Hmm I didn't see this story originally. The last thing I remember was a guy named T telling me to look directly into an chrome vibrator. There was a flash and... uh. wow, what an exciting story! I have an urge to subscribe though...
I had an idea along these lines, only it worked a little differently:
Create a webserver that has a RAM disk big enough to hold the site. Then, at boot, dump all the contents from the CD-ROM over to the RAM Disk. Then, periodically check a few things in RAM:
- # of files served vs. # of files on the CD
- Dates modified
- Significant changes in file size
- Maybe a file comparison on a random file here and there
- Refresh the RAMdisk with what's on the CD-ROM at regular intervals like every hour.... and so on. If there is a change, the server could alert the admin and let them know what the attempted change was to.
That idea's not as well developed as I'd like, but it's food for thought.:)
The site my company uses doesn't use.EXE's anywhere. B'sides, I think you can tell it to allow a very particular.EXE. It's been a while since I've needed to play with it, so it might be worth double checking.
Remember, this is stuff I manually set, not default settings for everybody to use.:P
Okay, I'll give you guys a tip about NT Server running IIS: Download a tool called "URLSniffer". (Damn I hope that's the name of it, been a while...)
Basically what it does is it applies a rule to each address that comes in and allows you to filter out ones intended to be buffer overflows that cerate weakenesses that viruses like Nimda can exploit. What I did was I looked through the logs of an infected machine and looked at all the bad URLS that were attempted. From there, I composed a comprehensive set of rules. They go someething like this:
- If it has.EXE in the string, don't allow it through to IIS.
- If it has CMD, or other common hacking executables, flush it.
- If it contains non-alphanumeric characters, flush it....and so on. Because of this tool, anybody trying to use a malicious url cannot get through to IIS. It's like a firewall. Combine this with MS's "Lockdown" tool that disables a bunch of 'features' in IIS, and you have a pretty strong webserver. I won't say that it's entirely secure, or that it's secure as Apache, but I do feel pretty good that the Nimda wannabe's out there will have a good deal of trouble getting through.
I realize I'm way off topic here, but I'm hoping this little tip will help people down the road lock-up their servers to help get rid of Nimda.
I've come to the conclusion that anyone who is still re-booting their NT4 servers every night for stability is pretty much incompetent, or relying on coders who are. There are just too many of us out there who are managing to keep the things up without doing anything of the sort, running rock-solid, for months and months on end--it's not a fluke. It's good management versus poor management, which I think you'll find is ALWAYS more of a factor than the OS when it comes to the stability of any box.
Good point. The first thing I recommend to anybody running Windows NT is to go through the event log and do what you can to get it to stop producing alerts. I have an NT box running Exchange using a prototype Intel machine, old hardware, and tape to hold it together. It gets rebooted about once a month. If I had used a decent machine (i.e. had the money to NOT scavenge..) I'm confident I could do fine with it. Using components that Windows NT has drivers built into it is a good idea as well. I try to do as much of that as possible. (I'm not saying don't update the drivers, just to be clear.)
I wouldn't use this as a reflective indicator as to how good NT is, though. There are several people scratching their heads wondering how I manage to keep it up. Heh. Fun stuff, but I hate Exchange. MS thinks that if we use more than 25 connections at a time (IMAP uses 2 connections...) then we owe them more money for licenses. I'm so looking forward to replacing that box with Sendmail.
"However, to put it in perspective, doing normal development with Java, VBScript, IIS, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Flash (I am deliberately excluding crashes that occured while coding C/C++ and other "non-safe" systems), I observe Win2k either bluescreening, spontaneously rebooting, or getting to a state where it needs to be power-cycled approximately 2-4 times a month."
Wow, I totally don't relate to your story heh. I have 3 engineers sitting around me, using Win2k, doing development, and not blue-screening. I've done.ASP programming and have never had a 'reboot the computer' problem, let alone a bsod. As a matter of fact, I've used everything you've mentioned except for MySQL and Java. Not a prob.
Without the chance to have a gander at your computer, I'd wager you've got yourself a hardware problem there. I'd be running Linux today if Win2k worked like that here. Come to think of it, the only auto-reboot or freezing that ever occured on my machine was caused by RealPlayer heh.
In any case, I think your situation is unusual. I assume you read about my experiences. I've worked with a ridiculous number of Win2k boxes and haven't had any problems worth mentioning. Hell, I've developed a nasty habit of not saving my files because I take my computer for granted. Stupid? Yes. But I'd rather be able to take my computer for granted and lose once in a while than have my environment teach me to be paranoid.
