The Life of Lou Ruppert

Lent and the Easter season are over, which means no more mandatory daily blog postings. I intend to keep up pretty regularly, but only when I have time to sit down and write something worthwhile. The last couple weeks’ postings have suffered as I’ve gotten more and more overwhelmed with work and volunteer obligations. I’ve learned a lot, though:

• When I sit down and am not rushing to post something so I can get to bed, I can usually come up with something good enough for me to be happy with it.
• The thing about doing something every day for thirty days really does work for establishing habits.
• I have more fun writing happy stuff than angry stuff.
• I’m still capable of sharing my faith when inspiration strikes.
• Blog postings can easily find their way into the wrong people’s hands if you write about topics like network hardware whose manufacturers pay people to “audit” what the internet is saying about it.
• Wordpress rocks!

Thank-you all of you who have borne with me during my long writing experiment. It was a lot of fun.

I’ve been worried for months about the mirror on my bedroom door. It has four clear plastic clips that hold the whole thing on the wall. One of them broke when I was having a bad day. Because broken mirrors are not fun to clean up, I kept thinking about needing to fix it, every time I’d look in the mirror. I finally went to the local home improvement store today to try to find something that would serve the same purpose, and to my surprise, there is actually such a thing as 1/8″ clear plastic mirror clips! All this time, I could have secured the thing to my door reliably, but because I didn’t search earlier, I never knew. There’s got to be a lesson in there somewhere.

I spent tonight fixing a light in my church, since I am in charge of maintenance for the next two years, until I snap and resign, that is. I went to replace it, and the replacement I bought was too small. So I went to trade a bulb from a less conspicuous place, and the one in there went dead as I turned it on, then exploded and fell out of the socket. It was like being in a 1970s horror flick. I had to vacuum the floor, twist the broken pieces out of the evil socket, and run to the grocery store to buy an expensive replacement.

I got home from church late, grabbed a pizza, and checked my email, only to find out that someone just called to report that our slumlord’s leaky roof got water all into the nursery, and that someone broke one of the florescent light fixtures cleaning today. So instead of making food for our Easter potluck, tomorrow morning, I’ll be driving all over town, rushing to buy parts in time to repair the problems during the one hour window between when the home improvement stores open and when people start showing up to the church. If I can just hang in there for another twenty months, it’ll feel so good to be done with this.

I just got back from a contract that went way longer than I expected. I applied SP2 to a Windows Server 2003 machine that seemed swap-bound, and it took six hours to complete! Dang.

Today’s healing service was pretty good. Despite being in a bad mood when I arrived, and thinking that people praying for me would be worse than useless, I still went up and got prayer. It was just a glimmer of hope in the middle of a storm of bitter skepticism, but I seized it and ran up to the front at the very end. It was funny. Sometimes faith is all about how we act in the tiny moment, rather than on how we live our lives in general. When it comes down to it, deep down I guess I do still believe God can miraculously heal people like me. When I got prayed for, the guy praying for me saw a picture of my feet being on fire when I walked or when I laid in bed. That’s exactly my chronic pain problem! So, in a roundabout way, I thing God heard my prayers today.

The Bosnian family I visited in my trip through Europe in 2004 was in town this week, so I finally got over to visit them tonight. I love those people. They are really hospitable, and very hard workers. The husband, the guy I know through my friend Dean, has a really good dry sense of humor. And the wife is a great cook and is really hospitable and funny too, so we always get great food and laugh a lot while we’re there.

The parents of the husband are the ones who were visiting this week. Both of them are older, gray-haired and all, but they do heavy duty farm work like they’re in their teens. The mother had a bad back and knee when we were at their house in Bosnia in 2004, not that you could tell by watching her work. They used to bother her every day until Dean and I prayed for her. They haven’t bothered her since. If anyone deserves a miracle like that, it’s this family. So that was another reason to be happy.

Tomorrow I take on another client for my consulting business. Windows systems are far from my strength, but I have good general diagnostic skills. I need to learn a bit about Windows forensics, so it seemed like a good fit. Time will tell, though. I have to fight the urge to turn every Windows problem into a Linux solution. I’m totally a penguin-thumper.

Tomorrow is so busy that I took it off from work. Lets see how good Good Friday will be this year.

