Good favorites have a Why – an article I definitely plan to write about …many years ago. Until then, I’ll just placehold it for Extreme: world-class musicianship, affecting song-writing, and lyrical content that’s evocative and meaningful. But that’s not what I’m on about right now.
Their new album “Six” is half good, half great. And that includes one song I can’t quit called “X Out”. It’s all there: great playing and affective execution (with a stimulating Tribe of Judah vibe). It’s pretty intense – listen while you read:
The song is also lyrically just PACKED with references, mostly from the Bible. And Shakespeare. (Yes, “Shakespeare-or-the-Bible” quizzes are fun, but this article is just a reference job.)
And in 2023, I expected surely some enterprising nerd had tagged all those references, but no!
So guess who’s the nerd now? 🪞 (Of course somedudes have already interpreted the lyrics, but I say just go read the sources, and interpret from there! : )
Psalm 103:14-16 As for man, his days are like grass — he blooms like a flower of the field; when the wind passes over it, it vanishes, and its place is no longer known.
Psalm 90:12-17 teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom
Save your breath
MacBeth Act 5 Scene 5 Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Ecclesiastes 12:6-7 before the silver cord is snapped, and the gold bowl is broken, and the jar is shattered at the spring, and the wheel is broken into the well; and the dust returns to the earth as it once was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. (Also: Silver Cord metaphysical term)
Hey Microsoft QA, you might want to check out your new look:
It looks less “modern, coherent and familiar”, and more “Unreadable” and “lost the Title Bar”.
This has popped up on many systems recently, so Consider it ✓ Checked outand extremely Not now.
—- Update 2022-02-25 It just popped up again where it was previously dismissed (did they realize it was garbled and wanted another chance to persuade?)
Comparing key frames…
BeforeAfter
Their fixed comparison seems to offer :
LOSS of support for Windows’ Title Bar accent colors
LOSS of the Quick Access Toolbar from the Title Bar …and of those, add just “Undo” back to the Ribbon (Customize the Ribbon could already do this)
LOSS of usable vertical space to 15% increased Ribbon sprawl
LOSS of usable horizontal space, reducing Style choices from 4 to 3.
So “modern, coherent and familiar” means: form over function!, set the designers loose!, dumb it down! …aka a typical “Fresh New Look”.
At Slingshot, we’ve moved our Managed clients over to Unifi networking systems, and I wanted to use our RMM to directly monitor the Unifi Controller. The API isn’t officially documented, but I did find other resources: the community’s API documentation, CyberDrain’s examples, and the Unifi API browser. Add tons of other research and trial/error, and I finally accomplished a Powershell RMM script that monitors Device connections, resources/ports, and Alerts, and reports on a ton more.
Enough with the intros. Here’s an instance currently alerting in Solarwinds RMM:
…and More Info gives the full report (looks better in console — I wish SWRMM preserved whitespace):
Before I forget, some quick notes:
Needs a local account (limited admin/readonly) on controller
For UDMPs with firmware 1.6 or greater, use port 443; For older controllers, use port 8443
It defaults the Controller IP to the detected Gateway IP (we do a lot of UDMPs).
Several of the Device Status codes are documented nowhere, so this script might have the only public record of them (for posterity, I’ve figured out 2=pending adoption, 9=inform error, and 11=isolated).
And finally the Powershell — (self-consciously) still in progress with plenty of debug stubs, BUT with lots of useful production miles already under its belt:
NOTE: updates since publishing this have so far added: * proper detection of the “pending adoption” state * awareness of the undocumented “adopting” state * awareness of the undocumented UBB, USP and USW-Flex-Mini models If anyone’s dying to see the latest version, let me know in the comments.
Are you an ExcelMicro partner who needs to stay in the loop on what they’re doing?
