BUS 250 A day like today rarely happens...

To the left of this sentence is a photo of the Apple Time Capsule. Supposedly this little device makes backup and restoration of your computer data a breeze. Up until today, I would have agreed with that. I spent the majority of my day today remotely controlling the school nurse's macbook, trying to force the damn thing to backup to this Time Capsule. I blame the Time Capsule, but actually, it is the Time Machine software that is causing the problem. No matter what I did, this thing would NOT create a sparsebundle that would stick around on the Time Capsule. I could see it trying to create it, but there were errors all over the system logs and eventually it just gave up and told me it wasn't going to happen. I tried deleting the sparsebundle, renaming the local network name on the macbook and starting a completely new backup..nothing worked. Eventually I had to give up. I've now got a choice in front of me, reformat the computer and try again..or..calling Apple tech support. You'd think the obvious choice would be the latter..but the majority of the Apple tech team hasn't a clue how our MLTI program works, nor do they have any idea of what kind of restrictions have been placed on our OS's. The MLTI division of Apple is no help either..as they do not support the use of Time Machine or Time Capsule on MLTI machines. Lame. I will probably just end up backing her stuff up the old fashioned way, reformatting it and then resetting the backup on the Time Capsule. It was working fine before and something changed..unfortunately there's no way of telling what.
Also, the rootkit won. I've tried everything imaginable to remove this thing from the operating system. Three rootkit scans with different programs and 2 malwarebytes antimalware scans. Nothing is working. Again, I'm going to have to suggest a format. I hate formatting machines but I don't feel as bad when the threat of identity theft or the theft of personal information is present.
Okay..going to go read to the little one now, good night all.

(Image Courtesy: http://images.appleinsider.com)

BUS COM 250 ..just a small one

I'm just going to write a small post today as I am tired. After some regrouping with myself I tackled the evil rootkit computer once more today. This time my tactic was a bit different. I ended up taking the hard drive out of the computer, tossing it into an external enclosure and running the scan from a non-vital PC on the external drive. I left work at 5:30 and the scan was STILL running. Elapsed time was something like 6 hours and 40 minutes when I left. I will win this battle. Another battle I had today was with Mac OS X's time machine. Time machine is the software included on Tiger and Leopard that allows you to perform time stamped automatic backups onto an external storage device which can be either directly connected or networked. It works best with a device called "Time Capsule" which is basically an Airport with a built in hard drive. You can find information on Time Machine here and Time Capsule here. Anyway, we have 22 macbooks and a wireless network and I thought it would be a good choice for a simple backup/restore system. It seems to have a few nasty bugs here and there though. Today a staff member's macbook would NOT back up at all. It would go all the way through the back up and then just say it failed..and it wouldn't even go as far as to place a log in the console for me to look at. 3 hours of fiddling and I realized that it was a corrupted sparsebundle ..I ended up having to change the local computer name in sharing, deleting the old sparsebundle and creating a whole new backup from scratch. Apple...please work out these kinks..the whole point of a backup is for reliability..doesn't make much sense for me to delete an entire backup just so it can continue backing up..does it?
Off to make dinner now.

BUS COM 250 "This computer doesn't have a virus..it has contracted the plague"

