We have a remote user that works out of his home that has trouble getting into the companies Webmail system, which is available on any internet connected PC.  There really isn’t anything strange about this but what makes this situation unique is that since the guy is located in another city it makes support challenging and on top of that he makes a strong case for a potential Dyslexic patient.   9am I get a call from the guy and .. well, consider this scenario, <Read the User: parts with the most-excellent and hard-to-decipher Canadian Newfie accent>:

Jon: Okay so you’re having trouble getting into our Webmail, this is pretty straightforward we have another Webmail address I am going to tell you. Go ahead and load up Internet Explorer and in the address bar….

User: <Interrupts> Is that where you put in the google?

Jon: …Yes, in the address bar type in HTTPS:/ …

User: <Interrupts> Is that HPPS?

Jon: No, HTTPS (Note to reader, it was a perfectly clear telephone line, the guy is just…well…read on…)

User: HTPPS?

Jon: No, HTTPS

User: HEPES

Jon: NO!, H T T P S  … <Repeats again slowly> H   T   T   P   S..

User: H T P E S?

Jon: ….. O_o no! <You FAIL at listening>

Jon: Okay…..type this, H..

User: H

Jon: T..

User: T

Jon: T..

User: T

Jon: P..

User: P

Jon: S..

User: S

Jon: Colon..

User: Cooling?

Jon: NO, colon!

User: Culen?

Jon: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, COLON!

User: Eh, whats that?

Jon: IT’S THE BUTTON WITH THE TWO DOTS ON IT NEXT TO THE “L” KEY ON YOUR KEYBOARD ON YOUR LAPTOP ON THE TABLE THAT IS SITUATED DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF YOU INSIDE THE VERY HOUSE WHICH YOU ARE CURRENTLY SEATED MY GOOD FRIEND. DO YOU NEED GPS CO-ORDINATES?

User: Okay dokey I’ll have to look for it hold on.

User: <Mumbles something incoherent>

Jon: … <Thinks to himself…OMFG OMFG is this guy for real?!> <But then sympathises that he might be genuinely IQ challenged>

User: I can’t find this ‘coling’ button…..I’m in Red Deer, can I bring the laptop to you today?

Jon: Uhhhh … Sure.    <Thinks to himself “That’s a heckuva trip to make because you can’t enter HTTPS:// into your address bar! I mean WOW, you’re going to spend 2 hours driving down to my office because you can’t get this right?  AMAZING!” I am absolutely floored!>

Lawl. Epic fail.

What do you get when you combine 1 part fail, 3 parts incompetence and a farm animal?  You get the FIBC of course!  The Fail Incompetent Blonde Cow is a rare species and one that deserves special attention.  In today’s blog I’m going to pay homage to the FIBC seeing as she’s the winner of this months epicly failed contest.

My tale starts in the past, 3 months ago to be precise.  Travelling back through time we find ourselves enjoying a merry day at my place of employment.  I am notified by my manager that HP have decided to, out of goodwill towards our company, provide us with a printer, this is not just any printer mind you, it’s big, it’s bulky but who cares because best of all it’s completely free!  “Great!” I proclaim but I think to myself “Where will I put such a beast?”  After some thought I come to the conclusion that the Engineering department will benefit the most from this new printer since it prints in colour and supports 11×17 papersize.

Enter problem #1.  After a quick look-see I realise that there’s no room in the Engineering department to set this monstrosity up but notice there’s also a lot of wasted space with the cubicles being set far apart from each other.  I proceed to initiate correspondence with the FIBC and the head of engineering to determine what we can do to resolve the issue.  The initial idea is to move some furniture around, a menial and trivial task at it’s core.  This would solve the problem…no?  Easy enough you think?  Have you met FIBC?  I’m sure you’ll agree with me when you do.

As this wasn’t a high priority item at the time we fast forward three months.  I receive notice from the IT Manager that there’s been a ‘motivated suggestion’ to move the printer off the warehouse floor which is where it sat peacefully for 3 months.  “Hey, I got no problem with that but where can we put the box as it’s bulky++ in size?”

I make the decision to re-establish contact the FIBC to find out what the status is of moving the furniture, as the best thing to do would be to just setup and install the printer instead of moving the un-opened box around.

