Flying By

18 Days Until Aber
Hmm still knackered and got to decide about a lot of things at the moment :( Family all went manchester for the bank holiday weekend on sunday, saw all the relatives probably for the last time until xmas :| It was actually quite wierd to all go up at once as a family, not done it for ages.

On saturday I changed the firewall config so that it doesn't flood with messages, then reloaded and scanned for open ports, to my horror there were 5 open! arrgh! so spend the rest of the evening in a bit of a panic as to why this had happened, initially I thought it was a bug in my script causing wierd behaviour. In the end I decided to try and reset the firewall all together so flushed all the rules with me accessing from the outside and a default policy of drop, so I ended up without any means of connecting to the outside world. Great. Phoned bug and he reset the firewall for me while in a drunken state and I could get in the next morning and get all the services running agian. Until today [tuesday] I didn't realise what was causing me to think that the ports were open, it was Internet Connection Firewall for Windows XP on my parents machine i use as an internet gateway at home, according to a document I came to by chance, ICF uses proxies to allow connections to things like FTP and Netmeeting, so this was making my machine think that the port was open on my server when I scanned it. Great! In this document MS tells us that the Internet Connection Firewall is not a firewall, oh no, it's a "Security Experience" how noddy can you get? One of my colleagues said "An experience, yeah, like a roller coaster ride, ups, downs, and it makes you want to vomit" -hehe :) To their credit though, Securityfocus did some testing and it seems quite resilliant and suited to home users.
On monday the server crashed which was really annoying, possibly faulty ram, got to investigate. Car going in tommorrow to have the rust removed - that'll be another £130 gone :/

PS. Pictures are coming, honest, I've sorted them out, just not got around to resizing them, laptop battery died on the way home after showing relatives pictures on it.