Inner Drive Software

I've finally brought a new server online to take over from three old ones. By "old" I mean a Windows 2000 box with gerbils powering it and two salvaged desktops, one with a whopping 640 MB of RAM. Together all three have performed the tasks of one fully-functional server. And now, I have one fully-functional server.

A couple of problems have emerged.

First, which I knew would happen, the IDT Webcam that used to run on the old Windows 2000 server needed a new home. I've moved it to my spare laptop.

Second, apparently Symantec Endpoint Security does not run on 64-bit operating systems. Never mind that Windows 2003 x64 has been around since—wait for it—2003; Symantec apparently missed the memo. They're telling me I need to keep an old, 32-bit computer (they actually suggested a Windows XP machine) as the central antivirus server for the network. Um. No.

Finally, the rails that shipped with the new server don't fit my server rack. I am now looking for new rails.

Otherwise everything is hunky-dory, and as soon as I figure out the antivirus situation, I can decommission the old Windows 2000 box (along with the two old desktops.)

Useless fact: Today was the first time since April 6th that my walk to work was below freezing.

Not useless fact: the Inner Drive Webcam was temporarily off-line overnight, as I'm making some infrastructure changes and the computer it's attached to is being decommissioned. (It's back up now.) Apparently people noticed:

I don't do business with you because I don't need to, however, I do look at your live camera every day to see the weather and get a look at Evanston, the town in which I was born and raised. My grandfather lived in the North Shore Hotel in the '50s and I visited there often. Your bottom line may not get any bigger if you continue with the camera but there may be people like myself that will miss getting a glimpse of a portion of the city. I hope that you will not let your new infrastructure cancel out the continuation of the camera.

—John in Craddockville, Va.

And:

Greetings:

I look out at Chicago Ave almost every morning that I am not home in Evanston—just to 'check in'. I think it is the only Webcam in the town. Please keep it up! I love it!

—Bernard, writing from Los Angeles

I had no idea.

The technical issue is simple. Right now the camera runs on an ancient (6-year-old) server running Windows 2000. It's essentially Inner Drive's backup server, sort of the Prince Charles of the office. All it does with its 200 watts is run the Webcam and wait for another server to die.

Here's a photo. The Webcam is hooked into the server on the bottom. (One wag called it "Paul McServer" and called the other one "Server Wonder," but in the office we call them McHenry and Bulle. Bulle is so old it reflects the obsolete naming scheme we haven't used in years.)

Well, server prices having fallen, and efficiencies having risen, and rack-mounting being generally preferable to floor-mounting, we're replacing it with a Dell 860. But the new server will have a Xeon processor, which means we'll be running the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003, which means (finally) our Webcam software won't run on the new server.

When we get the new server running (probably the first week of December), I may take an old, decrepit laptop and hook that into the Webcam. In any event, given the outpouring of support for it, I'll do what I can to keep it running.

The New York Times picked up the ongoing story of botnets, networks of computers that spammers and other miscreants have taken over:

According to the annual intelligence report of MessageLabs, a New York-based computer security firm, more than 80 percent of all spam now originates from botnets. Last month, for the first time ever, a single Internet service provider generated more than one billion spam e-mail messages in a 24-hour period, according to a ranking system maintained by Trend Micro, the computer security firm. That indicated that machines of the service providers' customers had been woven into a giant network, with a single control point using them to pump out spam.

Users, ISPs, users, software vendors, and users contribute to the problem:

Serry Winkler, a sales representative in Denver, said that she had turned off the network-security software provided by her Internet service provider because it slowed performance to a crawl on her PC, which was running Windows 98. A few months ago four sheriff’s deputies pounded on her apartment door to confiscate the PC, which they said was being used to order goods from Sears with a stolen credit card. The computer, it turned out, had been commandeered by an intruder who was using it remotely.

Note that Winkler's computer probably ran slowly because it had already gotten infected, and the ISP's security software had a lot of work to do because of this.

At least with the Times picking up the story, perhaps more people will notice.

The ParkerCam is such a hit (Anne refreshes it more than I do, it turns out), I replaced the ailing, sunburned, five-year-old Intel camera with the same model that I use for the Inner Drive webcam. It's easy to see why; here's the "before:"

And the "after:"

(The new camera is so good, if you open the bottom image in its own window you can read half my programming library.)

<Geek Stuff>

Alas, the new camera and I had a disagreement initially. It's a Logitech QuickCam Orbit that I'm running through Sascha Keller's VisionGS Webcam software. I had to reduce the thread priority of VisionGS to get it to play nicely with my computer. And I have Microsoft Index Service turned off until I shut down the Webcam, because it was taking every available processor cycle. The Index service sometimes repopulates its database after an unexpected reboot, and There were also several reboots involved. I also disturbed poor Parker's sleep a few times commenting *ahem* on the installation process.

</Geek Stuff>

It's working now. And if Parker moves we'll see if the face- (puppy-) tracking feature works.

The great infrastructure project is nearly complete. Everything is now done, except for upgrading the last old server to Windows 2003. It even looks better.

My previous post brings up, tangentially, our naming scheme. For years I bought only Gateway computers, and for no reason I can remember, named all of them something to do with cows—but in German.

We are now rebuilding the next-to-last server in our great infra-restructure project. Since the first step in blowing away a server is to restart the server, I got the Windows 2003 "why are you doing this to me?" dialog box. Now, the comment I wrote has ceased to exist due to reformatting the system partition; so what was the purpose of this comment?

I spent more than 8½ hours yesterday reconfiguring the Inner Drive network. I think other guys might have taken no more than an hour to do this. I do software; routers and DNS and DHCP and DSL are all hardware problems. I really don't enjoy doing hardware stuff but I'm glad I did it. Because now I know how.

The changes vastly improve our network topology, and will help when we install our new web/app server later this week. In the past, we used a Windows Server 2003 machine to bridge between our public interface and our private network. The server ran BlackIce Defender as a firewall, which means, as astute readers will notice right away, evil packets got all the way to the server before the firewall could have at them. The same server also ran our Websites, Exchange, and was the Active Directory catalog master.

Having all of these services (did I mention DNS as well?) on the public box is asking for trouble, as I found out.