BINARYBB.info - John Galbraith

I am not quite sure what happened to my website during a recent power outage but the whole root directory was corrupted. I will add my custom images in later. For now, at least I was able to recover the content.

John

www.cisco.com

Their site looks alright at first. Good navigation system, good colors, good look, the problem… security. This is an example of a site that is locked down WAY TOO MUCH! So you are navigating through the site and you make your way to the download page. You see downloads that are locked and ones that are unlocked. This is displayed with a lock on it. Then you click one without a lock and what?? You have to log in?? WTF? If the file is unlocked why login? So you create an account and return to the download page. You log in and bam, you don’t have access to the file. Why not? Because you have to have different level of access. You look anywhere on the site to get that access and you get nowhere. If you are smart you will eventually find a contact page where you can open a TAC request. What the hell is TAC. We will just deduct some points for unexplained acronyms. Then, they get back to you to tell you that you have to have a contract with Cisco and purchase a certain dollar amount. What about the people that buy routers and switches on Ebay or online used? Do they not get to download a firmware for their retired model router? Is the 2600 and 2500 series router IOS locked down like Fort Knox? Sure are. Rediculous. Cisco, if someone were going to reverse engineer your software do you thing they would have done it already. It is easy to buy a router on Ebay for $40 and tftp the IOS down to start taking apart. DUH! Open up the firmware downloads for your equipment and stick to hardware.

Your website is overcomplicated and frustrating! For this, it lands on the #2 slot of my Websites that Suck List. Fix it Cisco and start thinking about your smaller customers.

John

www.ilovemywife.com

They had a good thing going at one time and now, they are dead. They have advertisement link smothered all over the site that direct you to junk money making sites. They have a picture in the center of some dudes girl that is a little slutty for the original theme of the site. There is no more actual romanic advise and there is no method of contact. The we went black and white with a crappy web rating gadget at the top. It repeats the phrase *ilovemywife* and there IS NO NAVIGATION SYSTEM!

This is a great domain that is easy to remember and has the potential to go huge. I would love to take the torch and run with it if they were willing to give it up. To the webmaster that set up the mess, hand in your CIW certification and throw in the towel, your site is now on the BinaryBB WSL (Websites that Suck List).

John

Round robin DNS is nothing but one service pointed to multiple resources. Lets use WEB service for instance. We all know that the default port for HTTP traffic is port 80. We all know that we want to use DNS for web traffic because firewalls are starting to block IP addresses used instead of names to get to resources and we don’t want users having to try to remember IP addresses to get to our site. We choose a DNS name that fits in with our brand or theme and hope users will remember how to return without having to do a google search or having to write a non nonsensical name down. (The government is notorious for those. ie: www2.ia.gordon.army.mil/resour/p/l/page_start.html)

That is not a real page but you get the idea of what they tend to do. Don’t do that idiotic crap. Keep it simple for the users to get to. Look at mine, binarybb.info. The .info screws people up so .com takes you to .info if you can’t remember it. Too easy.

Notice that www. is not included in there. That is because www is completely no needed to host a site and I think it is a thing of the past. Does binarybb root point to one server though? No it doesn’t. It points to one dedicated server and one virtual server. All of them synchronize the files using Dropbox and you have no idea which server you are talking to when  you hit my site.

I can assure you that you are hitting one database that is backed up and restored to a virtual server database nightly. Fortunately that process only takes about 7 minutes with my small well kept databases.

So, what happens when one server goes down? Easy, I have a fail safe script that looks for specific hostnames and if it cant ping the hostname it removes it immediately from DNS. This will NOT work with BIND9 because every change you make you have to restart the service and there is a high probability that the server will fail to start. BIND9 is touchy. Instead, yes I am going to say this… use MSDNS or JHSOFT DNSPLUS. Your scripts will be significantly different for these because one has to interract with MS DNS through CMD LINE  and the other has to edit a file and restart the JHSOFT service. I recommend using MSDNS.. it is the easiest.  You can do the monitoring part with a Yahoo Widget or Batch file, or even make a c++ or Java program to do it.. I prefer using SQL to do it with a scheduled job that runs. You put all your host names in a table then have a stored procedure that pings the hostname and listens for a specific keywork in the response like “successfully” then have it put a value in a status field like a 1 or a 0 or good or dead. Have another field called action or something like that and put in the action “none” or “deleted” or something.   Have your stored procedure sweep through your host names and once it goes through the pinging process and updates the tables of what is alive or dead, have it sweep through again and kick off command line to remove or add DNS entries into DNS. This is where MSSQL comes in handy in being able to do stuff like this. I would also send an email from SQL if you deleted any entries and this is a good indicator if a server is down. This is completely transparent to the user and you truly get your fail safe environment. Complicated? Yes. Worth it in the long run? Absolutely.

Enjoy and little tidbit into the mind of John. LOL

Our Government has NO money. They are representatives of our money and yet, we hire incompetent people to do the job. Take the IRS for instance. They have a program to refund people $8000 for first time home buyers. The requirements are that you buy a home and MOVE INTO IT!!! So, if I move into a house… would that qualify as an address change? To the IRS, NOPE! You have to fill out a seperate address change form to get the refund sent to  your new address because they will have no idea that you moved.

