Author: peter

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Verizon, You Suck

Verizon, you suck. You cannot suck enough. I am so looking forward to Fairpoint Communications taking over your business here in New England because I am not convinced that, no matter how bad they are, you are worse.
Thank you, Verizon, for making me take yesterday afternoon off, to wait for your technician, between the hours of 1pm and 5pm, to come and install my new telephone line. Except, you never showed up. Instead, you called me at 5:15pm to say “due to unforeseen circumstances, we were unable to keep our appointment.” (No $#!+.) “We will be sending someone to your location tomorrow between the hours of 8AM and 5PM. You do not need to be there at this time.”
What?! Then why the ^&*@ did I need to be there all afternoon?!
That was yesterday. Then, this morning, I came in to work to find our business DSL was down. Here’s the backstory. A couple of weeks ago, I ordered an upgrade to our account. Basically, it doubles the cost of our DSL so we have a static IP address. I wanted to do this because I wanted to run our Outlook Web Access (Exchange) server on a public IP. Since they block inbound port 80 connections, I wanted the static IP because they allow you to run a web server with that package. Then I realized that they do not block inbound port 443 connections with a dynamic IP address. So I installed a self-signed SSL certificate on my Exchange server, and presto! I can access OWA via my DynDNS-assigned IP address.
So I had my assistant call and cancel the order. Somehow, I knew when it took her almost an hour to do this, that things were not going to turn out right. My suspicions, although put far on the back burner, were confirmed this morning, as our Internet connection was down. After a half an hour on the phone with these jokers, my assistant got

  • confirmation that they had switched us over to a static IP, despite our order to cancel, and
  • disconnected.

I called back, more than a little irate at this point. The charming lady on the other end of the line stated that “I’m not showing you as having a static IP address on your account.” Of course, that doesn’t help, as we still have no Internet connectivity at all right now… So I told her this, insisted that we were offline, and she was nice enough to reconfigure our account so that we could get online again. Total time wasted, 7 employee-hours.
As I was finishing the call, the customer service rep said “Usually when people order the static IP and decide to cancel the order, we tell them to wait until it goes through, and then cancel it, so they don’t have to go through this long down time.” First off, no one told us that. Second, wow. You guys really DO suck. Your internal processes are so messed up that you cannot cancel an order even if the cancellation notice is given over a week in advance.
So, they expect to have things repaired within 3 days. Until then, we wait…

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No Sugar Added

Today I’ve decided I’m going on an official diet. My first step will be to not add sugar to anything I eat. This will be interesting. My first cup of coffee today is bitter, and I’m so tempted to put some sugar or maple syrup into it.
/sigh

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Ten Things Your IT Department Won't Tell You (With Good Reason!)

Last week I read an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Ten Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You. It’s a really good article.
My first reaction to hearing this was “the writer and editor who approved it should be fired.” There are reasons we don’t want people to know this stuff! So here’s one of the most respected news publications in the country is telling people how to circumvent corporate content filters, access their company files on their home PCs, and how to install applications on their work PC that aren’t allowed. Brilliant, WSJ. Way to turn a bunch of ordinarily (mostly) harmless users into serious threats to network integrity and security. Not to mention how many kids you just informed of ways to circumvent content filters so they can surf porn while at school. Oh yeah, brilliant move.
Yes, like the Anarchist’s Cookbook, if someone really wants to learn how to do any of these things, there are plenty of other places they can go to find them. And now, thanks to the WSJ, a lot more people know this.
However, after further consideration, I asked myself “is just another form of full disclosure?” After all, all the WSJ has done is pointed out that these techniques and tools are out there, which is really no different from what security analysts and hackers do on a daily basis when they find flaws in applications and systems across the Internet. Okay, so now everyone knows about file-sharing sites for sending large files. So we need to YouSendIt.com on our content filter along with Playboy.com. Now they know you can use Google as a proxy. Similarly to how we block Gmail, Google Talk and Google Image Search without blocking the rest of Google itself.
I’m curious to do some further reading on what the rest of the sysadmin/security community has to say about this.

