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New toy, day two…

By on October 21, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

A little more study on the ThinkPad T40 leads to the great Linux On Laptops web site with some specific advice on the T40 models and a tremendous amount of details on setting up the millions of little devices – mouse buttons, touchpad, IR, video, sound, modem, ethernet, power management, volume control, wireless – whew! – that make a laptop such a pleasure to use.

After setting the hidden non-partition to “Secure” so that no application would attempt to overwrite it, I used an Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD to resize the WinXPPro NTFS partition down to 18 Gb and set up a boot, root, and swap partition and then install Ubuntu. I set up all the optional repositories that Ubuntu comes with, update the local machine with 200Mb of updates and reboot. Up and running and current. Pretty cool.

Restarting in Windows, WinXP started CHKDSK, since the partition size had changes and it completed and forced a reboot. On the second start, Windows cheerfully reported it had “installed new devices” and needed to restart. What new devices? Hmm. Restarted again. Sheesh.

OOBE as it was meant to be…

By on October 20, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Security, Technology

I've been holding off on purchasing a new laptop until IBM/Lenovo had a Linux-compatible ThinkPad T61p with the Merom (“Core 2 Duo”) CPU installed. “End of October” is the latest estimate, but knowing how long Real Soon Now can get to be, I elected to pick up a bench spare laptop Just In Case. My primary machine (“Lucky”) had a dead LCD, fried USB ports and a flaky wireless card. My older beater laptops have about bit the dust. I shopped around the BigBox stores and they were selling consumer junk. I looked at the Apples; they're sweet machines, but the software's still proprietary. If I was going to go for an Apple, I'd want to pick up a monster machine, and the budget doesn't allow that. So, for a while I was stumped. Finally, Laura suggested I look at a lower-model ThinkPad to tide me over.

IBM/Lenovo has a site for refurbished machines. I shopped over a couple of days. Keep an eye on the site, as inventory is changing often. I finally selected a T40, Pentium-M 1.5GHz, 256 Mb RAM (with a free upgrade to 512), 40 Gb HDD, WinXPPro, 1024×768 and CD-RW/DVD for just under USD $700.

With UPS ground shipping, it took less than a week to get here. The Out of Box Experience was perfect. Clean and well-packaged, the machine looked new. Other than a couple scratches on the serial number label, you'd think this thing had been vacuum-packed since it was manufactured in June of 2003. The HDD was a clean install of WinXP, and the “preinstallation” process took about an hour to install XP, forty million patches, IBM custom tools and drivers. A couple onerous registration forms (Yes, I want to register, no, I don't want you to have your “partners” send me mail) and I was up and running. First, a trip to Windows Update. A “new version” of Windows Update (the dreaded Windows Genuine Advantage check — I passed! Whew!) and I was up to date. I was surprised to find that Windows Firewall was not running — I had forgotten is was off by default, and was glad I was within a reasonable safe network as I raised the shields.

Next, a backup before I broke things. Booting onto a Knoppix CD, I followed the same process I used in July to upgrade Laura's hard drive: with the machine off, plug in an external drive and Knoppix, boot, Ctrl-F2 to a root console,

mkdir /media/target
mount /dev/sda1 /media/target
partimage


and in eleven and a half minutes, the 4.5 Gb is backed up. Magick!

I was suprised to see that the recovery partition isn't a partion at all, according to the machine, but unpartitioned space at the end of the drive. That makes it a bit more difficult to make a backup copy for the inevitable hard disk drive failure. IBM's help file tries to explain how this is a feature to keep you from mis-laying a Recovery CD (You'll have to order one from IBM when the hdd fails, it explains. Of course, it will be a little difficult to read the help file on the hdd to discover this once it's failed.) Google, of course, will point you to solutions that can work around pretty much any “feature” the vendor throws in there.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the machine, and it will work great as a stopgap between Lucky and the next machine, and at a good price. Now, off to tinker some more…

The good news: it's not an IE7 vulnerability. The bad news?

By on October 20, 2006 in Microsoft, Security

SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green is reporting New Internet Explorer and an old vulnerability, (Fri, Oct 20th). “As you probably know by now, Microsoft yesterday released the final version of Internet Explorer 7 …”

There was a great flap as Secunia grabbed the headlines by claiming that they had found a vulnerability in IE7. Not so, claims Microsoft! The vulnerability is in Outlook Express, installed by default on all Windows installations. And the flaw is a known one, seven months old. And it's unpatched.

