Zero / Love

Hope everyone had a great three day weekend. We decided on Saturday to wake up and try to finish the trail we started last time. We took the Slave Cemetery Trail. This trail is not long but understand we are all out of shape and fat. I don't believe in lying so there it is. We had a single goal to make it to the Cemetery and we did. We completed that part of it. We then followed the rest of the trail around back over to the Civil War reenactment and watched it for a while. We actually didn't stay for the complete reenactment but we got to see the cannons fire.

We have now decided we enjoy hiking. When I say "we" I mean "me", not everyone is on board but I think we are off to a good start. Being we are new I'm asking for your help. We are going to start off easy with some Oak Mountain Trails. Going to also being doing only single day hikes. I hope one day to do a multi day hike, but first I have to figure out how to explain to my girls that means peeing in the woods, and how my daughter can charge her Mp3 player. So here is the list of what I think we need, remember there are 5 of us including our dog.

• Water Containers - 140 oz (recommended for 4 hours of hiking for 5 people)
• Back Packs (We need 5, what do you recommend?)
• Tents (We think 5 individual tents)
• Water Treatment (We ran out of water last trip, not good)
• Cooking Gear (Same with tents will be needing eventually)
• Sleeping Bags
• Alcohol Stove

If you can recommend anything else please let me know, leave a comment. We are new so any advise is good advise. I also need a good "Trail Mix Recipe". If you have one please let me know.

Why do these companies have such a hard time figuring out people want good customer service. Here is a sign found in Hueytown, Al. Even this boils down to customer service. I want to find the companies that care about their customers. I want to find the companies that do not. If you want this to, you can help keep reading.

 

 

If you have an issue with a company, or  you want to tell others about a place that has good Customer Service email me z3r010v3@gmail.com and tell me. I will not give anyone your name or email address unless you tell me it is ok. You can either write up something yourself or you can just tell me about a good or bad place. I will either check on it myself and or post  your write up. I don't want to add a bunch of rules, but I think one should be common sense. You can't work at the place you are writing about! Remember to let me know how many *'s the place deserves.

I'm starting a new part to this blog. I have the whole family part, and the technical part, now its time for the bitch part. This is going to be an on going bitch about Customer Service in Birmingham Alabama. So why this part? It is a pet peeve of mine. I hate it when someone is employed in a customer service position and they SUCK at it. Why do people work in these positions when they should be doing something like I don't know picking up trash along the highway! I understand people have bad days, I understand life is not always fair but if you work in Customer Service "GET OVER IT".  For the Corporate People and Business owners around, watch your people.  CS Rating will * start for SUCK customer server, horrible period, up to ***** for Awesome Customer Service. If no * then the customer service is dead! The staff should be fired and the store closed.

 

To Start:
Walgreen's Store Number 6033 at 1815 9th Ave. N., Bessemer, Al 35023

CS Rating: *

We had our daughter call in our normal prescriptions, and we spend $300 easy a month on, being my wife and myself are both on monthly medications. Normally we go to Hueytown Walgreens, but knowing we where going to be late, we decided to call them into this store. They where called in at 3:30 PM with a pick up of 7:00 PM. When we arrived there was a small line of 3 people. We arrived at 8:00 P.M and the girl says "Oh these where called in for 7:00 P.M, give me a minute to get them filled." This minute turned into us leaving after 9:00! This is crazy at any one point they had three people working the back, one at the drive thru, and one up front at register. With a max of 5 people picking up prescriptions. This is in efficient and ridicules. The pharmacist was in the back literally throwing prescriptions and slamming things. He almost reminded me of a 3 or 4 your old, I was waiting on him to drop and just start crying.

What is the point of them putting drive thru's in? This is about one of the stupidist ideas someone at Walgreen's ever cam up with? Or it is an idea that needs to be fixed. I thought the idea of the drive thru was to have a place to drop off or pick up? Tonight there was a pick up at the drive thru and it was there when we arrived. It continued to sit there and was still threre when we left. I seriously believe they where dead in the pick up if it wasn't for the obnoxious ringing of the bell! I almost can't fault them since they where sitting so long, even though the two people working the front and drive through where arguing over who was handling the customer?!?! Yes they where arguing at one point over who was getting this customers prescriptions. 

One lady that was waiting very patiently for her prescriptions finally says "I'll just come back after 10pm and pick them up". So what does the pharmacist do... Fills her prescription keeping my wife and myself sitting waiting even longer.