Well here I am, back from vacation! I wish I could say I am as ecstatic as the exclamation point indicates but, I am not. Winter vacation was far from uneventful as has been the past couple of years. Alyssa I and went to Bangor and stayed at the Hollywood Slots hotel. We decided to hit up the casino where Alyssa, with her last 12 dollars, managed win double our money back. We went to the Texas Roadhouse..which I love and we also found an awesome deal on Microsoft Office 2007 at the Circuit City liquidation. Bought two copies for 45 dollars each which have already sold on Ebay for twice that. Don't judge me for taking advantage of a liquidation either, poorly run companies SHOULD suffer. What else..oh, we bought a new 46 inch Sony Bravia LCD TV for our living room, it's pretty sweet. My Xbox died again, had to send it in for repairs. Oh..yeah..and I got engaged! :) Over vacation Alyssa and I scoured every jewlery store within 200 miles and I ended up buying her ring on 02/17/09, proposed on 02/18/09 at Napoli's in Caribou. Since she picked the ring out, she obviously loved it..and me for not being an idiot and picking out something she would hate. We plan on getting married soonish, we plan on taking a cruise, at least that was the last plan:)
Okay, now down to business. I returned to work on Tuesday thanks to the fun little snowstorm we had on Sunday/Monday, only to be inundated with strange little issues. Somehow our Administrative secretary managed to update the Maine State Retirement figures in her accounting system not once..but four times. Each update applying itself to the previous update and therefore giving everyone a nice huge retirement sum. I was called upon to restore the previous tables from backup. No problem right? Wrong. Our accounting system is DOS based..so..yeah..I had to actually compare file modification dates and update individual DOS files. Took a good 2 hours. Once I was done with that, I received a computer in my office that was doing some funny stuff. First it was mentioned that a spyware scan kept starting itself and it kept nagging them to download and install this software that it recommended. So, my first thought was "great, another antivirus 2009". Wrong. It was something called System Security. I originally had pointed the user to a place on the web where it listed step-by-step instructions to remove most malware, including antivirus 2009. The user told me that she couldn't install Malwarebytes antimalware as instructed. She said that it would close the second she tried to install it. I found this a bit strange so I decided to take a look myself. Not only would it close anything you tried to install, whether it be malwarebytes, avira antivir..or any other antivirus...it wouldn't let you uninstall anything. Also, if you tried searching for anything related to malware removal..it would close your browser. Nasty little bugger. I'm still fighting with it. I've tried everything I can think of, including a rescue cd provided by Avira that works by booting into a linux OS included on the disc and running the scan from there. It found some stuff but didn't really help much. I'm afriad this may call for a reformat. Sad part is, it was all caused by uneducated computer users playing around on the internet without a care in the world. I could tell the second that I looked at the computer that they download anything that flies in front of their faces. One of the malware programs I found is attached to an opened mail message...so that tells me that they open email attachments from people they don't know. Adaware and spybot were both last updated in may of 2008. That was when I worked on the computer last. Antivirus..well..I couldn't check it because it wouldn't run at all. At first I felt bad telling the user that the computer would probably have to be reformatted and they would lose all of their stuff...but...after seeing how they've been using it...I'm hoping it'll turn into a learning experience for them. I took the time to explain safe internet practices and recommend good preventative maintenance software. Lets see if they put the advice to good use.

UPDATE: So I've discovered that I'm dealing with a rootkit..mass password change and reformat here we come!


(Image Source: http://blog.fotogenia.info)

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry "Big Brother isn't only watching..he has hit record"

Today, the topic of the day was ediscovery. Lucky for those of us in the IT world, the federal government decided to update the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to better suit our legal system in this "digital age". Basically, we're required to archive, backup and maintain all electronic information. This includes email, instant messaging and even includes websites visited in some extreme cases. If the e-documents that were requested aren't provided the institution could be subject to things like monetary fines, sanctions and beyond that, could even affect the outcome of a court case. One example would be a superintendent of a school district who was busted for surfing child porn at work. The IT staff were smart enough to keep a log of all the websites that users visited. Bad news is, they didn't cache the websites and when the judge asked them to prove that the website was child porn (it had been taken down and was a godaddy placeholder when the judge looked at it) they couldn't do it. The superintendent got his job back and is still working in the district. So..adverse court rulings, that's a pretty big reason to comply. The sad part is, no one understands the full complexity of the issue of non-compliance and since it's such a huge job to tackle, no one wants to face it either. I've been trying to rally the state technology directors and coordinators to get our ISP, who services over 80% of the schools in the state, to comply with this. They want us to do all the legwork even though it is their legal responsibility to comply. I tried to get together some support, and the ISP even offered to facilitate a working group for us to come together and plan a solution, but I believe they did this because they think nothing will come of it. Realistically, how impossible is it going to be to get all of the tech directors together at one time to discuss anything? We're all too busy to even sleep most of the time. So today, in a desperate move, I decided to corner our superintendent for a few minutes to explain the issue to him and see what his take was on it. Thankfully he's going to contact the school attourney and find out how serious the issue really is for us..and he will back me in pushing the ISP to provide a solution if necessary. But man..the appliances that people are selling to take care of e-mail archiving and internet content record alone..the prices are unreal! I was looking at a model that topped out at 500 gb of space. They want $50,000 to purchase it and then $20,000 per year for support and maintenance. WHAT?! It's basically a glorified packet sniffer with a hard drive attached to it ..the thing your paying the most for is the application that they've created that saves the captured packets and leaves them in a user-friendly state for later reference and retrieval. $50,000? They know schools are becoming desperate to comply and I'll bet $50,000 that some schools are paying this outrageous price too. I'll keep you updated on my crusade to archive every piece of electronic media in the state educaitonal system...if you want to read more about ediscovery, google it, you will find plenty to keep you busy.
I'm going to end with a gripe. Sorry folks, but I have to get it out somewhere. Let me toss a question at you. What do you do with a user who refuses to learn. It's not that they CAN'T learn, I know better. It's a complete refusal. It has to be. I've instructed this person numerous times, taking a different approach each time. They've even sat through a 3 hour instruction by yours truly on basic file management. Yet they keep doing the same things wrong, over and over. They keep blaming the issues on the computer instead of themselves and I'm pretty much at the end of my rope when it comes to patience. I've gone as far as to suggest to their superior that they take college classes. I don't know what else I can do, but I may flip out if I keep getting spammed with mail bouncebacks and things like "I don't know where I saved that file to, I don't think the computer saved it right". Any suggestions? I believe I've done all I can do.
In other news, we're getting a new TV, my Xbox broke..going on number 3, and I really need a vacation...from the county.

