/chronicle

All of this is documented fact that would hold up in court.

A couple of months ago I attempted to get DSL service provisioned by Verizon into a new facility location for Pack-Rat. They screwed up and cancelled the order three times only to re-open it every time. We even paid $49.00 to have a tech go out an install the service for us. They never showed for three scheduled appointments delaying our ability to open for business by two months. In the final call I made to Verizon regarding this provisioning I was told that the installation tech that was suppose to go on-site to install the service would not be available for a “truck roll” for another week. I indicated that was not acceptable. Verizon charged us for the install, no truck rolled and the rep actually asked me if I would “like to cancel” if the option of waiting another week was not to my liking. I cancelled. Covad’s getting the business.

But that’s not as bad as it gets. 2 weeks ago I called Verizon to get order a PRI for our corporate location in DC. We already have four analog lines with them in that location. I was told by the sales rep that we would have to be referred to a sales rep and the request would be “put in queue”. 2 weeks later – no call. So I called them this morning. I was told that the request was “picked up” by Russell Noll, someone I’ve never heard from.

Is Verizon in the business of selling telecommunications or not? They are no more than another company that got so busy with a large customer base they do not care one bit about new business or customer service. May their stock drop like Bell South’s and burn into bankruptcy and corporate corruption scandals. For the record, I’ve heard their cell coverage sucks from those I know stuck on one of their plans. Probably overloaded their network in this area.

And don’t even get me started on the voice prompts when you call Verizon customer service. They are truely a company that has lost the ability to make customers happy while generating new business. They’re like Republican’s in Iraq. They won the first round of the turf battle but now they’re neck deep into something out of their control. Could this be the beginning of the end?

Had a really strange virus break out on our network yesterday. Here’s the breakdown:

Trend Micro Office Scan detected an initiation on a workstation at 12:21 PM. The virus was located in the file C:\Program Files\RealVNC\VNC4\WinVNC4.exe. This is a legitimate file and location for us as we have VNC server installed on workstations for remote admin. Trend reported the virus name as Trojan_Generic and it could not be cleaned or quarantine. It propagated through an unknown transport to random machines on the WAN in a matter of 10 minutes.

15 machines got infected before I shut down the MS Exchange services just in case it was using the address book as a transport. It didn’t seem logical that this was the propagation mechanism but the outbreak seemed to subside. We then removed VNC from the machines that got infected and I restarted the Exchange services. Two more machines were infected after this but no more. Several other workstations on the network had VNC server and the port open but were not ever infected.

One more interesting lead I have is that the machine where the outbreak initiated was the only one on the network with ports 6697 and 9234 recently opened for a custom IRC application. These have been closed. Anyone with any information about this outbreak is welcome to leave a comment.

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Update: 07-26-2006

Turns out this was a “false-positive” in Officescan virus definitions release 5.99.

Upgrading to the 6.07 definitions clears the problem.  I still think Trend Micro is the leader in the Anti-virus industry.

I had a full copy of Acrobat 6 on my machine at work. For some reason only known to Adobe it decided to start hosing and wouldn’t open any documents. It just froze a blank white box on the center of my display. So I uninstalled it and put on a copy of Acrobat 7 reader. I needed to open some documents damn it.

Acrobat 7 ran flawlessly. Once. Then any time I tried to open a subsequent document it gave me an hour glass and the Acrobat process chewed up 45-50% of my CPU with no results. What a piece of sh*#!

Flush Acrobat – Get Foxit PDF reader and never look back. Adobe should pay as much attention to these readers as they do Photoshop. And what’s to happen to all the wonderful Macromedia products now that they’ve entered the Adobe family as step-child applications? We will know shortly. Until I know I won’t give up my old copy of Dreamweaver.

I had the worst day trying to troubleshoot slow internet connection speeds with Time Warner today. Without SNMP interfaces on the 3Com OfficeConnect VPN Firewalls we use I couldn’t get a handle on where the problem was occurring. All I knew is that we didn’t have a lot of irregular traffic on any ports, the VPN stayed up (barely) and I had external URL and IP ping times as high as 2500 ms.

We’re going to be putting an SNMP compliant firewall/router at our core. Probably a 3Com Tipping Point. That will let me use PRTG Traffic Grapher to look at our bandwidth by interface in real time. Monitoring without SNMP sucks.