They don’t run so well, when somebody changes all the passwords they run as, without notifying you… grumbles

Earlier this morning, I received an email from “The CapitalOne Fraud Department”, claiming to have been trying to reach me concerning fraudulent activity on my email account.

It started with the subject “A message from Capital One’s Fraud Department”, and had the body:

Capital One--Customer Fraud Protection

http://email.capitalone.com/T9RT03B4D356207A38AE47DB54E840

- Protect
- Monitor
- Resolve

http://email.capitalone.com/T9RT03B4D336D07A38AE47DB54E840

We've been trying to reach you
Please call us at 1-800-427-9428
=======================================

Jonathan Angliss ,

With your assistance, we would like to verify some recent 
transactions on your account ending in ####. We want 
to ensure that all charges have been authorized by you. Please 
call us at 1-800-427-9428 as soon as possible.

If you've already contacted us and approved these charges, thank 
you...there is no need to call again. 

You are a valued Capital One customer and we do all we can to 
protect your account at all times. 

Thank you for helping us protect your account. 

-- Capital One(R) Customer Fraud Protection
P.S. For any general account questions, call 1-800-955-7070 or 
the phone number on the back of your card. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Important Information from Capital One

This e-mail was sent to jon@netdork.net and contains 
information directly related to your account with us, other 
services to which you have subscribed, and/or any application 
you may have submitted. 

Capital One and its service providers are committed to protecting 
your privacy and ask you not to send sensitive account 
information through e-mail. You can view our privacy policy and 
contact information at 

http://email.capitalone.com/T9RT03B4D346C07A38AE47DB54E840

If you are not a Capital One customer and believe you received 
this message in error, please notify us by responding to this 
e-mail. 

Copyright 2006 Capital One Services, Inc. Capital One is a 
federally registered service mark. All rights reserved. 

07578 070 001 

Now, there are a number of phishy. The first is the lack of actual calls I have received relating to this fraud. They’ve apparently been trying to call me, yet I don’t have any records of calls, or any voice mails. The second is that they’re requesting I call them. Doing a relatively extensive search on their website, I couldn’t find any reference to the number they wanted me to call.

So instead of being stupid, and calling that number, I did what the email recommended, and called the number on the back of my card. Phishers aren’t stupid, they try to make the email look as legitimate as possible, hence the recommendations. When I got through to them, I asked for the number for the fraud department, and they confirmed it was 1-800-427-9428, and then transferred me directly.

Now, you can go to http://www.capitalone.com, and select the “Contact Us” links, and there you will be taken to a page that gives you an option to select what area. As this was related to my credit card, I selected that. A handful of phone numbers, but no number for the Fraud department, just an address.

Next step was their search. Searching for “Fraud” took me to this, but again, no phone numbers, just hints and tips on how to avoid fraud. I also tried searching for 9428, which is part of the number, but that returned nothing.

This adds to the feeling of suspicion on the email. Google also returned a handful of hits on the phone number, and only one site “confirmed” it was a CapitalOne number, but it was a user forum, so that couldn’t really be trusted. My recommendation for CapitalOne would be to add the fraud number to the website, or not send it in an email, and just ask the person to call the number on the back of the card. Or both!

Technorati Tags: Fraud, Capital One, CapitalOne, Rant, Phishing

Well, I am apparently unable to take a vacation… ever.

As I previously mentioned, Thursday last week, at about 0200 our main line went down. It was down for about an hour until I got it back up again. Later that morning, I spoke with our line provider SpeakEasy, they did some line tests, and reported a lot of noise on the line. They decided to engage our line provider to have a look at the line. They got back to us and reported the line would have to be replaced, and have set about doing it. This was where it was left on Thursday. The line had stabilized, all was well…

Tuesday afternoon, while on vacation back home, my boss called reporting total line loss, and no working connectivity. This was causing so much trouble that we were about to break SLAs with our customers, and we’d have to start paying them back money. This meant it would be a long day. I had to figure a way to move all existing connectivity to our new fiber line, without interrupting service.

