Category: Computer bits

I suppose one of these days, I shall have to get around to fixing that problem with the side bar where it spreads out at the bottom of the page for short entries. That means I’ll have to get around to learning CSS. Just another item on my List of Things To Do.
Maybe I’ll just do away with the side bar on the archive pages. Or maybe I’ll just make a shorter version of the sidebar to use on the archive pages. More things for my List.

After several months of waffling, watching and just general procrastinating, I finally took the plunge and upgraded the database server on my Sparc20 from MySQL 3.23.58 to 4.0.18. It wasn’t exactly trouble free, but wasn’t as much work or as difficult as I thought it might be.
Step 1: Create an SQL dump of all the databases: mysqldump -A -u user -p > dbdump.sql
Step 2: Shut down MySQL
Step 3: Run mysql_install_db from the MySQL4 installation
Step 4: Start up MySQL4
Step 5: Use the database dump created in Step 1 to restore the databases: mysql -u root < dbdump.sql
Step 6: Change password on MySQL root user and recreate database users.
Went pretty smoothly with a 30 MB dump file. There are probably easier ways, but this method seemed more straight forward.
Ended up losing a couple of tables because of column names conflicting with MySQL4 reserved words. Fairly easy to fix though. Just took time to go through all the databases and compare the tables to the dbdump.
So, next task is to learn about all the new things in MySQL 4. Then the next big thing will be to repeat the upgrade process on my main production server. I figure by the time I get around to that, MySQL 5 will be the production release :).

Our hospital mail servers are being hit pretty hard with a nefarious virus that claims to be from the networking team. It’s making email unpleasantly slow.

The first message I got came from the hospital-wide broadcast email address, just a 🙂 in the subject, “I don’t bite! Password: 53321” and an attachment masquerading as a zip file. Naturally the first thing I did was delete the message, since didn’t even remotely resemble anything that typically comes from the broadcast email address. Apparently, others did not think about the message as much and now chaos is ensuing.

There’s also been a similar one claiming to be from the IT group about accounts being deactivated.

Subject: E-mail account disabling warning.
Dear user of xxxxxxx gateway e-mail server,
We warn you about some attacks on your e-mail account. Your computer may
contain viruses, in order to keep your computer and e-mail account safe,
please, follow the instructions.
Advanced details can be found in attached file.
In order to read the attach you have to use the following password:
35151.
Best wishes,
The xxxxxxxx team

So I’ve been getting about 4 or 5 emails every minute from various people I’ve never heard of on campus. Ironically, most of the messages aren’t propagated by the virus…instead they’re coming from people responding to the initial virus message saying stuff like “Why am I getting this”, and people responding with stuff like “I don’t know why I’m getting this either”. Then these people click “Reply to all”, so not only does the original sender get a response, but the entire hospital has to see the same message too, since the broadcast email address was in the From header.

So now hospital email (Groupwise) is all but useless because the mail server is bogged down with virus email, people responding to virus email and people responding to people responding to virus email.

Ugh

I want one of these