"Have you ever made any comparsions? Photos are usually a lot larger when compressed as gif, instead of jpeg. And you only get 256 colors."
That is an excellent response to something I didn't say. I didn't say '.GIF compresses smaller than.JPG' I didn't say "Use.GIF instead of.JPG". I didn't even say ".GIF can look as good as.JPG".
You misinterpreted me. I was explaining why.GIF is still used along with.JPG. Is JPG gonna be better than.GIF in most situations? Certainly, it's better than.PNG in most situations as well. However, you asked "And what the hell are you doing compressing a photo with gif in the first place?" and I gave you a few reasons he might. Don't pull out deeper reasoning than I expressed.
Heh my principal was cool. I had to sit in his office quite a bit, but he knew I was a decent kid. Somehow I managed to have a good enough story to tell that I never really did get into trouble with him, much to the disgruntlement of some of my teachers. I'm a real bastard when it comes to placing the blame elswhere, hehe. (That'd explain why I've lost 15 points so far in a Karma bombing over the last 3 days.)
"Those who would criticise you must be pretty stupid. You simply tell your experience with win2k."
Thanks man. T'was nice to get a response that wasn't like this:
"OH yeah?! WelL I had a computer with WinDows 2000, and I couldn't do anything without it BSOD'ing. My one computer tells a better story than your 19 working ones!", or in other words "1 bad computers > 19 good computers".
Funny thing is, most of the problems that people have told me about could be traced back to defective/crappy hardware. Heh.:)
Lol! Actually I did move thousands of miles away after graduation.
The guy took flying way too seriously, and I think he thought I was making fun of plane crashes. Honestly, I wasn't going for sarcasm. My mouth was moving while I was thinking and 'gravity' came out. It's the type of thing that would have been avoided if I had waited a little bit before opening my yaps.
I'm not defending the guy, though. He'd sit there telling you stupid jokes all the time like:
"If everbody in America had a pink cadillac, the USA could be called a 'pink-car-nation'."... Yet I make a joke that erupts the class into laughter (albeit unintentionally), and I get to go see the principal.
Heh. Joke's on him, though. 2 years after I leave and start my career, I'm making more than he is.
Wow, them'z angry words over a file-format comparison. Never thought.GIF vs..JPG would stir 'a feudin'.
"Are you on crack? Take a photo, compress it via png... what are those nasty artifcats, diffusion paterns, etc, etc..."
PNG is lossless. You can run some optimizations to lessen the amount of data in it before compressing, that's where some of the compression comes in. If you run the same compression twice, you don't get a worse image.
"And what the hell are you doing compressing a photo with gif in the first place? Jpeg is meant for photos, and gif is meant for low-color pictures. When you draw line-art that has at most 256 colours, gif is lossless."
There are valid reasons to go with.GIF. It has a 1-bit transparency channel and can be animated. It decompresses quicker, on an image heavy site that's really important. With a good ditherer,.GIF photos can look just fine..GIF is lossless. The color information is a pre-processing effect applied before the image is compressed. This drops the total colors down to 256 (or lower for better compression.) If you take that image, compress it again (same as I said above), you don't lose any data in the image. If you take JPEG, and recompress an image, you lose more data.
Yep, that's right. I spun my sister around when she was teeny weeny, and I ended up wearing the contents of her tummy. I apologize for not recording the RPM it took to do that.
"Now this is more of an MS bash... people have come to expect system failures, and I've read admissions that 5-9's uptime is just too difficult and expensive a goal, and so-on, and of course this mostly points to MS desktop and server software"
That's an interesting read, my company chose Windows 2000 for stability as desktop machines, and we're doing fine. 19 desktops and laptops, all running 2k. My job is to maintain them, and I find way too much time to post on Slashdot.;)
We've also got an NT4 webserver running IIS, and it's been up for 3 months. It would have been up longer except I had to shut the box down to move it.
I'll tell you something, it was a huge relief to go to 2000 from 98. Nobody bugs me about anything anymore. We have computers running all weekend processing video data. We haven't had an 'over the weekend crash'. We'll have 4 video files going at once, two per processor, and they'll all be done by Monday. As you can see, we beat our machines pretty hard sometimes.
