After work today, I went to my parents house. The kids were on their last day of official spring break and they spent it with their grandparents.
When I arrived, I found that my Dad was having problems getting connected to the internet. I assumed that it was a simple thing. I sat down and started to poke around. The computer reacted slow and I had trouble bringing up windows. My dad pointed to the DSL modem at the flashing lights and said, “When it does that, nothing works.” The flashing lights are the activity lights.
I called up the network interface and saw no packet coming down and tons going out. It looked like 2 megs a second blasting out. What the hell, I thought. I called up the task manager, and after a long wait, it opened. I looked at the processes and was suprised to see ‘sqlserver.exe’ running at 90+ percent CPU usage.
SQL on my fathers computer? How can this be?
I aked him why he had SQL on his computer. He told me it was for some sales software he had for his company. It couldn’t be what I thought it was.
I ended the sqlserver process. The lights stopped flashing. The computer became responsive. I could connect to the net.
Could my father really have the Sapphire/Slammer worm? Looks like it.
I downloaded the Microsoft Slammer Patch Utility, and sure enough his system was wide open to the worm. I ran the utility and rebooted again. Everything seemed fixed.
One of these days, a virus or worm is going to hit the net that does some real damage and individuals will really get hurt. Consider that two and a half months after the Sapphire worm hit the net, packets are still travelling around in significant quanities that it found my father computer.
OS and software manufacturers are going to have to step up to the plate here. Windows Update didn’t patch his computer. Norton anti-virus didn’t protect his computer. All software is going to need updating of problems built-in.
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see this is the kind of stuff that screams, “SWITCH” to me. I have both a PC and a Mac, the number of times i have had a major problem with the PC is unbelieveable (the kids and wife take as much credit as I do for some of them). I have had 2 major problems with the mac and i am talking OS 9 (people cant believe i still run it, bu if it aint broke…) one was a battery and the other was because i was installing a drive and did it wrong.
dont get me wrong, i still perfer PC to Mac for the reason of versitility and software availability, but when it comes down to it. there truly is something to the simple world of Macs.
There may be something simple, but there is also something completely limiting by using a Mac. Go to a software store and if you have a PC, you can have anything. If you have a Mac, 90% of the stuff doesn’t work for you.
Also, if Macs were as popular as PCs, all the spyware, virii, and other nasties woud be targeting Macs as well.
You have to pay a premium for it, but owning a Mac feels like your part of a special club. And it is a club that doesn’t have to worry about Slammer… (but then the club has no good filesharing and gets bad ports of few games…)
I am well and happy to be in the Mac club, mostly because it serves us video/designer people well. Stuff works, it’s easy to deal with, much better color calibration control (this is one of the main reason why so many designers are stuck with macs), lets me get on with my work. None of the DVD authoring issues Michael was dealing with.
But at the same time, I miss the processing speed I get with a PC (I only went full on Mac only a few months back) and as I’m moving over to doing more HD video work, I’m re-thinking PCs again. As much as I’m a Mac fan, I can’t denied the speed improvement I get on a PC for working with high data rate video.
Plus I can’t say I didn’t stop and drool a little when I saw the new Sony VAIO Z1 series Laptops 🙂
But for now I’m sticking with the Mac.