Not Necessarily Interesting News

Last weekend I decided to upgrade our Tivo. We bought the basic 40hour model last winter and have been more and more getting really close to running out of space. Fry’s had 200GB Western Digital hard drives on sale for only $55 without any rebate hassles.
I followed the instructions from http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/ and swapped the original 40GB HDD for the 200GB in about 30 minutes. This includes copying over the data from the original drive to the new one.
I plugged it back into the TV and powered it on. I looked in the system info menu and we now have a 220 hour Tivo. The little guy has been recording its head off. No more running out of stuff to watch. I’ve got 10 CSI episodes ready to watch at all times. The kid has a good selection of educational programs and cartoons in Tivo’s KidsZone. We wonder why we waited this long to do the upgrade.

Woohoo! We got tix to the BNL concert on 11-11 here in Austin. It took us 20 minutes to get through with 3 people calling and 5 computers hammering the website. Decent tix too. Center section, row 15, center of row. Last time our tix were way back and the stage was partially obscured by a large oak tree. That won’t be a problem this time.

We got to see them two years ago here too. I believe that was their first sucessful concert in Austin the prvious two tries were rained out. We’re taking our 10 year old son to see them too. He knows all their songs and is looking forward to going.

My son’s birthday is this week. He’s been begging for the longest time for a trampoline. We finally caved and got together with a few family members to get him one for the backyard. We picked up a nice 14′ trampoline with a full net on it. The net was at mom’s insistence. No trampoline was going to be at our house without one.
It took about 30 minutes to setup the trampoline and another hour and a 1/2 to do the cage. We have a prefectly sized spot in the backyard under the shade of a few pecan trees. The trampoline is shaded from sunrise to sunset so, even in the Texas summer heat, you don’t overheat too badly.
After we got it setup we played for a bit on it. Here it is, two days later, and my stomach oblique muscles are sore as hell. You don’t realize how much of a workout it is until you go at it for a while. It’s one form of aerobic excersize I actually enjoy so maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have it back there. Now I’ve got to wait on my muscles to heal before I go again. 🙂

I sit here wondering why I was spared but not my friends. This week there was a round of layoffs at work. 1/3rd of my group was let go. Some in the most unprofessional manner I’ve ever seen.

We were playing poker at my place and one of my friends went out early so headed home. We got a call from him a 1/2 hour later saying that he’d been let go. Via voicemail. ‘Hey, you’re unemployed and your badge no longer works. Have a nice life.’ My other co-worker called his house and heard the news from his wife. The fucking company called his home and told his wife, basically, ‘Hey, your husband’s unemployed. Have a good night.’

I hadn’t heard anything, but since I had less seniority than the others, I assumed I was toast too. I tried calling my manager at home but couldn’t get her. I decided to just try heading in to work at midnight to see if my badge still worked. It did. I grabbed all my stuff from my office just-in-case and headed home to see what happened.

Thursday I went in to work and it appeared I still had a job but many, many others didn’t. Now we’re expected to take up the slack but are not going to be able to do so. We were understaffed before and now we are so understaffed it’s hilarious. There was no time to cross-train in jobs. Most jobs have backup people. In our case they managed to layoff primaries and backups at the same time so we’re lost without a clue as to how to pickup the pieces.

I guess I have survivor’s guilt. It’s tough when people are laid off. It’s worse when it’s your friends and poker buddies.

Things have been very busy around the household as evidenced by my lack of posts lately.

We went to Padre Island National Seashore again with my Land Rover club. Always a good time. The weather was beautiful. About as perfect as I’ve ever seen.

We got the boat fixed finally. Just in time for summer. Also apparently just in time for thunderstorm season. We keep getting rained out of going to the lake. Luckily the only problem with the boat was a baseball hat sucked into the impeller. A quick 5 minute fix in the driveway and it was good as new. It was a one-in-a-million shot to get that thing wedged in there like that so that’s why we assumed it was something more costly.

