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Week of 6 August 2001 Latest
Update: Friday, 05 July 2002 09:16 |
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Monday, 6 August 2001 [Last
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| I think my network is under attack. I noticed
yesterday afternoon that the data light on my cable modem was flickering
constantly, although there was no reason it should have been. My first
thought, of course, was that a Trojan had made its way onto one of my
systems and was pillaging all my data and sending it to China or
something. I'd installed a beta shareware hard disk temperature monitoring
utility immediately before I noticed the problem, so that was the prime
suspect. I uninstalled it, cleared all its files from the hard drive,
cleaned the registry, and rebooted. The flickering continued.
Virus scans showed nothing on any of my systems, so the next thing I did was shut down my main system. The problem continued. I shut down Barbara's main system, and the flickering still continued. I fired up Gatekeeper, the WinGate management utility, and it told me that no software running on any of my clients had active sessions with the proxy server. So I shut down meepmeep, the box to which the cable modem is connected, and the flickering still continued. Obviously inbound traffic rather than outbound. Perhaps I'm being hit by a DoS attack? If so, it's a remarkably inept one, because I don't notice any degradation in throughput. David Bierbaum commented on the messageboard last night that his cable modem was also flickering constantly under a constant assault of pings, so perhaps that's what's going on. I was going to fire up Network Monitor to look at the raw packets on meepmeep, but meepmeep is running Windows NT Workstation rather than Server, so Network Monitor isn't installed. I should probably install promiscuous-mode Ethernet drivers on one of my test-beds and run packet-grabber software on it so that I can view the raw packet stream on my network. There used to be several free Windows-based software packet-grabbers available, but I have no idea whether they still are. I'm sure it'd be trivially easy to do this under Linux. Yet another reason to learn Linux.
It looks like Tropical Storm Betty may be headed our way. (Yes, I know some people call it TS Barry, but I refuse to go along with Politically Correct male names for tropical storms and hurricanes. They have female names because they behave unpredictably. If they said what they meant and did what they said, we'd call them himmicanes. So I'm forced to assign my own names.) We're not likely to see any severe weather, but clouds and rain are likely, which rules out using the telescopes for a while.
I've gotten quite a bit of feedback, both publicly and privately, from others who have noticed on their cable modems exactly the same symptoms I described on my cable modem. The attacks are from the CodeRed III worm, also known as CodeRed.C, CodeRed.v3, and W32.Bady.C. Although this worm has been described as a variant of the recent CodeRed worm, it's not really. It's only similarity is that it exploits the same buffer vulnerability as that earlier worm. CodeRed III is nasty and it's widespread. If you run an IIS server and you haven't patched it, you're almost certainly already infected. Please shut down your server right now, regardless of inconvenience. I mean right now, this second, before you do anything else. Then read this page from the Symantec AntiVirus Research Center and then visit this Microsoft page to download the patch. I'd be very surprised if any of my readers are still running unpatched IIS servers, but there are obviously still a lot of clueless IIS administrators out there. If you know anyone who might be running IIS, give him a call and make sure he knows about the problem.
