Category: IDTENT

If you disconnect your Canon CanonScan LiDE 80, 50, or 30 scanner, be prepared for thousands of logfile entries while the scanner driver searches the USB bus for the scanner.

Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717
Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8718

Wonderful. Since I permanently deinstalled the scanner to replace it with an EPSON Perfection 2400, I ended up running the driver delete utility to nuke it from my system.

No more errors. Joy.

Update: Jon Rentzsch seems to agree that the LiDE sucks.

The storm last night caused numerous power outages both at work and at home. Unfortunately, the Web server UPS died and caused some minor disk corruption. No problem, the disks are ext3 with journaling enabled.

But, when I got home, instead of allowing the system to come up on its own and recover the journal, I ran fsck just to see what the damage was. Only one directory was lost…the PostNuke PostCalendar cache directory on /var. No problem, that’s a temp directory with no valuable data, so I unlinked it and let fsck finish.

On the second pass fsck found approximately 24,000 lost files. I panicked. We’re talking deep down, gut wrenching, “I just lost all of my data and I’m totally screwed” fear.
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Our Snap Server 2200 has failed for the third time in 12 months resulting in total data loss. The first time was due to a software hiccup where the disk lost its drive configuration. The second and third times were due to physical disk failure. Since the disk was configured for RAID0 (striping), a single disk failure meant total data loss. I was aware of this while configuring it so it didn’t come as a big shock…although three failures in 12 months is rather surprising for the self-proclaimed global leader in network storage systems.

That’s why the appliance was being used as a dumping grounds for crap that wasn’t mission critical but was nice to have around like installers, old data snapshots, random tarballs that had already been dumped to tape or CD, etc. Since the system had already failed previously, it was no longer trusted and treated as such: a gyroscopic paperweight.

I’ve been fighting with CSS all afternoon at work trying to get background-repeat to render properly. Turns out Safari 1.0 is broken. Bowl of suck.

• http://www.onda-media.com/jani/archive/safari_bug/
• http://www.xs4all.nl/~mosm/Opinion/Articles/safari_bug.html
• http://mamamusings.net/archives/2003/08/08/css_frustration.php
• http://www.google.com/search?q=safari+css+background+scroll

It looks like it will be fixed in the next version. And there was much rejoicing.

So, what’s the best way to execute a global denial of service attack against an unsuspecting university? Simple! Convince a megacorporation to start selling routers with hardcoded NTP servers set to the intended victim! And then, just for grins and giggles, make sure the end user isn’t allowed to change the setting! Sweet…screwups like this make me happy in pants.

Everybody’s connecting. Why yes…yes they are!

Update (08/22/2003): What’s the second best way to DOS a university? Slashdot their writeup on getting DOSed.

Do not click on any link in any email masquerading as any financial institution! Instead, if you receive an email from your bank (or PayPal or eBay), manually go to your browser, open up their Web site to login and then manually browse to whatever new feature they want you to look at. Reputable institutions will never direct you to a page that asks you to re-enter any personal information.
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