This can be summed up in one word.. retardation. On top of that, we hire rude lazy people to handle our money. In the local office in Springfield, IL there is a lady that flat out stated that she was not willing to help us because she was about to go home. This was at 3 PM. Rediculous yet? Just wait. Everything in the Government has a 2 week waiting period. If you submit a change of your file for something.. 2 weeks. Waiting on a letter to get mailed to  you??? 2 weeks to process it, 2 weeks for it to arrive. Need a check, 2 weeks to process, 2 weeks to mail it.

Need a license of some sort. Maybe a medical permit or certification to get a promotion or get a job… 2 to 8 weeks to process that. Why is our Governement so slow?? Incompetence. Simply put. We have lazy retards all through the Government that let paperwork pile up on their desks. What are they doing? Facebook, myspace, porn? Well, we have already identified Government officials that were frequenting porn sites, what is keeping the rest from Facebook (America’s #1 time waster).

Here is something you would like to know.. YOU CAN’T FIRE THEM! Once you have a permanent position in one of these office you are set until retirement. They have to build huge amounts of complaints against their employees and if everyone is improving their farm or playing Bejeweled, when are they counceling their employees?

They also get 20 to 40 days paid off per year of vacation time, plus they get all holidays off paid, plus huge salaries, awesome benefits, etc, etc…

So, the standing question is “How do we hold the representatives of our money accountable for their work and time?” We pay for them to waste our money, we need a lean team to visit the Governement offices and start cleaning house. NOW!

Spread the word, start a petition today.

We have all gotten that call from that frustrated and sometimes flaming mad user.  They are short and snippy, claiming that “the system” is a piece of crap and nothing works. Here is what you do with them:

Step 1 (Rant Stage). Listen to their entire complaint and take notes while letting them rant and rave.

Step 2 (Agreement Stage). Agree and accept their frustration with phrases like “Yeah, that isn’t right.” or “I certainly can see how frustrating that could be.”

Step 3 (Assurance Stage). Assure them that you are working diligently to generate a solution for their problem as fast as you can.

Step 4 (Pacifier Stage). Look for another way to help the user that would seem like a small victory for them immediately. If they have an old ball mouse, see if you can replace it with a nicer laser mouse. It is an easy and quick fix. While you are replacing their mouse, assure them that you are going to take care of their IT needs and give them the idea that you are working on their problem 100%.

Here are some techniques that are helpful in different situations (Use your best judgement):

(You are my only love technique) – Use the phrase “Wow, that is a problem. You are definitely top of my list.”

(Conversation Steering Technique) – Let them talk and listen for keywords that would allow you to steer the conversation away from the problem so you can work on the problem.  You must throw a distraction while you fix the PC. This is a skill that needs lots of practice to pull off. If you are married or have a girlfriend/boyfriend practice on them. Driving a car and talking about something not related to cars is  great practice. Try and use those keywords. The better you use them, the more smooth and flowing the conversation will be and successfully drifting away from the task at hand.

(Subject injection Technique) This one is best described with an example. The user is complaining about a power outage turning off their computer. You reply with and injection statement like “Bad weather like lighting storms are notorious for doing this, though, I am not sure when we will be expecting bad weather next.” If the user takes the bait, they will start to talk about the weather.

(Water Walker Technique) The idea in this one is to make the user think that you knew what the problem was before you even got in the room and you know exactly what to do. This boast of confidence has calming properties for the user. Don’t be a cocky prick though, it could have a reverse effect. Start doing your troubleshooting steps swiftly and without pause of flaw to give the illusion that the troubleshooting steps are part of the solution. Then, administer the solution like you had it timed and knew exactly when it was going to get done. Commonly, the user will be astounded at your performance and praise you not only because you got the job done, but because of the way you got it done.

(Bulldog technique) Use this one carefully! reserve this one for the users that are complainers and get in your face in an aggressive way. If they get in your face, ask them calmly “Are you going to fight me?” They will likely respond with no and back down. If they are yelling and screaming, cussing, and being nasty, use a phrase like “Would you like HR to be part of the solution or can we have a professional conversation so I can generate a solution?” Chances are, they will respond with an attitude infused “Excuse me??” That is when you state “I am perceiving your tone, attitude, and language as unprofessional.” They will either get worse in which case you then contact your manager (NOT THEIRS) for a resolution. Or, they will instantly flip their tune and apologize.  That is the effect we are aiming for.