I got a message from Pournelle on his back-channel mailing list asking for thoughts about the Adobe/Sklyarow situation and Microsoft XP. For anyone who's interested, here's what I responded: As far as Adobe, although I think it was obnoxious of them to get the ball rolling, they aren't really at fault here, nor is there anything they can do to improve the situation for Sklyarov. From a legal viewpoint, they're a disinterested party, since criminal charges are filed on behalf of the state rather than the injured party. Sklyarov's supposed offense was not against Adobe per se, but against the DMCA, and it is the DMCA that must die. I see the same thing happening with DMCA that happened with RICO. Both are unconstitutional prima facie, so the federal government is being very careful to avoid having the issue of constitutionality raised in court. With RICO, the feds spent, what?, 15 years applying it case-by-carefully-selected-case against mobsters and others that would get no sympathy from the public. After 15 years of carefully selected prosecutions against unsympathetic victims, the feds figured RICO now had an aura of constitutionality and started applying RICO wholesale. Nowadays, RICO is used against small businesses and individuals, which was clearly not the original intention. I see the same thing happening with DMCA. The feds must know that they're on very shaky constitutional grounds with DMCA, so they'll choose victims that can't defend themselves very well and are unlikely to get much public support. They obviously misjudged with Sklyarov--there must be a lot of puckered assholes at Justice right about now--and I think we need to make the most of that. The feds would love us to concentrate on Bad Old Adobe, but I say that's the wrong thing to do. What we need to concentrate on is the Bad Old DMCA, hammering away at its unconstitutionality. That and its outrageous favoritism for commercial interests like the MPAA and the RIAA, who can afford to pay lobbyists to get laws passed that take away our Fair Use rights. Make no mistake, the goal of MPAA and RIAA is copyright in perpetuity, regardless of what the Founders intended. As far as Microsoft, the only sane position I can see is to boycott XP. As I wrote three years ago or more, the upgrade revenue model is unsustainable for Microsoft. In order to survive, let alone thrive, they have no choice but to force us to pay periodically for using their software. At first, it'll be by the year, then by the month, then for each time the software is used. I'm simply not willing to give Microsoft carte blanche to draft my wallet, which is what they really need if they are to survive. I'll continue using their earlier software products, which do everything I need to do, and will never upgrade past Windows 2000, Office 2000, and IE5. Ever. NT4/W2K and Office 2K/IE5 will hold me until Linux is a workable desktop solution for me. I think XP is going to be a disaster for Microsoft. I predicted that W2K would be a disaster for them, and it has been. But XP is going to make them long for the good old days when they were able to sell at least a few copies of Windows 2000. They're losing ground big time in server-space to Linux, and XP just puts them further behind. As Linux and other Open Source stuff continues to develop, Microsoft is going to start losing desktop market share as well. Realistically, I'd guess that it'll be at least two years until Linux shows up as anything more than an asterisk in desktop market share, but once Linux gets its foot in the door the floodgates will open. In five years, I think Microsoft will be seriously sweating the desktop. In ten years, I believe that Windows will be a minor player on the desktop, if indeed it's still around at all. I think Microsoft is a dinosaur, built on an unsustainable revenue model, and I think what we're seeing with XP is that dinosaur thrashing in its death throes. Microsoft needs most people to be willing to pay much more money much more often for their products, and I don't see that happening. Some will, of course, but fewer and fewer as the years pass. And as revenues decline, stock prices are going to follow, which kind of makes you wonder how all those folks working 80 hour weeks for little pay are going to react when they find out that their stock options aren't worth what they expected.
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Tuesday, 7 August 2001 [Last
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| Very strange. This morning I walked into my
office and found a large red notice emblazoned across my screen, telling
me that I was infected by SirCam. I'm not sure how, since Norton AntiVirus
is installed on my system. I leave Outlook running most of the time, and
it had downloaded another half dozen copies of SirCam-infected messages
overnight. In the past, NAV did nothing to catch these messages on the way
in. They'd simply arrive in my inbox, and I'd delete them. If I attempted
to open such a message, NAV would catch it. According to Symantec, NAV
doesn't catch SirCam on the way in, so my system had been behaving as
expected, although others including Jerry Pournelle have mentioned that
NAV for no apparent reason started catching infected messages as they
arrived on their systems.
At any rate, the big red warning dialog gave me the option to start a disinfection wizard, so I did so. The disinfection wizard told me that there were two infected files in the thompson subfolder of the Documents and Settings folder. The filenames were unfamiliar to me, so they must have been from a SirCam message that came in overnight (which I obviously hadn't opened). I started the wizard and it offered me the choice of automatic or manual. I chose manual, of course, and kept clicking next. When the process completed, NAV told me that I was still infected by SirCam. Very strange. So I ran a NAV virus scan manually. That didn't find anything. As I was sitting there watching my computer do its thing, NAV popped up a warning that a SirCam message had just arrived. That's the first time it had ever done that. I told NAV to delete the attachment, after which Outlook clunked away and a new message showed up in my inbox. Oddly, it still had the icon that denotes an attachment is present. I deleted the message, of course. I'm not sure why NAV detected the inbound message this time. I have NAV set to visit the Symantec LiveUpdate site at 02:30 to download updates and then run a full scan at 03:00. It did that this morning as usual, so my first thought was that the update had fixed the problem with not detecting infected inbound messages. But that can't be the case, because of the half dozen or so SirCam messages that came in overnight, at least two or three arrived after the update had occurred. And yet those messages still showed up in my inbox normally. I'm kind of hoping that NAV will stay broken. Deleting SirCam messages manually takes half a second. Having NAV pop up its warning and then clicking through all the steps to kill the attachment takes much longer. It seems to me that there should be an option in there to turn off automatic detection or, alternatively, to automatically handle all SirCam messages that arrive without prompting.