Last week my wife cut open her leg very badly and had to get 8 stitches. She was running through the garage and my son had left open a tool box. She caught her leg on it and laid it open really good. That earned us 4.5 hours in the ER while waiting to get it stitched up. If you’re going to get injured don’t do it on a Monday afternoon/evening. It’s the busiest time at the ER.

Last weekend we worked a Ducks Unlimited shoot with my son’s Young Marine platoon. Lots of fun. The Young Marines run the traps for the shooters then clean up afterwards. It’s part of their community service requirments of being in the organization.

For Father’s Day I took my father and son fishing on Lake Travis. We knew that the fishing would suck as it’s summer and some storms rolled through overnight but we really just wanted to go out and BS while drowning earthworms. We all managed to catch something though so it wasn’t a total loss. Getting up before dawn to go out though is always tough for me. 4:45AM is a bedtime not a time to wake up.

I had to drive to Fort Worth today to pick up some new wheels for my Defender so we decided to make a family day of it. We got up early and hit the road. First stop, West, Texas to get some kolaches at the Czech Stop. I think there’s some sort of rule that if you’re driving between Austin and DFW that you must stop there for some of those awesome pastries. We stocked up on hot sausage kolaches and some apple ones for a snack later.

We hit Ft Worth at 10:30 and met the guy that I was buying my wheels from. On our way into town we noticed that they had southbound 35W closed down to one lane and the same with 820E. Well, we’ll take the loop around town to the west to get back to I-35 south. As we passed the airbase we saw the Blue Angels getting ready to take off. If we’d have known we would have changed around our trip to go see them. Too late now. As we passed the airbase I remembered something that was somewhere southwest of Fort Worth but I wasn’t quite sure where. I pulled out a map and the GPS and set a course for Dublin, TX about an hour southwest of town.

If you’re from Texas you probably know what’s in Dublin. The original Dr Pepper bottling plant. The plant also holds the distinction of being the only Dr Pepper bottler that still uses cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. We drove into town and straight to the plant/soda shop. We were surprised at exactly how small the place was. We got tickets for the tour and grabbed a bottle of DP while we waited. I like Dr Pepper but never went too far out of my way to get it. This stuff was so much better than the normal soda. It doesn’t taste as ‘syrupy’ I guess you could say. My son and I finished off the 8oz bottle in a couple minutes. The tour was interesting and looking at the years of memorabilia was pretty neat. During the tour they give you more Dr Pepper to drink. After the tour we grabbed some DP to take home and hit the road. After we left I realized I totally forgot to take any pics of the tour. Dummy.

The rest of the drive was through miles and miles of ranchland. I love doing long drives like this. I find it quite relaxing.

Today was the company car show. Yes, our company has an employee car show every year. There were about 80 cars entered of all types. Everything from little 50cc dirt bikes to a Hearse.

I entered in the off-road and racing class. There were a whopping three cars in the class. Mine, a spec-racer, and an old vw-buggy. During the awards the spec-racer was picked by the judges as best-in-class. I had won this last year so wasn’t too upset. I got to talk to all the former J**pers about their glory days and how much they always wanted a D-90. I figured after they announced the winner in my class that that was it and I had to get back to work so wandered back to my office.

About an hour later a cow-orker dropped by and said congrats. I said, ‘thanks for rubbing in my loss, bastard’. He said, ‘um, you won People’s Choice. Where were you?’ ‘Yeah, right’ was my response. He went back to his office and the show was over so I went down to pull my truck off the ramps I use to twist the suspension. I got to my truck and, sure enough, there was the People’s Choice trophy sitting on my hood. Wow. I beat out fully restored Ford Fairlanes, dozens of Vettes.

I heard the Vette club wasn’t too happy. I spent all of 2 hours cleaning up the truck after I had it out mudding last weekend. The exterior looked decent from 20 feet but up close it was a mess. I had a few pics of it offroading pasted in the window. I talked to a few people and they said they voted for mine because I actually used it for its intended purpose instead of it being a garage queen. Sweet. I’ve taken a first place trophy of some sort in every show I’ve entered.
After all that, I took zero pics of my own truck in the show. I did get some pics of the other cars though.

