FlishFun.com

It’s been a few days since my last post… seems our conversion to a new domain (name and servers) for my company took a bit longer than I realized! I worked about 36 hours starting from when I got off on Friday @ 5:00 PM and when I came back at Monday @ 8:00 AM.

I’d say the conversion is a good 90% done… we had a total of around 160 users scattered over 5+ states and had never attempted something like this before. We just have some minor fires to put out and little details to finish and we’re done. Not bad for a team of 4 people (2 contractors and 2 corporate staff).

Anyway, that’s my update for the day… I’m just glad I got to get off work at a normal time today!!

Imagine, if you will, that you worked in a company without an IT staff… and the people who help you when you’re having issue have to drive an hour or so to get to you. Ouch, right? Now what if you have a few power outages/surges right in a row and no one at your place of business had bought a UPS for any PC? Add in the fact that suddenly after two of these outages a PC that handles important orders goes down (BSOD’s) and that no management is there that day (vacation) and you have yourself a problem, right?

Well, this situation happened to Jess just days ago. Now, as you all know, I’m in IT, so the first thing she thought to do is call me. She told me the BSOD, and we determined that there was a 99% chance it was a memory error. She then talks to the lady who’s having the issue and they agree they’d like me to come down and check it. Now, I’m a nice guy, so I use my lunch break to come test their system. I burn a copy of MemTest86+ and I go down there. Just seconds into the first test the system starts kicking out errors left and right, beautiful. She had two sticks of RAM in there so I take one out, run the full test, it’s good… I then swap it into the other mem slot to make sure it’s not the Mother Board… nope, still fine. I run one last test with the “bad” stick and it starts tossing errors. Great, she blew a stick of RAM.

I explain the results, tell her she needs to buy another, give her advice, etc. She’s happy, she can work, everyone’s happy. Wonderful. Fast forward to yesterday… the management is back and they’ve decided that it’s impossible for a power outage/surge to blow out RAM… I’m obviously trying to screw them over! One of the big wigs there decides that she will test the memory herself by putting it in a system and booting Windows a few times. Awesome test! I have no idea what they think I was trying to do:

Step 1. Lie about RAM.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!!

Seriously… there’s just no pleasing some people!

While I was imaging a laptop in the office today I noticed a connection named “Free Public Wifi” on the Windows Wireless Network Connection screen. I found this quite odd for a few reasons…

1. It was a PC to PC connection
2. My office building is by an airport in the middle of nowhere
3. We have only two wireless connections in our building

Being the nosy person that I am, I thought I’d google to see if this is something others have seen. Imagine my (lack of) surprise… it’s a scam! It seems people are sitting around at airports and using this “free” wifi connection to get into your system… nice.

A quick snippet from the article:

The next time you’re at an airport looking for a wireless hot spot, and you see one called “Free Wi-Fi” or a similar name, beware — you may end up being victimized by the latest hot-spot scam hitting airports across the country.

You could end up being the target of a “man in the middle” attack, in which a hacker is able to steal the information you send over the Internet, including usernames and passwords. And you could also have your files and identity stolen, end up with a spyware-infested PC and have your PC turned into a spam-spewing zombie. The attack could even leave your laptop open to hackers every time you turn it on, by allowing anyone to connect to it without your knowledge.

If you’re a Windows Vista user, you’re especially susceptible to this attack because of the difficulty in identifying it when using Vista. In this article, you’ll learn how the attack works and how to keep yourself safe from it if you use Windows XP or Vista.

You can read the article here: Don’t fall victim to the ‘Free Wi-Fi’ scam @Computerworld

For the second day in a row now our new server room here at work has reached over 90 degrees by the time I’ve come in (it is also the second day in a row that I’ve been called before 7:00 AM). From what we can figure, the air conditioning unit is thinking that the outside temperature (around 10 degrees) is the inside temp, and instead of cooling, is heating. Why does it even know that it is cold outside? Well it looks like someone punctured the roof when working on it and that is causing the cold air to seep down to the air unit… nice.

Yesterday it got so hot that one of our phone cards started to malfunction and caused about 20 people here to go without their phones till we cooled it off (canned air works wonders in a pinch). We called someone out, he puttered around for an hour or so, and called it fixed. Great. Well last night it actually got so bad that one of our servers actually failed and shut itself down… luckily we were able to get it to come up, but it never should have gotten anywhere close to that point in the first place. The only way we’re getting it to cool down now is actually having a giant fan blowing the hot air out of the room, which we have wide open… it looks ridiculous, but at least it’s working. We have a call in for people to not only fix the roof, but hopefully to disable the heating unit, period. I don’t care if it’s 40 degrees in there, I’ll wear a coat.

I swear, it better be an icebox in there tomorrow morning or heads will roll…