What's going on? Jesse left yesterday afternoon, by now he's back in Munich. Yuri, Bill, and Sergei left yesterday morning, by tomorrow they'll be aboard their new home (and dig that new spaceflight design...).
I reinstalled linux 6.2 on wanker yesterday, after a rogue FTP process brought the /home partition to its knees. ugh.
Oh, and of course, I didn't get paid. Cashier's office had no check. Payroll said there was no money in my account. Molvig wasn't in. His secretary sent me to Linda. Linda sent me to Dorian (hubba hubba). Dorian sent me to Clare. Clare wasn't in. After emailing Clare and Molvig, something finally happened and now I have money in my account. They'll cut me a check tomorrow and I won't be broke. Until then, I have exactly $9 to my name.
[it appears that a post that should be here somehow never got into the blogger database, so i'm rewriting it to the best of my memory]
As the age-old addage goes, if it's not MIT payroll, it's AT&T legal.
I finally got ahold of MIT payroll this morning and got them to agree to cut me a check tomorrow. This is good because right now I'm stealing food from my roommates to survive.
But then, when I got home from my research meeting, I found my cable modem service not working for the umteenth time this month and a message from some guy at AT&T computer security. He tells me that my service has been suspended because some (4) educational institutions have complained of portscanning from my computer.
I explained that I had detected the intruder yesterday and had reinstalled the whole computer, just to be safe. He tells me I can't have my service back unless I can produce logs to prove that there was a security breach on my machine. But, of course, the logs were detroyed when I repartitioned the harddrive.
I am so very very annoyed... I don't understand what kind of policy would require me to keep my machine in a rooted state. Makes no sense; I hate AT&T. If I could find another service provider for my neighborhood, I'd be defecting as we speak. But no such luck, I have to call their legal department to appeal their decision to terminate my shitty service.
---- 2 hours later ----
Well... that was actually a lot less painful than I was expecting.
The AT&T legal lady was very kind, helpful, and direct. We discussed how ironic my situation was, she concluded immediately that I had done the right thing, and that was that. I have to accept a three day suspension of service so that AT&T can tell the educational institutions involved that they took action.
Oh, and they issued me... a Warning!
Which basically boils down to "don't be such a lazy jerk." If I had just plugged the security holes that I knew about when I first did the reinstall, this wouldn't have been a problem. Interesting, it seems that the bulk of the portscanning occurred Halloween night - about 12 hours before I reinstalled the box. I guess that means my response time is pretty good. Unfortunately, AT&T's is about 12 hours longer than that.
A three day suspension isn't so bad, I guess...
