If you didn’t know, this has been a tumultuous week for clients of Westhost, my internet service provider. Their Primary data center is located in Utah and they share that space with a sister brand VPS.net. The datacenter is a Tier IV center managed by Consonus. Saturday afternoon there was a yearly fire equipment/alarm/suppression system test. The third party technician failed to follow procedures and one actuator remained on the output system for the gas that is designed to suppress fires in the building. When the system was re-armed there was a sudden release of the gaseous fire suppressant. At that same moment hundreds of hard drives died. Now, Inergen is what was used and the gases themselves shouldn’t be a problem. In this case, and judging from what I’ve read, the problem was with the sudden and intense change in air pressure caused by the release. That point is somewhat moot though, the end result is hundreds of dead and damaged hard drives.
Tag: responsibility
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Collection company….
I’m quite frustrated this evening. Another long day of computer problems and tonight I come in to around the tenth call from a collection agency. The kicker in this case is that it’s not for me, but for someone I’ve never heard of. Over the years we’ve had a fair amount of credit card debt and have worked our way to within about one payment of being out from under. All with no defaults, no collection agencies, etc. We’ve followed the rules in other words. And the last 2 weeks we’ve been harrassed by a collection agency looking for someone that we’ve never met that I can only assume gave our phone number. The collection agency is….
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Third Party WMF patch
The F-secure blog is reporting on a third party patch for the WMF exploit. I have not tested it, it seems to come from a knowledgable source though. As I’m writing this though, the thought strikes me that a really nasty trick would be a claimed fix that actually exploited the vulnerability. It pays to check up on the source of ANY third-party fix for Windows (or any other operating system or software suite…) Anyway, this seems to be a good source though. He’s the primary author of IDA Pro (Interactive Disassembler Pro).
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Wikipedia Class action suit?
ZDNet’s the Open Source blog is talking about a possible Classaction suit against the wikipedia. He calls it the next SCO suit and summarizes things like this…
The SCO suits were an attempt to shut down open source based on the idea that everything is owned, or comes from something that is owned, and so the use of any code requires payment to someone.
While that lawsuit is winding down, a new threat is now emerging. It’s a class action against Wikipedia, aimed at ending open source information by demanding that “someone take responsibility” for everything published on the Web.
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The challenge of online content
The Open Source blog at zdnet has an article today on the Wikipedia. “Is Wikipedia a threat or a menace?” is the title… (which doesn’t give leeway for it to be a good thing I guess…) Anyway it raises an interesting point. Over the last few days there was a lot of press about (from the article above) “John Siegenthaler, a former Kennedy aide who found that his own entry falsely called him a suspect in his boss’ murder.” Now the Wikipedia is an online collaborated encyclopedia. Anyone can sign up and start editing whether it’s fact or not. There is a great responsibility to this…
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Good introductory article on linux
There is a Newsforge article talking about “Best Practices for the Linux home office”. They cover a lot of ground for the newcomer to linux. But some of their advice is excellent for computing in general. One is to treat your work machine like a production system (not development) the advice here is not to risk your main work machine on that game you’ve been dying to try out.
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Google filtering some searches
It caught me by surprise at first. I had done a search and got the following…
“We’re sorry…
… but we can’t process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.
We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google. ”
(more…)