In Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace the Trade Federation used tall, thin, skeleton-like battle droids in many large-scale attacks. These battle droids blindly carried out commands sent to them from centralized control ships. The droids were unthinking and would follow any orders given to them.

It seems like something you would only see in a science-fiction movie, but just like battle droids, there are armies of zombie computers all around the world being centrally controlled to wage wars. These “botnets”, as they are called, are used for varying types of criminal activity like attacking other computers and sending spam. There are some botnet armies that number in the millions, but most are in the tens of thousands. When the Wikileaks website was recently attacked, it was by some of these botnets. And when Paypal stopped allowing donations to Wikileaks through their website, botnets attacked and took down credit card websites in retaliation. Continue reading “Cyber Wars” →

I upgraded a client’s Domino server last night.  Today we discovered that they use Axiom Groupware Integration for a service they receive from Rearden Commerce.  It is a service that allows them to book flights, rental cars and hotels at a discount and have those items be pushed automatically to user’s calendars over the Internet.  It is a pretty nice service from what I saw of it.  Here is the website with more info:

http://www.reardencommerce.com/

Here is information on the Axiom component:

http://corp.americanexpress.com/gcs/travel/us/land/axiom.htm

So ever since the upgrade was completed, none of the appointments were being created automatically like they were supposed to be.  We looked into the logs on the Tomcat webserver that Rearden uses to submit the appointments to Domino and found this error:

2009-07-22 17:42:57,171 ERROR [groupware] [http-8080-2] – createAppointment  error NotesException: Could not get IOR from Domino Server: http://ServerName:63148/diiop_ior.txt

That Tomcat server receives the request from Rearden over the Internet, then uses a DIIOP connection to the Domino server to create the calendar entry.  As part of our normal upgrade process, we had hardened security on the Domino server and we had disabled Anonymous HTTP access to the server.  It looks like this requires that to be allowed.  We turned anonymous HTTP access back on, restarted HTTP, and everything was working again.  Looks like we will have to see if there is a way for this to work without the need for anonymous HTTP access.  But at least for now they can update their schedules.

Another problem solved!

I stumbled upon this fascinating presentation by Mozy:

http://mozy.com/blog/misc/how-much-is-a-petabyte/

Not only does it do a good job of visually explaining how big a petabyte is – it also has some interesting facts about the amount of power and storage space our worldwide computing resources consume.  Enjoy!

You aren’t alone.  Had this exact issue at a client today.  Pointed them toward this adapter:

http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/adexc34cb.asp

Kind of bulky to have that thing sticking out of the side of the laptop, but at least they can use their old PCMCIA card with their new laptop.

I’m just glad my Lenovo T500 has both slots 😉

I stumbled across this company today in a magazine:

http://www.infragistics.com

They look to have some great tools to build some very nice looking application interfaces.  The pricing looked pretty reasonable, also.

Update 7/25/09 –> Ran across some similar tools for generating nice dashboards:  http://www.spreadsheetgear.com