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Lost

Okay, so I never called myself a trend-setter. My wife and I are watching the first episode of Lost now. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. More later, assuming it’s worth writing on.

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More Skunks

Just a few hours after re-baiting the trap, we have another skunk in it. This time the poor little thing is out in the rain, but at least there’s a heavy wool blanket (and now, a piece of cardboard) on top of the trap to keep it dry. If I had my own truck, I’d let the thing go somewhere else, but I’m not about to transport it in my Subaru.
Okay, pest removal experts, you can call us back now…

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Baby Skunks Are Cute

Today I got my second look at the skunk who has been inhabiting the space below our house since last year. It turns out that “Murray,” as we’ve named him, is actually “Marie,” and she has at least six little babies keeping her company.
We saw six baby skunks today, after we managed to capture one in a trap. After repeated failed attempts by a professional pest control service to capture the skunk, I took a friend’s advice and baited the trap with a leftover zucchini and orange, instead of the cat food the pest controllers had recommended (and used to successfully catch our neighbor’s cat – twice).
This morning, my wife looked out the window and saw that we had indeed caught a skunk. I observed that it looked rather small. Later, she saw that it was small because it’s just a baby, and that two of its siblings had come to attempt to rescue it. This was the cutest thing I’ve seen in a long time, as all three worked together to try to find a weakness in the trap.
They were soon joined by momma Skunk (“Marie”), who worked furiously to get her baby out of the trap. Her efforts were hampered by her babies, who crowded around her, and whom she would drag, one at a time, back under the house by their necks.
I went out when the mother was gone and stuck a piece of cardboard over the trap so the baby wouldn’t bake in direct sunlight, and we called the pest controllers.
We went shopping, and returned a few hours later to find the mother still there, working furiously to free her baby. She’d dug holes around the trap, trying to get underneath, and as of a few minutes ago, managed to flip the trap on its side. Of course, since it’s latched shut, she’d not going to get it out, so my wife is convinced me, against my better judgement, to assist her in setting the baby free.
So if you don’t see any new posts in the near future, you’ll know it’s because I am busy bathing myself in baking soda and vinegar. Wish me luck.
As luck would have it, my wife’s ex just showed up to drop her son off. She asked if he knew anything about skunks and, ‘lo and behold, he does! He walked right up to the trap, grabbed it, put it in the back of his pickup, and the skunk sprayed! Luckily it was under a blanket that we don’t care about. Awesome skunk removal timing on his part! I guess I need to buy him a beer or two now.
Update: We gave him four.

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The Joys of Rural Internet Access

Since moving back into a rural area, I’ve had to give up my precious high-speed Internet options and settle for what’s left. Downtown, I can choose between Comcast cable (boasting up to 6Mb downloads), Verizon DSL (3Mb downloads), Sovernet SDSL (1.5Mb), or a T1 line in my office building.
Out in the sticks, however, the options are fewer. I am restricted to the wonders of satellite, cellular, and dialup.
We’ve had Wildblue for satellite Internet for the last year, and it’s been pretty terrible. I decided to go with Wildblue after a client of mine had it installed, and it worked extremely well. There was very little latency, and I could run a VPN connection over it. Unfortunately, my experience with the service was not nearly as good, and it turned out to be very slow, and drops several times a day, requiring me to power cycle the modem, and often just going without service for a long time.
I tried using an EVDO card from Verizon Wireless, and also using my Nokia e61 as a cellular modem from my current provider, Unicel. Unfortunately, despite my installing a cellular repeater in my house, the signal is not strong enough to sustain a reliable Internet connection.
So, I’m biting the bullet, and ordering another telephone line. In the year 2007, the best Internet access option I have at my house is dialup. 26.4kbps.
Pathetic.