A Mind Lost

This is a long-standing annoyance of mine. Why is it that when we buy a new PC, be it a laptop or desktop, it has to have a whole bunch of stickers right on the front completely ruining the look of your new machine?

These stickers are annoying for several reasons:

• They are always stuck on with a glue which is ridiculously difficult to remove.
• Often they are not even on straight.
• They tell you what you already know (It has Windows XP installed – great, I could see that from the blurb before I bought it thanks!)
• If they insist on sticking their crap advertising on a PC I’ve just paid for, they could at least find a less obtrusive spot on the back to do it.

I believe a campaign should be started to remove this blight from our technology!

  We had our third break-in in six weeks at the office last thursday morning.  They’ve broken in on Thursday morning every fortnight now.  After the first break-in, I installed a Panasonic BC-01 IP camera in the server cupboard in my office.  The second time they broke in, they didn’t turn the lights on so the images I got were just silhouettes, so I installed a PIR bulkhead light as a temporary light source.  This time, I got some images.  To begin with they were blurred as the camera appeared to struggle to set its focus and exposure.  Then I got a few good shots of the one intruder and a couple of decent ones of the second.

The police have the images and if they don’t find these two scumbags, I’ll be  looking into the legality of posting them online.

As you may have read from my earlier post, I have been investigating the use of a GSM modem attached to a server to warn me of system and security alerts. After a bit of web searching I came across a USB modem from RF Solutions. I ordered one to have a play with and when it arrived, all I had to do was insert a SIM card, install their software and I had it running, under Windows at least.

Under Linux, plugging the modem in on my recent Debian install detected the modem and installed it under /dev/ttyUSB0 at which point I thought it would be straight forward so I apt-get’d gsm-utils and tried to send a text:

gsmsendsms -d /dev/ttyUSB0 <phone_no> <message>

This failed and all commands to gsmctl also failed. The modem is actally a Teltonika USB/E10 so I emailed teltonika’s UK support office and was extremely impressed when I received a phonecall within ten minutes from a guy called Mark Dampster. He was out of the office but could receive emails so he thought he’d give me a call and tell me he’d send me any linux-specific documentation which teltonika had available as soon as he was back in the office. He later emailed me some basic documentation and a copy of the GSM AT command set.

After a great deal of trial and error, I discovered that running minicom would initialise the modem after which I could quit and be able to send messages. Of course upon restart, them modem was back in it’s unresponsive state. Minicom’s default initialisation command worked fine so I was hoping that issuing gsmctl -d /dev/ttyUSB0 -i <string> would work but I think that gsmctl needs to be able to communicate with the modem before it sends the init string so the command just hangs.

In order to get the GSM modem working reliably in case the server restarts, I have scripted minicom to start, initialise the modem and then ‘kill’ itself. This works by creating a script, here called initmodem.script which contains the following:

! killall -9 minicom
exit

Then in /etc/rc.local I inserted the following line:

minicom -S /usr/local/bin/initmodem.script

Now at least the modem is available and working at all times. If anyone knows a more elegant solution, I’d be interested to hear it.

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.