They’ve got some great services and folks, but it sounds like they’re swamped with a lot of internal changes over the last couple years. Unfortunately, that leaves them a bit weak on partner communication…
Their ONLY official way to not get surprised by changes is to manually/constantly check their support portal web pages. After extended nagging for them to publish ANY info on Proofpoint releases, they did finally add that a few months ago. But still no mailing lists, no RSS feeds, no carrier pigeons — just keep clicking refresh til something shows up…
So I took matters into my own hands: Using Feed43’s fantastic service, I wrote custom regular expressions to scrape EM’s content, which I’ve published into my own RSS feeds. If you’re looking to stay in the ExcelMicro loop, feel free to subscribe to these feeds:
I just updated my jsDate library (easier Date manipulation for Javascript) with a couple small improvements. After all these years, I’m not sure why this stuff still isn’t baked in (or at least bundled into the big libraries), but jsDate is still handy!
I’ve mentioned before that I have pet peeves around driving. And I recently saw a bumper sticker that reminded me that I’m not alone: “Forget About World Peace / Visualize Using Your Turn Signals”Actually, I saw it again, but in a new way At a glance it’s just snarky, and I’m all about snark. But bad driving begets traffic jams, and time to reflect on the bumper stickers in front of you…
Everyone’s an armchair general of world politics, and these days everyone has a soapbox for that too (yay Facebook). But I only see 1/3 of Cincinnati drivers use their indicators to signal their turns or lane changes. (And I think 1/3 is generous). It’s surely the easiest effort in driving.
Literally, only 1/3rd of the world will LIFT A FINGER for safer driving.
I found this realization depressing for a few days, but I’ve decided it should be a Jeremiad, or a harsh reminder to do better: The little stuff matters. Before asking everyone else for a better world, Lift A Finger to start making it happen.
I mean catch-up.
Too much work for too long meant many accrued life complications, so I’m on a purge…
Breaking news: Identity theft is a bad thing
One target is paper: The last 3 weekends have included many hours of sorting through paper files for shred, toss, or reuse as scrap. (Yes, I caught my mother’s frugality, so our family prints on the blank sides of old stuff, which is fun when you discover weird personal history on the flip side years later.)
In the shred category: I award special recognition to Anthem, Discover, and US Bank for taking an extra decade to notice any news about that new-fangled “identity theft”. (It took them until ~2006 to start removing complete SSNs and account numbers from monthly statements)
The other is Digital: Today I turned to my blog feeds. 15 years had “collected” roughly 450 feed subscriptions in my reader, which I’m still reading daily. …Well, I knew some of those 450 had gone dark, but managing them has been a recurring pain (browsing feeds by name isn’t easy in Feedly – how about some basic alphabetical sorting?).
Awesome
So I decided to clean house on my feeds. +A couple hours = a couple realizations:
It’s messed up that I can get sentimental about an RSS Feed. WebMonkey, I still miss your irreverent teaching methods, and I probably owe you my career. But in culture of obscene plenty, I gotta start dropping some burdens.
Blogs are Dead! At least half of those feeds are now offline or haven’t been updated in 5-10 years. Now I know why the huge feed count was only netting a few dozen posts per day.
But why have bloggers given up? Facebook and its ilk are obvious. Long-form takes too long, and “Sharing” is now a grunt-button (yes, a grunt is how much value you’re sharing with those things) . With grunt-buttons over at the HealthyViralConservatives page (that’s probably a thing), we smart people are all now stealing our own thunder. But minimal effort = minimal value, so those with nothing to share are sharing the most, and discourse is dead.
…But wait, isn’t this Rob’s like, yearly blog post? Yeah, I’m not done yet — that’s another comeback in the works.
Not Awesome
But what direction? Journaling is a great exercise and enjoyable, butwhat do I have that interests folks?
Comments would be a great measure, but I’ve never been popular enough for much of them, and folks have even LESS time for comments in the grunt-jab era, so they’re out. But …Akismet brags it’s outright blocked 18,279spam comments just since I switched to WordPress 2 years ago. And I get regular notices of spam comments quarantined for review (and that’s easy. The last blog move was good to me, and I’d like to heartily thank the whole WordPress community. Posting is way more likely when I’m not just cleaning up.)