I received a couple of the following message today. The greeting differs, but the basic text (other than the randomized bits at the end) is the same:

Ahn nyeong,

+-------------------------------------------+
Warning! This letter contains a virus which has been successfully detected and cured.
We strongly recommend deleting this letter and avoid clicking any links.
+-------------------------------------------+

[RBN Networks Antivirus]

Days after the interview with mrs. Hammond, found born under
a mad moon with some wild humor in hari as deserving of
the first worship. Amongst a member or otherwise. The neighboring
church gratified with dharma's son yudhishthira, imparted
opere miror) would not eulogise himself quite couldn't have
done any rupert was not given to intelligence, while they
were being thus smitten to live deprived of thy company.
o king, if thou the king of rakshasas, that descendant of
ikshwaku's of the last word of the last line of the last
of great strength, and accordingly pursued with them talking
to each other in the dew. A galaxy also handed him a note
that he had written toof will be theirs? I do not seek the
accomplishment.

What makes it interesting is the hidden code at the end of the HTML version of the spam message:

 in the dew. A galaxy also handed him a note<br>   that he had written toof=
 will be theirs? I do not seek the<br>   accomplishment.</p>

<a href=3D"http://aaaahosting.com/.xkhafeedmaaabgehd.php"></a></body></html>
------------CFA6ED93730CD2--

online pharmacycialislevitrapropeciaviagra

I’m not sure what the goal of it is, but something is probably meant to have lurked behind the link. I just got a Page Not Found, so either it’s got some logic to tell whether a Windows machine is hitting it, or someone had already sanitized it. I changed the link before pasting it here, so clicking it yourself won’t help.

Other news: I played around with relay_recipient_maps today in postfix. They’re a nice way to move the bounces to the edge of my infrastructure, but I don’t know if they’re worth the work on a big scale. It seems even Google has decided for backscatter these days. I’m probably better off writing blocking rules for stuff like the RBN message.

Kicked in the Gutsy

I got together with a friend of mine tonight and tried to install Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on the music studio machine in our church. It was a disaster at first. Here’s what happened:

• The initial patch update didn’t work because the capplets-data package seemed to hang indefinitely
• Installing the auth-ldap-client package and answering its questions resulted in an unconfigured machine. It ignored every answer to the wizard’s questions and went ahead and created an empty configuration file with default values.
• Rebooting the machine resulted in a bug where udevd would spawn endlessly, trying to connect to the LDAP server the empty configuration file was insisting was on 127.0.0.1
• Apparently, single-user mode also requires the LDAP server because we weren’t able to boot into maintenance mode either. Only my 15+ years of hardcore Linux experience enabled me to figure out how to disable the offending subsystem, remount the disk read-write, and update the settings to disable the LDAP auth. The average user would have had to reinstall from scratch at that point, because there was no other way to get into the system.
• The login screen kept changing resolution every time we’d switch to the other machine on the KVM. After a certain point, it would only choose resolutions that were impossible for our monitor to display. Again, a show stopper for pretty much anyone who is not a Unix expert.
• My attempt to hard-code the screen resolution in /etc/X11/xorg.conf was overridden by some unknown force to set it to a resolution not listed in that file. Why list restrictions in the file if the program is going to just do what it wants regardless?
• My attempt to set the resolution via the Résolution de l'écran menu ended up setting it to an impossible mode for the monitor to display, but instead of switching back to the original mode after thirty seconds, it remained in that mode.
• Text mode was unavailable after the initial login screen came up, because the Intel drivers forced that into an impossible configuration as well. How is one supposed to correct a problem with the main display window if the virtual ones are disabled as well?
• The fancy splash screen that is supposed to show the progress of the boot process also chooses a mode impossible to display on the monitor. What ever happened to defaulting to conservative VESA modes? So after the machine does its POST and displays the boot menu, the screen goes blank until the login screen comes up.
• The machine is pegged at a load average of nearly 2.0, because each user who logs in ends up spawning a trackerd process that takes hours to iterate our network filesystems. Does nobody at Ubuntu test these machines someplace other than on their brand new game machine in their mom’s basement?

Combine that with Monday’s announcement that Ubuntu is dropping the official release of its server product for the SPARC platform, and you can see how my opinion of Ubuntu has been plummeting recently.

SPARC hardware is reasonably priced used, typically of exceptional quality, and nearly completely resistant to a lot of the “script kiddie” attacks against Linux’s already tiny network footprint. It’s the perfect platform for small businesses to deploy because it affords them safety, quality, and performance at a reasonable price. And now, for their biggest release in a few years, Ubuntu has chosen to discontinue support for it. This after picking it up with great fanfare two years ago as the only major player to offer support for the SPARC platform. I don’t get it.