Enter problem #2: The FIBC.  The two of us, we have a history, there must be a personality clash of some kind because we just don’t seem to get along.  I try very hard and make a concerted effort to help her whenever she needs help but her problems are often along the lines of “I’m pretty stupid, I can’t figure anything out by myself, please hold my hand.” oh and, “I’m also a cow so you better help me or else!”

I phone and leave a voicemail with her and she instantly shoots back an email reply:

FIBC: No, XGS has no part of office moves and Desks are not being moved.

My query involved asking her if XGS (our back office function people) would be able to help me to plan on moving some furniture around.  Of course, she never responded to the second part of my original question so I restate it nicely and with different wording:

Jon: Ok any word on when desks are going to be moved?

She responds quite bluntly with the following unprofessionalism:

FIBC: They are not being moved at all.

I am quite taken back by that reply, why would there any opposition to my query at all, it’s such a simple task! I remain calm and compose the following:

Jon: Is there any particular reason why the desks aren’t being moved…or plan to be moved?  We have a printer for engineering and it needs to be moved off the warehouse floor as soon as possible. I had sent an email to you and the Director of Engineering 3 months ago about it.

If you could let me know, thanks.

She replies with:

FIBC: And I personally spoke to you about it 3 months ago and said no. You told me at that time that you had someone else who could use the printer.

Uh yea DUUUH, the engineering department is that ’someone else’.  Why would I say the printer is for engineering and then change my mind?

Jon: Can we move forward with the process, the requirement is to move the printer off the shop floor as per <name withheld to protect the innocent>.  This has always been assigned to the engineering department and I was waiting for space to be made so that I could set it up.

What needs to be done to make this process move forward?

I’m not understanding her position at this point:

FIBC: It’s not being done right now. Move offsite to Blackfoot for now

Blackfoot is our other office in town but it’s up for sale so the suits are trying to keep it from becoming a permanent place for storage so having us spend time and money to move this gigantic printer to a building which may or may not be vacated in the near future is simply not an option, FIBC understands that…..or does she?  I decide to bypass her ignorant comment and reply back with this:

Jon: We currently have some printing capacity concerns on the second floor so utilising the printer from the shop floor and locating it in Engineering would alleviate quite a few problems including reducing human traffic in your wing of the building.  Is there any way we can proceed forward with this without moving the printer to Blackfoot?

I try to play my ace card, ‘reduce human traffic’!  FIBC’s boss has complained about the increasing number of traffic down his wing of the building due to it being the location of the main printer hub on that floor.  I figure that offering her an incentive would get her on my side to assist with getting the new printer installed in the Engineering department.  Well it didn’t work because this is what I got in return:

FIBC: no

Wow, what a blunt and completely unprofessional reply, not even a fullstop afterwards, I’m hurt.  At this point I’m trying to figure out her mentality:

Jon: Is there a business justification why we are not able to do this?  If it means having to get a moving company in to move tables then by all means let’s get them in to help us with that.

Three days go by without a reply from her so I get the ball rolling again:

Hi FIBC,

I didn’t receive a reply from you on this one the other day, any word on the business reasoning why we are not able to do this?

Thanks

She jumps right back onto her horse (which is a midget pony by the name of Little Pumpkin by the way) and shoots out this:

FIBC: I am not justifying anything to you Jon. The subject is closed.

Wow!  Just WOW!  I loved that reply, I loved it so much I decided that what is supposed to be quite a trivial task has turned out to be too much of a mission for the FIBC to carry out and I’ve just about had enough of her pathetic existence, I reply to her but CC all the higher ups, people that can actually make thing’s happen without causing me undue, and completely unnecessary, grief.  I remain calm and professional throughout:

Jon: The printer is for the engineering department, you will have to justify to them why they’re not going to get it when they start asking questions why they’re not going to get a printer.  I have also been requested to remove the printer from the warehouse floor as it’s been sitting there for 3 months now waiting to be put in place in the engineering department.

Can we work as a team to make this happen?