Want to know where the manager was during this hell time? He was in the pharmacy filling prescriptions! He should have been at the front calming people down, but then I saw some of them women up front and I can't blame him I wouldn't want to be up there either.

The family woke up Saturday morning and just decided to take off and go humping (hiking for you non combatants) up to Tannehill Historical State Park. If you live near Alabama and haven't been there it is beautiful this time of year. It was good leaving behind what I could of technology and just wondering through the woods. I of course couldn't leave it all behind being I am on call this weekend and the pager had to go nuts, but we had a great time. We will be going back soon, this month on the 24-25th they will have Civil War reenactments. If you have never seen this before, it is like stepping back in time... but with a pager.

 

 

I get tired of people trying to sell their spam filtering and all they do is turn up every filter so that all email is marked/quarantined as spam and they expect you to whitelist everything you want to get.

So what is whitelisting? Well it is a list of accepted items, in this case email address or domains. When whitelisted an emails skip the filtering so that they are delivered. If I wanted to make sure that any email from z3r010v3@gmail.com would get delivered to me I could whitelist the whole email or I could whitelist @gmail.com and then it would always get to me. This is not the way to do it, I believe whitelists should be a last resort.

With computers being infected with viruses that allow spammers to send emails from them, and email servers configured wrong allowing for open relays there is always a chance a domain you have whitelisted will spam you. To top it off most whitelist use the "From" address and this is easy to bypass. I had a client for example that whitelisted *@*.gov so that all emails from anything ending in .gov would get through. That is fine till you have a person complaining at the clients office because they are getting spam from not.a.real.host.gov. Then you have spammers that are smart and figure out what email address to use based on the company. For example here in Alabama lawyers always want to whitelist alacourt.gov, yea didn't take spammers long to figure out they could spam any law office in Alabama if they just used the alacourt domain for their email address.

The same that goes here for whitelisting also applies to blacklist. I have had clients inadvertently blacklist everyone at aol.com or gmail.com. So the same goes here for blacklisting.

If you do not trust your rules and filters  work at them more. Don't just start whitelisting every tom, dick, and harry.com

Vbounce is the weapon!

What ever you are going to call it as some call it backscatter and some call it Joe Jobs, well it is annoying. People where complaining, it was an direct attack of this junk. No fear tho, I have added to my Ninja weapons. This time, I have activated.... vbounce. It was really that easy since it comes with Spamassassin 3.2.x and you are using that version right? Well you should be.

Configure

/etc/mail/spamassassin/v320.pre

Change:

# VBounce - anti-bounce-message rules, see rules/20_vbounce.cf
#
#loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::VBounce

to

# VBounce - anti-bounce-message rules, see rules/20_vbounce.cf
#
loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::VBounce

and then turn on if you have not shortcircuit see Justin Mason's entry at the Spamassassin Wiki here.

Then in /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf add
whitelist_bounce_relays myrelay.myhost.net you should add every server that sends email on your behalf. You must enable this or none of this will work correctly. Now also in /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf add score BOUNCE_MESSAGE 5.0.

What it does

So now when backscatter comes in, we are going to check and see if it came from one of our servers. If it does then we are going to mark it with vbounce and send it on in. Now if it is not from one of our servers it is going to hit BOUNCE_MESSAGE and get marked spam. I have enabled this on all my servers and have not yet got another complaint. This is one of those tools I think are going to be very important.

 

I've been using Twitter for a while now, and I know when it is something that I believe is going to be useful when I tell my wife about it and sign her up. So if you are not using Twitter yet, let me tell you what it is.

Well it isn't IM, and yet it is. It isn't a blog and yet it is. And it isn't a way to keep up with someone and find friends, and yet it is.

It is a way to chat with friends, meet new friends, keep up with people and read about what others are doing.

You can use Twitter via their web site, its real easy to sign up and get an account. I'm not going to go into that part of it here. Trust me it is simple. Once you have it then you can just use it to post your messages on the website. Then there is chat, using your favorite IM client (Pidgin) and your Google Talk account you can add a friend, twitter@twitter.com. Once you have done this, then you can chat your status/messages directly to Twitter. This doesn't stop here either. I can only speak as to what I have, but I have an T-Mobile Wing. Using it I can also SMS to Twitter, and I run ceTwit on the phone so when I have a network connection I can also send and receive twits. Twits are by the way messages from other people. We'll get into that in a minute. So I can send my updates and messages from web, chat, and phone while mobile.