This ended up being easier than I had ever hoped. A simple IP address change on the existing firewall (which is linux) to a spare IP on the new line. I then called our technical account rep at AT&T, and asked for an emergency change request on the firewall to allow the new IP address to establish a VPN tunnel to our hosting environment. This was done in about 20 minutes. within 45 minutes, I had the server moved, the vpn tunnel reestablished, and a faster, more happier network in place.

I then spent the rest of the night fixing other minor IP address changes, configuring new monitoring policies, and clearing everything is okay with our data and development teams to make sure everything is running smoothly. Then, about 2 hours ago, I received a call from SpeakEasy reporting that our line provider has completed repairs on the line (only 1 week later), and that I can test. This is of course a little difficult now because I am at “home”. oh well… breaking SLAs for 3 complete days, 1500 customers… I think I’d have been jobless.

Technorati Tags: Work, Rantings, Chaos, SpeakEasy, Vacation

Late Monday afternoon, we were notified by AT&T that our fiber connection was active, and they were ready to turn it over to us. Unfortunately because I’ve been snowed under with about 50 million projects, not much of an exaggeration honest, I hadn’t had time to rack mount the pix, and router. So late monday afternoon, I put the router up, and planned on doing the pix later that night. I arrive at the office at about 2100, and set to rearranging stuff to get the pix on. My other plan while there was to move all servers from one of the switches to a new 48 port switch, and leave internet connectivity on one switch, and everything else on the other two we had there. I didn’t think it’d take me more than about 45 minutes.

More horrors follow…

2 hours, 35 minutes later, I finally finish, updated a few configs, and started shutting down. My phone starts to alert me of an issue, and I start to ponder what I’d screwed up, so I started looking into it, only to find the current link had gone down. 25 minutes later, and a call to the tech center, the line came up on its own, so I went home.

Tuesday rolls around, and something isn’t right. The 48 port switch I’d dropped all the servers secondary NICs onto seemed a little “blink happy”. The activity lights were racing faster than I’ve seen before which hinted at a possible packet storm. I also got a report from the QA department that their test servers were down. Most odd, the changes I’d made shouldn’t have had that affect. So I start to take a look. I can ping the web box, I can ping the SQL box, but the web server is generating an error that suggests it cannot see the SQL server. A little odd, they’re on the same subnet, even on the server (vmware), and yet they cannot talk. So I logon to the servers, and sure enough, they cannot ping each other. So I reboot both, and they come back to life, for a while. This has been going on for the last day and a bit now, and I’m totally stumped.

So this afternoon, I decided that it must have something to do with what I’d been doing, so I reverted the switch configs back to a backup I took before I started (yes I’m s-m-r-t), moved all the cables back, after tyding them up a bit, and it seemed to have worked… for about an hour, and it broke again, much cursing and swearing has followed since. So I’m about to break the server, and pull out the redundant nic configuration, and go all off of a single nic, and see if that helps instead of an LACP controlled team. We shall see..

In the mean time, tonight is the third conference call this week held after midnight, of which I’m pretty sure I’m not going to bed before 3am again, and with all my other work chaoses right now, and many people asking for stuff to be done, I’m feeling a little “worn”.

In a sane environment, you set limits on the sizes of attachments you can both send, and receive. However I’m not in a sane environment. The corporate types complain when they cannot do what they want, and being just a meer Network Admin I have to follow their orders albeit with reluctance, and severe suffering of everybody else.

I’ve been dieing to deploy message limits in our environment for a few years. The reason is simple, our line doesn’t have the capacity for what we are doing (soon to be resolved with the fiber connection). We didn’t really have the capacity a year ago, and we now have more people, more external contacts, and so much more emails. It’s also stupidly insane to allow people to send 50MB files back and forth, especially as emails were not designed to transport files, encoding adds about a third of the size on to the file again for the encoding.