Last night was to be clear. We were thinking about heading up to Bullington, but I decided I'd like to find out just how much or how little we could see from our yard, which has a limiting magnitude of about 2.5. The answer turned out to be not much. The temperature and humidity were terrible. Barbara and I were both dripping with sweat within minutes of starting to set up. Worse yet, the lenses were fogging up. When we pulled a fresh eyepiece out of the case, we'd be able to look through it for only a few seconds before the view started to get blurry. Just the proximity of our faces was enough to cause the eye lenses to fog up. The eyepieces had been stored in the truck in a cool garage, so we tried letting them equilibrate, but that didn't help. Not that it would have made much difference. There were a few stars visible, but not enough to make it possible to find anything interesting to look at. I think we'll be limited to Lunar and planetary observing from our yard, and even that's not likely to be very satisfactory until the cooler, clearer air of Fall and Winter arrive. Until then, we'll just have to drive to a better observing site. I'm becoming dissatisfied with Bullington. There's enough light pollution there that I can read newspaper headlines. The horizons are mostly pretty good, but there's a lot of haze. We need to get up higher, out of the humidity and haze, and away from lights. I see why many of the club members head up to the Parkway, even though it is a three hour round trip. Later this year, we'll start going to the Parkway routinely as well. By then, sunset will be at a reasonable time. It's just not practical for us now, because it doesn't get dark enough to observe much until 10:00 p.m. or later. This Winter, when it's dark by 6:30, we'll probably be making quite a few trips up there.
Okay, I didn't want to say it, because I didn't have enough direct experience to state my suspicions as fact. I still don't, in fact. But several people have asked me why I recommend Seagate and Maxtor hard drives so strongly, but have been lukewarm or worse in my comments about IBM hard drives. This article about IBM hard drives is interesting. Though many of the hardware enthusiast pages like AnandTech and Tom's Hardware have been pushing IBM IDE drives for years, I've never been impressed with them. I don't know if the problem is due to the GMR heads, as the author of that review speculates, but I think a problem does exist. A couple of quick calls to people I know who aren't willing to be quoted or named but are in a position to know confirms that failures with IBM drives are pretty common. At any rate, stick with Seagate and Maxtor hard drives. Sure, they sometimes die--no hardware is perfect--but on average I'd expect a Seagate or Maxtor drive to be spinning long after an IBM or WD drive had been consigned to the trash heap. And no matter what model hard drive you use, keep a good current backup set. Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries Click here to read or post responses to the Linux Chronicles Forum [Top] |
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Wednesday, 8 August 2001 [Last
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| As I sit here with my cable modem data light
flickering from CodeRed.c probes and my Norton AntiVirus catching SirCam
messages as they arrive, I wonder if this is a harbinger of things to
come. In the future, are we all going to be spending all our time hunkered
down behind our computerized shields under constant attack from viruses,
worms and other nasties?
