Archives for March 2009

March 31, 2009

Cornficker

I was just reading about the Cornficker worm on how it’s going to infect hundreds or perhaps millions of personal computers on April 1, 2009. Here are some facts about the Cornficker worm from ZDNet’s website.

What is Conficker and how does it work?
Conficker is a worm, also known as Kido or Downadup, that cropped up in November. It exploits a vulnerability in Windows that Microsoft patched in October.

Conficker.B, detected in February, added the ability to spread through network shares and via removable storage devices, like USB drives, through the AutoRun function in Windows.

Conficker.C, which surfaced earlier this month, shuts down security services, blocks computers from connecting to security Web sites, and downloads a Trojan. It also reaches out to other infected computers via peer-to-peer networking and includes a list of 50,000 different domains, of which 500 will be contacted by the infected computer on April 1 to receive updated copies or other malware or instructions. Previous Conficker variants were written to connect to 250 domains a day.

After reading more of it, I just realized, I have nothing to worry about. My desktop is running Ubuntu Linux.

March 27, 2009

Stuck on Ubuntu 8.04

I have to admit, I am stuck on Ubuntu 8.04. I have been an Ubuntu user since version 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog. Every six months, I have religiously upgraded to every version of Ubuntu that came along from version 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger, Edgy Eft, Feisty Fawn to version 8.04 Hardy Heron. And that is where it stops. I tried Ubuntu version 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, but there were a couple things that broke. I ended up putting back 8.04 Hardy Heron because everything seems to work fine with Hardy Heron. They don’t call it Hardy for no reason.

The biggest killer for me was screen rotation support. I have this HP w2207h widescreen monitor with swivel functionality and I need to have an Ubuntu version capable of rotating my screen by 90 degrees to support portrait viewing. Oh yes, Intrepid supports it, but not quite the way I wanted it. I need to be able to rotate it from the menu screen and not from the command-line or some third-party software.

So fast forward to today, I just heard that Jaunty Jackalope Beta was just released. Some of the new features being touted are: ext4 support, new login screen, some new wallpapers, faster boot-time and updated versions of software. Hmmm. For some reason, I am not so impressed. But still, I should upgrade. Well, not quite so fast. Why fix something that’s not broken. So, I’m stuck on Ubuntu 8.04 for the time being.

It’s a good thing Ubuntu Hardy Heron is under LTS support or Long Term Support. I don’t have to worry until April 2011 for support to end. Wow, that’s two more years from today. I will milk it for all its worth. You can almost guess what my next article will be, “I’m stuck on Windows XP.” I love Windows XP compared to Vista, but I digress. Well, that’s another story. In the meantime, the Ubuntu Update Manager is calling me to update my system. Well, you have to excuse me while my system is updating. And yes, there are no reboots required.

March 25, 2009

8TB Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440

Two years ago, I purchased a Vantec Nexstar LX Network Attached Storage or NAS for several of my systems at home. I added a 160gb drive to the NAS device to store, share and backup documents. The advantage of having a NAS drive over a regular USB-attached drive is that it’s easily available to any computer on the network via several networking protocols mainly HTTP, FTP, Windows Share and Samba for Linux users.

Seagate is now releasing a Linux-based NAS device called the Black Armor NAS 440. It comes with an iTunes server and is also a DLNA-compliant media server. It can be configured to run several RAID formats using RAID 0/1/5/10. It comes with a dual ethernet ports and 4 USB ports. It supports several networking protocols mainly NFS, HTTP, HTTPS,Â FTP, CIFS, Microsoft’s Rally and Active Directory. With 4 drive bays at 2TB capacity each, the device can be configured up to 8TB of storage.

Seagate’s new BlackArmor NAS devices cost $800 (NAS 420 with 2TB), $1,200 (NAS 440 with 4TB), $1,700 (NAS 440 with 6TB), and $2,000 (NAS 440 with 8TB).