*Thought it'd be nice for you to hear from somebody who's had good experiences with MS for a change.*
I've drifted off topic a bit. Sorry. The point I'm basically making is that Windows 2000 is a fine OS and would probably be up to the job, at least run-time wise. I know that comment's going to draw criticism, but oh well. I've worked around a ton of these machines for the last two years and you're not going to change my mind about it. Heck, I have a computer in my bedroom right now capturing TV shows as a home-brew Tivo. Hasn't been rebooted in over a month. Not bad given how buggy the TV drivers are. Heh.
Not to be cliche or anything, and I'm sure you could see this one coming a million miles away,
but what happens when it crashes?
Hahahahaha!!!
This reminds me of some trouble I got into in high-school once: Anybody remember Channel 1? It started around 1990-1, and it was a news channel that some schools got. Each episode had a trivia question just before a commercial break.
One day, they asked "What is the most common cause of plane crashes?". I hastily and enthusiastically responded "gravity!!" I got in real serious trouble that day, I forgot that the teacher was also a pilot. The real answer was 'human error', which I had illustrated that day when my teacher shot me down to the principal's office.
It could be. This is Sony we're talking about, here. They have strange ways of illustrating performance. They think that rendering 75 million 0-pixel polygons within a second is a fast machine. All they have to do is increase SOME number by 1000x, and they'll claim it's 1000x faster.
Reality will tell a whole different story. And you know what their rationalization will be? "well, the system is up to that speed, it's dependent on the game developers...".
One should never believe Sony's #'s about anything. To be honest, I don't believe that's really the Playstation 3. It's only a potential #.
Actually, the Playstation 2 is capable of 75 million poly's a second. They were all drawn at 0,0,0 with a size of 0, and the buffer they were drawn into wasn't drawn on the screen.
No, didn't read it. I didn't want to read your rationalization. I read this one because I was curious how well you'd take your idiocy being ignored. It really isn't hard to skip right to the reply without reading what you said. I didn't see it, I'm not going back to look. Don't care.
As for being a troll for an idiot... I may very well be an idiot, but you're the troll. "Bill Clinton did stuff as bad as 9-11." Yah whatever.
You have issues, man. I hope one day you find the happiness you desperately need.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yeah, because money is the only measuring stick worth using... you shallow fuck."
::eyeroll::
I'm sure more than one person will find it funny that you based your judgement on only one post. Heh. Yep, I'm the shallow one here.
I am absolutely uninterested in talking about it. :P
What inspired that sig was people saying "nope, you are completely 100% wrong because of an unlikely scenario that I just theorized."
Didn't catch the part where I said this: "It would have been up longer except I had to shut the box down to move it." Didja?
I have no idea how long the uptime would be if we didn't geographically move it.
It sure beats the pants off of "herrr herr, Windows crashes every 10 minutes." duddn't it?
"I was under the impression time was absolute, due to the psychological, thermodynamic and cosmological arrows all going the same way."
Funny, I thought Einstein said that time was relative. I spent the last two hours waiting for 15 minutes to pass by so I could go home.
Hmm I didn't see this story originally. The last thing I remember was a guy named T telling me to look directly into an chrome vibrator. There was a flash and... uh. wow, what an exciting story! I have an urge to subscribe though...
I had an idea along these lines, only it worked a little differently:
... and so on. If there is a change, the server could alert the admin and let them know what the attempted change was to.
:)
Create a webserver that has a RAM disk big enough to hold the site. Then, at boot, dump all the contents from the CD-ROM over to the RAM Disk. Then, periodically check a few things in RAM:
- # of files served vs. # of files on the CD
- Dates modified
- Significant changes in file size
- Maybe a file comparison on a random file here and there
- Refresh the RAMdisk with what's on the CD-ROM at regular intervals like every hour.
That idea's not as well developed as I'd like, but it's food for thought.
Fair enough. :) Good day!
Heh.
.EXE's anywhere. B'sides, I think you can tell it to allow a very particular .EXE. It's been a while since I've needed to play with it, so it might be worth double checking.
:P
The site my company uses doesn't use
Remember, this is stuff I manually set, not default settings for everybody to use.
Doubtful. My Dual 1.4 gig Athlon takes a noticable hit when a bunch of .JPG's need to be decoded. .GIF shows up quicker AND it uses 1/3rd the memory.
Remember this: I don't live in a world of absolutes.
LOL! Hehe.
.EXE in the string, don't allow it through to IIS.
