Last night, a got an interesting call from a couple guys at a dot-com in Salt Lake City. Their web site was down because a backend NFS server was having kernel problems with a RAID card inside. Normally, they would have their system administrator go over to the colocation facility and take care of things himself. Unfortunately, their system administrator was out of town. Backup administrator? He just happened to be out of town as well.

So... I met one of the VPs and their Internet marketing guy at their colocation facility and proceeded to take the NFS server offline, remove the offending hardware, bring the NFS server back up, and reboot all the other servers.

Their website was back online in an hour or two and then I got a midnight snack at a local restaurant compliments of the VP.

There's some possibility of them calling me this next week about employment opportunities with the company. That could be cool.

Virii

While in Salt Lake, I also had the task of ridding my father's computer of a virus he received in e-mail. I was surprised when he told me he got a virus that sends out e-mail because he uses Eudora as his e-mail client application. E-mail related virii tend to associate themselves with Microsoft Outlook and it's relatives.

A scan using the free Trend Micro Housecall PC-Cillin browser/Java-based virus scanner and cleaner detected multiple files infected with the PE_MTX.A and TROJ_MTX.A virii. These virii are related and work together to infect a Windows-based system usually via e-mail attachments. Once an infected file is executed, it replaces or modifies the system WSOCK32.DLL so that any outgoing e-mail (SMTP traffic) is monitored and a copy of the virus is sent as an attachment to all addresses listed in outgoing messages.

Pretty ingenious. More smarts than those pathetic VBS viruses.