mcbeen.com

Found this most interesting MacGyver moment walking to lunch today.
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In typical “helpful” MS fashion, they have helped the world by taking down the site of one of the best ani spyware vendors. Since the link is gone to the download, you can get it from here:
Giant Antispyware

On a drive over to reno this weekend, I discovered an interesting sight. I found a tree and landscape completely covered in frost gowth. It kind of looked like someone had ripped up a bunch of post cards and the stuck them in the branches of everything.

Upon closer look, I discovered that this one tree had astounding frost growth on it measuring in at over 8 inches in places.

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I’ve been working with HP trying to figure out what we can do here about these phones. It is not a simple problem. Most hardware can deal with multi-link loopback conditions using technology like spanning tree, but how the hell do you handle a loopback on the same link? It is technically impossible to do unless you actually go ahead and create a cable with shorted out pins, or litterally looped the wires back into the connector. It is not condition you would normally ever see by accident.

So far I have had limited success. Spanning tree has been usefull in limiting how many loopbacks I get on the switch. It will shut down all loopbacked ports except one. The second step was to turn on flood control (throttling). This keeps the ports from shutting down the entire switch with broadcast storms.

The final solution is to get HP to patch the switch to sense this insane condition and shut down the port. I have no idea when I will get that.

This is another fun photo. Take a good look at the signage

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I’m moving into a scary time now. My boss is on medical leave for a month while I’m alone maintaining our network. We have two positions open… Anyone want a job?

It will suck being with out her for so long. I have to say that she is easily the best boss I can ever hope to have.

If you answered yes, then I am living your wish. I don’t know how long it can last, but I’m enjoying it while I can. Here’s to hoping she makes a speedy recovery!

Go take a look at these photos…

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Clicking on the image will take you to the photo library to see larger versions.

Last thursday, I had another Dell machine hard crash the disk drive. I’m not really sure why so many Dell machines crash this way. Anyways, I was not sure at the time that the problem was the disk drive. I could not boot windows, and I could not reinstall windows without disk errors. I have had similar problems on hp machines that were caused by wrong ram modules being installed.
So, after testing a few things out, and getting a disk failure message in the diag util, I called Dell up to ask advice. The tech was convinced it was a drive failure, and he convinced me too after about 15 minutes of corrolating symptoms. He went ahead and sent me a drive.
If I had known it was a drive failure, I would never have called them. I have been through too many refurb disks with these guys to screw around with that. I always put brand new disk drives in machines. It’s cheaper in the long run.
You can imagine my shock when I opened the Dell repair box to see a shiny new shrink wrapped sealed drive inside. I could not believe it. They sent me a new drive. I had already built the machine with a drive of the same model, so I did not use it, but put it on the shelf for next time.
May be these guys are finally waking up. Melissa was able to get a new TFT panel out of them last week without even a fight. I sure hope they are coming out of thier funk.

So. Where to start.

Just to show that I am an equal opportunity bitcher, I had an hp d530 ultra slim blow a motherboard last week. hp was nice enough to send me a used motherboard to replace it. Unfortuantely, they did not make sure it was usable before shipping it. The video connector was mostly broken off the board. They did not argue and sent me working used board. At least it works now. TAKE NOTES DELL!!!! [sigh]

Ok, so… the fun of my day today. Everyone is really keen on all these lovely cisco IP phone we have now. I have to say the whole thing has been quite mixed from my point of view. On a scale of 1 to 10, our success runs in the 3-4 range.
And now that I have discovered the most wonderful “feature” ever, I can tell everyone I know to run away from these pieces of shit screaming. As fast as you can. Are you ready? You sure?

Every cisco IP phone ever made is a network time bomb. Every fucking one. Want proof? Read this:

If the phone is not powered by an AC power adapter and the phone is connected to an Ethernet switch that does not provide POE support, the circuit inside the phone’s uplink port remains closed. In this state, any traffic sent by the switch to the phone may loop back to the switch and create a loop back storm that disables the entire VLAN.

This may mean nothing to most of you non network admins, but all you real admins right now are shuddering. Read that again to just make sure you fully understand the situation.

It took out one of my branches last night. A cleaning lady knocked a powersupply loose. Took everything out: Security, atm, teller machines, phones, everything. And it can happen to anyone. Any company that has IP phones, and a mix of POE and non POE ports on thier system (everyone), are in danger. Just imagine little Suzie moving some stuff around in her cube, and accidentally plugging her computer and phone into the opposite ports. POOF the main vlan for the comapny is now DEAD! By design no less. Here is another quote for you:

Devices that are capable of receiving POE, such as Cisco IP Phones, close the loop back circuit on their uplink Ethernet port when they are powered down to enable the POE discovery pulse message to be looped back to the switch.

Again, you might want to read that twice. Cisco ip phones use the biggest mistake in networking to power themselves up. It is completely unnessesary as well. 802.3af uses resistance and capacitance on the line to determine the same thing. And it is backward compatible to NOT take your network down. how quaint.

Cisco is quick to trumpet the fact that cisco hard ware is “immune” to this problem. They claim that their hardware has loopback recovery features to prevent the vlan from crashing down. Just one problem. It shuts down real live working servers. cisco has shut down their own fucking Call Manager software (phone switch) on our network three times due to “errors”. The problem has been remedied by moving the server to an HP switch that does not suck.

Full doc on this “feature” can be found here