Failure is the Key to Success

Tim at The Inflatable Soapbox blind sided me this with this post and tag on Tuesday night.

I wasn’t able to reply on Tuesday as I was replacing a failing hard disc and reinstalling Windows XP on a laptop for a colleague at work. I’d forgotten how long it takes from plain XP, through Service Pack 2 and then downloading and installing the remaining 91 security patches. Still, after all that I was able to install Avast as a free Anti-Virus program and Open Office as a free office suite (much better than MS Works that was previously on the system).

On Wednesday at work, I got called to look at a printer with a paper jam. Usually a simple fix, in the worse case maybe a pair of tweezers to remove the last bit of torn paper. The printer was an old, but very serviceable LaserJet 4000, not very heavy use, so plenty of life left in it. Of course, no maintenance on it, its not worth it for a printer that’s getting on for 9-10 years, so if I didn’t fix it, we would replace it…it would be cheaper than getting it fixed. After 10 minutes at the printer location pulling scraps of paper out of it, I took it back to my desk. I ended up unscrewing just about every bit that would come off, before I could finally get the tweezers to the last bits of crinkled paper and pull it out. All in all, I removed a piece of paper about the size of my hand, but it was finally working again. Just time to get it back on the shop-floor and get the toner off my hands before going home.

Continue reading » Tuesday Tech Troubles and Triumphs

?The news today about the loss of Child Benefit data is astounding. The entire database of all families with children under 16 has been lost. The data at HMRC (HM Revenue and Customs) was saved to 2 discs and sent unrecorded through the internal post to the National Audit Office to be audited. The discs never arrived.

The data on the discs includes name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25 million people; 15 million children and 10 million adults.

We are now being advised to carefully check all transactions on bank statements. It’s madness that the entire database should be copied to disc and posted. Surely in this age of technology, a secure datalink could have been established between the two locations, after all they aren’t small companies.

Tags:audit office,child benefit,hmrc

Our internet connection has been extremely intermittant this evening.

Pinging the next VirginMedia router on our route out has given awful results all evening. You get a batch of low latency 7ms pings then it goes up into the 200ms and 300ms. Then you get a time out, or maybe 5 minutes of time outs. Then it comes back and you start all over again.

Checking on the service status page, I see issues with TV/Internet all over their network this evening. I hope they hurry up and get this fixed because it’s a nightmare to surf when the connection drops between pages.

At lunchtime today Jo mentioned she was having trouble connecting wirelessly to our network. This has happened a few of times in the last couple of weeks, but retrying or in one case restarting the router resolved the issue.

Not today! Wired connection was working fine, but there was no wireless. After resetting the router and re-entering the configurations, I had intermittant wireless, but now no routing of wireless connections to the internet. Also, it was no longer logging any connection details.

I have had the router since February 2005, so it has been on for most of that time continuously. I updated the firmware from the default Linksys to Hyperwrt when I got it which gave me the ability to log the incoming and outgoing firewall connections and messages. This has had its uses; a few weeks ago I was able to identify a test signal from my VOIP service that was trying to connect every few seconds.

So, unexpectedly, I had to go out and buy a replacement router this afternoon. Linksys routers used to run Linux. There is a great support for 3rd party firmware upgrades to the Linux based routers, one good site for this is Linksysinfo. Unfortunately, a few years ago, Linksys changed their routers from using Linux, which means the 3rd party options are now limited.

I now have full connectivity restored, but have had to sacrifice the logging ability as this isn’t part of the standard firmware.

Tags:network router

Spam, don’t you love it. I just about had it under control in my inbox. My spam filter was tagging most of it and moving it to a spam folder. About 30 a day were being tagged and only 4 or 5 would get through.

This morning my inbox looked like a bomb site. It appears that somebody has been sending spam forged as coming from accounts on my domain. Throughout the day I have received over 450 emails bouncing ‘my’ spam messages from locations all over the world. I’ll have to start making checks now to make sure that I haven’t been blacklisted anywhere.

Tags:spam

OK, I’m sat at our desktop typing this, so here goes panning from left to right:

• 2 drive mounting rails from an old server
• 2 dvd cases with home movies of the kids
• 17″ monitor for desktop computer
• stack of CDs in rack (some computer and some music)
• Jo’s digital camera in it’s case
• left speaker for desktop
• port replicator for laptop
• autoloader tape drive for backups with right speaker for desktop on top
• mouse mat with wireless mouse
• surgemaster under monitor power distribution unit with 2nd 17″ monitor for desktop
• 2 stacks of CDs balanced on the corner of the desk

I know I must be the exception and that everyone else’s desk must be less cluttered than mine.

So, what’s on your desk?