bonneyarmstrong.com - now THAT'S secure!

2006.5.30

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2004.12.26

2004.11.1

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2003.7.18

2003.7.3

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2002.3.21

2002.3.19

1986.5.23

now THAT'S secure!

so i'm fixing a broken ethernet card (the plug's come unsoldered from the board!). i slap the new one in, install the driver, and life is good. the user logs in, we can download patches over the internet, what's not to love? so i take the box back to the user's desk and he logs in. but he doesn't have admin on his own box, which is strange considering he's the cfo, but ok, no problem, i can fix that, right? well, no, i can't. i try to log in as me and it won't let me. it says it can't find the domain. wtf??? sure it can, *he* logged in, didn't he? i replace ethernet cables, jack around with all kinds of things, none of them work. so this is the third time i've had the user unhook his machine and give it to me. he's getting tired of this exercise and since he runs the money, he runs the show, and he's gotten zilch done for a day and a half now. so i take it one last time and log in locally, thinking well, worst case scenario, i'll just flash drive all his stuff to the network so we can pull it down to configure his laptop so he'll be good to go. at least his laptop can see the network. then a funny thought occurs to me - if i can touch the internet, but not the domain, it's not his configuration, because if his dns and other settings were wrong, he couldn't get email and i saw him do that, he wouldn't be able to surf and i downloaded patches for him too. what could he have on his system that would prevent domain access but not really jack with his tcp/ip settings per se? NORTON INTERNET SECURITY. i uninstalled that, rebooted, and lo and behold, i was able to log into the domain as if there'd never been any trouble at all. he must have been logging in cached, and given the advances in programming since windows nt 4.0, xp professional doesn't let you know you're logging in with a cached profile. way to go, guys! two solid minutes of expletives later, i'd backed up his email. after several deep cleansing breaths, i got the rest of the files up to the network. i imported his old email and calendar settings into the laptop, and from there on he was back up and running. guess they take that security stuff seriously over there at norton; if you can't log into the domain, then you can't access anything harmful! poor guy, i felt really bad that one lousy poorly written piece of software caused him two days' worth of heartburn. another reason to hate norton internet security suite. of course, norton utilities still rocks. :)