In which what the fuck?!

So when I checked on goblinbox before bed last night, everything looked fine. This morning my layout was all hosed and funky looking, and I — believe it or not — didn’t do it. I wasn’t even there! (It’s usually my fault, when the site’s screwy-looking, though I rarely admit it.)

So I changed my password just in case and then changed back to an older theme. I’m sure y’all recognize it. Links were orange, now they’re purple, but it’s an old theme. Maybe it’s time for a new spring theme or something.

I added Justinsomnia’s Random Image plugin today, which is amusing me greatly. It pulls an image from an old post and displays it over there at the right; if you click on the pic it takes you to the old post. Whee!

In other news, one of the two remaining Cobalt web servers here at work is dying a hideous death. (The password files are corrupted so users of the three remaining domains can’t connect or check their email or nothin’.) Been madly transferring domains to the new outsourced server, calling customers, faxing things, updating DNS. Whee again!

Starving. Going to get some lunch.

In which I repeat a funny ISP moment.

Our Sales department sold a maintenance contract on a wireless LAN installation to a hotel in a town about two hours from here.

Hotel people are luddites.

When guests check in and can’t get on the wireless LAN, the hotel people freak out on Sales, and Sales in turn freaks out on IT. Which means I spent about nine minutes on the phone this morning getting lectured by Sales about how we’re charging for this LAN maintenance and how we really need to “make this thing work,” while IMing both Support and Engineering, who were saying things like “I’m reading the support call notes and Support did everything right, the connection was up to the gateway, so the problem had to be PEBKAC, it’s so NOF!” and “There’s no way we can possibly support a wireless LAN that far away, especially for what we’re charging! One truck roll eats up the monthly fee. Plus, they had me come up there last month just to make sure the fucking thing was working!” (Engineers don’t mind being dispatched to fix something, but they get testy when they’re asked to go look at something that’s already working.)

You may need at this point to understand that I work at an ISP. The product is Internet connectivity, not internal networking. We sell connections to gateway devices; what customers do with their connection once it’s in past their router is their business. We’re a small company, and we just don’t have the infrastructure to troubleshoot laptop settings all day long.

I told my co-worker, “We need to take this thing out on the field or something, work it out — before it gets nasty.” My co-worker countered with, “Nuh-UH. No way does Sales wanna take on IT! It’d be pure slaughter.”

In other news, IT’S PAYDAY. Whoo-hoo!

In which I’ve been totally busy all day! (This is a geek post; you can skip it if you’re not one.)

You know what’s awesome? Being busy at work! There’s an old web server here that’s been hacked (yes, totally pwn3d – and yes, we’re appropriately ashamed) and some clever little punk-ass geek is running a mail server on it and sending tons of spam.

Tons of spam. Which is slowing the box way down, and both mail and HTTP services are halting and crashing. Argh. The box is totally compromised.

Buzz has been engaged in a fairly active battle with our spamming friend all day. He’d take the mail server down, the hacker’d turn it back on. Root passwords have been changed, stuff’s been deleted, installed, moved… it’s a kind of chess-like warfare, really.

I’ve been moving content off the hacked box and onto another server as fast as I can. Some of the content I’ve moved and done DNS for included my employers’s own web site and several sub-domains. Getting those moved was exciting — pages didn’t come up, scripts didn’t work, PHP wasn’t turned on — but we managed it. Then it turns out the cgi-scripts still aren’t working, so I just spent the last hour messing with that but I still can’t get them to work and I have tons of sites left to move. We need to get the box turned off ASAP.

The day has whizzed by! I think I actually feel good about this whole working-for-a-living thing. *shudder*

In which I get something new for once.

Last week, my monitor failed. It was all pink and evil and strobing madly when I came in one morning.

So I told the appropriate people and a replacement was ordered.

It came today.

Yay! New flat panel monitor with built-in speakers! (Wow, now that I’ve moved stuff, it appears that my desk sure needs to be dusted.)

In other news, BvB told me that teasing and ratting is back in. Therefore I’ve quit brushing my hair altogether.