My Mandrake Cocoon

Week of April 24, 2002
Dr Gerry watches the latest onslaught of MS ActiveIntelligence®.

I'm watching Klez from my Mandrake cocoon. I'm fairly certain it's not going through my SAMBA shares, and in theory the Win2K boxes under my control are all patched, and NAV corporate edition is automagically updating and looking for it in people's webmail via both Exchange and Notes, but I have to admit I'm not as motivated to patch this stuff until my sniffers and LaBrea and stuff tell me we're congested and slow - or radsoft.net takes more than an eyeblink to load.

If that should happen, I'll have to go down to the trenches and clean up the MS boxes. I'll feel so dirty afterwards. But that's the thing: this MS/McAfee monster really messes up the space/time of the whole Internet - it's out of control. And the new thing I just found out is that if 2K+ domain admins apply patches via both the enterprise level patch system and Windows Update - which of course most of them by definition are clueless enough to be doing - the different patch mechanisms can cancel each other out, and apparently if someone patches IIS via Windows Update, it kills the original Nimda patch and opens the network up again.

And am I any better? Over the last 7 or 8 months or so I taught myself enough Unix to combine LDAP, BIND, NIS and SAMBA to exactly mimic what Win2K domain controllers do, and when I finally got it working perfectly, only then did it hit me: it's really the other way around, isn't it? MS ripped them all off from Unix in the first place.

I should have known that, but I was dazzled by the MS wizards and flashy MS GUI to the point I forgot what I already knew.

Now back to the bunkers.