So, without bothering on analytics, maybe the spammers know something. They LOVE two ancient posts in particular: my write-up on Royal TS (RIP), and another about line-breaks in VBScript. (Was 2005 special? It was arguably the golden age of blogging, but I’ve no idea how that could still echo now.)
So I’m gonna go with the topics: “meta-throbs” journally junk like this doesn’t enthrall, but every geek loves good Tools and Tips. And I’ve always got tons of those, so I’ll try to get back to sharing them here soon.
I’d love requests too, but certainly won’t get my hopes up. After all, there’s probably a heart-warming new LiberalCatVideo with a grunt-button.
I’ve sat on this far too long. In 2013 I was setting up SBS 2011 (rebuilding it for a Slingshot client, actually), and hit the classic gotcha where the Connect To Internet Wizard insists on being the DHCP server. My workaround was usually to temporarily disable the router’s DHCP, finish the wizard, then re-enable the router’s DHCP.
Unfortunately, this time I was working remotely after hours, and had no access to their router or its admin to do anything about it, so I was at risk of losing the night’s work and the client finding their stuff still down the next day.
Fortunately, I already had Microsoft support on the line for other matters. They knew a workaround for this — when I asked about it, this is the registry screenshot I got:
For the record, that’s HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SmallBusinessServer\Networking and a DWORD of SkipDHCPConfig = 1
I asked if this was public knowledge, and the answer was no. I’ve saved this for a while, but with SBS 2011 now abandoned I think the knowledge should benefit others. So I hope this helps someone else! (I actually just needed that info myself, for a similar situation 🙂
(Following is some material that Slingshot recently wrote up to help guide our customers through securing their IT systems against Ransomware. It’s too good to not share with the world, though, so here ya go. BTW, we pair this with a personalized recommendation — just holler if your organization would like a Slingshot consultation!)
Introduction
CryptoWall, CryptoLocker, and a variety of other names – they’re all Ransomware, one of the newer and most dangerous types of malicious software (Malware) threatening anyone who uses computers. Once a computer is infected, these threats can lock your users out of their computers or encrypt your data irreversibly, including data on your servers.
Once the computers and/or data are compromised, users are told they can pay a “ransom” to recover their system and data access, often for thousands of dollars. Since the culprits are often overseas, they reach over and hide behind the Internet in ways that regular law enforcement can’t help you. This is extortion, and you just don’t want to be there!
Instead, we want to help you stay safe, so we’ve written this document to do two things:
Outline your options to Avoid, Block, Catch, Limit and Recover From Ransomware.
Recommend yourbest options to quickly and thoroughly secure your organization.
Options
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to avoid paying your way out of Ransomware!
1) Avoid It with User Training:
Some technologies can reduce your risks, but the most important part of the puzzle is training users. Besides Ransomware, training can help you avoid other threats, such as:
Phishing: Masquerading as a trustworthy entity to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details, and sometimes money.
Whaling: Phishing that specifically targets organizations’ empowered decision makers. Targeting details are harvested through Internet searches and/or social engineering attempts. Hackers will sometimes register a very similar-looking domain, and then email decision makers from what appears to be their bosses, directing them to transfer money to offshore accounts.
Pharming: Malware is secretly planted in your computer to hijack your web browser. When you type in the address of a legitimate Web site, you’re redirected to a fake copy of the site without realizing it, where the attackers can harvest your sensitive information.
Vishing: Phishing via telephone, this relies on social engineering techniques to trick you into providing sensitive information.
Informed users are the first line of defense against Internet security threats! Slingshot can train your staff by several means: easy-to-read advisory documents, “lunch and learn” sessions with a hands-on visual component and Q&A, one-on-one training, or any combination of these.