So the corporate entity decides to send PDFs to us on a regular basis. That’s fine, incoming mail isn’t too bad for us, it’s outgoing. So these PDFs are usually 2-3MB in size. They regularly get sent to large groups. This is also fine because it goes to a single address, and exchange dispurses the email internally. The problem roles around when some of these groups have external contacts. Take our sales group for example. It has about 15 external addresses that go right back to the corporate entity’s mail servers. However exchange doesn’t seem so smart, and sends them individually. So 3MB*15 addresses = 45MB. Then there are the people that have individual forwards because they use blackberries (yes I seriously want an enterprise server to remove this requirement). That’s another 5 people. So we now have 60MB of PDF, add the encoding size, and that’s close to about 80MB, all very eager to jam the connection that is already saturated.

So I was recently directed by a friend on Undernet to an Exchange blog, more specifically to this item. It’s a small script written, and executed on Monad (or PowerShell as it’s known now). It takes 3 arguments, the server name, the time period you want to look back into, and the size you want to report on. So now I can at least see the culprit who just subjected me to a dozen complaints about network speed, and subject equal punishment in their direction.

Sunday afternoon, we received a call from building security reporting that they’ve had a power outage lasting 1.5 hours, and power has now been restored. This means hell for me. 1.5hours is quite a long time. Our UPSes are able to sustain the servers for approximately 30 minutes, and longer if we reduce the servers to critical load only.

So why didn’t I get a notification earlier that power was out?

The server that monitors our internal infrastructure runs on a different UPS. Unfortunately this UPS has apparently given up any hope of sustaining anything but the LED on the front, and the small speaker to tell you there is issues. This caused the monitoring server to go down within seconds of the power outage beginning. To round things off here, it looks like it fried either the PSU, or mother board in the server. So now we have no internal monitoring.

That’s just the start. About a month ago, I wrote about another Bad Day in which a seriously crippled SQL server decided to cause me some major headaches. I must say, I’m glad I documented what happened, because the power outage also took that server offline too causing the master db to corrupt once again. Instead of taking several hours to recover this time, i was back up and running within an hour and 15 minutes. I could have fixed that yesterday, had I known the sql service was dead, however our internal monitoring server was broken, so I wasn’t notified… argh!

So I wonder how the rest of my week is going to be…? Stay tuned.

So I admit, I’m all for torturing the hell out of people that sexually assult children, but what parent would let their 14 year old daughter go to meet somebody they met online without being with them? Seriously? Any takers? No, didn’t think so… At least not the sane. But apparently somebody did. And for their incompetency as parents, they want to make somebody else pay.

Who better to represent England in the World Cup than two bald gay guys… you know… the ones from the early 90s with the song “I’m Too Sexy”… yes yes… Right Said Fred are representing England for the world cup.

I don’t know what the hell Microsoft were thinking when they did this, but they need to be shot.

Notice the extra option at the bottom of the MMC window? That should be a “close” like it is on every single application except mmc… argh wtf? I’m forever clicking on it instead of close. And then you have to wait 30 seconds for the help thing to come up.

Weird, I know, but I think most people probably already knew it.

This morning, whilst driving to work, I got stuck behind a woman driving her car about 15 mph down the road, she had her hazards on, and a flat tire. Okay, shit happens, but if you blow a tire, you find the nearest safest spot to pull over, because the last thing you want is to destroy your rims, and any chance you might be able to fix what caused your tire to go flat in the first place. So I followed her for a bit before deciding to over-take her. In the process of following her, I drop past 2 small side streets, a gas station, a small shopping strip, and an Albertsons. So commonsense dictates that you really should have pulled over at some point along this route, but no… she kept going.

I finally had enough of pottering along at 15mph, and started to go around her, to find her chatting on her cell phone… ARGH!!!

Then, as if that wasn’t stupid, I get into work, and as I’m about to pull into the office carpark, I notice an SUV parked in the entrance, with blinkers on. Now, to get into our parking, you go behind the building, and down a ramp. The corner is a blind bend, and drops right down. Now she’s parked right before the corner, so you have to go on the wrong side of the road before you get to the bend… SMART. So I drive around her, to see she’s on her cell phone. Now, I’m impressed she stopped to take the phone call, but we have a whole road in front of the building that is seperated from the main street, so instead of pulling in there (which incidentally would have made it about 50 times easier to get back out as you don’t have to reverse up a road), she decides to wrecklessly endanger people’s lives by parking on a blind bend… great stuff…

/Rant