Digital Choke Daynotes

I'm on the last legs of the special project, so don't have a lot of time for a long and thoughtful posts. (Yeah, who said they were thoughtful?)

And I haven't had a whole lot of time to do my usual web surfing. Although I did notice some reports that a hacker got into Cisco's servers and stole the source code for their routers. Since Cisco routers are everywhere, this could be a concern for many network security guys. And I wouldn't want to be the guy in charge of the security of that part of Cisco's network.

Anywho, back to my special project. I should be able to report on the results tomorrow.

That picture over there is the "special project". Pam and I spent a week in Oceanside (CA) which is about 30 miles north of San Diego. The top picture shows the view from the balcony of the condo (apartment) that we rented for the week. The condo was one bedroom, bath, kitchen, dining area, and living room. The beach is about 150 yards away from the balcony. It was very relaxing to sit on the balcony for meals, or just listening to the surf. And the cost was quite reasonable, compared to a hotel; it was $750 for the week. Since we had a kitchen, we were able to prepare some of our meals, so we didn't have the cost of going out to eat. It was actually less expensive to be there than a hotel.

We drove down Friday, leaving work about noon, and got there by about 8 pm. It's really easy to get to from our house. Take I-80 west, turn left onto I-5, then turn right at Oceanside. There were a couple of slow spots in the Los Angeles area, but overall the drive was pleasant. The weather was very cooperative, with temps in Oceanside in the 70's (F) during the day, and low 60's at night, and sunny all week.

Saturday morning was our niece's wedding in San Diego, with a nice reception and dinner that evening at a country club in Laguna Nigel. We were able to have a nice visit with most of the family. Sunday we went to church with my oldest brother in Laguna Nigel (about 30 minutes north of Oceanside). Then that afternoon we drove back to the condo and relaxed, with a nice walk on the beach.

Monday was more relaxing around the condo, and a couple of walks on the beach. Oceanside has a pier out into the ocean, with a "Ruby's" diner at the end (you can see the pier on the left side of the second picture). So we had lunch there that day. But we mostly relaxed, unwinding, and getting mellow.

Tuesday we went to Disneyland, which is about an hour north. We got there about 10am, missing most of the LA traffic, since we were able to use the car-pool (high occupancy) lane. Disneyland wasn't very crowded; we were able to go on all the rides with minimal waits. We did the usual rides: Splash Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted House, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (open again), Small World, Star Tours, and the train ride around the park. It was all enjoyable, with pleasant weather. It was a relaxing day, without kids or grandkids (we went there with them last November). We bought a few souvenirs for the kids, and got on the road before the rush hour, again using the car-pool lanes. We got back to Oceanside in time for another walk on the beach.

Wednesday was another day of just relaxing around the condo. By that time, I was suffering from a bit of Internet withdrawal, so I set up a dial-up connection and got my 'net fix. (Pam was surprised that I lasted that long.) She did give me a bit of a hard time because of it. She relaxed by reading, and I relax by "surfing the Net".

I did spend a bit of time installing VMWare for Windows, and then a Mandrake Linux installation in one of the vmWare's virtual machines. vmWare allows you to have several virtual computers, each with a different operating system if you wish, and all running at the same time without having to restart your computer. The Mandrake (version 9.1) installation was fairly easy, and I set up the KDE desktop. I haven't played with the whole thing very much, but will be working on that for the next several weeks in preparation for another project in July. There are some Linux-based security tools I need to work with a bit more.

Thursday we drove down to San Diego and poked around there a bit, and Friday we relaxed again at the condo. Saturday was the trip home.

So it may not have been a really exciting vacation by some standards; Pam and I are a pretty quiet couple. But it was quite relaxing. The sound of the ocean and waves crashing on the beach is quite soothing.

Sunday was the usual morning meetings, afternoon church, and dinner with the family. This is a picture of the two cute grandkids: Liam (2) and Joelle (4).

But it was back to work today, although in a much more relaxed mood. I caught up on the email and voice mail, and worked on a presentation that I'll give later this week. I also did an analysis of our patch level for the workstations; it is slowly improving.

Now it's Monday evening, and I am watching "Colonial House" on PBS. It's another in their "put modern people back into an earlier time"; this time the group goes back to the 17th century. It might be interesting, although sometimes the participants have a hard time adjusting to the earlier time and circumstances.

I was playing around with my Mandrake (Linux) installation in vmWare. I'm at the point of a begining user of this, partly on purpose. I want to learn it in the same way that I learned how to use DOS and Windows many years ago, and how I learn new things. A lot of experimentation, reading the documentation, and trying to relate my previous experience with new ones.

And there are the puzzlers that I haven't figured out yet. For instance, the web browser is Konquerer. It has the same basic features as IE, but many things are slightly different. Web pages mostly look the same as they do in IE, but not always. For instance, this site uses CSS styles for text formatting. In IE, the text is blue (as designed), as it is also in NetCaptor, which I believe uses parts of the IE engine. But in Konquerer, the text is green. That was puzzling. So I changed the CSS style sheet to have black text, and uploaded it to this site. In IE, the text on these pages changed to black. In Konquerer, the text is still green.

