One of the gifts I got for Christmas is a Lexar Jumpdrive Secure 1GB usb drive.

I can’t go on enough about how handy this is! I work in a NOC (network operations center) which is set up with two mutually exclusive networks (production and local). Transfering files, ghost images, etc. is now a breeze! It’s way faster than uploading to another server and downloading again or burning a CD. This thing saves me massive time!

I’ve been trying to convince my boss that she should buy us each one for use at work (leaving mine for storing and moving porn at home).

I don’t care for the “secure” part of the drive (which is nothing more than an autorun.ini file and a folder with an application sitting in it). I’m going to see if I can remove that from the drive without making it useless.

In other news… we’re preparing for our New Year’s Eve bash at Casa de Toné. I’ve got a 17lb prime rib to coat in salt and slow bake (so people better get their asses over or I’ll be eating beef for the next month!). We will be having a Risk marathon (because it’s not a game, it’s a religion in my house).

Once again, the question of Harley Davidson’s “Made In America” claim has come under question on the forum.

I’ve been scouring the web trying to find a definitive answer to this question.

While there’s no doubt that the motorcycle manufacturer’s creations are assembled in this country by American workers, the actual percentage of parts used that are manufactured in this country by American owned companies is under debate. I’ve seen ranges from 51% to 95% but can’t seem to get an actual number from a reliable source.

Does anyone out there actually know?

Harley Davidson stock parts known to be manufactured abroad or by foreign companies in the US:

• Carburetor
• Speedometer
• Forks
• Shocks
• Electronics
• Turn Signals
• Wheels

I’m contemplating writing the Harley Davidson company to see if they’ll give me the answer.

Edit: There’s more to the burning question here

Christmas was good at Casa de WWBD!

My damn kids woke me at 7:00 am (what… is it THAT exciting?!?). By 7:30, I had a cup of coffee in me and was ready to do the days deed. A lot of wrapping paper met it’s fate this morning.

Big gift of the day for me:

Black & Decker Firestorm 24volt Cordless Combo Kit.

It includes: hammer drill, circular saw, reciprocating saw, and a stud finder. All kinds of sexy!!

After we opened everything up, had more coffee, showered, etc., it was time to jump in the car and head over to my Brother-in-law’s house for Christmas dinner. The food was excellent and so was the company (well.. mostly), but my wife and son weren’t feeling so hot, so we had to bail early.

We got home and watched Badder Santa on DVD, then I went down to install the present that Eddie got me: Battlefield Vietnam. After putting on a couple patches and the Point of Existence mod (1.32 GB worth of files to be exact), then uninstalling and reinstalling the mod again, I was in business. Beautiful game!

My son and I went online to try it out. We found a server with low ping and ruled the world for a few rounds, taking turns coming in first and second place. Good times!

Tomorrows plan: Grandma’s house!

I’ve spent the past good many hours cleaning crap up after those rocket scientists in Brazil decided to turn my server into so much trash.

Around 4:30 yesterday… every .php, .html, .htm page became exactly like this. This was caused by the NeverEverNoSanity WebWorm released by those damn spammers.

I updated the whole damn box, php included and spent the rest of the day cleaning up with help from an older backup (some of the kids I host who’s sites aren’t database driven may have to re-upload their stuff).

I did find the IP address where the files originated from and reported it to it’s ISP. I also made a report with the FBI in their Cyber Crimes department. Not that any of this will do any good.

Anyway… we’re live once again (though if you live in the country of Brazil, you’ll never know, because I blocked your whole damn country from being able to access this server).

Huge damn thanks to the following people for all their help with this:
Eve at ms-geek.net for all the helpful info
Jam at delcambres.com for alerting me it happened
Jester at linuxpunks.org for everything! I owe you soooo much!

Someone’s been having fun.

Jester was setting up spam assassin on the server and checked the running processes to verify that it was working. What he saw caused him concern.

Apparently, someone had gotten into the server and had left a few goodies: IRC bots, mail relay clients, etc. They were all running under the same rights as apache, so they didn’t get root access, but it was a wakeup call to us.

We upgraded all applications to the latest, greatest versions and did some research. We found that there was a security update a few days ago to one of the applications I run that fixed this kind of security hole (so we’re pretty sure that’s how they got in). Jester removed all the offending applications (which were spread all over the system in hidden directories) and a quick reboot got rid of all the zombie processes (all 53 of them).

Crap like this makes me really cranky.

Things look good for now, but I’ll be keeping a much closer eye on it in the future.