Thanks

Within 10 minutes I receive a reply back from one of the VP’s with the answer I was looking for right at the start:

Jon,

Looks like the desks will be moved back a few feet to accommodate the printer in the central part of the engineering wing.  You will be notified when the desks have been moved, and the printer has been moved to its new home.

thanks

I havn’t spoken to or heard from FIBC since…and she still hasn’t replied to my question about working as a team to make thing’s happen. *sigh*

Such simple tasks. Tsk.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve left an internal voicemail with a fellow co-worker only to have them call me back and enquire why I was calling.

I get this a lot:

User: “I saw you called”,

Me: “Yea I did, did you check the voicemail that I left? I kind of explain why I called you.”

User: “Oh, no I didn’t”.

Me: “So you completely missed the big blindingly red light on your phone that indicates you have a voicemail?”

User: “Yea I don’t really use it, whats up?”

Me: *Bangs head against wall*

It’s aggravating to have to explain yourself over and over again to the technopeasants that refuse to use technology that has been put there to help them.  “Oh is checking voicemail too difficult a task for you?  You shouldn’t be here then, here’s your badge, go stand in the corner.”

You’re kind of expecting the user to call back with a response to your question but instead you have to waste more time by explaining what it is you called about in the first place. Lately it’s hit or miss, sometimes they do check, other times they don’t.

There’s a little fact of life which I’ve only just learned now and that is ‘users are completely clueless and pretty much beyond any hope of redemption and there’s nothing I can do about it’.  I’m just learning to accept it now.  It’s taken this long to learn because I’ve always had a glimmer of hope that maybe thing’s would be different down the road with constant teaching, constant hand holding, constant patience but it was all for naught.

Why?  Because users absolutely refuse to follow proper processes and procedures. Procedures that have been set in place for a reason (in concrete too I might add) to assist us in timely problem resolution and to keep thing’s orderly and scheduled and also so that my boss knows I have work to do!  The problem is time and time again I find people want to bypass the system.  Why has the IT department become the adult baby-sitters club?  Why do you want us to hold your hands while you write up an email to IT Support?

I wrote about this issue back in March of this year. Here it is for you to take a look at.  In that article I argued that as a result of geographical transparency roles and responsibilities of the IT department are skewed for users in the company, especially when the main IT department is based in another country.  The only initial point of contact for users are the local IT Support staff in Calgary, these happen to be my co-worker and I.  Read the article, you’ll see what I mean.  It’s interesting.

Consider this seemingly all too real scenario:

User interrupts Jon helping another user: “Jon follow me to my PC, I want you to fix a problem!”
Jon helping another user: “Please send it into IT Support, I’m a little busy at the moment”
User: “I did”
Jon: “No ,you didn’t”
User: “I did!!!!”
Jon without being rude: “No .. you didn’t .. you sent it to ME, not to *****IT SUPPORT****, you know you need to send things into IT Support, especially of this nature!”.

It’s got to the point where if somebody sends a request directly to me I just ignore it because otherwise when will they learn? Sure, if it’s urgent I’ll fix it when I get a chance but I’m not making it my priority if you’re not willing to follow the rules.

People have been donkey trained for years now to send their computer related issues into IT Support (which is an email address front-end that distributes requests to an organized back-end) but what I’m finding is that they refuse to use the system.  They feel their issues are infinitely more superior than the people that took the time to properly send us problem requests so that a ticket can be opened up and assigned in the correct manner. I get this continuously “Jon, have you got just 2 minutes to take a look at something?”, which then turns into a 30minute find and fix situation.  Meanwhile the guy that followed the rules, that sent his request in the right way, is left waiting in the wings.  Sound unfair to you?  It sure as hell does to me.

We’ve paid our dues and drilled this into your heads for years now but you just don’t get it!  Never have I seen such blatant and outright incompetence in my entire life!  Time and time again I say to myself “Okay next time will be better, I’ll tell them just this once more, they’ll understand then.” But they never do.  We send out emails reminding users of the process, I tell users in person what the process is, I even have a big notice on my door with the process written in black and white….and color.  Out of pure frustration what more can I do without alienating myself frome the users?!  Must I be abruptly rude to them so that they’ll learn?  Do I have to take a hard stance against those users unwilling to learn? At what point does a human being realize that they should maybe start following the rules?  What action needs to precursor that thought pattern in them?

