The Life of Lou Ruppert

Happy Ash Wednesday everyone. Like last year, I’ll be trying to blog once a day during Lent. This year’s guidelines seem simple but will be quite a challenge: Each day, I will try to offer something positive and valuable in the blog. (Yes, it’s going to rain blog posts for forty days.) Hopefully at that [...]

Good morning. Today, I got the following interesting email that managed to make it past our enterprise virus scanning here at work (the recipient address has been changed to protect the innocent): From: United Parcel Service To: notmyuid@legacymailserver.syr.edu Subject: UPS Tracking Number 9077074317 Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:51:28 -0500 (18:51 EDT) Unfortunately we were [...]

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. +——————————————-+ [...]

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 [...]

Sharing the wealth The presentation on Mac Trojans went OK today. Most of the audience had read my previous stuff on the topic, so I only needed to review the material. The great thing was that a lot of people had really good questions. I’m used to speaking in front of a non-technical audience, so [...]

The mystery of 85.255.115.45 It all started with a series of mysterious connections to DNS servers in the Ukraine. (I know, technically you’re supposed to refer to it simply as Ukraine, and never The Ukraine, but call me a child of the Cold War.) All of the articles I’d found on the net about the [...]

I’m still reviewing my notes from 2007. As of five minutes ago, I’m finished with May. Looking over a year’s notes is a great way to get a big picture perspective on how long things sometimes take. I realize now that we began our search for an IDS (Intrusion Detection System) setup back in April [...]

Laou the Sfaxi My friend Mr Ahmed informed me today that the African Football Cup was won this weekend by the Club Sportif Sfaxien from Sfax, Tunisia! Nice work guys! I know a few Tunisians from when I went there last winter. I spent a week traveling from Tunis down to Sfax, intending to practice [...]

You can’t eat a habanero pepper and not remember it the next day. The decision to eat the shiny orange fruit is followed by a series of distinct burn incidents over a 24 hour period. According to some dog owners that I know, if you feed a dog a habanero pepper, he’ll eat it once, [...]

One time when I was in college, I went to an all night cartoon festival. Around 6am, after I’d been up for 24 hours straight, I began to see people who weren’t there. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d see a guy walking down the aisle of the theater, but when I’d turn [...]