There’s a price on yer head

Some of you may have read that latest news that Microsoft has put out a $250,000 reward to find who is behind the Conficker worm that is said to have infected as many as 12 million computers.  They are doing this because it has taken the firm view that the creation of the Conficker worm as a criminal act.

This may seem like a bold move but it is not the first time they have done this. In 2005 they paid $250,000 to two individuals who helped identify the creator of the Sasser worm.  Rewards were also offered of $250,000 for the creators of the other three major computer worms Blaster, MyDoom and Sobig however the authors of these were never caught.

In reality this amount of money is a small drop in the ocean for a company like Microsoft but in doing so they are trying to send out a strong message to the authors of such worms.  They are simply saying that they will not sit idly by while the creators wreak havoc on their clients systems.  In reality the fact of the matter is that regardless of what Microsoft or Microsoft Trustworth Computing Group offer it seems that it will offer very little in the way of a deterrent for such authors as it is a challenge that they enjoy rising to.  What it does do is help their clients to feel that they are doing all they can to try an prevent such hassles returning in the future.

The worm itself infects a computer that is not fully up to date with the latest updates from the Microsoft Update website. If you are in any doubt then the best action is to visit the Microsoft Update website and apply all the latest critical updates.  Once this is complete continue to revisit the site until you are told there are no further critical updates. You should also ensure that your Anti-Virus software is fully up-to-date, if you don’t already have one then visit either AVG or aVast who both provide free versions for home use.

Network woes

Today I was called to a clients that had added some new RAM to a Windows XP pc but could not access the network any longer.  What was happening was it showed a connection was in place but it would not obtain an IP address from the network nor would it workwith a fixed IP address.  The first thing to check was the physical side of the networking such as cables, network ports etc, but still to no avail.  Tried a known working connection from another PC and drew the same blank result which started to look like cooked OS which was not something I wanted as the look in his eyes said he wanted it sorting today.  So I tried a new network card in case the internal adapter was toasted but stil no good. Next option was going to be trying repairing the TCP/IP stack using the time old command of:

netsh int ip reset c:\ipreset.txt

Still no joy, now things were really starting to look bleak as this was an older unit that shipped with an OS CD Rom and not the good ol’ recovery disks.  Then with a burst of inspiration I decided to try the winsock stack, as it was possible this was damaged as a standard “ping” command produced some very odd results.  The command, as before, was:

netsh winsock reset

This was followed by a restart and cries of joy (inside of course, outside it was “there we go all sorted”).  This is not a command that I have had to use before, many a time the ip reset has been used but no this one.

Anyhow, you learn something new everyday!

Reminder: General Availability for Windows 7 Beta Ending This Week

This is a repost from the Windows Blog here:

I wanted to quickly remind everyone that this week general availability for the Windows 7 Beta will be ending:

February 10th: Starting at 12am Pacific Time, no new downloads will be available. If you have already begun downloading the Windows 7 Beta, you have until Feb. 12th to complete the download.

February 12th: Starting at 9am Pacific Time all downloads will no longer be available for the Windows 7 Beta. If you have not finished your download, you will be unable to do so.

After February 12th, folks will still be able to register for product keys for the Windows 7 Beta.

The above schedule does *not* apply to TechNet and MSDN Subscribers.

Special thanks to everyone who is beta testing Windows 7!

The world keeps turning

This week has been an interesting week for UK business.  We have discovered, surprise  surprise, that as a country we are totally unable to cope with any kind of weather outside of the standard drizzle of rain or a sparkle of sunshine.  As a Brit I am truly embarrassed to call myself a UK citizen this week.  I mean there are countries that have 5-6 times more snow in a day than we saw over the last three days and the wheels of commerce continue to turn.  But the good old UK can’t even keep the Underground running..that’s right the underground I mean what the hell does the underground have to do with snow I ask.  All buses services in London were ceased which meant most people were left with three choices; a) either make their way in cars, which for London folk is just impossible due to costs etc; b) they walk but that is too far for some; c) phone in sick/work from home.  The Federation of Small Businesses have estimated that 20% of the UK workforce, that’s around 6.4 million people did not make it in to work and as of early Tuesday morning they estimated that it had cost the British economy £1.2bn which is probably much higher.

It was not just the public transport system that failed miserably it was also the hi-tech systems that run the UK.  Mobile networks creaked heavily under the extra load of trying to call friends and colleagues, it’s reported that some of the networks experienced up to 73% more calls that usual and a steep increase in the number of picture messages being sent as snowmen make rare appearances in gardens.

There was also politicians that venture into the fray making bold statements about how sadly unprepared the country was despite having plenty of warning from the Met Office.  Liberal Democrat shadow transport secretary, Norman Baker said it was "an absolute disgrace" the country’s transport networks were unable to cope with bad weather.  He went on to say "The lack of preparedness is astounding and damaging for the economy. I have travelled from Stockholm to the Arctic Circle on a train that arrived five minutes early, yet Britain lapses into chaos at the first hint of snow,".

So why was this country so unprepared?  I don’t have the answer just an opinion; that is that we are just British, no matter what type of “extreme” weather we experience we just panic with hosepipe bans in summer while pipes lay leaking gallons of water per hour.  The economy stops when snow falls because a lot of people see it as a great way to get out of work.  Either way we need to sort ourselves out and get prepared as the country cannot afford too many of these “snow” days..

Just plain insane

This was the scene in Nottingham today.  Not too bad considering how bad the weather gets in other countries but as true Brits we were totally ill-equipped to cope with the snow.  Still it was fun and apparently there’s more snow on the way, lets hope so then the media can blame the recession on Snow!!!!

Fixin’ stuff

Over the weekend it was time to re-install the work laptop, which isn’t too much of an issue however the data need to be taken off first.  So the first job was to try and find somewhere to dump about 40gb of data, nothing too major but the state of modern computing shows that your average desktop/notebook typically has more storage than servers.  The best place to put this data was going to be on the host for our three virtual servers but for some reason, following the installation of VMWare 2.0, network access to this server stopped altogether.  The server itself could get out but nothing could get back into the server itself.  What transpired after a number of hours of testing was that during the upgrade to VMWare Server 2.0 it changed many of the policies in the Routing and Remote Access Service which meant that there was not NetBIOS access to the host server but the virtual servers were still accessible which was more confusing.  The end result was to downgrade VMWare Server to a previous version and then to disable the Routing and Remote Access Service.  Following a reboot of the host everything came back on fine and network access to the host was fully restored.

All that was left was to reinstall Vista back on the laptop which went very smooth, so much so that I now have a dual boot to Windows 7 Beta configured so that I can start and give it some serious testing.  More to follow on this one.