PS, while I was writing this blog entry, I received 3 emails and 1 phone call from people not following the rules and the guy that I told to send his request into IT Support didn’t send anything in even after he said he would…..but instead he takes the time to phone me to find out why his problem hasn’t been fixed yet.  *Bangs head against wall…repeatedly!”

Did you know that you have a really good friend that you didn’t know about?  He’s always there, behind the scenes, and he’s a genius because if you ask him any question he knows the answer.  His name is a little weird though but you’ll get used to it and next thing you know you’ll be referring to him by his name like you use the words ‘and’ and well ‘well’.  His name is Google.  Don’t fear him though because Google Is Your Friend. He’s a kind and just fellow, benevolent and good, he may have a little megalomaniac chip on his shoulder but once you get to know him he’s actually kinda cool…

If people would only learn to use Google to fix problems on their PC’s it would save a mountain of time, not to say that I don’t like fixing problems on PC’s but by solving their own problems they would learn much more than they would if somebody else were to fix it for them. In addition, they would actually empower themselves in the process.

Okay guys I’m coming clean as of today.  When somebody calls me up with an unknown problem all I’m going to do is Google it and then try various suggestions until I get it right, okay sure I’m also basing that off 10 years of experience but what’s stopping anyone else from doing it?

If anyone even had the faintest interest in solving their own problems I know many people that would respect them more for it, even if they failed at fixing the issue.  “Hi Jon, I have this issue, I googled for a solution, tried a couple thing’s, didn’t get anywhere, can you come check it out?”  I’ll be all over that like Chocolate Milk.

Google is our secret weapon and it can be yours too.  Learning to use Google I can accurately say that you’ll discover unique and interesting ways to solve just about any problem you are faced with, be it computer related or not.  This is justified because in the long term you’ll save yourself hours doing your own research and finding out new ways to do things and you’ll learn hell of a lot in the process.  More than anyone can teach you.

I was rocked by this post by Lea Woodward, you mean somebody outside of IT actually gets it? Her argument is that there are people out there with such a bare minimum set of skills that they are hardly able to operate a computer in any productive kind of way.  Her argument is well justified in my opinion because frankly, I see it every day.  Props to you Lea.  I’ve always said that if you’re using a computer to do your job it’s in your best interest to learn how to use it effectively.  Can you imagine a ‘car mechanic’ showing up to work without a clue how to use a spanner or an accountant without the ability to use a calculator?

I’ve often thought that if somebody were to change jobs and move from the IT department to another department they would be so incredibly effective because they understand computers and they’ll know the Office suite and understand how to make killer presentations, why, because they’ve explored their computer and understand what it can do for them.

Understanding how to use Google can be empowering.  Know where to find information.

So here’s a bunch of tips for using Google to find just about anything you’re looking for.

Respek the Google, GIYF. Westside yo.

It’s been almost a year since Microsoft released Office 2007. It’s great, it really is and I’m not being paid to say it.  Their Operating Systems aside, out of all their products released so far the Office suite has always been one of the best things to come out of Redmond, ever since Office 95.

Office 95 was introduced during the ‘hey days’ of computing when everyone was just beginning to figure out that using a computer was actually easier and more efficient than using type-writers and ledger books.  This new understanding was, of course, kick-started and coincided with the release of Windows 95 and their GUI is one of the reasons for it’s success.  Up until then the general computing experience wasn’t as permissive as it is today.

Back then people quickly became familiar with the ‘Microsoft interface’, they understood how to accomplish tasks with only a few clicks, they understood that to perform an Undo in Office 95 you had to click Edit-Undo or simply press CTRL-Z. So of course with the release of subsequent versions Microsoft stuck with the tried and true Office 95 interface…and everyone loved it. Subsequent versions brought only marginal improvements to the UI but the core functionality remained. (For a complete and detailed history of the entire Office series click here.)