Now when you add a friend, you can easily choose how you want to get updates. You can get them to any of the ways you can send, same as above web, chat, or phone. Just because you have a friend added you do not have to receive their chats via your phone for instance. You can set where you want to receive updates.  I have several people I follow, and some are really chatty or I just really don't want to know what they are talking about all the time. So I make sure not to follow them on chat and my phone. You can always check your Twitter site to see what people you are following have been saying.

A Blog you say? Yes it is a social blog. Remember what ever you chat on Twitter others will see. If you have clicked any of the Twitter links in this post you will see mine. It is NOT private, but then neither is IM unless you use a private server with encryption and we won't get into that.

It ends up being either a I love it! or an I don't get it? You will have to check it out for yourself to make that call. I also hear people saying it is a fad. I agree with that, but I see it leveling off in growth. I think it will stay around for a while. I can see a large company "Google" buying them. We will just have to wait and see.

Links for more information:

If you are a Birmingham Alabama Twitter user you can Follow Bhampulse (http://bhampulse.zerosource.org).

Twitters website is at http://www.twitter.com

Twitter Fan Wiki is at http://twitter.pbwiki.com/

 

Upcoming:

 Brightkite review, so far not looking good!

AndLinux nice... run Linux (Ubuntu) in windows

Sun VirtualBox good... acquired VM system

Announcing System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions and Connectors

Of course not a lot of details but in essence Microsoft wants to manage your Linux Servers. Has someone lost their mind? I run Linux servers so that I don't have to deal with Microsoft servers? The most I want to use a windows machine to manage my Linux Servers is to be able to run SSH.

I believe Microsoft Servers have their place, don't get me wrong. I do not believe that place is however managing a Linux Server or having anything else to do with Linux except running SSH client.

Of course they could be making something where it will be easy for anyone to be able to run Linux. So we use something easy to install like Ubuntu, then run something that allows a windows server to connect and manage it from a MMC. No more knowing what is really happening, and or knowing how to run say vim. No more beating away at a config file. Just point and click! No more cli! Everyone will be able to run a Linux Server. So what would we put in front now to protect the MS Linux Servers?!? Will it make it reboot at least once a month now?

YOU HAVE UPDATED YOUR LINUX SERVER WINDOWS MANAGED! YOU MUST REBOOT TO HAVE CHANGES TAKE EFFECT!

Coming up I just got invite for Bright Kite, more information as I get a chance to use it. Thanks Mojo!

 

So today we completed the March for Babies. It was very interesting mix of people. I was surprised on the number of people that showed up. You would have thought it would be more "organized" but it really wasn't. There was some items they took care of "Who raised the most money", "Who designed the best shirts", etc.. but other then that it was a free for all 5 mile walk. Some people cheated and cut across streets to get done faster and others just quit and had to be picked up by the bus. I am proud to say our whole team kids, wife, and friend all made it the whole way.  Here is a shot of the start.

 

 

It was fun, but will we do it again. I'm not sure got some things to think about before we do.

 

Today was also my beautiful wife's birthday! She is great, seriously not just posting it here for point. She really is a great woman. I couldn't have asked for better.

 

Tomorrow Art Fest!

 

To all those that donated, Thanks. I appreciate it much. I hope the March of Dimes does great things with the money. We raised a good amount for a "Family Team".

So if you run ClamAV (and you should) to scan incoming email, the current release had some issue or did on several of my servers. The errors put out where:

cdiff.o(.text+0x190a): In function `cdiff_apply':
 ../shared/cdiff.c:984: undefined reference to `gzdopen'

cdiff.o(.text+0x1950):../shared/cdiff.c:994: undefined reference to `gzgets'

cdiff.o(.text+0x19a5):../shared/cdiff.c:1016: undefined reference to `gzclose'

cdiff.o(.text+0x19f5):../shared/cdiff.c:1010: undefined reference to `gzclose'

tar.o(.text+0xd4): In function `tar_addfile':
../shared/tar.c:82: undefined reference to `gzwrite'

tar.o(.text+0x109):../shared/tar.c:95: undefined reference to `gzwrite'

tar.o(.text+0x1a3):../shared/tar.c:111: undefined reference to `gzwrite'

etc..... then   

collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [freshclam] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/clamav0.93/freshclam'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/clamav-0.93'
make: *** [all] Error 2

To fix recompile Zlib with --shared 

Don't forget to sponsor me for March of Babies use the Badge at the right to sponsor me. The walk is this weekend. 

