Howto: Find the Serial Number on a new Dell Monitor

23. June 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", Hardware, howto, Rants · Tags: , ,

I picked up a few Dell P2210t 22″ widescreen LCD monitors the other day.

Monitor - Front

Very nice!

As part of my asset acquisition process, I have to document serial numbers and assign an asset tags to each new asset. When I turned the monitor around, though, I ran in to a problem:

Monitor - Back

WTH?

Hey, uh, Dell? Did you forget something?

Well, actually they didn’t. Apparently all of the required labeling is too much of an ‘eye sore’, so Dell has decided to hide it:

Monitor Pop-Out - BackMonitor Pop-Out - Front

Pretty Sneaky, Dell

I would have appreciated it if Dell would have made more of an effort to point out where it is (I actually had to refer to the unpacking diagram to show me), but that’s it. Hidden with the USB ports is a small little pull-out card. Now that I know it’s there, though, it does make it easier to get a serial number off of a monitor when I have to figure out which asset belongs to which program when someone has inevitably pulled off the asset tag.

Fun Fact – Number of times the word ‘ass’ appears in this post: 6.

After 5000 Tweets: A Review/HowTo of Twitter

11. June 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: Android, Apple, howto, Rants, Twitter · Tags: , , , ,

I recently hit the 5,000 tweet mark on Twitter, and figured that it’s as good a time as any to write something about my experience on the abbreviated social networking site. It also seems appropriate as I permanently deleted my Facebook account (well, I’m in the process, anyway).

Click ‘Continue Reading’ below for the wall-of-text review.

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Rogers Marketing: Opt-Out is Hard-ish To Do

07. June 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", howto, Rants · Tags: , ,

Rogers LogoIt seems like ages ago I’d gone and opt’ed out of Rogers Marketing ‘services’ – I made sure that I’d chosen opt-out options for email, snail-mail, and SMS, and all was well. However, a few months ago I started receiving telemarketing phone calls on my Rogers-provided cell phone. I did the individual opt-out each time they called, a different company/number would call each time.

While updating other parts of my account today, I decided to double-check the marketing settings, and found this:

Rogers Marketing Opt-Out

Click for the full-sized image

Err, that’s great Rogers – you’re not going to have anyone call my work number, but why isn’t my cell phone in the list, and why can’t I add it?

A quick call to Rogers (meaning twenty minutes of hold time) later and I had an answer (sort of) – the rep that I got instructed me to http://www.rogers.com/optout and enter the relevant details to opt-out of all marketing on that number.

After doing this, my cell number still isn’t listed in the Marketing Opt-Out in my Rogers My Account section, but the site did say that it may take 1-2 weeks for the changes to take effect. Only time will tell, but next time the telemarketers call, there will be a few more questions as to how they got my number.

Rogers Wireless Hijacks Wildcard DNS Records

07. June 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: "It's a Feature", Android, Apple, Hack, howto, iPhone, Linux, Rants · Tags: , , , , , ,

Rogers LogoAlthough I can’t confirm when this happened (it may have happened a while ago and I just never noticed), I was browsing the internet last night on my Google Nexus One and noticed that, when I mistyped http://imdb.com, I was redirected to http://www20.search.rogers.com (which doesn’t work outside of Rogers’ network) instead of receiving a normal Not Found error. This all smacks of the infamous VeriSign Site Finder fiasco.

I’m no fan of browser redirects in any form, and I’m even less of a fan of Yahoo which Rogers partners with to, among other things, provide results on their hijacked landing page. But what can you do? It’s their service, and there’s no opt-out link on the page.

Well, the answer is to manually opt-out. Unfortunately, you need to have a rooted/jail-broken phone to do this. As stated above, I have a Google Nexus One which runs CyanogenMod, but this should work with any other rooted Android phone and even jail-broken iPhones (although the paths are different — you’ll need to alter them as applicable).

To manually opt-out, do the following (assumes Android phone):

  1. Open a shell on your phone. You can use ConnectBot, Terminal Emulator, or adb shell.
  2. Assume root (su command).
  3. Remount the system partition in to read/write mode —  mount -o rw,remount /system
  4. Browse to /system/etc.
  5. Use your favourite text editor to open hosts.
  6. Add the following to the bottom of the hosts file — 127.0.0.1 www20.search.rogers.com
  7. Save and quit!

