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I’ve had a really bad Apple Powerbook situation to kick off the week. The machine will not boot from hard drive or removeable media, even after a PRAM and PMU zapping. I’ve only been able to get into Open Firmware once, and even then the keyboard was behaving too erratically for me to get anything done. What a mess.

Rather than contact AppleCare and have it sent in myself, I took it over to Hardware Support for a change. They’re an authorized warranty repair center, but they contacted me soon after the visit to inform me that the unit would be shipped back to Apple for repair. I suspect that was because of the severity of the problem, but its worth noting that it afforded me no advantage of time as opposed to sending it myself.

Apple suggests in the AppleCare footnotes that it depends on the circumstance as whether or not an Authorized Repair Center will be able to help you on-site. I guess the lesson learned here is to call Hardware Support first to find out what they can do for you locally before making the trip. On the bright side, at least now the monster is out of my hands.

“During the incident response process we often come across a situation where a compromised system wasn’t powered off by a user or administrator. This is a great opportunity to acquire much valuable information, which is irretrievably lost after powering off. … All of this data can help the investigator in offline examination to find forensic evidence. Moreover, when an incident is still relatively new we can recover almost all data used by and activities performed by an intruder.”

Full article via Security Focus

How is Dell’s foray into supercomputing at the University of Buffalo going? Well, views seem to be mixed. From the gist of the article it seems that scaling in size and complexity is where the problems lie. A 2000 node cluster is being criticized by the Bioinformatics director, but the University reports that researchers are generally happy with another 300 node machine. Something to think about if Princeton wants to grow its research capacity.

Microsoft has done a comprehensive write-up on what we can expect in SP2 for Windows XP. If the early release candidate reviews are any indication, it will certainly be a service pack supreme. While I haven’t downloaded any of the RCs, I’ve skimmed through the details and taken a few notes on what to expect from a user or admin perspective. I wish developers the best of luck.
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“To understand why you need to scan IP ports, it helps to know a little about how the networking protocol makes and breaks connections. When a TCP/IP connection has been established, each end knows the other’s IP address, port number, and the initial sequence number (ISN) the other will use. They learn this information about each other via a ‘three-way handshake.’ Here is how two computers (A and B) negotiate the deal.”

(Pulled from the sidebar of Port Scanning and NMAP 3.5.)
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I’ve upgraded SCADBLOG to kernel 2.6. You should notice significantly faster load times, and hopefully we won’t see any crashes. This acts as my testbed to try out 2.6 before rolling it out to more critical systems later this year. That should be really fun. In case you are interested, here’s how it was done. The emphasis was on speed because I don’t have time to tinker on this machine. I just need it to serve a few specific purposes, so I haven’t repaired things like sound, graphic hardware acceleration, etc.
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I just want to register some praise for IBM’s level of service and support over the phone. I’ve been meaning to do this because this is about the third time I’ve come away with a smile on my face. I believe I was on the line with them today for all of 10 minutes as opposed to the 30 or more that I typically waste with Dell (and possibly will with Apple, although I haven’t had a problem personally yet on that end). The issue was resolved in no time flat. I came prepared, having narrowed my problem to a hardware issue. With Dell reps I often feel as though they’re frantically jumping around a checklist of things to check even when I bring them all of the evidence and lay it at their feet. In IBM’s case, they understood what I was telling them and agreed with the logic in my conclusion. Big Blue made a big difference this afternoon.