But over time thing’s change, our needs shift, they become better geared and the software ultimately has to evolve to suit us.  Enter Office 2007. My company finally deployed Office 2007 recently after a bit of internal testing and generally speaking, the reception I get from people is good, they like the new user interface, in some cases it’s a Godsend, in others it’s a little clunky.  But it could be a case of just needing more time with it.  As with anything new it’s going to take time to get used to, to become familiar with the controls and steps involved in completing an action.  Microsoft have implemented this new Ribbon UI based on a lot of user feedback, and I mean a lot. This is a pretty good read if you want to learn more about how the general public helped to craft the Office 2007 UI.

We have only a handful of users resisting Office 2007, they complain about a clunky interface or an ‘ergnomic atrocity’.  These are the ones that this article is geared towards.  And to them I just have to say get over it. Learn the new interface, everything we do with a computer is moving towards these context-sensitive UI’s meaning what-is-present-is-relevant-and-will-be-useful, it makes complete sense to move in this direction.  Even our OS’s are beginning to be pushed through this plastic injection mold.  It’s for the better.  Keep up with the times.  We had one user that kindly asked that we load a 3rd party addon which reverts the 2007 UI to the old 2003 look & feel.  We allowed that because we’re enablers of technology not disablers but the user in question obviously didn’t want to embrace the change.

Sure, the new office suite is just as prone to ridiculous vulnerabilities as any other Windows application and it’s certainly had it’s fair share but the design changes are markedly improved and I have faith that they will continue to change and improve as our needs change.

Don’t resist the change of the UI, learn it, understand it, use it, move out of your comfort zone and your own personal shortcut space you’ve created for yourself and experience an application for what it truly is.  It’s the way of the future.  And you know what they say, if you can’t embrace change well then…

Now if only they made this for Linux….

Gentoo is simply the best distro out there so in an attempt to simplify the installation I’m going to summarise the entire thing so that you can install Gentoo the right way the first time and avoid trouble later on. The official Gentoo documentation is obviously the best place to go to get the latest info on the install process but if you’re like me and spend alot of time installing Gentoo on multiple machines and end up reading the documentation over and over again you know how tedious it can get with the amount of explaining they do on every little detail so my install summary should help those out that don’t want to wade through all the sludge just to get a squeaky clean installation. In other words I’m cutting through all the clutter, and I mean ALL of it.

This is the most basic install procedure as it relates to stock standard x86 hardware. It’s just pure coincidence that this worked out to be exactly 50 steps :)

• 1. Download and burn the ‘universal livecd’. Boot up from it and get to the boot prompt.

• 2. gentoo-nofb

• 3. fdisk /dev/hda

• 4. d, 1, d, 1, n, p, 1, enter, +32M, n, p, 2, enter, +512M, n, p, 3, enter, enter, w, quit (Delete as many partitions as you have)

• 5. mke2fs /dev/hda1

• 6. mke2fs -j /dev/hda3
  

• 7. mkswap /dev/hda2

• 8. swapon /dev/hda2

• 9. mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/gentoo.

• 10. mkdir /mnt/gentoo/boot.

• 11. mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot

• 12. date 013015002005 for January 30th 3pm 2005

• 13. cd /mnt/gentoo

• 14. tar -xvjpf /mnt/cdrom/stages/stage3-<subarch>-2005.1.tar.bz2

• 15. tar -xvjf /mnt/cdrom/snapshot/portage-2005.1.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/gentoo/usr

• 16. mkdir /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage/distfiles (skip this step if distfiles is already there)

• 17. cp /mnt/cdrom/distfiles/* /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage/distfiles/

• 18. nano -w /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf (add MAKEOPTS=”-j2″ at the bottom)

• 19. mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc

• 20. cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf

• 21. chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash

• 22. env-update

• 23. source /etc/profile

• 24. nano -w /etc/make.conf (add USE=”-gtk -gnome qt kde dvd alsa cdr -kde -X” at the bottom)

• 25. ls /usr/share/zoneinfo

• 26. ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT /etc/localtime (Replace GMT with your timezone from step 25)

• 27. emerge gentoo-sources

• 28. cd /usr/src/linux

• 29. make menuconfig (make necessary changes here according to your needs, don’t forget to include NIC drivers)

• 30. make && make modules_install

• 31. cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/linux-2.6.11-gentoo-r3