Not long ago, I told Pournelle that I expected Red China to launch cyber-attacks against the US sooner rather than later. I said, in part, "It may not happen this week or this month. It may not even happen this year. But it is going to happen." What evidence there is suggests that CodeRed and CodeRed.c may be the first such concerted attacks by Red China. As serious as the latest CodeRed is, it's minor in terms of what might have been done, so I suspect that Red China is just dipping its toe in the water. Part of what minimized damage from CodeRed.c is its high burn rate. Like Ebola, which has too short a latency to allow it to break out (so far), CodeRed.c and other recent exploits have been too impatient to do the amount of damage they might otherwise have done. Imagine a virus like Ebola but that had, say, a 30 day lag between the time someone who was infected became contagious and the time symptoms began appearing. In that 30 days, the virus would spread worldwide and infect essentially everyone on the planet. By the time symptoms began to appear, it would be too late to contain the infection and people would die by the billion. A computer virus or worm designed with similar latency could infect a huge number of systems worldwide, continuing to spread during the extended latency. Then, 30 days later, it could trigger, swamping everything. The Internet would be shut down, flooded by a hundred million computers generating trillions of packets. We wouldn't be able to do much about it quickly, because we wouldn't even be able to download virus sig updates or OS patches. I suspect that Red China has a lot of people looking for undiscovered vulnerabilities in Windows. When they find a good one, they'll keep quiet about it and work to develop a worm that exploits that vulnerability. When they're ready, they'll launch that worm and then sit back to await developments. What will happen then I can only imagine. Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries Click here to read or post responses to the Linux Chronicles Forum [Top] |
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Thursday, 9 August 2001 [Last
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Once again the screensaver on my main Windows 2000 system has stopped working for no apparent reason. I'm really tired of all the bizarre little things that happen with Windows 2000. I'm thinking about building a new personal system. I'm not sure what I'll put in it yet, except that I've started a stack that now includes a Plextor PlexWriter 16X burner and an 80 GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV hard drive. I'll probably put it in an Antec case, perhaps the SX840. I'm still thinking about processors--Celeron, Pentium III, Pentium 4, Athlon, or Duron--and motherboard. I suppose I'll install 512 MB of RAM, although that sounds ridiculous. For what I do, I can't tell the difference between 256 MB and 512 MB. In fact, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 256 MB and 128 MB except for the fact that I often keep many, many windows open. One thing I am sure about. I'm going to run Windows NT4. The only reason I'm running Windows 2000 on my personal system right now is that when my old main system started overheating I had to grab something fast and what is now my main system was sitting there as a test-bed, fully functional. So I've used Windows 2000 for several months, and I don't much like it. Except for the lack of USB, which I really don't much care about, Windows NT4 with SP6a beats Windows 2000 in every respect. It feels faster, at least to me, and it seems more stable and less subject to weird goings on. And I have about ten legal copies of Windows NT 4 Workstation, so I should be set for the next couple of years anyway. Until I can migrate my desktops over to Linux, whenever that may be.
It seems that Amazon is ending their experiment with higher prices. About the only thing I use the Amazon site for nowadays is checking on books, but I'd noticed that they'd given up their 10% discounts and moved back to 30% discounts. I guess they must have taken a real hit on sales volumes with the lower discounts. I got a message from Amazon this morning that announced that all books over $20 except those clearly marked would now sell at a 30% discount. I still won't buy anything from Amazon, but it's nice to see that they're back to their original higher discounts.
I speculated last week that going from my predictable posting routine, around 9:30 a.m. ET, to more sporadic postings would increase traffic, and it has. I'm now posting any time from early morning to late evening, often with two or three updates per day, and the average daily traffic for this page has jumped from about 2,500 page reads per day to between 4,000 and 4,500 page reads per day. Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries Click here to read or post responses to the Linux Chronicles Forum [Top] |
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Friday, 10 August 2001 [Last
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| One of our porcelain waste disposal units had a
critical failure the other night. The link that joins the actuating handle
to the hydraulic valve failed. Barbara removed the lid, and found that she
could actuate the device manually by pulling up on the assembly that
connects to the valve. I tried to point out the advantage of that method:
since one washes one's hands after using the unit, leaving the actuator
handle disconnected would remove one step from the process. We could
simply store soap near the open water tank and kill two birds with one
stone, as it were. As usual, my eloquent arguments failed to sway Barbara,
so on our way to dinner last night we stopped at Lowe's to look at handle
mechanisms.
There were many to choose from, priced from $0.98 to nearly $20.00. They had an exact replacement for the unit that had failed, but it cost about $16.00, and was as shoddily constructed of plastic as the failed one. So we decided to buy an all-metal unit that cost only $3.00. The rod on that unit was about 1.5" (3.8 cm) shorter than on the original unit. When I installed it, I found that there was enough wiggle room that the bracket could slip to one side and release the trapped rod. So Barbara brought me a paper clip, which I fashioned into a sort of cotter pin to prevent the bracket from slipping off the rod. And hence today's entry for Internet's Most Boring Photo.
The Register has an interesting story up about Palm being sued by two people who claim that using Palm HotSync destroyed their Dell PC's motherboard. Very strange. The law firm says it's not an isolated case, but I'm dubious. With millions of Palms in use, we should have heard about this problem long ago if in fact the problem exists. Sounds to me as though they had a defective motherboard or did something else to damage it.