...and so on. Because of this tool, anybody trying to use a malicious url cannot get through to IIS. It's like a firewall. Combine this with MS's "Lockdown" tool that disables a bunch of 'features' in IIS, and you have a pretty strong webserver. I won't say that it's entirely secure, or that it's secure as Apache, but I do feel pretty good that the Nimda wannabe's out there will have a good deal of trouble getting through.
Okay, I'll give you guys a tip about NT Server running IIS: Download a tool called "URLSniffer". (Damn I hope that's the name of it, been a while...)
Basically what it does is it applies a rule to each address that comes in and allows you to filter out ones intended to be buffer overflows that cerate weakenesses that viruses like Nimda can exploit. What I did was I looked through the logs of an infected machine and looked at all the bad URLS that were attempted. From there, I composed a comprehensive set of rules. They go someething like this:
- If it has
- If it has CMD, or other common hacking executables, flush it.
- If it contains non-alphanumeric characters, flush it.
I realize I'm way off topic here, but I'm hoping this little tip will help people down the road lock-up their servers to help get rid of Nimda.
I wouldn't use this as a reflective indicator as to how good NT is, though. There are several people scratching their heads wondering how I manage to keep it up. Heh. Fun stuff, but I hate Exchange. MS thinks that if we use more than 25 connections at a time (IMAP uses 2 connections...) then we owe them more money for licenses. I'm so looking forward to replacing that box with Sendmail.
Whoah.. I drifted way off topic. Sorry dudes.
"However, to put it in perspective, doing normal development with Java, VBScript, IIS, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Flash (I am deliberately excluding crashes that occured while coding C/C++ and other "non-safe" systems), I observe Win2k either bluescreening, spontaneously rebooting, or getting to a state where it needs to be power-cycled approximately 2-4 times a month."
.ASP programming and have never had a 'reboot the computer' problem, let alone a bsod. As a matter of fact, I've used everything you've mentioned except for MySQL and Java. Not a prob.
Wow, I totally don't relate to your story heh. I have 3 engineers sitting around me, using Win2k, doing development, and not blue-screening. I've done
Without the chance to have a gander at your computer, I'd wager you've got yourself a hardware problem there. I'd be running Linux today if Win2k worked like that here. Come to think of it, the only auto-reboot or freezing that ever occured on my machine was caused by RealPlayer heh.
In any case, I think your situation is unusual. I assume you read about my experiences. I've worked with a ridiculous number of Win2k boxes and haven't had any problems worth mentioning. Hell, I've developed a nasty habit of not saving my files because I take my computer for granted. Stupid? Yes. But I'd rather be able to take my computer for granted and lose once in a while than have my environment teach me to be paranoid.
"Have you ever made any comparsions? Photos are usually a lot larger when compressed as gif, instead of jpeg. And you only get 256 colors."
.JPG' I didn't say "Use .GIF instead of .JPG". I didn't even say ".GIF can look as good as .JPG".
.GIF is still used along with .JPG. Is JPG gonna be better than .GIF in most situations? Certainly, it's better than .PNG in most situations as well. However, you asked "And what the hell are you doing compressing a photo with gif in the first place?" and I gave you a few reasons he might. Don't pull out deeper reasoning than I expressed.
That is an excellent response to something I didn't say. I didn't say '.GIF compresses smaller than
You misinterpreted me. I was explaining why
Heh my principal was cool. I had to sit in his office quite a bit, but he knew I was a decent kid. Somehow I managed to have a good enough story to tell that I never really did get into trouble with him, much to the disgruntlement of some of my teachers. I'm a real bastard when it comes to placing the blame elswhere, hehe. (That'd explain why I've lost 15 points so far in a Karma bombing over the last 3 days.)
"Those who would criticise you must be pretty stupid. You simply tell your experience with win2k."
:)
Thanks man. T'was nice to get a response that wasn't like this:
"OH yeah?! WelL I had a computer with WinDows 2000, and I couldn't do anything without it BSOD'ing. My one computer tells a better story than your 19 working ones!", or in other words "1 bad computers > 19 good computers".
Funny thing is, most of the problems that people have told me about could be traced back to defective/crappy hardware. Heh.
Lol! Actually I did move thousands of miles away after graduation.
... Yet I make a joke that erupts the class into laughter (albeit unintentionally), and I get to go see the principal.
The guy took flying way too seriously, and I think he thought I was making fun of plane crashes. Honestly, I wasn't going for sarcasm. My mouth was moving while I was thinking and 'gravity' came out. It's the type of thing that would have been avoided if I had waited a little bit before opening my yaps.