• 32. cp .config /boot/config-2.6.11-gentoo-r3

• 33. nano -w /etc/fstab (change BOOT, SWAP AND ROOT to their hda equivalents)

• 34. nano -w /etc/conf.d/hostname (make necessary changes)

• 35. nano -w /etc/conf.d/domainname (make necessary changes)

• 36. rc-update add domainname default

• 37. nano -w /etc/conf.d/net (add config_eth0=( “dhcp” ) at the bottom)

• 38. rc-update add net.eth0 default

• 39. passwd (change root password)

• 40. emerge syslog-ng

• 41. rc-update add syslog-ng default

• 42. emerge vixie-cron

• 43. rc-update add vixie-cron default

• 44. emerge slocate

• 45. emerge dhcpcd

• 46. emerge grub

• 47. nano -w /boot/grub/grub.conf (add the following:)

default 0
timeout 10
title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.x
root (hd0,0)
kernel /linux-2.6.11-gentoo-r11 root=/dev/hda3

• 48. cp /proc/mounts /etc/mtab

• 49. grub-install /dev/hda

• 50. exit, umount /mnt/gentoo/boot /mnt/gentoo/proc /mnt/gentoo, reboot

Voila you’re done. Now go and emerge whatever software you need. Check out the Gentoo-Wiki for some great tips & tricks.

If you find any typos or anything wrong with this most basic of how-to’s please drop me a line at copelandj@’N.O.S.P.A.M’gmail.com. Leave out the N.O.S.P.A.M part.

This summarised guide can be expanded upon here with the official Gentoo Install Handbook.
This article is free to be used by anyone, anytime, anywhere and is NOT governed by any license agreement, just be a gentleman and give me credit m’kaay.

Update 4 August 2008: Re-positioning my old articles on the new blog site.  Yep you guessed it, another old and mostly irrelevant article.

Working in IT is interesting, adding people to the mix makes it even more interesting.   As humans we have a need and desire to connect and be connected to other people and events.  For some it’s the base from which they jump, it’s what drives them, the need to always be accepted by their peers.

Working in IT I see some interesting human-socio dynamics come into play in the subtlest form.  It’s the typical ‘Keeping up with the Jones’ mentality.  I’m sure there’s a thesis on this topic somewhere, if you know of one drop me an email at copelandjNOSPAM@gmail.com (remove the NOSPAM part) it might make interesting reading….

What I’m talking about is the ‘What you have I want” scenario.  It plays on all levels and facets throughout our lives but I see it so clearly in action at work and it’s here that it operates on an innocent plane.  One of my duties is to manage the ordering of new equipment such as laptops/ desktops for new and existing users.  We have hardware standards that we stick to but these get revised once every 6 months or so.  Whatever the latest thing is, we’ll set that as our standard and buy it. Sometimes we’re ordering upwards of 25 laptops per quarter.  These would go to either new people starting with the company or go to existing users that have been authorized to receive upgrades.  And here’s the thing.  I find that when somebody gets an upgrade, suddenly the whole atmosphere changes and everyone in that department wants one, they don’t say anything but you can smell it as distinct as a foul odor.  I mean User-X has it so why can’t I?

But they know they’re not going to get one unless there’s a valid and business-justified reason behind it. And this is where it gets interesting.  In my experience, what I have found is that post-new-laptop-deployment I start to hear about ‘issues’ and ’seemingly unsolvable problems’ with pre-generation equipment.  I get a lot of “Jon, my laptop/desktop/pre-gen gadget is slow” and “Jon, I get this re-curring problem with my system, I need a new laptop“.  I laugh at that last one.  The funny thing is these sorts of issues only crop up after something new and flashy is deployed into the office stream.  It’s amazing to observe this event in action.  Guaranteed every 6 months I see this.  Suddenly everyone wants the wider screen because of –>insert business-justified reason 1 here<– and my old laptop needs an upgrade because of –>insert business-justified reason 2 here<–.  It can get wild sometimes.  The problem I think is that these business justified reasons are completely valid, which is annoying.  The requests to upgrade sound just plausible enough to not be declined.  In other words problems are created with enough validity to warrant purchasing a new laptop. Heck I’ve even had people outright lie about a problem in order to justify getting something new….those were declined.  “No, there’s nothing wrong with your laptop….trust me…it’s all psychological and you need to see a shrink, take a number.”