Late last year we got a load of tile from a friend that they couldn’t use. It’s been sitting in the garage since then. This weekend we finally got time to get around to re-tiling our entryway. The original linoleum tile was not the most lovely but it wasn’t ancient when we moved in so we left it where it was.

Friday night I got home from work and started ripping out the old stuff. There were two layers of the stuff there and we attacked it with small chisels and a giant tile scraper. Pulling up the 25 year old bottom layer took nearly 3 hours.

Saturday morning we woke up bright and early to start laying the new tile. We decided to run to Lowe’s to grab some accent tiles to compliment the new tile. We figured without the accents the floor would be rather boring. After planning out what the pattern would look like I realized my little hand operated tile cutter wasn’t going to be up to the task. The pattern called for every single tile to be cut in some way. We rented a large wet saw to do all the cutting. Without it we’d have never gotten things done.
We had a good system going. I’d cut the tile, my wife would lay the mortar, and my son would lay and space the tile. Laying all the tile took us about 3-4 hours. After using the tile saw all day I decided I’ve got to get myself one of those.
This morning we woke up and got around to doing the grout. This only took us about another hour. After all the cleaning and such was done we ended up with what we thought was a pretty damn good job. I’ve done tile work before and actually enjoy doing it. I guess if things don’t work out in the IT career path then I’ve got a backup.

This past weekend was Texas Rovers’ annual SCARR(South Central America Rover Rally) event held at Barnwell Mountain in northeast Texas. About 80 trucks turned up for a weekend of wheeling, eating, drinking, and socializing.

Thursday afternoon we in the Austin chapter hooked up with folks from the San Antonio chapter and started the 6 hour long trek to our nirvana. We weren’t allowed to go wheeling Thursday because the park was offically closed. They were nice enough to let us in early to setup camp though. After camp was set up before sunset we had nothing to do. Well, nothing to do but drink and play loud offensive music. We did this well past midnight.

Friday started our first real play day. We started off with a few easy trails to get limber and wait for hangovers to settle down and aspirin to kick in. Our first tough trail was one called Polititian. Supposedly a 3 diamond trail. (Trails out there are rated from 1-4 diamonds. Our trucks should be able to easily handle any 3 diamond and some 4 diamonds.) Last year this trail ate 4 trucks. Bent trailing arms were the order of the day then. Only one out of 7 trucks made the climb without damage or being winched last year. We wanted revenge. We kind of got it. We did get all the trucks that wanted to try up the last pitch. No damage other than hurt pride of those that needed winching. I, sadly, was one of those.

It doesn’t look like much but that’s a 2 foot ledge hiding in the shadows under my truck and those holes dug out in front of my truck made for a traction nightmare. Gaze upon my shame.

Chris’s D-90 earned a couple bruises on Clyde’s Ravine here.

Here’s Chris conquering Twister. We were looking at it deciding if we’d make it. Right then a Rubicon driver walks up and said he made it but didn’t think we could. We took the challenge and made it up without problem. And without lockers. Screw you, Jeep dude.

Scott’s Disco playing on a tight trail. Cleared the tree by about an inch.

One of the chapter members is a chef and hooked us up. He helped us perpetuate the Land Rover driver image. We had folks wandering over from other camps asking what we were cooking and we’d lift the lid on 15 lobster tails and stacks of ribeyes. They’d look back at their hotdog and nearly cry. For lunch the next day it was bacon-wrapped filet mignon and caviar. That’s how we roll, bitch

Waiting to start trail runs.

After breakfast I volunteered to lead a trail run. I had about 8 trucks in my group and we hit a few 3-diamond trails. I’d go through first then spot them coming after me. There’s nothing more nerve-racking then being soley responsible for someone’s $60K truck coming down a tough trail. If they follow your directions and something goes wrong that damages their truck, or worse hurts someone, you’d never forgive yourself. Luckily the worst thing to happen under my lead was some scratches from trailside branches.

