i couldn't figure out facebook

A woman brought her laptop in running Norton 360 and Moon Secure antivirus. Moon Secure? Sure, Moon Secure.

When I saw this my first thought was, “Gross Norton!” but my second thought was if the program is legit. It is, I suppose. It’s based off the ClamAV virus definitions. ClamAV doesn’t do on access scanning, that’s what this Moon program adds. It’s limited in user control, there is no GUI, and it’s based on Clam… Why is she using this? Because someone said it was awesome. +1 for underground security solutions.

Removing it fixed the problems she had. I would have removed Norton and installed MSE but people get upset when you remove the bloatware they paid for at Best Buy.

This post military job is much different than what I expected. The military was never driven by profit, or efficiency, or sense. Repairs were paid for by an unlimited source of money that came from somewhere. Problems were fixed after normal working hours. And no one really wondered why something took so long.

I used to get a lot of “while you’re here” requests. Like, hey, while you’re here to fix that network thing, come fix this printer. I still get that, except now it’s followed by “why should I have to pay for all the time you were here??” I didn’t fix anything in your office for my own amusement, ma’am.

Some customers are great, others I dread. That part is the same. I do have to call them customers now as opposed to users, apparently “users” is implying something.

I first read about this on Mr Schneier‘s blog, now reddit is talking about it.

Since nearly everything is closed, we only find out that the government has put a backdoor into a device when they or attackers misuse it. So I’m glad they make these bad decisions out loud or we’d never know.

It’s not like they really need backdoors.

Wifi can’t actually blow away. But there’s been a sand storm that lasted from last night until just now. The sand kept the wifi from working (I guess). Africa needs grass or something, these sand storms are getting out of line.

There must be sand in the rain here as well. A rain storm just took out the wifi for a few hours.

I was a little surprised after finishing the CCNA 640-802 exam. It’s an exam for a technician with 6 months experience yet it covers nearly everything. No technician is going to encounter EIGRP, OSPF, Frame Relay, enterprise wireless, IPv6, etc etc in their first 6 months. The range and depth of the study material had me convinced that this was going to be an in-depth exam.

What surprised me was that the exam barely touched on all the topics you’re required to study. The OSI model questions were basic, I did not have to subnet anything, the OSPF questions (that I studied the most) could have been answered after only skimming the chapter in the Sybex textbook. For example, an OSI model question would be along the lines of, “Which layer converts electrical signals into digital bits?” I studied for this?

I had 50 questions on my version of the exam, you get anywhere from 40 to 60 questions and you have 90 minutes to finish. Once you answer a question you cannot go back to it.  You can only progress forward through the exam. I do not think the rumors of “adaptive testing” are true. Some people say that if you miss a question of a certain topic then you will get more of that same topic, seemed to me that all the questions were predetermined.

The best resource for the test is the CCNA Video Mentor series and book from Cisco press. I had the Preplogic material as well, not so much help there, and I forgot to study the 15-minute guide of theirs right before the test. You can study the pass4sure material only, but I hope they change the exam right before you take the test (you paper cert).

The labs on the exam were easy and I recommend looking at www.9tut.com to get an example of how the labs will look.

A router simulator would have been nice since it’s been 3 months since I’d actually logged into a switch, but the 6 years of previous logging into switches made up for that… for me at least.