If you’ve been around long enough your keen observation can identify the real reasons for these upgrades.  A lot of the time it boils down to the fact that they just want a laptop to watch DVD’s or to surf the internet wirelessly from their couch.  We have systems in place that allow people to connect to the company network from their home machines and do their work…but no…they still want the laptop.  When I suggest that to them they come up with all kinds of interesting excuses as to why their home PC’s wouldn’t work for them and why a new laptop will.

Amazing.

I am incredibly curious and I am always finding new ways of tinkering around with new things so in my neverending quest to better understand the nature of security, vulnerabilities and hacking I decided to setup a honeypot machine live on the internet 24×7 with a public IP.  The PC has Gentoo linux installed which is running on top of a 2.6.12 general-use kernel.  There is no special security or intrusion detection software installed.  SSH is the only noteworthy service running which is listening on port 22 and it’s configured to allow root logins – usually a big no-no but completely acceptable in this situation.  The hackable IP is 68.144.238.32 if you want to give it a shot.

Now we all know how long it takes to install Gentoo (see my Gentoo Install Guide for a streamlined install process without the extra garbage), especially on a P2/233 with 164MB of RAM (64+64+32) and an 8Gig UDMA/33 Hard Drive.  I wanted to have the ability to quickly and easily restore my Gentoo root partition in the ‘likely’ event that this PC became compromised.

So I went about setting up 4 partitions, boot/root/swap/spare, now I only had 8gig’s to work with and I knew that a standard Gentoo install takes up 1.5GB’s (at least by following the standard install guide it did on mine).

I started out by creating the 4 partitions and installing Gentoo on hda3.  hda1 and hda2 house the boot and swap partitions and these are never modified.  Essentially what we are going to accomplish is have 2 bootable Gentoo installs, one on hda3 and the other on hda4, the reason for this being so that we can use hda4 with partimage to create backup images of hda3.  These are going to be mirror images, in other words everything from the hostname to the NIC configuration are going to be the same.  hda3 and 4 better be the same filesystem, I havn’t tested it with other filesystems but it’s better just to do this, I don’t even think that these 2 partitions have to be the same size for it to work (mine are).

• Grab a linux livecd, for this I used the Gentoo Universal 2005.1 CD.
• Boot up off of it and get to the console
• We’re now going to copy hda3 over to hda4 (you did create a filesystem on hda4 right?) mount hda3 and hda4 by entering these commands
• mkdir /to
• mkdir /from
• mount -t ext3 /dev/hda3 /to (assuming you’re running an ext3 filesystem, if you followed the standard install guide then it should be)
  
• mount -t ext3 /dev/hda4 /from
• cp -a /from/* /to (don’t leave out the -a, this is important)
• This will take ages depending on the speed of your HD, on my 8gig it took about 45mins.  You might also want to check if you’ve got DMA enabled on the HD by typing hdparm -d /dev/hda.
• Once the copy is complete do the following:
• mount /boot (I’m a bit iffy on this one, you may or may not have to do this but if you try the command below and it doesn’t display the grub.conf file then you will have to do this one)
• nano -w /from/boot/grub/grub.conf and add a second entry into the boot menu so that it looks like this, leave out the <code> bits and make sure that your kernel version is reflected correctly:

<code>
default 0
timeout 10
title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.12-gentoo-r6
root (hd0,0)
kernel /linux-2.6.12-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/hda3

title=Gentoo Backup 2.6.12-gentoo-r6 w/ partimage
root (hd0,0)
kernel /linux-2.6.12-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/hda4
</code>

