Small Joys
July 26th, 2008So, there’s this lab down in the south quad which managed to get it’s computer compromised. We found out because we have received an email from our network monitors, telling us that an unusual amount of traffic was going through one of our machines. Apparently, this machine had transferred over 7 terabytes of data over the network in the span of a month or so. Seven. While that may not seem that impressive a number to some of you seasoned webby “buccaneers,” I assure you that is no number to balk at.
That’s 7,696,581,394,432 bytes! With a constant (and very reasonable, I might add) broadband transfer rate of 750 kb/s, it would still take over 118 DAYS to finish. So when I first heard the news, I’ll admit, I was impressed. Then I was annoyed because we had to look for this machine. The machine was located in a lab past the the architecture studio. Bleh.
The primary contact had a very thick Indian accent, which wasn’t helped by the fact that he was also very soft spoken. I did not enjoy speaking to him. He kept this odd “what?-I-didn’t-know-this-computer-was-comprimised-LOL” look on his face, even though I bet he well knew what he was doing. *shakes fist* It was either that, or he was undressing me with his eyes. While both interpretations are equally repulsive, I’ll stick with the former.
Anyway, I couldn’t understand anything he was saying. Long story short, I brought the machine back to our office, rebuilt it, and returned it. As I was leaving, they told me that I needed to install some software for them, since now we properly added the machine to Active Directory and made it conform to department permissions. It was angry software, the kind where you simply need to sit around and replace cd after cd. To top it off, I had to pick up the cds from the office too. Bleh.
Being one for creative solutions, but not for walking in the sun, I decided to install the program remotely. My current workstation, for various testing purposes is off the AD, so I couldn’t load the msi from my tower. So instead, I remoted into the lab machine and through the network, accessed another office workstation which was two desks away from me for its cd rom drive. I made the cd rom drive shared and started the installation. So for a good 25 minutes or so, I had to walk back and forth in my office, swapping cds and hitting ok. It was an amusing victory for laziness.