Now is not a good time to be buying a new PC. Intel is ramping down the Pentium III quickly and starting to roll out the "real" Pentium 4, with motherboards based on the i845 "Brookdale" chipset due to ship two weeks from Monday. That version of the i845, however, supports only SDR-SDRAM, whereas the Pentium 4 really requires the additional bandwidth of either RDRAM or DDR-SDRAM to avoid being memory-bound. There is a DDR Pentium 4 chipset imminent, however, the VIA P4X266, which is now being demonstrated. VIA says they've begun volume production of the P4X266. But Intel claims that the P4X266 is unlicensed and has threatened lawsuits to prevent it from being sold. Meanwhile, Intel has a DDR version of the i845 in the works. That's currently scheduled to ship early in 2002, but there is some speculation that Intel will ship it early. Intel really wants to get the P4 off to a big start, and the P4 with SDR-SDRAM is operating at a big handicap. My guess is that we'll see SDR i845 motherboards shipping in volume late this month to take advantage of the back-to-school market. I wouldn't buy an SDR i845-based system, nor would I buy a VIA P4X266-based system. I think both are dead-end products. I'd wait if at all possible for a DDR i845-based system. I suspect Intel is pulling out all the stops to get them to market, and they may well show up well before the end of this year. If you absolutely have to buy a fast system in the near term, a Pentium 4 in the 2 GHz range running on a SDR i845 board is probably the best bet. SDR doesn't allow the P4 to run unfettered, but it'll still be faster than a Pentium III or Athlon system. I haven't seen an i845 motherboard yet, so I can't comment authoritatively, but by all accounts the i845 is likely to do yeoman service for years, much as did the i440BX. If instead you need an entry-level or mid-range system, the Celeron or PIII on an 815 board is still the way to go.
12:00 - I mention Phil Croucher's BIOS Companion periodically, and gave it a plug in PC Hardware in a Nutshell. There's a new version out, which is available in printed form, on CD, or as a PDF file. If you do much work with PCs and the BIOS is as mysterious to you as it is to most people, do yourself a favor and get a copy. You can order it directly from Phil's web site. Click here to read or post responses to this week's journal entries Click here to read or post responses to the Linux Chronicles Forum [Top] |
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Saturday, 11 August 2001 [Last
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| 09:20
- About 17:15 yesterday, we had a power failure. I don't always know when
we're having a power failure as opposed to a momentary problem, because
all of my stuff keeps working. I hear the alert tones from the UPSs, but
nearly everything in my office (including my desk lamp, a 13-watt Ott
Lite) is on backup power, so it's not always immediately evident that the
power has failed completely. This time, though, I heard Barbara and my
mother talking about the failure, so I knew it hadn't been just a blip. I
waited 30 seconds or so, and the power still hadn't come back on. Not a
good sign. Probably a blown transformer or something.
So I called 1-800-POWERON to get Duke Power's automated power outage reporting system. It told me that they expected to have the power restored by 19:30. Hmmm. I have good UPSs, but not that good. So I started the rounds of turning off systems. We have lots of systems around here, but only half a dozen or so that are in regular use. I turned off meepmeep, the Roadrunner box, first. Then thoth, my own main system, and hathor, a Linux box. With those systems and their monitors shut down, the load was off the Smart Power Systems SineSmart 2KVA UPS under my desk. I try to keep the battery good on that one so that I can, if necessary, carry it into my mother's room to operate her lift chair during an extended outage. Her lift chair actually has a "battery backup". Believe it or not, that backup consists of one standard 9V battery, the kind you might use in a portable radio. If the power fails, that 9V battery is good for raising and/or lowering the chair once. Or it's supposed to be, anyway. We've never tested that, because I always have at least one UPS with enough charge on it to raise and lower her chair several times. And, if there's a really extended outage, we can always fire up the generator. At any rate, once I got my systems shut down, I headed back to Barbara's office and shut down her system. Then I came back to my office to shut down theodore, the main server, and orion, a Windows 98SE box that has the scanner and inkjet printer connected to it. There I encountered a slight problem. Those boxes share a monitor, keyboard and mouse via a Belkin OmniView KVM switch. The systems were running and the KVM switch was lit up, but the monitor was dark. Uh-oh. The monitor wasn't connected to a UPS. Duh. So I waited a while longer, hoping the power would come back on. Duke Power is always pessimistic about repair time estimates. Usually, if they say it's going to take two hours to restore power, the power actually comes back on within half an hour to an hour. Sometimes sooner. So I waited a few minutes, hoping that the power would come back on. It didn't, so I did a blind shutdown of those two systems. Barbara had just started preparing an early dinner when the power failed, so we ended up just having sandwiches and salads for dinner. The power came back on about 6:30, an hour earlier than promised. If I ever build a house, I'm going to wire the place with two separate AC systems. Critical receptacles will all be on separate lines, with an automated cutover to power those circuits from the generator. Of course, our generator is only 5KW sustained and 6.25KW peak, so I'll have to do some picking and choosing.