Particularly hairy trail called Binder Boulevard. I hadn’t run it before leading a group down it. I ran it without a spotter and came close to rolling two different times. I’m still picking pieces of seat cushion out of my ass. Sadly there are no pics of my run. After watching some of the more hardy trucks struggle down this, 1/2 the crew decided to take a pass and head in for lunch. Pussies.

Even old SeriesIIs came out to play.

Descent of right side of Sierra Skyview. After I finished my run my spotter, Chris, who talked me into doing the run, said there was no way in hell he’d do it. Fucker. This was probably the scariest run all weekend. The hill was so steep that you were constantly on the edge of losing traction and going barreling downhill. This was evidenced by the scars on trees and tire marks running off randomly into the forest.

Bone stock LR3/Disco3. This thing still had the sticker in the window. They had bought it only 3 days earlier I believe. They had been sticking to bunny trails and we convinced them to follow us down a 3-diamond trail to show them what their trucks can really do. After an hour with us they were already talking about what upgrades they were going to buy. Someone somewhere owes us some commisions.

If you ever wanted a better look at a Defender suspension, here you go. My next mod is to replace those wimpy ass trailing arms.

Joe’s Disco grabbing air.

And I didn’t enter.

All in all a good weekend. Hanging out and getting stupid in our trucks was a blast and the food and drink couldn’t have been better. My truck earned a few battle scars(dented slider and brush guard and scratches from trees) but performed flawlessly. No one had any major mechanical problems and everyone was able to leave under their own power on Sunday. In most cases these trucks are people’s daily drivers and it takes balls to go throw them around on trails on a weekend like this.

I had problems sending out email over the weekend and couldn’t figure it out. I was getting email but discovered that outbound was getting relay refused by my smarthost. They had disabled me because they claimed I was an open relay. I knew that wasn’t right. I started poking around in my logs and found a whole bunch of outbound emails to random addresses but nothing inbound that I was relaying. Everything seemed to be coming from inside my machine.

Hmmm. Weird. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been spamming the world. I looked and everything was being sent by my apache user. Ok, not good. I couldn’t figure out why it was doing this. I had no formmail or any other way to email me, or anyone else, from my site. I started digging in logs and found some very interesting lines in my apache2 error log. They were very long and were calling a page on my site I didn’t even remember having. Reading the lines I realized that they were exploiting a security hole in a piece of software I had forgotten I’d even installed. It was ages ago. I installed it, didn’t like it and removed it. When I had the hard drive crash last year I had restored from backup and apparently restored this file too.

First thing, move that file elsewhere until we figure out what’s going on. The exploit was rather ingenious. It could get my apache user to execute any code they felt like. This is where it gets funny. They’d get it to go out to a remote site and download a rootkit. Usually not a good thing. Then they’d command apache to run the exploit on my machine to give them root access so they could take over the box. Well, this is where they ran into problems. They’d try over and over to run their kit and it wasn’t seeming to work. Script kiddies aren’t that bright it seems. Here’s the ‘file’ output of one of their programs:

tony@www /tmp/hack $ file xxxxx
xxxxx: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.0.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

Here’s the ‘file’ output of one of the programs on my machine:

tony@www /tmp/hack $ file /usr/bin/w
/usr/bin/w: ELF 32-bit MSB executable, SPARC32PLUS, V8+ Required, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.4.1, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

Any 1/2way smart sysadmin will see there’s a big problem when it comes to running their code on my machine. Yeah, mine’s a Linux box but it’s not your average run-of-the-mill Linux box. Their code would never run on my machine. They tried dozens of times to get it to run and I’m sure pulled their hair out wondering why it wasn’t working. They left all kinds of rootkit toys in my tmp directory too. Thanks, guys!

Now, one very smart person did get code to run. He got my machine to send out spam emails using a clever perl script. Unluckily for him, my smarthost clamps down hard and fast when it sees more than 1,000 messages in a short time. That he got my machine to send spam pisses me off to no end but was easily killed. It’s kind of sad that a seemingly skilled programmer is using his talent for something like cracking machines and sending spam.

Knowing that my box wasn’t fully compromised makes me feel much better though.