One last post before bedtime... My buddie E called me today to see if I had seen the Aggie game this weekend... well I was a bit busy. At A&M they take tradition very seriously, and school spirt is very very high! sometimes at football games they will have a maroon out where everyone and I mean everyone wears maroon. Well to support America they decided to do a Red White and Blue out... only in Aggieland could you get this kind of support... I think there are a dozen or so people who didn't do it and boy do they stick out... check it out... you might want to use Internet Explorer as my Netscape did not work. Yes that picture is not retouched and yes they are wearing t-shirts to make that color like that! WOW!
Back home now... been sick all day! I'm so glad this waited for me to get back. Well all that happened last week with the virus was doubly bad on me. I was set to leave wednesday afternoon when a new unknown virus goes spreading around the world on tuesday morning. The reason I was going to FL was to display our website which was now under attack 36 hours before I'm supposed to leave! I managed tyo stop the virus and get on a plane, but I'll have alot to do come tommorrow morning.
Wednesday... Dade's first plane ride! The airport was empty the plane was empty... security was tighter than normal but this was one easy ride. Dade was not even remotely scared, we stopped in New Orleans and landed in Orlando at around midnight. We grabbed a rent-a-car and headed for hotel. Ahhh sleep! I've only had about 3 hours in the 48! Embassy Suites... very nice!
Thursday Universal Studios... well $150 for the 3 of us to get in was a bit steep but overall what a great place. The entire park is geared around shows and interactive motion rides... the twister effects INCREDIBLE! the 3d in T2 very good as well! Despite all the big budget effects in each of these the Ball Factory was the best thing there! Imagine a room, 2 stories tall, catwal around the edge of the second story, air cannons and vacuums everywhere and 1000s or nerf balls... oh what fun we had suckin up balls and shooting them every which way you could imagine. I want one of these for my backyard ... to cool! Over all lots of fun no lines at all and great time.
Friday... got up and headed for Blizzard Beach. BB is a water park in the Disney complex that is based on a ski resort. Everywhere you look is snow and icicles. Long slides a giant wave pool, a very long river, kiddie area... all very good. We played here till our feet hurt from climbing steps over and over. Dade really liked the tobagan racers where you lay on a mat slide down these really long slides... lots of fun. We wore out long before the park closed and went back to the hotel sun-burnt! That evening we went to Race Rock cafe for dinner, Dade's head was on a swivel... Race Rock is full of real vehicles, like... Sampson the monster Truck, John Forces Funny car, Miss Budweiser, about 10 Winston Cup Cars a couple of Top Fuel Dragsters and 20-30 other cars, everything from a racing go cart to World of Outlaws car to some Drag Bikes... He didn't want to eat, it was just "look at that, look at that, lookat that, OH MY GOD look at that..." for about an hour!
Saturday the reason we were there... I spent all day Saturday at the conference, I won't bore with this and that but overall we were well recieved and had a very good turn out... caught a plane that evening and were home by 10pm.
From Orlando,Fl yep that's where I've been the last few day's. We are leaving in a few hours to head back home.
Thursday we went to Universal Studios... wow to cool Dade got a bit scared in some of the things but most things were great ... the ball factory ... I want one! more on that when I get back. Twister, MIB, T2 everything was awesome.
Phew false alarm... site crashed... still having some strange things going on. anyway... read the previous post to catch up...
continued...
6:30p Cookin now figured out a quick way to kill the .dll files and tftp scripts.
8:30p Looks like a complete reload is in order flatten the drive and start from scratch... about 12-15 hours with my setup is my guess.
8:45p Despair... some of the files I need are not on tape and are on the machine just shut down earlier time to turn it on...
8:55p Machine won't boot all the way. Just get an explorer screen and soon as that happens it starts crunching.
9:30p Still can't get past the file mess on this server others holding up ... so far!
10:30p F' this ... I decide I'm going to start replacing files and hope for the best.