Photo Courtesy : Here

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry "I'm afraid I can't let you play that, Tim"

So many things to blog about, where to start. Lets start with the good stuff, I'll move to the bad stuff, then I'll float on over to the thing I'm kinda indifferent about.
Firstly, Alyssa and I made a super cool purchase this week. We ordered a new TV. Yay. We ordered a 46 inch Sony Bravia LCD TV, 1080p..all the HD goodness you can handle. We did our research before we bought this TV, unlike the last one and we decided to order it from Walmart because the price was a cheaper one than in-house and also because the salesfolk at Sears ticked me off with their multiple sales pitches of their damned Sear's credit cards. No sir..I do not want the credit card of a company that seems to be going bankrupt in the near future. No thank you. So the TV will be here by the 19th. That's the good news. We, in our old age had decided to purchase a new TV because we could no longer see the 32 inch TV we have now. You know...ocular degeneration..all that. Even though our TV is nice, it was completely an impulse purchase. When Alyssa bought my Xbox 360 for me, we went to hook it up to our old RCA CRT TV, and I said..you know..we really should hook this up to an HD TV. So, we went out and bought the first decent HD TV we could find at 8 pm on a Friday night. It has lasted through the years, and is still in excellent shape, we plan on moving it up into our bedroom. Something that HASN'T lasted through the years though, would be the Xbox 360. Here comes the bad.
I will begin with a story that took place last year. I had recently purchased the game that the world was raving about, "Halo 3" and was excited to play the crap out of it. I played it for a few hours the day I got it but had to get back to my responsibilities..you know, life, so I ended up having to come back to it a few days later. I had a whole day of gaming planned out, I had my meals planned, my breaks, had all the friends gathered..couldn't have been more perfect of a Saturday. I remember, I was bouncing around trying to keep myself from being run over by a Ghost (if you don't know what that is, you need to play Halo) when suddenly all the landscape turned green and the rest of the screen into other funky colors. Odd. I repair things for a living and have learned not to panic when things don't work properly...even if it happened to be one of my most prized possessions. I restarted the Xbox, completely confident that everything would return to normal, convincing myself that it was just a glitch. My Xbox never came back on. After a huge fight with Microsoft, and $100 later, I ended up sending it away to be fixed because of some GPU issue. The Xbox they sent back however, was not the one I sent to them. Different serial numbers and different MAC addresses ( I use MAC filtering on my network). So, either I got a refurb or a new Xbox..hurray for me right? Wrong. Fast forward to last night. Alyssa and I enjoy the show "Hell's Kitchen" and I had downloaded an episode for us to watch. We stream almost everything to the Xbox so we can watch it on our TV. I pressed the power button on my remote..I couldn't wait to see Gordon Ramsay rip these chefs a new one...then I saw it. The thing that all Xbox owners fear..
The three red LEDs of doom.
The indication of hardware failure.
The thing Microsoft had to pay billions to fix.
The issue that over 1/3 of all of the Xbox 360's have.
Yep...it happened to me.
I've shipped it off, and since we have no cable and our Xbox is our media center, we have no TV.
Best part is, next week is vacation. We'll have our new TV..but I won't have my xbox back for 3-6 weeks. So..there's a good chance we'll have a new TV but no way to watch anything on it. Curse you Microsoft.
Finally, before I eat my dinner, I would like to mention my plan for storage and back up for the staff in my district next fall. This year, for storage purposes, I issued every staff member a 1GB jumpdrive. Based on average storage, this seemed to be an adequate amount for each of them. However, most seem to be too irresponsible to keep track of the jumpdrives, and some have gotten into creating/editing videos..and working with larger files. My plan for next fall will be to work Dropbox into the image. Get everyone signed up with an account, and then just have them use that for storage. Best part about it, it backs up to the cloud automatically..and they can sync it with other machines. It's just an idea but it IS more storage than they currently have..and right now I know they're not backing up much of it. Thing is, I need free options, at least until my budget comes out of the ice age...yeah.."deep freeze" were the words that were used the last time we discussed the budget.
Anyway, my Tuscana soup is done..Alyssa rules. Later folks

