A Mind Lost

  I’m trying a new look to the blog, based on the GridLock-K2 style for the WordPress K2 theme.  I was having trouble getting the sidebar to appear at the side instead of the bottom, but found a modified gridlock.css file which fixed it.  I want to define the sidebar elements a little more as they look at bit basic at the moment so I’ll hopefully be digging into the CSS in the next few days to smarten everything up a bit.

I found some decent guides to tweaking the K2 theme on the blog of Paul Stamatiou:

• Customizing K2:  Part 1
• Customizing K2:  Part 2
• Customizing K2:  Part 3
• Customizing K2:  Part 4
• Customizing K2:  Part 5

I have finally carried out an upgrade of WordPress, the engine that powers this blog, to v2.3.2 which fixes a significant number of bugs. I must admit I have been a little lax in keeping WordPress up to date. Until today it was running on v2.1 which contains a number of security flaws fixed in later revisions. I need to pay more attention to these security updates in future.

If you find any bugs or problems, let me know!

While we’re on the subject of the WordPress, does anyone else feel the constant desire to keep fiddling with their theme? I’ve used this theme for a while now and keep thinking I should switch, but then I think that’s just me wanting to mess about with new stuff!

Last week at the office, one of our phone lines went down. This particular phone line is in my own office and has our broadband running over it and it gets used for dial-up corporate banking and accounts fax facilities. The broadband was still working but calls out resulted in a message “the number you have dialled has not been recognised” and calls in gave the message “this number does not receive incoming calls”.

I called our service provider who chased up the problem with BT and called me back. The response opened up a can of worms which has huge ramifications. Apparently, the line has been transferred back to BT and BT will no longer talk to our service provider about it since they have nothing to do with it! I had to call BT and got the runaround a few departments until someone told me that not only had the line been transferred back to BT, for which I got the blame since apparently this cannot happen without the customer requesting it, but it was now in a different company name. The address is still the same but the company is one which has never occupied this address and no-one has ever heard of it. Our building is 30,000+ square feet and we take up half of the road so there is no way anyone can be using the same address.

Next problem, the line was transferred back in April and since no-one has paid the bill it has been disconnected. No-one could have paid the bill because no bill has been sent and no bill could have been sent because the company on the bill doesn’t exist!

Now, here’s the real crunch, not only will BT not discuss it with our service provider, they will also not discuss it with me because we are not the owners of the line, even though they insist that we must have requested the transfer back to BT! They also told me that I can expect the broadband to get switched off as well as soon as it filters through to the ADSL side of the business.

Our service provider has raised an urgent investigation with their BT account manager. In the meantime, I have ordered a replacement line at our cost. Once that is installed our provider can arrange with BT to get ADSL enabled on it. I doubt if this will all happen before we lose our broadband so I need to make alternative arrangements to get some kind of email and MSN facility up and running.

I enquired with our service provider what would have happened if BT had snatched the main company phone number instead. The answer is that our six line switchboard would have been dead for two weeks while they installed new lines. How do they expect a business with a £12 million turnover and 40+ employees to operate without phones for a fortnight?

There also doesn’t appear to be any way for an order to jump the queue even though a huge cockup has been made. BT has basically stolen our phone number and line and we just have to accept it and join the queue to be reinstalled.

One final moan. Why can’t BT install a line AND activate ADSL on it AT THE SAME TIME? It takes six working days to install a line and only then can the provider request ADSL which takes up to fourteen working days. The same engineer could do the whole thing while he’s there the first time. Its ****ing stupid!

The whole sorry mess is a farce and I land the blame squarely at BT’s door. The arrogance they have shown is unbelievable. The only retribution I have is that I have a say in which provider is used for the IT services of a group of 15 companies and I will make it my mission that BT sees none of that business.

It’s just occurred to me that in all the years I’ve been using the web, I’ve yet to come across an online purchasing system as quick and effective as play.com. Once your a registered customer, the whole checkout experience is a couple of clicks away yet it has the flexibility to store several cards and several delivery addresses. If you want your default settings, you just buy, click and click and you’re done. Companies like Amazon get all the praise with their so-called ‘one-click’ checkout but it lacks all of the elegance of play’s system.