I'm not defending the guy, though. He'd sit there telling you stupid jokes all the time like:
"If everbody in America had a pink cadillac, the USA could be called a 'pink-car-nation'."
Heh. Joke's on him, though. 2 years after I leave and start my career, I'm making more than he is.
Wow, them'z angry words over a file-format comparison. Never thought .GIF vs. .JPG would stir 'a feudin'.
.GIF. It has a 1-bit transparency channel and can be animated. It decompresses quicker, on an image heavy site that's really important. With a good ditherer, .GIF photos can look just fine. .GIF is lossless. The color information is a pre-processing effect applied before the image is compressed. This drops the total colors down to 256 (or lower for better compression.) If you take that image, compress it again (same as I said above), you don't lose any data in the image. If you take JPEG, and recompress an image, you lose more data.
"Are you on crack? Take a photo, compress it via png... what are those nasty artifcats, diffusion paterns, etc, etc..."
PNG is lossless. You can run some optimizations to lessen the amount of data in it before compressing, that's where some of the compression comes in. If you run the same compression twice, you don't get a worse image.
"And what the hell are you doing compressing a photo with gif in the first place? Jpeg is meant for photos, and gif is meant for low-color pictures. When you draw line-art that has at most 256 colours, gif is lossless."
There are valid reasons to go with
That clarify things a bit?
Yep, that's right. I spun my sister around when she was teeny weeny, and I ended up wearing the contents of her tummy. I apologize for not recording the RPM it took to do that.
They're having trouble recruiting new pilots today because they're sick of campers sitting there using their anti-aircraft guns.
He missed his target anyway. The pilot didn't realize he had to be logged in as Administrator to fire the guns in the first place.
"Now this is more of an MS bash... people have come to expect system failures, and I've read admissions that 5-9's uptime is just too difficult and expensive a goal, and so-on, and of course this mostly points to MS desktop and server software"
;)
That's an interesting read, my company chose Windows 2000 for stability as desktop machines, and we're doing fine. 19 desktops and laptops, all running 2k. My job is to maintain them, and I find way too much time to post on Slashdot.
We've also got an NT4 webserver running IIS, and it's been up for 3 months. It would have been up longer except I had to shut the box down to move it.
I'll tell you something, it was a huge relief to go to 2000 from 98. Nobody bugs me about anything anymore. We have computers running all weekend processing video data. We haven't had an 'over the weekend crash'. We'll have 4 video files going at once, two per processor, and they'll all be done by Monday. As you can see, we beat our machines pretty hard sometimes.
*Thought it'd be nice for you to hear from somebody who's had good experiences with MS for a change.*
I've drifted off topic a bit. Sorry. The point I'm basically making is that Windows 2000 is a fine OS and would probably be up to the job, at least run-time wise. I know that comment's going to draw criticism, but oh well. I've worked around a ton of these machines for the last two years and you're not going to change my mind about it. Heck, I have a computer in my bedroom right now capturing TV shows as a home-brew Tivo. Hasn't been rebooted in over a month. Not bad given how buggy the TV drivers are. Heh.
One day, they asked "What is the most common cause of plane crashes?". I hastily and enthusiastically responded "gravity!!" I got in real serious trouble that day, I forgot that the teacher was also a pilot. The real answer was 'human error', which I had illustrated that day when my teacher shot me down to the principal's office.
It could be. This is Sony we're talking about, here. They have strange ways of illustrating performance. They think that rendering 75 million 0-pixel polygons within a second is a fast machine. All they have to do is increase SOME number by 1000x, and they'll claim it's 1000x faster.
Reality will tell a whole different story. And you know what their rationalization will be? "well, the system is up to that speed, it's dependent on the game developers...".
One should never believe Sony's #'s about anything. To be honest, I don't believe that's really the Playstation 3. It's only a potential #.
Actually, the Playstation 2 is capable of 75 million poly's a second. They were all drawn at 0,0,0 with a size of 0, and the buffer they were drawn into wasn't drawn on the screen.
I shit you not, that's how they came to that #.
No, didn't read it. I didn't want to read your rationalization. I read this one because I was curious how well you'd take your idiocy being ignored. It really isn't hard to skip right to the reply without reading what you said. I didn't see it, I'm not going back to look. Don't care.
As for being a troll for an idiot... I may very well be an idiot, but you're the troll. "Bill Clinton did stuff as bad as 9-11." Yah whatever.
You have issues, man. I hope one day you find the happiness you desperately need.