(Wizard of Oz Technique) This one takes two techs to pull off. Use on users are are irate.  The first thing you need to do is excuse yourself for some reason and get out of ear reach of the user. Restroom is a great place. Call your buddy and have him call you back in 1 minute. Re enter the user’s area and listen to the rant some more. Then, interrupt the user’s rant by answering that supper important phone call you are getting. Talk kind of loudly. Tell them that you are with that certain user and relay the cliff notes of the rant you have been getting to the person on the other end. Ask semi loudly “What can we do for her/him?” End the conversation with ok, I will get right on that. Yeah, it should make her/him plenty happy. Hang up and tell the user “You are being taken care of from both the server side and from here.”  Then get on the PC and fix the problem that they are encountering. Likely, the user would have changer their tone quickly thinking that be man on the other side of that phone is solving all their problems.

When users are asking for a time frame they can get nasty. I made a mistake recently that cost me some cool points with the boss. NEVER NEVER NEVER give a definitive time range. Stating anywhere from 2 minutes to 2 weeks is bad. Very bad. Don’t do it. (That’s what I did. It didn’t turn out pleasant.) For the question “How long are we going to be down for?” Answer with “We have our entire on duty team working on the problem and we intend to get it back up and functioning ASAP. If they throw a time at you at all trying to get more info from you reply with “I certainly hope it is no where near that long.”

One of the main reasons a DNS server would fail is because it is unable to generate a socket. Remember that a socket is the IP address plus the port. The default port for DNS is port 53. Be sure your bind address is the same as the IP that you want to listen on and that no other application has hijacked the DNS port. In my case, I run CCProxy and it had a check mark in dns under proxies. Therefore, my Active Directory DNS server was unable to function only allowing cached logins and slow login times on the network. This is where a secondary DNS server will come in handy when I get my virtual environment up and running. I simply disabled the DNS feature in CCProxy and tada.. Windows DNS was up and running again after a quick restart of the service.

John

First off, editing the DirIcons line in your config file will do nothing for  you but frustrate you. Open your awstats page like you normally would (http://mysite.com/awstats.pl?config) in GOOGLE CHROME! Yes, Chrome is a great tool to help find out what the browser is looking for on your webserver. Right click on one of the broken elements, I used the logo in the top right and select inspect element.  Scroll down in the code until you find broken element. When you hover over the line of code it will highlight it in the top. You are likely looking for something like this “src=/etc/icon/logo.png”.

This entire path is relative to your HTTPD root. For Apache2 it is likely /var/www. Download AWSTATS tar.gz or zip file extract it out. Navigate to the httpd folder and snag the icon folder. Place it in a path to match the one in your code. Mine was like the demo above so I put the icon folder in a folder called etc and threw it into /var/www. Wala.. I have Icons. Too easy.

John

This is old news. Wireless routers have been around for 10+ years and we still fail to lock them down.  Do you really want to answer to the authorities for all the kiddy porn that was downloaded on your connection be some passer by.

Here is an analogy for you. You drive downtown Chicago and leave your car unsecure with the keys in the ignition. Someone “borrows” your car and robs a bank. The car is returned to the location and you get off work or out of your meeting and drive away without ever knowing that your car budged. You get pulled over and the next thing you know, you lawyer is trying to prove that you are innocent in the bank robbery that happened.  Hmmmm…. That could have easily been prevented by simply pulling the keys out of the ignition and locking the doors of your car.

As for your router, read the instructions and follow them for getting into the config web page.  Here are some tips for locking down your router / access point:

1. Choose a name (SSID) for you router that does NOT contain your name or address. This gives experienced attackers a target to start social engineering on.

2. WEP is OK, but a pain in the butt if you have guests you want to join to the network. Use WPA-PSK instead.

3.  When choosing your key for WPA choose a password that is not easy. If it is a word in the dictionary or is all numerals or your address or name, it is too easy. Use special characters, numerals, and alpha characters in the key. An example would be 3x@mpl3  If you look at it closely it spells out example. I subbed 3 for E and @ for A.

If  you still thing you are safe.. here is a concept for you. It is not uncommon for someone to get a PC, put a high powered antenna in it and leach your internet connection. The set up a firewall so they are stealth on your network. In addition to that, they have a LAN card in the machine and they are sharing your wireless connection to that connection. They cable that to a Wireless router of their own and wala.. they are online and you are paying for it.

So, if you are refusing to lock down your wireless, do your neighbor a favor and get the Comcast 22Mb service so he can use Bit Torrent without a hitch.

Windows 7 seems to continually have USB problems. I didn’t catch this one because the drivers that HP has in their database and the drivers the Microsoft has in their system are difficult to compare. According Windows the drivers are up to date yet there are updated drivers on the HP site? How is anyone supposed to know if the USB driver you have installed is the latest?

I guess every Windows operating system has it’s quirks and USB drivers are the big one for Windows 7. Here is the guidance..

Before you buy a copy of Windows 7, ensure that your computer’s manufacturer has an updated USB driver for your computer. This will be the only thing that renders your computer dead in the water. My Compaq v2000 laptop runs Win7 great until the USB drivers zonked on me. The manufacturer refuses to write updated drivers so I am waiting on a fix from Microsoft update to repair this issue.

I am also waiting on a coprocessor for my dv6809wm HP laptop. Come on Microsoft.. get on these drivers and pick up the slack where HP naturally fails. HP absolutely sucks at writing software.