this again). Actually looking forward to that, perl is lovely 
Found a nice AV demon to use on linux (actually myrddin did) so have that installed on my main gateway - clamav is very nice and updates as many times a day as you want. It fits nicely into the whole postfix/amavis/procmail/spamassassin thing that I have running.
Other interesting things I’ve learnt in the last few days - when you update from mysql 3.x -> 4.x, run the fix permissions script - if you don’t trying to make things like phpwiki work with mysql can be tricky (the lock tables permission gave me heart ache for a week).
Aside form that, three day weekends are excellent (got to love Australia Day) but back to work tomorrow.