I suspect that there is some setting somewhere that needs to be changed. And a Linux expert like Brian B could probably tell me how to fix that in two command line parameters or some configuration file. At the moment, I don't have it figured out yet.

Another example. One of the purposes of this Linux experiment is to learn how to use some Linux-based security tools. One of my focuses is wireless networking. So I need to learn how to use Kismet to analyze wireless packets. And that brings me to one of the different things about Linux -- installing programs.

The basic steps are to download the 'tar' file (sort of like a zip file), then you have to uncomress it, then compile it into the operating system. This is done with commands at a command prompt (sort of like the old "DOS" prompt, the one that you get with a Windows "Start, Run, cmd.exe" command). There are installation commands, but (like most Linux things), there is this assumption that you already know how to do things. Example: here are the instructions straight from the Kismet site:

1. Download any libraries and external utilities needed
   2. Run './configure' with any special options you want (see './configure --help')
   3. Run 'make' or 'gmake'
   4. Run 'make install' or 'make suidinstall' - SEE THE SECURITY SECTION OF THE README BEFORE INSTALLING KISMET SUIDROOT! IF YOU INSTALL SUIDROOT ON A SYSTEM WITH UNTRUSTED USERS, BAD THINGS CAN HAPPEN.

Now, I consider myself a pretty smart guy. I've been working with PC's almost since IBM invented them (my first was a IBM PC with 16K of memory and an operating system loaded from a cassette tape player; but that's a story for another time). And I am mostly self-taught: lots of trial-and-error, lots of reading books, asking questions, etc. And some of what's up there is vaguely familiar. I suspect there are easier ways to do things, or perhaps some easier installation package. But my initial reaction to those instructions was "Huh?".

So, some more research is in order. I'll do a bit more "Googling" to figure this out. It will be a good learning experience.

I didn't have much time today to play with the Mandrake installation. I was working on the presentation about VPN (virtual private networking) that I need to give tomorrow morning. It will be pretty generic, without much technical content, since I'm talking to a non-technical group. And you don't want (or need) to give detailed information about how your network is protected. "Need to know", and all that.

I'm still looking for a FTP solution, as described here. I talked to one company about their product, and although I am not sure that it meets my requirements, I'll get a demo of it next week. I'm still in the information-gathering mode, and need to find some more options. If you have any ideas, hit the mailbox icon up there and let me know.

Yesterday, I had a premonition that there was a significant security risk out there. And, on the way to work, just down the street, I noticed that the new Krispy Kreme had opened. Although I was able to deflect the infection yesterday, there was a drive-by attack this morning, causing the purchase of a dozen glazed (plus a lemon-filled). I'm not sure of the strength of my protection against this threat. Although the big mirror in the bathroom is available.

Friday has arrived. But the weekend looks busy. As have the past couple of days.

Thursday was meeting day. It started off with a presentation of VPN basics for a non-technical audience.It was very generic, since it wasn't necessary to give all the gory details of configuration and equipment. (I did get some mail from a reader here asking for a copy of that presentation; I'll work on it and try to get it ready next week. But the information is readily available the same way that I got it -- "Google" is your friend. The Microsoft site has some good info on that subject and others.) Anyway, the presentation went well.

Then it was off to the monthly department meeting. Nothing terribly exciting there, just a sharing of information on projects. After lunch, I got caught up on email, and prepared for the weekly security status meeting with the boss.

Along with that, I worked some more on testing this laptop. It seems to be developing a problem with the character generator. During boot-up (or when you go into CMOS setup, which is character based), some of the alpha-numeric characters turn into graphic characters. All characters have an ASCII character code, as I recall an "A" is a hex value of 41 (or 0100 0001). If one of those bits is stuck, the value changes, and the 'A' character changes into something else. The problem also occurs when I try to boot two different Linux systems, which also start in a character-based mode.

I worked on this problem a bit more today. I used the HP site (it's a Compaq laptop) to run some diagnostics. There were a couple of driver updates, and a CMOS ROM update. So I installed all of those (after carefully backing up the data files to the network), but the problem persists. The next step was to get some on-line "chat" help, which connected me to an outsourced support tech, someone from India based on his name. He looked at his database of serial numbers, and pronounced my laptop off-warranty, since it was older than a year.

But a 3 year full warranty was purchased with the laptop (always a good idea with laptops), and I had the invoices and purchase requisitions to prove it. So I faxed them off, and will wait until Monday to follow up.

Tomorrow will be busy. I'll head over to my oldest daughter's (Christine, for any new readers) house, where Jared (husband) and I will make some closet shelving for the two (cute) children (Joelle and Liam, pictured above). I grabbed my late father-in-law's brad nailer to help things go faster. So I'll load up the sawhorses, circular saw, stud finder (wooden studs, silly), and some other tools and head off to Home Depot to grab the materials. With Jared helping, it shouldn't tape too long, and will help with the organization of the grandkids' clothes and toys. The new closet systems will help make room for the stuff for the third grandchild due next month.

... more later ...
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