I’ve just had to arrange a replacement for a DVD which didn’t arrive thanks to the good old Royal Mail and even that was a simple process. Login, order history, view order, click ‘haven’t received it’, select refund or replacement and that’s it. Five minutes later I got an email saying that the replacement had been ordered and would be shipped ASAP.

That’s how easy it should always be.

We had a break-in at the office last week. I got a phone call from one of the other Directors telling me that someone had broke into the factory and broke through into the offices and that my office was “a right mess”. Since my office has the server cupboard in it my immediate reaction was that I was facing any IT Admin’s worst nightmare – the loss of all the physical servers.

Of course, I have a backup on tape which is cycled off-site every night on a rotation basis. However, backups can give a false sense of security for several reasons:

• The backup script may not be working. Automation breeds laziness. When was the last time you checked your backup?

• Is the backup copying ALL of your data? You may have added directories to the server outside the scope of the backup.

• If a backup is on tape, will a new tape drive read the data OK?

• The backup is inherently out of date, particularly is you have to resort to the last off-site backup.

• You’ve still lost all of the servers which must be rebuilt, reinstalled/re-imaged and then the data restored from backup.

Luckily, when I got to the office, I was relieved to see all PCs and servers still in place and intact. The office was a mess in that papers had been thrown everywhere, cabinets forced open and small electricals stolen. A poor image on the CCTV shows a single youth prowling round, probably looking for quick sellable items and cash.

However, the experience has woken me from my comfortable sleep and I am checking everything now to improve the physical data security of the systems. Steps taken so far include:

• Review of the backup scripts. Several errors were found including a full backup drive meaning that all data was not being backed up.

• Installation of an IP camera in the server cupboard. Anyone opening the cupboard out of hours gets a dozen photos of their face emailed to me off-site.

• Construction of a ‘covert’ backup server which is basically a Mini-ITX box with a large hard drive which is deployed above the false ceiling in the opposite end of the building to the servers. It rsyncs a full backup of the file/mail/database/intranet servers twice a day. If anyone steals the servers, I have a full backup on-site which they can’t even find! Hopefully, should a fire break out, it will not affect both ends of the factory.

• The purchase of a GSM modem which will be connected to the covert backup box which will also be employed to do network monitoring and will send me an SMS message if anything is amiss.

I feel confident I’m covering all the bases but if anyone has any suggestions I’d be happy to hear them.

In a bizarre show of logic this week, the Chinese Government has ruled that buddhist monks living in Tibet must seek government permission if they wish to reincarnate.

As this article points out, although the idea to prevent an spiritual act of faith which, should it be even possible, would be difficult prove or prevent is wholly absurd, it has an ulterior motive firmly grounded in the physical world. The aim is to control who the next Dalai Lama will be, since they can simply deny the current one the permission to reincarnate and hence his sole cannot be reborn.

It’s kind of clever in a pointless kind of way!

I recently started having a strange problem with Excel 2007. All of my regular financial spreadsheets have shortcuts on the desktop so they are always at hand. In the last 10 days I’ve had problems opening them from these links.

Double clicking on the shortcut opens Excel but no spreadsheet. If I click around between other applications including the open copy of excel a few times, the file will suddenly appear but If I leave it to it’s own devices it never opens. If I close Excel down before the file has opened I get a Windows error message telling me that it couldn’t find the file. If I open excel and then open any of the files from the recent files list, they open straight away even though they are the same files I’m trying to open from the desktop shortcuts!

Today, I accidentally stumbled across the solution to the problem. I loaded two shortcuts one immediately after the other which brought up two excel instances, one which appeared to be working, although it did not load the file, and another which was just a window frame and a white page. After a few seconds it was obvious nothing was going to load so I closed the crashed one down. Excel popped up a small progress bar as it tried to close and then the ‘normal’ looking excel window popped up a warning telling me that there was a Sage Excel add-in which was malfunctioning and did I want to disable it. Disabling it loaded the file immediately and now all of my shortcuts are working again!

As it happens I had upgraded our Sage Line 50 installatiion from v11 to v13 last week and hadn’t linked the excel problems to the same point in time. I had no idea there was even a Sage Excel add-in. I’ve never used it and I can see no reason why it would only cause problems for files being loaded from a shortcut. It seems it’s just one of those many little incompatibilities which creep in undetected.

