BlueWolf's Howl

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February 05, 2008

More Wishes Granted

I'm realizing that I *do* get everything I wish for - just sometimes not in the way I intend...

The latest realization of a wish granted came in the form of an email. It was a topic reply notification. I had always wanted to have a message board with a lot of users and a lot of chatter. I set one up about 3 to 4 years ago. It really didn't take off at all. So I forgot about it. Then I started another board. That one has a moderate amount of success and a smattering of chatter now and then. A handful of people visit regularly and play the games. Nice.

So this topic reply notification... Yeah, it was from the *old* board. The one I forgot about. WTF? So I went there today and found out my wish had been granted. Yes, it's a LIVELY board. Apparently a large number of people found it and saw it was abandoned. They gave themselves squatter's rights. The board had thousands and thousands of posts. There were tons of visitors. And it looked like some alt.* group from Usenet! Needless to say - I was mortified.

After I regained my senses and figured out the password to log in... I deleted the database for the board and removed the entire folder for the site. It's gone now. Wonder how many people were regulars and will be disappointed that it's gone? And I had no idea that this little smutty society sprung up all on its own - and thrived! Quite a lesson to be learned about monitoring the sites you run/own.

The other wish to come true came in a much more pleasant form. [They're not *all* tough lessons.] I had always wanted a laptop that was purposed for sniffing and other network troubleshooting. Luckily my supervisor gave me an old laptop to work with for just that purpose. Yipeeee! No more having to sacrifice my laptop while doing a trace. I can actually get some work done while the trace is running. I can actually pull all the 'other' stuff off and focus its every bit of resources towards the task at hand. Granted, it's an old stinkpad with only 512MB of RAM. But it will be streamlined and focused. That will make the difference - or so I hope.

I'm formatting the hard drive now. Once I get it set up, I'll probably post the specs here. Although the laptop came with XP Pro, I'm putting 2K Pro on it. I've always found it to be a tighter and cleaner OS than XP Pro. I'm going to strip it down and customize it. The challenge will be to only keep that which is necessary without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Of course, I'll be putting Wireshark on it. I debated Word and Excel and figured I might really want those on it too. There might be a need for a csv file or two at some point and screen captures just don't work in Notepad. The OLD telnet is a must along with some type of term program - but I'm still debating which one (or two). TFTP is another 'must-have' along with WS_FTP or some ftp program. Perhaps I'll splurge and stick an IP subnet calculator on there. The more fluff I yank out, the more justified I'll feel in putting a small proggie of convenience on it.

I have to go that route because I'm going to have to share the laptop with others at work. But once that challenge is over, I would like to repeat the same thing on one of my old laptops so that I can keep it for myself. The greater challenge is going to be repeating it using Linux. I could probably eeek out a bit more power by using the command line interface and skipping X Windows. Now that would be a challenge. We shall see.

Posted by BlueWolf on February 5, 2008 08:34 PM