So, we heard back from Gillware yesterday. They were unable to recover any files. They did, however, suggest that the drive might still be recoverable by OnTrack, and offered to put them in touch with me. OnTrack called within an hour and was very optimistic. Gillware offered to send the drive to OnTrack free of charge, and it arrived OVERNIGHT!!!
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That sucking sound you hear is Jen’s hard drive imploding under its own mass. Around noon it died, and bad us, we haven’t backed it up in a long time. I have a backup set of DVDs labeled May 2003… So, the question, in addition to what to do about the data loss, is what to do about her computer.
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Very few things amuse me more than insignificant wannabes who think they can own my box for more than a few minutes. My system paged me last night about 5 minutes after some dork exploited a hole in Drupal 4.6.1 and started laying down tracks all over /tmp, /usr and /lib. Unfortunately for the snot-nosed little weasel, my machine is smarter than the average script kiddie and immediately detected something was amiss.
On the slightly sophisticated side, the attacker used chattr to try to make clean-up a bit more difficult for me, denying the removal, replacement or renaming of offending files. However, the idiot pulled down a rootkit that should have replaced a number of system utilities and didn’t even use it to cover tracks. What a loser.
Unfortunately for me, when such things happen, I need to run a full analysis to be sure they didn’t leave anything behind. Believe it or not, that is easier and takes less time than restoring from known-good backups. So, a few hours later of letting the machine do most of my dirty work and confirming key details by hand, and we’re back up, patched and running.
Went to see Revenge of the Sith… I think it was very enjoyable. I’ve heard a lot of people saying it was the best (of episodes I-III). I can’t really refute that but I’m not sure I agree. It was certainly worth watching and I do recommend it. Without spoiling the movie, I’d like to point something out. If I
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As a brief follow-up to my experiences with the Tiger upgrade, I have some news about my iFruit. As you may recall, I had trouble syncing my PDA after updating to Tiger. The fine people at Mark Space made a valiant effort to walk me through isolating the issue, with little success. However, their 4.0.5 “final” update to the Missing
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Welcome Sarah Grace “Grace” Bolton, born 5/16/05 @ 8:34AM. Click for details. Jennifer’s pregnancy web log. Pictures of Grace in the gallery.
After taming the Mini… it was time to update the iBook. This went pretty smoothly. I used the “upgrade” installer, since this was a machine that had never been tainted with the kind of firewire brain swap that seems to have affected the Mini originally. Having built Fink on the Mini in advance and done my homework on a few
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After a few days of exploring Tiger on the Mini, I had a small but important laundry list of things that simply must be fixed before I can use it. First, the system seemed sluggish, which is odd because everyone that is happy with Tiger remarks on its speed. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Classic environment didn’t work at
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The install on the Mini went rather smoothly. I popped in the install DVD, clicked “install,” rebooted, answered a few questions, and walked away. When I came back, the familiar LoginPanel.app greeted me with a list of users, inviting me to log in. This is where the only two issues I have experienced surfaced. First, the system was so busy
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So, my Tiger arrived today. I probably won’t install it on the iBook until next week after class is over. I may install on the Mini sooner, we’ll see how the weekend plays out. And why, you may ask, do I need a Tiger? Because I looked that muppet in the eye and said “give me the test!” And here
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