I keep an eye on the blog of Dick Morrell who was the founder and creator of the Smoothwall firewall. Smoothwall was a revelation in internet security since you could simply install the software on an old PC and use it as the secure gateway between the internet and your internal network and it was free and open source. It’s functionality was otherwise only available from bespoke appliances costing from hundreds to thousands of pounds. When Dick parted company with smoothwall after making it a technical and financial success, it took a more commercial path and a fork of the open source version was created call IP-Cop.

Dick is not what I would call a people person, his impatience with the users his software created are almost legendary and he is hated by some on the net. However, he knows his subject well and is regarded highly in the internet security field, having headed the security team at NTL/Virgin amongst others, so his personal short-comings can be overlooked to some extent.

In a recent post, Dick highlighted a new modular approach to the Smoothwall-type solution known as Untangle. This is installed on a PC in the same way, although it requires a slightly higher spec, but it allows functionality to be installed as required in the form of application modules which appear as part of a software rack through a slick-looking GUI. The applications include spam blocking, web filtering, virus blocking, spyware blocking, firewall, VPN and more. Almost all of the functionality is open-source and they have a professional offering which includes improved remote access and customer support. They also provide pre-installed servers. All in all, this exciting project looks to compete with appliances from sonicwall, watchguard etc.

I’m going to try and find some time to check the project out and get a box running to see what it can do and where it’s at so far.

Today I received an interesting new take on the phishing scam which is designed to get you to enter personal information for credit card and identity theft. It takes the form of an email claiming to be from HM Revenue & Customs inviting you to visit a website and give details so that they can process a tax refund to you. The email is shown below:

The website is sends you to is correctly identified by Firefox as a forgery and asks for address and credit card details as you can see from the image below:

(not currently online)

Will this catch out people who don’t fall for the bank phishing scams?

Update: More research on this has shown this BBC article from December 2006 but as ever the scammers have improved the quality of the forgery and the email and website are now more convincing to the unexpecting eye. This scam has also seen quite a bit of activity in the states in the last 12 months. It looks like the UK can expect more of the same.

I had a requirement this week to purchase a new basic network printer from one of our shop-floor users since their old on died. I opted for an HP 2015N and it duly arrived. Today I had to install the thing and I have no idea what HP think they are playing at but the installation routine is a farce!

All I wanted to do was install the printer and assign it an IP address before I went down and installed it on the shop floor.

So, I put the CD in and the autorun brought up the first screen and immediately crashed, reporting a missing library file from an Office 12 directory on my system. What that has to do with their printer software I have no idea! Next I got to a screen giving me two options, one for a full install with all the tools, including the one to configure the network settings and the other for a minimal “drivers only” install. The size of these installs were 250MB and 150MB respectively! What can any printer possible do that requires a minimum install of 150MB?!!! I remember the good old days when a Star LC-10 colour dot matrix had a driver of about 20KB! Anyway, I needed to install the damn thing so I opted for the “big” install. It trundled away for a while and I saw the printer pop up as new hardware in the system tray. The software gave me an option for either a USB connection or a network connection. I opted for the network connection hoping it would scan and find the printer. No such luck, so I had to go back and plug the USB in and choose the USB option. The software wouldn’t find it even then so I tried printing a test page which came out straight away but still the software couldn’t find the printer.

Undeterred I thought I’d cancel and try installing the network config utility directly from the CD so I cancelled the installation. This removed all the files it had installed, including the printer drivers and insisted that I reboot the PC. After the restart, I tried installing the HP FX utility directly and the .msi package would not do anything so I was forced to re-run the original installation. When it still couldn’t find the printer (despite the fact that I could print to it!) I wondered if it didn’t like my USB hub so I connected it straight to a USB port and it worked!

Just to finish off my frustration, the damn software insisted on rebooting after installation!

I cannot get over the bloat and unnecessary crap which printer manufacturers are building into their printer drivers and it gets worse every year. How come the installation of our HP 2430N printers was a simple case of a 30 second driver install and this thing wanted 250MB of my hard drive? All a driver has to do is tell an operating system how to talk to it and there is no way that this task requires a “minimum” install of 150MB and certainly should not require a reboot of the system!