I went home angry and disillusioned, after hours of angry grumbling. It’s the first time I’ve gotten discouraged by anything in a long time. I sat around dreading the eventual problems this system would cause us, and the four hours of my life that I would never get back, the dinner I skipped, etc. Then it dawned on me that there was no need to get upset. All computer stuff causes that kind of dread if you don’t set service agreements. So, my service agreement with myself was that I would resign myself to having to repair the machine for others five times. After those five times, I could justifiably get upset. Before that, though, I’d already counted the cost and accepted it. It worked great! I have no animosity towards that system at all, tonight. And I even got to eat dinner. And meanwhile my brain is working in overdrive on how to repair some of the remaining problems.

RBN AntiVirus Saves the Day, Or Does It?

This morning I started getting a unique type of spam. It was randomized text, with a segment at the top stating that RBN Antivirus detected and removed a virus, and that I shouldn’t click any links or anything. My first thought was how odd, and highly unlikely, it was that the Russian Business Network, the biggest criminal organization on the Internet, would be censoring its own messages for viruses. Well, as it turns out, buried deep in the code, and only visible if you don’t display HTML emails, was a tiny link to malicious content on another web site. Very clever. If I get another one, I’ll try to post an example.

I had to meet with another student today about the Trojan. I guess nobody wants to really believe that their mac is infected unless someone shows them in person. We’ll call this student Manni, for lack of a better name. It’s not his name. Manni’s mac had the same problems as the other ones. Sotov’s DNS servers had taken over his Internet connection. He seemed to understand my explanation well enough, but I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. He had a bunch of software he didn’t have the install media for, which he’d lose by reinstalling the Mac. I guess it’s a lesson that you should always back up your stuff, even if it’s something you just downloaded or borrowed from a friend. Disaster could strike any one of us. If it’s not a trojan, it’s a hard drive failure.

The interesting thing about Manni’s situation, assuming I understood it correctly, was that he’d never downloaded any software that required a password. I wonder if pirate software might have been shipped with Sotov’s DNS hack included with it. There are more reasons than just legal technicalities for not using stuff you download off of BitTorrent. Really, you have no idea where it’s been.

I wore a bit of orange with my green today for Saint Patrick’s Day. Saint Patrick was an Englishman.

We didn’t really do anything for Palm Sunday in my church, but I thought it was worth reminding the world via my blog title. The sermon was a good lesson on people being willing to make tons of noise and spectacle about something, but rarely willing to actually back it up with real action and belief. The same people that cheered for Jesus to come to Jerusalem were the ones that cheered to have him condemned days later. Crowds are shallow like that.

It’s “parade mentality,” like the jolly spectators that were beside themselves with enthusiasm for our cowbell yesterday. Would they sit home and listen to hours of cowbell recordings for pleasure? Not likely, but everybody wanted to yell “More Cowbell!” because it made them laugh at an old Saturday Night Live joke. In Jesus’ case, maybe it made people feel more patriotic or religious to celebrate their Jewishness with those kind of cheers. But I could identify with those crowds, waving green branches and yelling over nothing in particular. Sometimes it just feels good to be part of a noisy crowd, even if nobody really knows what all of the yelling really means.

I remembered while we were waiting to start the parade that I was in a parade back when I was in high school too. I was in the Civil Air Patrol, and we marched in a parade in one of the small towns near high school. This was a better experience, though. The parade itself was pretty funny. One of the guys marching with us had a cow bell, and pretty much every couple blocks, a different group of drunk people would wander out into the parade route screaming “More cow bell!” It was like a performance art breathalizer.

In any case, it was a long day, and I’m glad to have made it home without my sinus cold flaring up. Just to be safe, though, I’ll spend the evening watching movies under a couple blankets, drinking hot tea.

Tomorrow is the St Patrick’s Day parade. I’m marching in it with my local chapter of Toastmasters International. It’ll be the first time I’ve been in a parade since I played the clarinet in grade school marching band. It’s a longer parade than the two blocks I marched as a kid, but at least I don’t have to play an instrument! My day starts early, though: 8am breakfast at Kitty Hoyne’s, my favorite Irish restaurant. So that means scurrying around tonight, trying to find all of the green clothes I own. It also means getting to bed ridiculously early so that I can try to shake the cold that’s been chasing me all week.

Meanwhile, while I sleep, my mom and dad are driving up to get my youngest brother from the bus station at 3am. If I’d known earlier, I’d have made arrangements to get him myself. Maybe next time. Still, I feel as though I’m shirking my role as number one son. It should be me rolling out of bed at oh-dark-thirty, dragging him back to my house and letting him sleep on my bachelor couch.

Eagle vs Shark is a great movie. It’s like New Zealand’s answer to Napoleon Dynamite. I guess everyone needs an answer to Amélie. I love movies about nerds!