ryanreed.NET

Today was an interesting day. The MSS portion of VeriSign (which I am a part of) was recently acquired by SecureWorks. My Team Lead recently, without my knowledge, nominated me to become the Employee of the Month for SecureWorks. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I had won the honor.

I would definitely consider this an honor as it's not like a fast food style "Employee of the Month" deal (which, coincidentally, I have won before). I was recognized for the work I was doing company wide. It wasn't for just showing up on time, flipping burgers, and such, it was recognizing my performance and skills which I believe to be something I should definitely proud of.

If you are interested, you can check out the "censored" letter that was written by my Team Lead that lead to the award. Check it out

I'd like to welcome George Simons of geosimons.NET to the modern web development world. George currently works with me at SecureWorks and has finally got past the initial "under construction" page. I never thought the day would come. I'm so proud.

I've always preferred living in the south rather then New England for various reasons but in the last year, the urge to move has been pretty large. I've never been a cold weather kind of guy, snow gets boring after 10 minutes.

So you might ask yourself "Ryan, why not just move then?' Ah, there are numerous reasons but a few really stand out.

• The job - this is the biggest reason. I enjoy my job a great deal. I'm a big fan of the firewall management part of our business. It's extremely interesting and the troubleshooting, normally, doesn't drive me insane. I actually feel like I've come into my own in this respect, being able to troubleshoot firewall issues, setup VPNs, etc.
• The people I work with - I have an excellent team behind me. The shift is really rough, but I get to work with some smart and fun guys/gals. Our shift is pretty close and we have a lot of fun while getting a huge amount of work done. It's really the reason I haven't changed shifts
• The job - I know I said it earlier but it really is the job. Good money, good people, and good fun.
• The economy - It's a bit harder to find a job now adays. Finding a job without 10 years of experience maybe a bit tough. Leaving my current job without a job offer would be a huge problem.

Besides those points, I really don't have much holding me in New England. My family moved out of New England when I went to college and I don't have a significant other at the moment. I'd really like to move someplace South/Southwest. Texas seems really nice but I'd be open to almost anything south of Jersey. I guess I'll just keep a lookout and work on getting a good chunk of certs for a little while.

So a quick update regarding the "story" I posted a couple days ago. I received a letter from the Beaumont Legal Department informing me that they cannot be held legally liable for the damages to my camera. This is in contradiction to the officer who admitted to damaging the camera on voicemail.

Needless to say, I will be sending a reply back to Mr. Martin as I'm not sure what constitutes liability now adays but an officer dropping an $850 camera during a traffic stop and an admittance to dropping the camera on voicemail seems to me like it would make Beaumont liable in this case. We'll see how things turn out, I suppose.

Note: I really appreciate that the letter came from the directory G:\RMW\DENIAL\. Just makes it that much better.

I thought I would go and tell a true story about a run in with some police officers in Texas a couple weeks ago.

THE "STORY"

About a month ago, myself and 2 of my buddies, Randy McCaig and Brian Roy took a road trip from Providence, RI to Houston, TX to visit a good friend of ours, Matt Garza. We managed to make our way all the way to the Texas border without incident.

This little post is more of a continuation from a previous post. It is important to note that while this post dwells mostly on the negative, I am actually a large fan of Juniper Netscreen Firewalls. There are just various elements of the firewall that bother me.

All the problems I have with the firewall actually revolve around the Netscreen Manager. I'm not against Graphical User Interfaces. I believe it makes reviewing easier when I actually see the rules rather than the commands. Unfortunately the user interface that Juniper has come with has many major faults

• The interface is built on Java. Java isn't a bad language but it does have the problem of being memory/cpu intensive many times. Most days, within 20 minutes of opening the application, NSM is using roughly 500MB - 800MB of memory. There have also been countless memory leaks in the application. It's important to note that Juniper is working on the issues and has patched a memory leak issue we were having at the 'ol job.
• The more users working in the NSM server, the slower NSM appears to be. Where I work, we only tend to have up to 5 users in NSM at any point but NSM still slows to a crawl. It doesn't help that NSM is not optimized to use multiple core processors. This is a pretty major issue in the world of multi-core servers.
• When a netscreen contains IDP and firewall blades, there is a nifty little checkbox to allow the user to push ONLY IDP policies when checked. This seems like an awesome option when you have multiple policies and you just want to push the IDP policy on the firewalls. Unfortunately, this button does not work as desired. If you happen to be pushing to a bunch of firewalls, you'd better be sure they have IDP. Logic would dictate that if that box is checked, and there's no IDP, then NSM shouldn't push anything. Unfortunately, when NSM sees no IDP policy and the checkbox is checked, NSM will push the firewall policy.
• The audit logs are next to useless, in my opinion. It's hard to find anything you're really looking for. I would much prefer if Juniper took a page from Checkpoint in the way audit logs were handled.

A few run on sentences never hurt anybody. ;-) There are a few minor annoyances but those were just a few of the large problems I have with NSM. It's important to note that Netscreens are still excellent firewalls and I'm sure Juniper is working on the issues I've described. It's also important to note that my company uses Netscreens a great deal and it's possible that Juniper never expected such a large amount of policies to be used on the same NSM server. It's quite possible that users/companies with a smaller list of firewall policies in use would not see the issues I've noticed.

Keep a lookout for my post on some of my favorite features of Netscreens that make it such an awesome firewall (NSM included)

Just a few interesting links that are good to know

• RFC 1925 - The Twelve Networking Truths
• The case of the 500-mile email - An interesting story of the limit of the 500-mile email

* Credit for the links to my buddy, Patrick Dyl

So recently, there's been quite the worm hitting a huge number of networks, working at a ridiculous speed. In 4 days, the worm had gone from infecting 2.4 million PCs to 8.9 million PCs. The worm seems to affect Windows XP, Vista, and Server 2003/2008 computers. This worm works like this:

1. It starts scanning corporate networks for PCs that have the vulnerability
2. Once it is discovered, the worm attempts to guess the user's passwords from a large dictionary of passwords until it gets in
3. Once a PC is infected, the worm creates a list of domains to connect to
4. The worm then connects to one of the servers and downloads additional malware
5. The worm then spreads over a network or from an infected removable drive

The crazy thing about this worm is that it exploits a security hole that was patched on October 23, 2008. So while Microsoft did create the original security hole, it appears that end users and IT administrators were relatively slow in adoption.

Please, if you are an IT administrator, run a scheduled update. Keep your network up to date so things like this happens. In almost all cases, such worms and issues can be prevented if you're a little proactive.

Recently, I've been getting some random instant messages by "someone" who I did not know. About a week ago, it was from some user <something>coho. Never heard of the person but whatever. The person just IMs me and says "Do I know you?" and I answer back "I don't know, do you?" The user quickly response "don't think so, removing you from my buddy list" and it was over. Definitely weird and unusual.

So, today at 22:41 I received another IM. I'm not positive if the screen name was exactly the same but I do recall the screen name ending with "Coho." The screen name was TalkativeCoho. The conversation started off interestingly:

[22:41] TalkativeCoho: I hope your day is wonderfully amazing, just like you!
[22:41] Ryan: You too, man! You seem pretty wonderful
[22:42] TalkativeCoho: i hope you get fatally wounded
[22:42] Ryan: I don't think that's true