You’re done! You’ve just manually opt’ed-out of Rogers Wildcard DNS hijack. Now you’ll just get the normal ‘Not Found’ errors, as when Rogers see that the domain you’ve entered doesn’t exist and tried to redirect you to their search page, your phone will point that domain to itself and fail as it isn’t running a webserver.

TL;DR Version: To prevent getting directed to Rogers’ Search Page when you mistype an address, edit your hosts file to point www20.search.rogers.com to the 127.0.0.1 loopback address.

Update (05/01/2011): You can now officially opt-out using this link: http://searchassist.teoma.com/templates/rogers/optout

How To: Delete Your Facebook Account

06. June 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: howto, Rants, Twitter · Tags: ,

Facebook LogoDeleting your Facebook account isn’t as it should be. If you simply browse to Account and then Account Settings, you are only given an option to Deactivate your account. All this does is temporarily hide your profile details from everyone, and does not actually remove any information what-so-ever from the site. All you need to do is login again and you can easily reactivate your account. To permanently delete yourself from Facebook’s database of evil, you have to go through the following process:

  1. Click on Help Center in the footer.
  2. Select Profile under the Using Facebook heading.
  3. Choose Account Settings and Deletion (oddly, the first item on the list).
  4. Now click on the How do I permanently delete my account? heading.
  5. This will expand a wall-o-text explaining how to deactivate your account, which you don’t want to do. Instead, read to the half-way point, where there is a link to submit a request to have your account deleted – click it.
  6. After reading the guilt-trip, click the submit button.
  7. In the new window, enter your password, and then the two words in the captcha box, then click Okay.

Note that at this point, your account still hasn’t been deleted! After clicking okay on the last box, you’ll see the following text:

Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. If you log into your account within the next 14 days, your account will be reactivated and you will have the option to cancel your request.

Yes, even though you went through 8 steps (the waiting is the 8th step) to delete your account, Facebook really wants to make sure you haven’t accidentally done so! As such, if you login in anytime in that 14 day period, you’re account will be reactivated (fortunately, it doesn’t automatically cancel the deletion request).

So quitting Facebook is nearly as hard as quitting smoking, but it can be done. I’ve started the process, and in 14 days my account will finally be out of there! What will I do with all of my Facebook time? Probably put it towards Twitter instead….

Rant: Microsoft Telephone Activation

31. May 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: "It's a Feature", Microsoft, Rants, Support, Windows · Tags: , , ,

I’ve blogged about Microsoft Telephone Action before, but now I’m off on a rant….

Click ‘Continue Reading’ for the wall-of-text!

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Rant: BP “SpillCam” is Windows-Only

26. May 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: Linux, OS X, Rants, Windows · Tags:

So in the wake of this whole oil-spill thing going on, BP was forced to drop a camera down to the source of the link and broadcast the footage out over the internet. Initially, the site was wanged (see the Penny-Arcade definition) due to the huge amount of traffic it was generating, however it’s working fine now, at this link:

http://globalwarming.house.gov/spillcam

Of course, unless you’re using Windows, that link is no good to you. Why? Because, in this age of HTML5 video and Flash streaming, the video uses the Windows Media plugin – specifically, the Windows Media 9 Codec. There are ways to get it working short of a Virtual Machine running Windows, but it shouldn’t be difficult. The video should be in an open, available format to allow everyone easy access.

Now, I’m no Microsoft-hater, and I’m not a Linux fanboy. All I want is to be able to watch video on whatever platform I want, be it Windows, *Nix, or even OS X. I don’t think this is too much to ask, yet apparently it is.

Update: A Flash-based stream is available here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127258287&ft=1&f=1003

Symantec Endpoint: Good at Giving Me Heart Attacks

04. May 2010 · 4 comments · Categories: "It's a Feature", Rants, Servers, Software, Troubleshooting · Tags: , ,

Oi. Symantec is definitely giving me a lot to blog about recently.

I logged in to one of our public file servers today for a weekly inspection, and as is someone common was greeted with a dozen reports from Symantec Endpoint 11 of infected files being deleted. It’s not uncommon for our clients to open malicious attachments, visit shady websites, and generally make a mess of things, but a combination of good ACL’s, Deep Freeze, and SEP 11 on the server have kept things clean.

