I scooped this one off the Neverblue Ad site. It’s only for Canadians. With these types of deals, they usually only want US traffic.

My apologies to my US readers. I hope you aren’t offended. I mean, being a Canadian and all that, I’m really sorry if your feeling are hurt in any way, shape, or form.

And about burning down the White House in the War of 1812? We’re sorry about that too. It wasn’t our fault, the damn Limeys made us do it.

Microsoft is giving away about 2000 free USB sticks loaded with hacking software to law enforcement agencies and military intelligence agencies.

“The device is a USB thumb drive called COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor). When you capture an enemy computer, you plug in COFEE and then use over a hundred software to quickly get whatever information is on the machine. COFEE can quickly reveal passwords, decrypt files, reveal recent Internet activity and much more.”

No word whatsoever on how civilians can get their hands on one of these sticks. It will be interesting to see if any of these things make it to blackhat world.

Hat tip to Strategy Page for catching the story from Seattle Times.

Use coupon PREPRESS for 8 bucks off any order at the Nerds shopping site. There’s a bunch of stuff there for under $15 so you can get more than 50% on some items. The coupon is good until end of May.

A Poweredge from Dell. Boy was it ever cheap, about $1200 with a 2003 small business server license and a UPS. I don’t know how computer manufacturers can keep shipping this stuff so cheap. I mean, the 2003 server license ships with IIS and Exchange so to buy that without the server you would be looking at $400+.

Of course, once you hook it up to the Internet, it asks if you want to download critical updates so you say yes and boom, it’s busy for the next hour and a half. And if you leave it to go do something else, it stops in the middle of the upgrade process to ask if its okay to do something. Annoying!!

Anyways, good to get new gear in the shop, I have to eventually totally overhaul how we do mail, as the mail services provided by Shaw totally suck. Not to mention we need to migrate some critical databases off the Linux server we bought off Craigslist for $300.

Before I get to the goodies, I just have to mention that I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 last week and at least one reader wasn’t able to comment on this blog. Sooooo, if you are having problems commenting on this blog and you didn’t have problems before, drop me an email at dj dot dunkerley at gmail dot com and I’ll look into it.

Now, here is the free stuff: You can get free trade publications and technical documents here. All you have to do is fill out some informational forms that ask for your name, address, what year you lost your virginity, and have you ever killed anybody. Just kidding. But apparently I get a little bit of money everytime a form is filled out and more importantly, some of the trade publications DO look a bit interesting if you’re a geek like me.

And if you aren’t a geek like me, I have no idea why you read my blog.

Second free item:

If you work on Macs (and I guess maybe 90% of readership does), you have to get your hands on this useful little utility from Fixamac. It does what it say, it fixes the printer setup utility if it starts to act up.

Lastly, one of my most popular post is the free (free!) but unadvertised color profiling software on the X-rite web site. So if you missed it, and you have a spectrophometer in the shop, you should definitely check it out.

Came in today after my day and the front office had big issues with the Simply Accounting server. As in the server wouldn’t come up. Great, just great.

That server is a VMware installation running on top of one of the Ubuntu servers. I have two VMware instances running on one blade server sharing one hard disk. This is a bit naughty as you are suppose to allocate one hard drive per VM instance otherwise performance takes a big hit, but the Simply Accounting server acts only as a data repository, so come on.

Anyways, to make a long story short, I had to kill the other instance of VMware (which generates ink profiles for the Komori ) to get up and running. Which means there is a pretty strong possibility I’ve got a flaky hard drive ready to barf for all eternity, sometime in the next month or so.

But that leads to the good news, the owner is okay with buying a new server, rather than making do with these secondhand servers we bought off Craigslist a year ago for $300 each. In speaking with the Prinergy operator, business looks good, lots of jobs coming in, good quality jobs that are going on the Komori. When the printshop makes money, you get the gear you need. When it is not….

I got called into Printcraft yesterday because they couldn’t send outgoing mail as Shaw (the internet provider) put a block on. They said that they were under suspicion of spamming as some e-mails originated from our IP address that got bounced.

Oh great, a spammer has compromised Exim email relay agent that I have been configuring on one of the Ubuntu servers, I thought. So I drive over and deinstall Exim and start to check the traffic logs off the router. Basically, when a spammer hits, you see a lot of traffic spewed from your IP address. In this case, I saw not a lot. Like nothing but the regular web surfing traffic from the office staff. I spent some time making sure that we are clean. Then I phone Shaw, explain what happened, and we get to send mail at lunchtime instead of waiting 24 hours like they first told us.

Still don’t know what happened, all they told us was that a number of bad emails originated from our IP address. Finally I figured out what. Yesterday, I was telnetting with the Ubuntu mail server (Exim) trying to make it play nice with the Prinergy server. Telnet from a DOS window really sucks, if you make a typo, it’s doesn’t allow you to erase your mistake, you have to abort and start over. So I had a few typos and sent out about 10 garbled emails. And the paranoid Shaw email spam sniffer must have picked up and put us on block.

Cripes, Shaw email is getting annoying. [Beginning of rant] They keep putting us on spam watch but their support really sucks. Actually, they don’t really provide any support beyond cutting us off once in awhile. For example, you can’t send secure mail from Entourage which guess is a real problem for a prepress shop [End of rant].

Because we have been dealing with these annoyances for the last six months, I have been seriously thinking of migrating the email to Google apps for the domains. Looks like I’m going to accelerate the process.

Holy cow, Akimet has caught more than 70 spam comments since I installed the plug-in last week. The only comment it missed was one from mkinc, a prepress distributor  of used equipement (makes sense that it would want me to okay the spamming).

It’s too bad that the mkinc guys are using a sleazy SEO outfit that is spamming blogs, if they had been nice enough to write a comment show there was a real person behind what was said, I would have let the link go by. I mean, they are prepress distributors so it shouldn’t have been too hard to say something relevant.

Frickin’ sleazy SEO outfits getting into the printing and prepress space. I mean, I do SEO for Printcraft but I don’t spam. Ugh, whatever.

By the way, if anybody out there knows Tom Hallinan of HELIOS software, could somebody be nice enough to tell him to put my email on the whitelist. He has me marked as SPAM. Note to people, if you send mail to people and you know you have one of those stupid spam filters than bounce mails rather than move them to a spam folder, then you should whitelist people that you send mails to. Just my opinion.

And yes, while I have received the Helios software, I haven’t played around with it yet. Sorry about that.

Order a Free B&B Electronics Catalog

These guys sell electronics that are near and dear to any system administrator that works at a printing company: serial connectivity devices, surge protectors, USB devices of all kinds, bluetooth to serial.

Hurry! hurry, before the offer ends

The press was running today, lots of work scheduled for this week. When you work at a printer, that’s all you need to know. Are the pressmen busy? Good.

Checked the web site rankings of printers in Vancouver. Uh-oh, some of them have suspiciously high backlinks. Like thousands of them, obviously purchased en mass from a text link broker. Oh well, it makes my webmaster job a little harder, but not by much.

Owner has bought a laptop and so is giving his desktop with the nice monitor to the operations managers. Spent most of the day switching over Outlook mail and various other applications. Weird problem with the Simply Accounting server fixed by tweaking the share settings.

BTW, here’s a tip, you can’t port mail directly from Outlook Express from a different computer into Outlook. You’ve got to import into an Outlook Express application that is running on the same machine as Outlook. Got it? Jeepers, how lazy can you be not to build Outlook without an Outlook Express mail importer?

Prinergy is running fine. Prinergy always runs fine.