Picture Courtesy : Here

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry - "Education for the educators"

Another short post, as I'm tired and have to get up super early tomorrow for my PD presentations. Today I spent the majority of my day finishing up a presentation on our webmail system, tossed in some internet safety guidelines along with my other presentation on digital citizenship. I'm proud of the work I've done on all of these presentations, they're all informative and I think they'll do well to educate the staff on all the things that I think that they are lacking in..technologically speaking. So, I'm probably going to run over my time for my section of the PD but I had a hard time cutting things out to make it fit. I'll just have a discussion with the principal beforehand to make sure that's it's cool if I run over a bit. Even though I've been instructed that digital citizenship and internet safety are not "things that the teachers can bring back to their classroom and use", I believe that they are a fundemental foundation to using technology responsibly and appropriately. I may bore them to death, but I hope they take some valuable information away from it. In other news, I went engagement ring shopping today..and Alyssa and I decided to buy eachother a new 46 inch tv for Valentine's day. Hooray! Tired, time for bed. Internet safety..ensure you and your children are protecting yourselves out there on the net! www.netsmartz.org. Check it out..have your kids check it out. Good night.

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry "Back to the basics"

For the first time since I've started my career as a Technology Director, I've been requested to work on a Saturday. After nearly 3 years of working the same schedule and having all of my weekends off, Saturday has become almost like a religious holiday for me..I was almost stupified when they asked me to work this one. It's a teacher inservice day, a make-up from one lost to a snow storm. No, I'm not a teacher, so why do I have to go? Well, let me answer that for you. The staff of the Elementary school decided to nominate Technology as their topic for professional development. So, in essence..they nominated me to facilitate the workshops for them. At first I paniced a little, I had no clue what I would talk about. I decided that digital citizenship would be an excellent topic so I got to work putting together a nice presentation on it. A few days later, I was working on our Student Information System..and a teacher came in and literally asked me if I could copy and paste something for her. I was kinda stunned that they didn't know how, but I'm accomodating and decided that even though I couldn't leave the work I was doing, I would write down instructions for them. I wrote the instructions and then sent them on their way. Not even 10 minutes later, they came back in. In the instructions I wrote "Open Microsoft Word". They were stuck there. They didn't know how to open Microsoft Word. I realized right then that we had a huge problem. Today I spent a few hours putting together a detailed and easy to follow presentation covering computer basics. Included were things like "this is a megabyte" all the way up to file management. When I see these teachers struggling with what I consider simple tasks, I sometimes have a hard time believing what I'm seeing. Let me tell you though, after putting this presentation together, I got to look at things froma different point of view. I can easily see now that if no one had ever stopped to show these folks anything, and if they didn't spend a lot of time geeking out, as I do...that these tasks that we computer nerds find so menial..could actually be difficult for those who are "old-school" as they say. I hope my presentation helps.

From now on, I'm going to try to get my blog posts done earlier in the day, this way I'm not half asleep while writing them. Sorry for the hurried posts, gotta get my message out before my face hits the keyboard and I start snoring.
Good night all.

Photo Courtesy: Amazon

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry - "Oh how you move me"

Today was another uneventful day, so I decided to do something I hadn't had time to do. The head cook in our elementary school cafeteria has been working on an old Pentium II 450 computer at least, since I had started working in Easton. She desperately needed a new machine and I finally had the means to give her one. There was one small problem..the entire Nutrikids system was located on that computer. This includes her menu programs and the database. Being familiar with Windows programs I knew there was no way to just drag and drop anything, since Windows installations usually drop files in the system folders and have registry entries, you know..things to make your life more complicated. This is why I love Macs so much..applications are so neatly packaged and you can just copy and paste them from one place to another...so nice. Anyway, I remembered working with this program called "PC-Mover" when I was a tech at Staples. I used it to move data and applications from some older computers at the Presque Isle water district over to some new Vista machines that they had purchased. It worked beautifully. It copied over everything I instructed it to, all the linked dlls and system files, registry entries..everything. It was all put in its proper place on the new OS and everything worked perfectly. So, I figured I'd give it a try again. Aside from having to clear some space to hook the computers up side by side, everything went well. Only after hooking the machines up next to eachother with the USB bridging cable did I realize that I could have performed the move over my network..wish it said that on the box somewhere! Anyway, now she has a new computer..the lunch program is still intact..and the kiddos will be having their chicken nuggets tomorrow.
I give PC-Mover two thumbs way up for making my life 100 times easier.

