Month: November 2004

Wormy

So I’m at my favorite net-enabled coffee shop and the connection is just sucking wind. It gets this way from time to time. I fire up “ettercap” to see if I can figure out why. Huh. There’s a computer at 192.168.1.106 constantly firing off requests on port 445 to random IPs. I mean dozens and dozens per second. I look it up and find out that port 445 is a Windows service of some sort, a favorite of worms. So somebody here has a badly worm-infected computer that is hosing the connection for everybody. Thanks.

I wish I was l33t enough to know how off the top of my head to identify who it was and tell them they have a problem (and they are causing problems for everyone else), or else just knock them offline.

Anyone got suggestions?

UPDATE: via the ancient technique of “walking around and talking to people” I managed to find the person whose IP it was. He was grateful to find out his machine was infected.

Andy Tannenbaum, the Votemaster!

Electoral-vote.com is slashdotted or being DOS’ed (six of one…) but today its mysterious maintainer revealed his identity — it’s Andy Tannenbaum, author of Minix, after which Linux was modeled! Tannenbaum’s been in the news a bit of late because some Microsoft shills have been trying hard to make him say that Linux is a ripoff of Minix, which annoys him, because he thinks (with some justification) that Minix is much better designed than Linux and the idea that Linux is a close imitation of Minix insults him.

Anyway, hats off to Professor Tanenbaum.