11:30p Using DOS I was able to mount the box from a win98se machine and rename explorer.exe. Then in an act of stupidity I copied a known good copy over. Now machine boots to windows but it keeps restarting over and over and mean just the screen not the whole shutdown business
11:45p DOS again smak on the HotFix from M$ into the winnt\profiles...\desktop so I can see it flash by... and I stab it! It worked!
12:30a All servers seem to be working
1:30a Ok all system are running and fine going home in minute
3 hours sleep... hey a body only needs 4 right! 1 to go... The internet is great isn't it? Nimda or Admin spelled backwards... what does it do... hmmm it attacks with a ferocity not seen in any virus before it. Once it's payload has been delivered it attacks 16 known exploits out there. It also tries the land and air approach... you can get it by opening an email, you can get it by opening a web page, hell you can get by sitting there with nothing going on but a web server and before you know it... during the morning yesterday we became infected.
7:45a I notice one of my office mates machines kept trying to load a web page(ours) and this annoying box kept popping up and starting media player with an invalid file...wtf
7:50a I pop up VI and take a look... hmm there seems to be some extra code in the bottom of this page. No sweat remove it save it done...
7:54a Oops that didn't fix it? Let me look ... oh I must not have hit save. There you go done...
7:55a WTF what do you mean it's back already! uh oh!
7:56a Norton AV Center, Mcafee, VirusStalker, Cert hmmm no mention of the symptoms...
8:20a groups.google.com someone is having the same problem and this just now posted!
8:45a Let me walk next door to GoBase2 and see if they are having problems.
8:50a uhhh yea they got it! running wil on thier boxes... ok I'm not alone now. Shut down the site due to possible infection of anyone who looks at it.
9:50a Usenet is starting to have lots of reports of this.
10:20a Symantec has a notice up NEW VIRUS called Nimba!
11:00a Nothing new... this thing replicating everywhere there is a web server. Seems to be adding files at an alarming rate. I just shut down my SQL server and it had 8,000 .EML files on it! Crap! This thing looks like a mass mailer I hope I didn't bomb out 8,000 people!
11:30a Ok getting a handle on it... run M$ patch to stop the vulnerability from CodeBlue(3 weeks old now) delete 78K *.eml and *.nws files ... this seems to have stopped it one machine but 3 others are spinning out of control still.
12:15p Damn I'm hungry... still at it.
12:30p Several places are reporting the virus now including CNN and NewsMax. At least one of my servers has the words "USa Goverment Sucks" embedded in evey web page... thank god I don't use that server for weeb stuff!
2:00p Starting to look like an all nighter... One step forward one step back...
3:30p I seem to have a handle on the 2 most important servers, I had to just shut one of the other off and pull the plug.
5:00p ok Our web site is back up and running Virii free for the moment.
Fight goes on... I have isolated the servers that have the problems and stopped the spread for now. Read about the virus here. This virus is spreading faster than code red and was apprently introduced exactly one week after the WTC attack. hmmmm....
Oh shit here I go again... this could be worse than Code Red by early reports... this virus us VERY aggressive and is spreading wild... we have it on at least 10 machines... I guess I better get a pillow, I'm gonna be here late tonight... more as things unfold...
Because people seem to be addicted to the news these days, I thought I'd pass along one of if not the best sites for news out there. NewsMax often has stuff the others like cnn.com and msnbc.com do not have. Check it out... can be slow sometimes so be patient.
Damn it my hands are killing me today! I spent the better part of yesterday putting up a DSS at my mother in laws house boat... the dish install is easy it was the mount that killed me. I used a chimney mount to attach the dish to a metal pole. Gak! anyway also yesterday I worked on my prop controller for about 3 hours and hope to finish it tonight.
For those of you following the story no my computer is still no right. I mostly have working but there is still one little something that I have not yet figured out.
Want to have a little fun... this is a cool interactive face thingy... just go see it and have some fun!
Looking for something new to do on the web... it may be coming in the way of 3d web browsers
I know at least some of you have done the internet music thing... if you want to know what I listen to at this time of year.. and many other times of the year click here 24/7 Halloween Music and stuff!!!! YEA!
I leave this post with an anonymous quote...
"Life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.
