current tune: sparta - while oceana sleeps
today was the worst day of my "sysadmin" job at k2. Due to My own carelessness. Our secretary's computer caught a light sneeze you would think that since that strain of the virus was released in february, that we'd be all patched up. and we were. symantec client security had been stopping it in it's tracks since february. what changed? I installed the RTM version of SP2 to all our workstations. since i had to go to each workstation individually (our server runs NT 4.0, and is unable to rollout policy changes), i figured it was worth individually installing and locking out the new windows firewall by group policy. the firewall is beyond redundant, since we have stately packet inspection at our perimeter via a netgear firewall router, and personal firewall via symantec client firewall.
apparently, because i ran the install overnight, i forgot to set group policy settings on the secretary's computer. while you would think this would make her more secure (3 firewalls to everyone else's 2), it doesn't. what it does is block her symantec client security from conacting the central server. thus, no live update, no central quarantine, nobody checking to see if it's dealing with virii properly.. and on and on. it was that way since august 20th. then, today, of the million e-mails she gets, one of them convinced her to open it. harsh luck that the workstation i fuck up is the one that recieves the most e-mail viruses.
so, mydoom runs amuck in our system deleting 60% of M$ Excel files and 40% of M$ Word files. fine, we have tape backup. takes a few hours, but all our files are safe. except that, since we don't have the manuals or tech support for the tape software, i can't figure out how to get our 100GB of data to span more than one 40GB tape without a tape robot. Since the only version of Veritas' software we have is designed for enterprise systems, not small business networks. so employee files weren't backed up. fortuantely lyle came through on one thing, after claiming to be "unable" to help me install SP2, whereby he might have caught my one mistake. one of his friends works in anti-hacker related computing, and uses file scavenger on hard drives the fugitives didn't manage to put a shotgun blast through before being arrested. best $40 ever spent.
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11 Jan 2006 at 11:28 pm
a laundry list of hand-wringing apologies » Free Software for Windows
[...] Office/Word Processing OpenOffice.org back before microsoft started requiring activation for it’s office products, all the cool kids in school had cracked copies of it. all the losers were stuck with the wordperfect that came with their dell paperweights. that’s over now. openoffice a full office suite: presentations (read:powerpoint), word processing, spreadsheets, page layout (read:pagemaker). the only complaints about it are that it doesn’t have a database (read:access) program, and that not all macros translate perfectly. given that i’m an architect, and none of my documents are that complex, none of this has affected me. I’ve been using this at work and at home for two years, and haven’t had any issues. Bonus: when a vius decides to delete all your files, it won’t bother with OOo’s native format. (anything you’ve saved as a microsoft format for sending to coworkers is fair game, though). [...]
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