So, how does a newer “secure” browser supporting an older, unpatched vulnerability, unfixed for over 200 days, mean we're more secure now?

InfoWorld: Microsoft re-releases a security patch

By on October 20, 2006 in Microsoft, Security

Microsoft reissues buggy patch for Windows 2000 users.

(InfoWorld) – Microsoft has reissued a Windows security patch that it published last week because the software did not work properly on Windows 2000 systems.

Folks running Windows 2000 servers, take note! Your machines are still vulnerable until you install this patch.

Microsoft to expand WGA to corporations

By on October 19, 2006 in Microsoft

Over at Microsoft Watch, Jason Brooks opines on the efforts Microsoft has spent to bring “Windows Genuine Advantage” to its corporate customers:

“What's worse, it appears that Microsoft has been expending significant development resources to make these expanded controls a reality. It seems to me that there's been a rather important and rather delayed product in the works that could've benefited from the developer hours that Microsoft had to devote to building the self-hosted activation server and associated tools required to bring WPA to Microsoft's biggest customers.”

There's an interesting challenge here: Microsoft may squeeze a few more licenses out of its corporate customers at the cost of alienating a few of them into switching to less difficult solutions.

Coming soon to a PC near you: more of the same

By on October 18, 2006 in Microsoft, Technology

In a June column, InfoWorld's Oliver Rist wrote, “Vista may just mark an OS revolution.” By September, the glitter of shiny things had worn off, and in “Vista's not so revolutionary after all.”

“I just finished previewing Vista Release Candidate 1 for the Test Center, and I suddenly realized I[base ']m more underwhelmed than I anticipated. A few months ago, in this very column, I used the adjective revolutionary instead of evolutionary. I[base ']m changing my mind.”

These positions are striking, and I wonder how much of that is due to the way Microsoft has spent millions positioning and repositioning the product. In the years (and years and years) before the product shipped, Microsoft regularly announced earth-shaking features that would make Longhorn/Vista the most incredible OS on the planet, keeping the buzz going among the techorati and tempting the early adopters. When the product finally (Finally!) is getting close to shipping (*exactly* on time, regardless of all of the press to the contrary), wouldn't it be in Microsoft's interest to make the new OS as harmless and uninteresting as possible, so that the vast majority of users just accepted it as an update and not a revolution? If the choice isn't revolutionary (read: risky), there's a lot less reason to consider alternatives like OS X or RedHat or SuSE.

It's the same disk file system, despite all the initial buzz over WinFS. It's the same AD-domain-group-user permission scheme, despite the fundamental security failings of that design. It's the same old desktop metaphor, albeit with outrageous demands for graphical processing power. (When the vast majority of business still gets by on black-and-white printouts of words and numbers in rows and columns, the point of enough GPU power to play video games at 10x7x32pp@120fps is baffling to me. What new information are they conveying in translucent dialog boxes?). It's the same old apps.

Where are the solutions to the hard problems? Where's universal and ubiquitous and secure access to your stuff? Where's immediate backup and recovery of all of your files, settings and gestures? Where's secure, unimpeachable, identification in a wallet where you control your personal information and can enforce iron-clad privacy? Where's simple wireless roaming? With five years in the making, thousands of employee's efforts and millions of dollars expended, where are the solutions that you can't download from any free Linux distribution? Where's the innovation?

Microsoft fought hard to be the dominant leader in the industry. It is sad to see them abdicate their leadership with yet another more-of-the-same product.

Yet another PowerPoint security exploit

By on October 14, 2006 in Microsoft, Security

InfoWorld: Application development reports: “Microsoft warns of new PowerPoint attack. Just days after patching four bugs in PowerPoint, Microsoft is warning of a new attack targeting its presentation software.”

Boy, Microsoft is just not catching a break this month! Don't open untrusted PowerPoints. Don't run as an admin – configure your day-to-day user account as a Least-Priviledged-User.

MS Patch Tuesday: 10 patches, 3 critical, all important

By on October 10, 2006 in Microsoft, Security

SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green does a far more thorough job than I can of summarizing Microsoft patch tuesday – October 2006 STATUS, (Tue, Oct 10th). “Overview of the October 2006 Microsoft patches and their status.”

A really quick summary: exploits in asp.net, in an IE “safe” ActiveX control, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, MSXML, Office, Publisher, the Server service, IPv6 and the Object Packager (wow! Haven't used that since OLE 1.0!). MS06-056-065. Get Patching! Try OpenOffice.org. Try FireFox. Think Differently. Good luck.

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