So, after reading through the alerts and verifying SEP cleaned all of the detected files, I ran Live Update followed by a Full System Scan, as is standard procedure. Out of curiosity, I watched the first part of the scan process, when I noticed it pause on these files:

c:windowshide_evr2.sys

c:windows9129837.exe

d:autorun.inf

The first two file names made me worried, and the third a little more so, if only because D: is another RAID array and therefore has no reason to have an Autorun.inf. After a little digging, however, I found that none of these files seemed to exist on the server. Now I started thinking ‘rootkit’.

Sure enough, a quick Google later showed that yes, these files are common to a number of different rootkit variants. As such, I busted out my usual toolkit of malware detection/removal utilities and took the server offline.

As I dug deeper in to the server, though, I still couldn’t find any traces of the mentioned files. I tried several different rootkit tools, browsing the hard drive contents from a Linux LiveCD, and even a few tools to check ADS (Alternate Data Streams), but had no luck.

At this point, I was fairly convinced that the server was clean, however why would Symantec report those files as present, unless…. Digging a little further in to the results from Google, I found this forum thread: http://www.antionline.com/showthread.php?t=278671 – apparently, during the initial part of the scan, Endpoint doesn’t actually report just the files that it’s scanning, it also reports the name of the files it’s looking for.

So, a little life lesson - don’t assume that Symantec will do anything that makes sense. And, when in double, Google is still you’re friend – you just need to look harder.

Sample Symantec Endpoint scan showing a non-existent file

Sample Symantec Endpoint scan showing a non-existent file

The TL;DR version: The scan status on Symantec Endpoint 11 doesn’t just show the actual files on the computer, but it also shows non-existent files that it’s looking for. When in doubt – verify manually!

Rant: Business Internets are Serious Business

08. April 2010 · 3 comments · Categories: "It's a Feature", Rants · Tags: ,

I work for a non-profit that provides general employment services to the public. In part, we offer a large number of public-access computers for job search purposes, as well as a smaller number of systems for general use. Couple these with ~20 staff workstations and a video conference unit, and we chew through a large chunk of bandwidth each day.

Until now, our dual 6Mbit DSL connections have been making due, but really only because of a WSUS server and two IPCop servers acting and web and update caches. With the possibility of adding new offices and increasing the number of computers on our network, I’ve been looking in to alternative ways of boosting our throughput.

One of the first plans was to check in to a Fiber connection, but that was quickly scrapped. Unfortunately, we can’t afford the $1500/month rates being offered for the lower-tier connections, and the staggering ~$5900/month for a 100Mbit up/down connection is completely impossible. As such, I started looking in to other business packages.

This brings me to the root of my rant. I’ve never been a big fan of DSL, so my first thought was to check out what was offered by our local cable provider, Shaw Cable. I’ve used them for my residential internet connection since 1997 and couldn’t be happier, especially since they’ve just started to offer 100Mbit down 2Mbit up service in my area.

After several phone calls to them, however, my opinion has completely changed. Despite the fact that they provide faster service, Shaw is only willing to offer a 15Mbit down/1Mbit up service to businesses. That’s the fastest you can go without switching to Fiber, which again is out of our price range. Although the service is slightly cheaper than the DSL equivalent, I need at least 4 static IP addresses, and which Shaw will provide–for an extra $50 on top.

Speaking with their customer service reps was a frustrating experience, because I couldn’t get an answer as to why businesses aren’t allowed access to higher tiered packages. “That’s just the way it is” was all I was told.

As such, we’ll be sticking with DSL, and Shaw has lost a potential customer. I hope they eventually decide to let businesses catch up with home users, but somehow, I have my doubts.

Internet. Serious Business.

Seriously.

Short Non-Tech Rant: Tim Hortons

08. March 2010 · 4 comments · Categories: Non-Tech, Rants, Short · Tags: , , , ,

Wow. I’ve got quite a long history with Tim Hortons, but for some reason I keep going back (probably because of Roll Up The Rim). This morning at the drive-through was about par for the course.

Her: Welcome to Tim Hortons, how can I help you?

Me: Hi. Can I please get an extra-large tea, with two milk and two sugar?

Her: <several seconds of silence> Ummm, so you want a decaf tea?

Me: Actually, I just want a regular tea.

Her: Okay. Do you want anything in it?

Me: Yes. Two milk, and two sugar.

Her: <several seconds more of silence>. So two cream, and one sweetener?

Me (trying not to sound frustrated): No. Two milk. <pause> And two sugar.

Her: Oh! Okay!

I’m surprised that I didn’t end up with a Double-Double instead, as has been known to happen before.

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