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Most probably the funniest resignation letter you’ll ever read. I laughed so loud that everybody was staring at me in office. Enjoy the World’s Best Resignation Letter

You wander around the building all day, shiftlessly seeking fault in others. You have a sharp dressed, useless look about you that may have worked for your interview, but now that you actually have responsibility, you pawn it off on overworked staff, hoping their talent will cover for your glaring ineptitude. In a world of managerial evolution, you are the blue-green algae that everyone else eats and laughs at. Managers like you are a sad proof of the Dilbert principle.

Seeing as this situation is unlikely to change without you getting a full frontal lobotomy reversal, I am forced to tender my resignation; however, I have a few parting thoughts:

Everyone is talking about the new interface that Google is testing. So, I decided to try and can confirm that it’s true. If you want to try for yourself follow this blog’s instruction. This is what I did:

Just Download the “Add N Edit Cookies” Firefox Extension e create a Cookie for your firefox in this way :

NAME: PREF
VALUE: ID=fb7740f107311e46:TM=1142683332:
LM=1142683332:S=fNSw6ljXTzvL3dWu
SERVER: www.google.com

Now you’re ready to check new google interfaces.

Note: VALUE should be in one line (ID=…:TM=…:LM=…:S=…)

Google blog was unavailable for a short time few days ago and this is what happened:

We’ve determined the cause of tonight’s outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d’oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.

Recently a new type of DNS attack have been discovered. Attackers are exploiting the recursive name servers to amplify the DDoS attacks by utilizing IP spoofing. If you want to know the very details of how this attack works then you must read DNS Amplification Attacks (pdf) by Randal Vaughn and Gadi Evron where they analyze 3 real attacks. Also this Cnet news article have some details about the attack.

At the heart of this attack is the recursive function of DNS servers. This is a very serious threat because The Measurement Factory in recent survey found that:

There are an estimated 7.5 million external DNS servers on the public Internet. Over 75% of domain name servers (of roughly 1.3 million sampled) allow recursive name service to arbitrary queriers. This opens a name server to both cache poisoning and attacks.

Here I’ve drawn the diagrams to explain what is Recursive DNS Query and how DNS Amplification Attacks work.

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A dvd disk got stuck inside the optical drive of MacBook Pro and couldn’t be ejected. I tried to eject it from WinXp, without success. Pressed F12 and Eject button in OSX but the disk wouldn’t come out. The drive was responding with some sound and seemed like it was trying to eject the disk but with no success. So, we opened it and here’s how MacBook Pro looks naked.

The keyboard lifted up

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Samba 4 Technology Preview 2 is released today. Technology Preview 1 was released on January. Samba is an open source software that allows Unix/Linux system to serve as a file and print server in Windows network. The main feature in Samba 4 is the support for Active Directory logon protocols used in Windows 2000 and above.

The release notes emphasizes that this is a Technology preview to allow users, managers and developers to see how they’ve progressed and to invite feedback and support. They warn that this should not be run on production servers and is not secure.

Samba 4 Technology Preview includes basic Access Control List (ACL) protection on the main user database, but due to time constraints, none on the registry at this stage. We also do not currently have ACLs on the SWAT web-based management tool. This means that Samba 4 Technology Preview is not secure.

I regularly check OnMac.net to see if there’re any updates on video driver for MacBook Pro but from yesterday the site is down. Today morning when I came back to office the site is still not responding. I Googled and found from this blog that there’s some problem with the Apache.

Well, it looks like something has gone wrong again. The server that we’re hosted on is up and running but apache is not. The site went down around 6:00 pm CST 2006-03-22. I’ve only now 8:00 am CST 2006-03-23 been able to get a hold of the guy who can make things happen. I tried to get it fixed last night but was unable. Sorry for the downtime! We’re going to be back up asap.

Update: Good news! The site is up and seems they’d some configuration issue.

We have been experiencing downtime on the main server due to a configuration error. I have alerted the host and created a redirect to this page. When the site is back up, you should be able to go there by clicking the forum, wiki etc… Sorry for the inconvenience - the site should be up shortly

If you’re working in IT Support for few years then most probably you’re already following similar steps. Geeks are Sexy have an excellent article 10 steps to a better IT support process. It’s refreshing and should be helpful to novice as well as veteran IT Support.

• 1. Answering the call

  2. Asking the user to explain the problem

  3. Reproducing the error

  4. Identifying the problem

  5. Gathering technical information

  6. Determine possible solutions

  7. Fixing the problem

  8. Test and test again

  9. Documenting the issue

  10. Pat yourself in the back for a job well done.

I’d written a Productive Network and System Administration which you might find helpful as well.

A serious flaw has been found in Sendmail that could allow an attacker to take control of the SMTP server running vulnerable version of the software. A remote attacker could send malicious data at certain time intervals, which can corrupt arbitrary stack memory and gain control of the Server.

This security hole affects all Linux and Unix versions of Sendmail 8 up to version 8.13.5. Microsoft Windows versions of Sendmail are not affected. Sendmail has released a new verion 8.13.6 to fix this problem and also patches for earlier versions are available at their FTP site.

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Windows Vista that was supposed to hit the market on Dec 2006 is delayed to Jan 2007. A Microsoft press release says:

Microsoft Corp. today confirmed that Windows Vista, the next generation of the Windows client operating system, is on target to go into broad consumer beta to approximately 2 million users in the second quarter of 2006. Microsoft is on track to complete the product this year, with business availability in November 2006 and broad consumer availability in January 2007.

The blogosphere is buzzing with what it means for Apple and PC makers.