There's a public observation scheduled for Pilot Mountain State Park tonight, but the weather forecast doesn't look promising. The Weather Channel site and the WeatherUnderground site both say it'll be cloudy with a 50% chance of thunderstorms and 91% humidity. I mentioned that to Barbara this morning. She said she'd talked with Duke Johnson at SciWorks yesterday. According to Duke, someone from the club has to go up there no matter how miserable it's likely to be. Unless the cloud cover is 10/10 and it's raining, we have to have people there, because the public will show up. We may go up. Then again, we may not.
First thing on tap this morning is to clean and make minor repairs to meepmeep, the Roadrunner box. I've been having sporadic problems with this box for months now. It'll run just fine for a month or more, and then suddenly start locking up for no apparent reason. A reboot always solves the lockup. After a reboot, the box will run for anything from five minutes to a month before the next lockup. Meepmeep isn't much of a box in today's terms. An EPoX EP-BXT motherboard, Celeron/366, a generic 64 MB SDRAM DIMM, and a 10 GB Maxtor hard drive. And, unfortunately, a shoddy Pacific Rim case and power supply. I think it's an Enlight or something similar. I hate working on meepmeep because of that case. It has sharp edges all over the place, and the holes don't line up very well. I bought it at Computer & Software Outlet, our local computer store, one day when I desperately needed a case for something or other. After it served whatever purpose I needed it for, it sat for a long time unused until one day when I needed to build a Roadrunner gateway box. That box has had it share of problems. The first strange thing was the the CD-ROM drive stopped working. It not only stopped working, but its mere presence would lock up the system. I solved that by running BIOS Setup and disabling the secondary IDE interface. Then the problems with lockups and memory errors started. I keep meaning to do something about meepmeep, like replacing it with a baby DSL/Cable router or rebuilding it on a better foundation, but every time I think about doing that meepmeep is behaving for the moment. So doing something about meepmeep always slides down the priority list. But this morning I've decided that it's worth devoting half an hour to improving the situation. So once I've published our journal pages, Barbara and I will pull meepmeep, put it on the kitchen table, open it up and vacuum it out, and replace the suspect memory with a Crucial DIMM. Of course, Murphy's Law says we'll probably have a total meltdown and end up without Internet access, so if you don't hear from me for a day or so you'll know why.
10:33 - Well, it actually took closer to an hour than half an hour, but meepmeep is clean and has some new components. I find that I did the case (and C&SO) an injustice. For a no-name Pacific Rim case, this case is actually pretty nice. It's stiff, has no sharp edges, and everything lines up. The power supply is decent as well. A 300W Premier unit. I'll put more up tomorrow, including pictures, but I have other things to do right now. At least meepmeep is working again.
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| 09:40
- The weather was horrible. Thunderstorms all evening. So they cancelled
the public observation at Pilot Mountain. Barbara and I were both just as
happy that they did. We attend these things as a public service, not
because we actually get to observe anything ourselves while we're there.
Yesterday morning, I powered down meepmeep, disconnected all the cables, and hauled it into the kitchen. At first glance, the outside didn't look too filthy. Until you started to look at things like the floppy drive recess, which foretold things to come. We popped the lid, and it was a different story inside. There was a significant accumulation of dust and grunge, no worse than most systems that hadn't been cleaned for a while, nor enough to seriously impede airflow, but enough that meepmeep was in need of a good cleaning even if it hadn't been having problems.