• So now when you boot up you will be given the option to choose which Gentoo partition to start up.
• nano -w /to/etc/fstab
• Edit the fstab file and replace hda3 with hda4
• umount /to /from
• reboot
• Test out both installations and make sure they are both bootable, because the partitions are identical in almost every way you may want to check that each partition *is* different.  You can do this by simply creating a temporary test file in / on one of the partitions booting up and doing an ls / to see if its there or not.  Hint: It will be.
• Boot up into the second partition, ie the one that we’re going to use with partimage.
• This step is optional, I disabled networking (after completing the step below) and changed the hostname to reflect which partition I am in and for a bit of extra security.
• Boot into hda4, this is where we’re going to install partimage and store the hard drive images from hda3
• emerge partimage
• Type partimage to load up the program
• Select which partition you want to backup, in this case select hda3.  hda3 is currently in an unmounted state so don’t worry about open files.
• Follow the image creation wizard step by step and you will have backed up hda3 completely.  When I did this I selected ‘use maximum compression’ and the 1.5GB’s of files from hda3 came out to be a mere +-350MB’s stored in a nice single file image.  Note this is not an .ISO, it is a bzip2 compressed file.
• In the future when you want to restore hda3 simply boot up into the ‘partimage’ partition aka hda4, load up partimage and use the restore option, select the HD image file you want which will then fully and completely restore hda3 to the state that it was saved in.

The ‘gist’ of this guide is such that the tools but most importantly the techniques outlined here can easily be ported to just about any OS environment with a bit of elbow grease and know-how.

This guide is created so that somewhere down the road somebody will find the information useful in their own environment and modify it to suit their needs and perhaps, hopefully, learn something cool and interesting that can be expanded upon in very deep & complex ways with a bit of ingenius creativity on their part. If I’ve left out any steps just email me and let me know thanks copelandj@NOSPAMgmail.com.  Remove the NOSPAM part.

Update 2 October 2005:  I have been informed that you can do something similar to this backup/restore technique with the ‘dd’ GNU program, once I’ve looked at it I’ll probably write a guide on it so check back in a couple weeks.

Update 4 August 2008: Re-positioning my old articles on the new blog site.  Yeah this one’s really old!

This is an interesting one.  Our company has contracted with a fairly large and highly reputable solutions provider, I don’t want to mention any names but lets refer to them as ‘X’ needless to say they’re huge and have been around since the dawn of man.  Their main purpose is to provide back-office functions to our company with an emphasis on efficiency.

That’s all good on paper and in theory.  In practice it’s another story entirely.  I wanted to title this story ‘Planning Illiteracy’, because in a way that’s really what we’re experiencing.  But I don’t want to be mean so I won’t call it that.

What I find is that, once again, the wrong people are being hired for the job.  Long story short and some history first, we had a single-solitary lady handle the entirety of the back office functions for us (exceptionally efficiently I might add), unfortunately there was a disagreement with some new management and she left the company, a company to which she was loyal for many years, the company now had a gaping wound and decided to heal it by contracting this big 3rd party solutions provider otherwise known as X.  For lack of a better way of putting this, it was a retarded move.  6 months on, we’re no better off than we were when just one person managed the back-office functions.  That doesn’t sound so bad does it?  No it doesn’t.  That’s all well and good until I throw this bomb into the fray – 5 people replaced the functions that this single-solitary lady was handling.  Shocked?   Let me repeat that, five people replaced one person and out of that five they’re doing no better than when we had one person.  Does that sound right?  Let me tell you, that single-solitary lady was a gem, she was efficient, she knew what she was doing and she was a pleasure to work with.

But why is this 3rd party company, codenamed X like this? Are they not pros at what they do?  Have they not done this kind of stuff before?  Okay, you don’t have to mention the obvious, we’re a stubborn company and we have an aversion to change, just like vampires resist the light but 6 months on you would expect an improvement.

Getting a little side-tracked.  The real problem is that when X plans something, they’re doing so without including all the appropriate parties, like, the entire IT department for instance. So they go and plan something, they don’t let us know what they’ve planned and then at the last minute they realize that they’ve left out a key component such as network wiring.  Or the lack thereof. They want something done but don’t think about what’s needed to get it done!  What aggravates the situation, highlighting an earlier point I made is that the lead person that represents X mumbles and you often have to say “I’m sorry can you say that again.”  *bangs head against wall repeatedly*

One example of many.  I’m willing to bet our situation isn’t unique with similar scenarios replaying around the world in other companies.  Why is this a problem?  Are people unable to learn company processes?  Do they suffer from short term memory loss?