The Birmingham Pulse is available and kicking online http://bhampulse.zerosource.org check it out!

 

So now that earth day is over, where to start. Spamassassin update, we are seeing a ton of emails with URL's that end in .exe such as

http://stalmix02.nazwa.pl/video.exe

So this one isn't a tough one and I don't know who wrote this originally but here is the rule to catch this:

uri EXE_FILE /\w\.exe/i
score EXE_FILE 10.0
describe EXE_FILE Potential link to executable

I've also had a ton of backscatter hitting the servers. I was also having trouble getting it to go away, not even sure it is gone yet. These are the things I've done. Of course I recommend running the latest and greatest Spamassassin currently 3.2.4. First edit your v320.pre should be located in /etc/mail/spamassassin and make sure this is on:

# VBounce - anti-bounce-message rules, see rules/20_vbounce.cf # loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::VBounce

Then in your local.cf again located in /etc/mail/spamassassin and place:

whitelist_bounce_relays yourdomain.com

So I hope you had a great Earth Day, I know I did. I made my contributions today. Last night I had 15 Bean Soup and tonight I had bean burrito's. Sometimes I contribute silently and then sometimes the world knows of my contributions.

 

This is great, I love it! Now when will we see this on TV? Oh wait never... that is when.

 

BBC NEWS | Technology | Paypal to block 'unsafe browsers'

 

When I first read this headline, I'm thinking finally IE is going to be blocked by a major web site since it is unsafe.  Then I read further.

 

Paypal said it supported the use of Extended Validation SSL Certificates. Browsers which support the technology highlight the address bar in green when users are on a site that has been deemed legitimate

So now we are calling a green highlighted address bar secure? I mean come on how long till someone writes a simple virus that infects a browser to make key words in a url light up the address bar. How many people are going to say "Well the address bar is highlighted green, guess it safe to put in my personal information".

 

After thinking about it do people actually care if the site has a secure certificate that is valid? I know I've gone to many sites that the certificate was expired or invalid and I still went to the site.  Different browsers let you know different ways if the site is secure or not. Most of the time if I see the https I feel pretty safe. Guess that is dumb too. So how do you think we should verify or know that a web site is trully safe and secure? What standard would you use to determine a web site is safe?

 

Why do I walk? Why do I care? Let me tell  you nothing in life is greater then the birth of a child. When that time comes and that child is placed in NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) and the doctors are not sure what is wrong with your child. It turns that great wonderful time into some of the hardest times of your life. So now do this x2 since I had not one but two children born at the same time. Yes Twins.

 

They where born three weeks early. Not a big deal in twin births, but Isabella had fluid in her lungs and Kaitlyn had swelling and bruising on her head. The doctors thought they both had pneumonia and no one knew what wrong with Kaitlyn.

 

They spent 5 days in the NICU during this time Isabella's lungs cleared up and they discovered that Kaitlyn had an abscessed and infected tear duct. This was taken care of with surgery when she was 6 days old.

 

While none of this is horrid like many parents stories I have heard and known about. Being told anything is wrong with your child at any time is tough. This is why I walk, this is why I support the March of Dimes.

 

I have personally seen what they do and have done, and to be honest who wouldn't want to help a baby. Unless you hate Babies omgz~

So while you can sponsor or support my walk by clicking here. Support them any way you can. Because every baby deserves someone in their corner. The March of Dimes is there for all babies!

 

Today they are both great or so we are told! They along with the rest of my family will be Walking this year for the March for Babies!

This is an aggregator for Birmingham Alabama Twitter users. With this you can keep up with what others in Birmingham are doing. You can also see all the other Birmingham Area Twitter out there. Think of it as a stream of consciousness.

Birmingham Pulse

I must give props to Justin Mason and Venus. I have used Justin's implementation.

How to use it:

Add yourself: if you’re a Twitter user in the ham, follow bhampulse. This will add you to the sources list.

Publicize it: feel free to pass on the URL to other Birmingham Alabama users, and blog about it.

Read it: bookmark and take a look now and again!