While Barbara fired up her Ferrari® vacuum cleaner, I set off in search of some replacement memory. Although meepmeep had only 64 MB currently, with the price of memory so low it didn't make any sense to install less than 128 MB. I found a Kingston ValueRAM 128 MB PC133 module and put that on the stack of upgrade components to be installed. Then I started digging around my box of processors. Since meepmeep is Slot 1 and the motherboard accepts only up to a Pentium III/600, there probably wasn't much I could do to improve on the Celeron/366 currently installed, but it was worth a look. I came up with a Pentium II/450. The 23% increase in clock speed would be worthwhile, but the increase in L2 cache from 128 KB to 512 KB would also contribute to higher performance. Overall, I expected that the Pentium II/450 would give me perhaps a 35% performance boost, so it was definitely worth installing. Because meepmeep connects directly to the Internet, I use it for things like FrontPage publishing, ftp clients, and so on. Nothing major, and nothing I use all that frequently, but 35% faster is not insignificant. I didn't expect the faster processor to have any noticeable impact on the primary purpose of the box, which is providing shared Internet access.
As I mentioned yesterday, I did the case an injustice. It's actually a pretty nice case, although I can't find a label anywhere on it to indicate who made it. It has a Premier 300W power supply. That's a decent model. Not one I'd choose if an Antec unit was available, and certainly nowhere near a PC Power & Cooling unit, but decent nonetheless. The Premier power supply makes me think this is probably an Enlight case, because I've seen many Enlight cases with Premier power supplies. After we got the case vacuumed clean, we installed the Pentium II/450 and the Kingston 128 MB DIMM, removed and reseated all the cables and expansion cards, and so on. I was mistaken yesterday when I said that meepmeep had a 64 MB DIMM. It had two 32 MB DIMMs, supposedly PC100, but I have my doubts. As always, using commodity memory is a big mistake. I remember the day I bought those DIMMs. I desperately needed memory and couldn't wait for mail-order, so I drove over to C&SO. All they had was commodity memory, so I bought these. Oh, well. I carried meepmeep back to my office, reconnected everything, and fired it up. The BIOS boot screen told me I had a 300 MHz Pentium II installed. Ooops. I forgot to change the jumper settings. They'd been set properly for the Celeron/366 at 66 MHz FSB and 5.5X for the multiplier. Most of the Intel processors I use are Engineering Samples, which don't have the multiplier locked. This one was a standard retail processor, so it ignored the 5.5X setting in favor of its internal 4.5X setting. It did, however, honor the 66 MHz FSB setting. So, a 66 MHz FSB with a 4.5X multiplier yields 300 MHz, and that's what I had. I powered the system down and slid the case around to where I could pull the side panel to access the jumpers. After some awkward contortions, I got the jumpers set to 4.5X and 100 MHz FSB. When I fired meepmeep back up, it ran properly at 450 MHz. The speed improvement was noticeable, as expected, but what wasn't expected was the performance improvement in Internet access. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but then Barbara shouted to me that when she did a mail check it seemed to be running much faster. Apparently, either the Celeron/366 or the 64 MB of RAM (or both) was a bottleneck for WinGate.
It's true. I've been famous since I was a little fellow. My photograph first appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, and other national publications when I was about six years old. The expected movie offers never came, however. Barbara was organizing some of my mother's things yesterday and found this clipping.
That's my dad and me in the picture. I remember the day my dad came home and told me that we were going to be models for an ad that would run in a bunch of different magazines and newspapers. They were even going to pay me. Ten dollars. The check sat on a display shelf in the kitchen for months. I also remember the shoot itself. We met the photographer at a local pond, and he brought the props. When I examined the fishing equipment he'd supplied, I was disappointed to see that the only thing on the end of the line was an old bolt. I asked him how he expected me to catch anything with a bolt, but he and my dad just laughed at me. I hated being thought cute even then. I've never gone fishing since. Well, not fishing per se. I've killed fish a few times, but that was either with my .44 Magnum (literally blows 'em out of the water) or with dynamite (blows 'em even further out of the water). I remember going camping with one girl when I was in college. As I left the campsite to walk to what looked like a decent trout stream, she asked me where I was going. "To shoot some fish for dinner," I replied. Got two of them with one shot. The look on her face when I came back with the fish was priceless.
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