2) Block It with Perimeter Defense:
The next defense is to block threats at a network level before they reach users (or vice versa). Here are options and recommendations for each network threat:
Malicious File Filtering – Blocks access to Malware and other known dangerous files.
→ We recommend Cyberoam firewalls paired with an Antivirus Filtering subscription for this.
Malicious Traffic Filtering – Blocks malicious traffic, like encryption keys used by Ransomware.
→ We recommend Cyberoam firewalls paired with an IPS subscription for this.
Geo Blocking – Blocks all traffic from countries known for their criminal Internet reputation.
→ We recommend Cyberoam firewalls with Geo Blocking configured.
Web Filtering – Blocks access to websites classified as dangerous. Many firewalls can do this as a blanket solution, but most folks want something more sophisticated.
→ We recommend WebFilter (a Slingshot Managed Service), which we can also setup with per-user policies to also shield you from productivity and legal risks.
Email Filtering – Blocks spam, dangerous email content, and fraudulent emails. Some email servers can be setup to do some of this, but not very effectively.
→ We recommend MailControl (another Slingshot Managed Service), which we setup and keep tuned up, but which gives users easy self-management over their own filtering.
3) Catch It with Endpoint Protection
Should Ransomware or other malware still get past the user and firewall (e.g. by infected flash drive or using a work laptop outside the office network), additional protections are available:
Antivirus software– Installed software to detect and block malware. Windows 8+ has Defender built-in, which is free, but basic and unmanageable. → We recommend Slingshot’s Managed Antivirus (a Slingshot Managed Service) which uses the top-ranked BitDefender scanning engine, and which we setup, manage and monitor.
CryptoPrevent – A third party software application that installs on each computer and blocks many Ransomware infections. The commercial version costs around $100 for 50 licenses.
Malwarebytes Anti-Ransomware – New program (still in beta) that detects ransomware behavior and blocks the threads that are trying to encrypt files. Currently available for free.
4) Limit It with Secure Settings
Even with a comprehensive protection plan in place, malware is constantly morphing to get around those measures. If malware gets past the user, firewall, and malware detection, we want to limit its impact as much as possible. There are two good ways to do this:
Software Restriction Policy (SRP) – A built-in Microsoft utility which can be configured to prevent executable files from running from directories that malware commonly tries to use. Basically, this keeps malware from having a foundation to work off.
Least User Privilege (LUA) – This is just a matter of using Standard User accounts for everyday work (rather than Administrator accounts). If a user account can only make changes to his areas, Ransomware running as that user has the same limitations. (A best practice anyway, LUA also protects against staff accidentally taking down systems, as well as from snooping or malicious users tampering with things they shouldn’t.)
Network Share Security – Similar to LUA and “need to know” thinking, server network shares should have their access set to only allow the level of access that’s needed by each user or user group. This requires some thinking about an organization’s groups and who needs what. (Also a best practice for the same reasons as LUA above).
5) Recover From It with Backups
Finally, no matter what you do, bad things can still happen. If worse comes to worst, there are options for data recovery without paying ransom.
→ Any properly configured server should follow the “3-2-1” Backup Rule: 3 backups, on 2 different media, and 1 offsite.
Volume Shadow Copy / Restore Previous Versions / System Restore – Properly configured Windows servers and workstations “snapshot” a backup of their files several times per day. In most cases, these previous versions can be easily restored over the encrypted versions. Unfortunately, some malware knows how to also corrupt the previous file versions – LUA (above) helps prevent that.
Nightly Backups – This is the second layer, usually a full-system (“bare metal”) Windows Backup to an external drive or NAS. Should Volume Shadow Copy have trouble, we can still restore files from this.
Offsite Backups – Finally, in the event of any catastrophe, you want a copy of your data offsite. We recommend CrashPlan or JungleDisk for this.
This is a great help for families who are in need in our district — please check it out and consider helping these folks this Thanksgiving or Christmas.
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