Photo Courtesy : Laplink Software

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry- "Don't Cut the Blue Wire.."

Short blog post since nothing super exciting happened today. First off, I would like to say that all teachers should be heavily screened for stupidity before being allowed near our children. Also, I believe that whoever hires any teacher who is deemed an idiot after said hiring, should be held accountable and fired along with the teacher. Case and point: Click Me. I don't know, maybe I'm being too harsh..maybe she's not a moron and she just doesn't understand that posting something like that on a public site where almost anyone can see it...COULD..possibly come back and bite her in the hind-quarters. I've seen many cases of people using the internet improperly and sharing information where they shouldn't. The internet is a public place people, email is considered a public document..would you stand up on a soapbox on the street corner in Presque Isle and yell obscinities about your boss? No..well...why would you say it on Facebook where everyone can read it? Use your head.
Work was pretty uneventful today. There was a little bit of a mix up with a library computer that hosts our Accelerated Reader program. Two blue ethernet cables were running really close together so the ed tech who was doing the trouble shooting for me yesterday ( I was sick at home) assumed that they were the same cable and told me that the computers were connected with a blue cable. I thought that was odd..assumed someone had been messing with my gear. Upon looking at it today, yeah..two separate cables and the whole reason there was a problem with the computer to begin with was because I had inadvertantly deleted its MAC address from my network management db so it wasn't picking up an IP address. Oops!
A pretty ho hum day over all. I did take a look at the Acer contest that I'm entered in, we're in line to receive 30 Veriton desktops and 30 Aspire One netbooks if we're one of the three schools chosen. That'd be nice...especially since my budget is frozen and I'm not allowed to buy new ...anything. I'm so tired of scavenging old computers to fix the LESS old computers. Ugh:P
Have a good night.

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry. "Thank you for calling Fairpoint Communications.."

By now everyone has probably heard something about the Fairpoint fiasco but I'm going to run the entire thing down for you anyway, from start to finish. I woke up this morning feeling ill so I made the decision to stay home and work today. One of my morning rituals is to scan the email archive for any suspicious messages, like from the students, or things like bounce errors. You know, just doing my part to make sure everything is running like it's supposed to. I was scrolling down through the emails, sipping on my chicken soup..and yes..it's okay to have chicken soup at 8 am. I came across a bounce message from Verizon, not a common occurance so I took a closer look. A teacher had sent a message to the easton rec dept. and the mail server sent a message back saying that the message was refuse by the mail server due to abuse. How odd. I know our mail server isn't blacklisted for spam anywhere. I noticed something a bit funky about this message as well..apparently Verizon's mail server had attempted to forward the message on to a fairpoint server which then rejected the message from Verizon's server, saying it was spam. Great..a server battle royale! In the mean time, no one's receiving their email. I called up MSLN to see if they had any other reports but the 1st tier tech guy I spoke to hadn't heard anything, so he escalated my issue and sent it to the upper tier. A few minutes later I receive a call from Doretta, the "2nd in command" so to speak, telling me that she had a similar issue over the weekend and it seems to be a problem with Fairpoint. Little did either of us know, how big the problem really was. A friend of mine runs an ISP here and his entire mail system was killed. Apparently Fairpoint, in their switch over..had taken control of my friend's ISP's IP pool..and didn't properly forward DNS to his servers..so basically, Fairpoint highjacked his network. Poor guy was up for 20 hours straight the last I had talked to him. The problems have hit thousands upon thousands of people in Maine, Vermont and NH. You can read about the issues here.
I feel bad for everyone that this screw up has had an effect on. This is the perfect example of what NOT to do when you head into the IT business. It gives everyone an excellent idea of what can happen with improper planning, lack of experience and lack of knowledge in a certain area. I spent most of my day fielding phone calls and handing out free tech support on DSLreports.com because I felt bad for all the poor folks that had been left stranded with no support and no options. You couldn't even call Fairpoint to talk to tech support for the majority of the day..you just got a busy signal. The scariest part of the entire situation is, they even messed up the 911 system. 911! Hasn't anyone over at Fairpoint heard of TESTING things before putting them into action? I don't know who is responsible for everything that has gone down, but someone had BETTER be fired for this. There is no excuse. I leave you with this. Funny..yet frightening. Good night all.