 

So I am not going to keep saying, oh I should have posted. I'm going to write about this and that. I keep doing it and I keep having issues come up. Two weeks ago I worked 80+ hours at work. Then last week I was home sick with pneumonia with the doctor threatening to put me in the hospital. I slept alot and when I wasn't sleeping I just didn't feel like doing anything. Much less look at a computer. 

This week i'm programing. Let me just state "I am NOT a programmer". We have programmers we just don't have enough. Now don't get me wrong I'm not a moron. I know enough about PHP/Perl/Shell Scripting. I just don't claim it as my job. So I am writing some PHP stuff to pull from a database, give logins, and give some users the ability to edit the database. I am having fun with it, writing the main page to display the table in a nice straight table. Then all the things you can do from searching, editing, to just viewing in a modalbox. So you have a single page with a table and modalboxes popping up all over the place when you click to do a function. 

Last week I installed a ProFTPD Server. I know I said I was sick, but that don't stop work. So this server is run over SSL and has a web interface to control it. So I found a ProFTP Admin and modified it a ton to get the function out of it I need for a client. I added the ability to create the home dir and directories under it automatic. I made the group settings more of "group" setting by making it actually give the groups something, a shared directory.

Well thats it for now, I will try to post aga... never mind.

Testing new phone, got a new T-Mobile Wing and I love it. Thats my cat there... one of the two that is.

PC World - Linux Communications Suite Enters Beta

I can speak from experience here. We tried an alternative to Exchange. We searched and searched, we tried several and finally we found the one we thought would be it. We deployed it to several clients and all hell broke loose. First every couple of days there was an update. This required us to go on site and install and addon to outlook. Then the server would not work or would randomly disconnect. We purchased support from this company only to get the run around, another patch, or no answer at all. At one time Adobe wouldn't work inside of outlook for a client that had the "addon" installed. No response, for 9 months. Then they got sold...

We are now selling hosted exchange, and I can say it works exactly how I would have expected. More important there is support and the clients are familiar with it.

Vista, and Mac support still not available in the other.

For some reason this just got me. I have two cats "in the human ownership type of world" and while I am not sure if they can read. I think its more that they don't care!

Cats Can’t Read !!!! | Bad-Control

 

So here's my idea. I'm sure others or someone has done it or something close. What I'm thinking is using Spamassassin when something scores over 50 go ahead and take the IP of the sending server and pass it to a database.  Then use this database to update a local DNSBL. This would be a cron job that would pull the database and create the records. I would also put a "expire" time that it would expire the entry. Then use the DNSBL at the front end of the smtp connection and block connections based on this. This can easily be done with qmail and postfix.

Would want to block with a url pointing the user to a way of requesting a removal of the block and information on the block. Also have a web front end so someone could make a block either permanent, whitelist, or remove it.

Why a score of 50+ on spamassassin, thats easy. Currently my 10 systems that are scanning if they score over 25 I am 100% sure it is spam. So just to be truly safe at 50 no doubt about it.

With 10 systems scanning 100's of thousands of messages a day this would take a large amount of load and processing time from the spam scanning servers.

 

I seem to never have time to post. Let me see at work I've been working on Xen cluster, openfiler iscsi setup. I've now got 10 Spam/Virus servers running. I've got one running with postfix and  Maia Mail Guard.

At home we had a large branch fall from a tree. I rented a chain saw from Home Depot and was able to cut it up. Then the whole tree fell a week later.

I've got an idea on how to speed up spam scanning among 10 servers using a internal DNS Black list. I will write up a post on this soon.

Oh yea and my wife has got me walking for the March of Dimes.

There is this radio show I listen to just about every morning on the way to work, it is The Rick and Bubba Show. On Jan 19th Rick Burgess son William Bronner "Cornbread" Burgess age 2 died after falling into the family pool. I have listened to Rick and Bubba for over 8 years, and most days it is just what I need to go into work with a smile. I have been on location, such as when Speedy was buried alive at the food world in Bessemer, Al. I have bought several of their CD's "Best of's" and a book they have wrote "Rick and Bubba's Expert Guide to God, Country, Family, and Anything Else We Can Think Of" I feel like I know each and every member of the show and their families.

I can not do this justice so I have provided the links below for you to view. These words from a father are powerfully moving. This was recorded on Tuesday Jan 22 at 2:00 PM, he buried his little boy at 11AM that morning. I will try to post a follow up, I have alot of thoughts on this but it is just hard to put words to it. So for now just watch.

A Fathers heart Part 1A Fathers heart Part 2
A Fathers heart Part 3