There has been enough feedback to indicate that some persons known to me but not necessarily SPAUG members have not heeded my advice to set up a double whammy for SPAM and viruses.
They have paid dearly for their failure to follow the guidelines set forth. If you are concerned with your ability to set up the proper protections, run you computer past the Saturday Morning Clinic--this is one of the key services provided to the SPAUG membership.
There are some caveats about the use of Norton Anti-Virus. I believe it is the most effective of the bunch but it is not set up well out of the box. It attempts to update itself only once a week--and that is totally inadequate. Further, it attempts to check for that update every five minutes which is total overkill. These two parameters should be brought into reasonable limits.
Further, there is a facility that can be found by inputting into GOOGLE: symantec "intelligent updater" download [be sure to include the quotation marks as shown] which will permit you to bring down manually the update of the day including beta anti-virus loads to avoid the slowness of the usually Wednesday Symantec update. If you are concerned about an especially virulent virus running around, updating more frequently under your control is probably a very good idea. The time of spread of some of the viruses is measured in hours--not days. Intelligent Update by Symantec is the answer to the formal update being not often enough. Try it.
To the best of my knowledge, no SPAUG member utilizing the Mail Washer and Norton Anti-Virus pair, properly set up, has contracted any viruses.
If you purchase one of the ubiquitous little mass storage sticks, all you have to do is to insert it into a USB port and the stick will be recognized immediately--unless you are still running Windows 98 which requires the installation of the Mass Storage Interface using the included mini-CD. No big deal but a pain if you are updating lots of computers.
If you are having to make long distance calls to other states or countries, you might like to go to www.1010297.com or some others to have much reduced rates.
The guys and gals of SPAUG are going to have the completely revamped SPAUG-MID-03 instructional CD consisting of all freeware with fuller explanations than ever before and composed entirely of freeware or starter kits. Over 200 man-hours were invested in this project.
Thanks to the efforts of our membership, we have speakers booked through December. Just what are we going to do in January?
A note about when you purchase a new computer: Many of the new computers have been purchased recently and their owners very soon realize that a second drive is highly desirable either for data or for backups. When you buy the computer originally, specify the second drive at purchase time as the big three have gone to cases that often are not designed for the second drive either in power supply capacity or physical dimensions to accommodate the second drive. In the long run, buying it from the original manufacturer is much more expedient and cost effective.
Windows 2000 support will be continued by Microsoft until 2005.
We'll be electing our officers and board members for 2004 at our November meeting. All officers and board members who attended our August planning meeting indicated their willingness to serve you again in 2004. That said, we're not averse to having new members on our SPAUG board. This is an all-volunteer group--get involved to assure the continued survival of SPAUG. The names of our current officers and board members are at the top of the address page of this newsletter, and are online on our Contact page.
Alan Broad, chief engineer and architect of Crossbow spoke briefly about their work on TinyOS, an open-source operating system for sensors and sensor networks, and at length about the Smart-Dust program. Crossbow website.
Crossbow Technology, Inc. is the leading supplier of low-cost, intelligent digital sensor solutions, including inertial sensor systems, MEMS gyro and FOG gyro-based Inertial Measurement Units, AHRS, and Vertical Gyros for Avionics and stabilization applications. Crossbow's sensors integrate silicon micromachined (MEMS) technology with digital signal processing and wireless technology in accelerometers (single and tri-axial), magnetometers, tilt sensors (inclinometers), vibration, seismic and other instrumentation sensors.
The sensors incorporate the company's proprietary SoftSensor embedded firmware, which includes algorithms for stabilization and navigation applications coupled with internal compensation and communication functions. Crossbow manufactures wireless sensor networks and wireless data-loggers based on the "Smart Dust" concept and utilizing UC Berkeley's TinyOS. Alan showed several wireless sensor working models, a "mote", MICA2DOT WB, MicroRadar and COTS-BOTS, and described some of the current and future applications.
This week has and will continue to be a disaster for computer users that fail to set up adequate defenses against worms, Trojans and viruses. Rather than merely railing about the problems, I want to outright order that you should have AT LEAST the following two criterion in place by the end of today as it is time to quit fooling around with half-measures.
You should have in place Norton Anti Virus and set it up that it self-updates DAILY (not weekly as it comes out of the box). Further, you should install and use without exception MailWasher which has the property of sensing that a particular e-mail has a virus in it by the means of checking each e-mail with a central database. The latter must be turned on by clicking on the box: "Check the origin against the DNS spam blocker servers." If there is anyone receiving this message and is either in doubt or knows that you are not using MailWasher properly or are not properly set up with Norton Anti-Virus, then I request that you make an appointment to show up on Saturday and get rid of the problem.
Your computer will be checked for the proper timing of the running of Norton Anti Virus.
Further, you will be shown how to pre-scan your e-mail while still on the server and before the e-mail is transferred to your computer by the use of MailWasher which also has an anti-virus reporting mechanism. It does not detect the virus, but it does take a database comparison and report the virus to you for deletion from the server.
You MUST isolate your machine from these problems if you are going to have safe and carefree computing.
Excerpted from an article in ZDNet by David Coursey, Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
With computers using WinNT/Win2000/WinXP operating system, they have means of communicating to the administrator/user what is wrong with them. One system tool, Event Viewer, is an application that is monitoring what is up (or down) with your system.
To find Event Viewer in Windows 2000, go to: Start/Settings/Control Panel. For WinXP go to: Start/Control Panel. Change to Classic View for the Control Panel in XP to make it easier to find what you're looking for.
Next, look for an icon called Admin Tools, Click on it and then open Event Viewer. Inside are three folders labeled: Application, Security, and System. We're going to concentrate on the Application and System folders.
Click on either one and review the log files. You will see blue dots ("happy dots") along with yellow warning dots, and angry red dots. Concentrate on the red dots, scrolling up and down to look for them.
If you see several of the same error messages over and over again, this is an excellent indication that your system is trying to tell you something. Click on that message and open it up to read the information inside.
Up near the top, there's a code called an event identification error code. That's a special number you will need to find out what's sick with your system. Copy that code number. Next, launch Internet Explorer and go to a Web site called EventID.Net. This is a Web site operated by a Canadian consulting firm that has accumulated from newsgroups and other sources all the fixes, resolutions, and everything that you will need to fix that issue or at least head you in the right direction. It costs $15 a year to subscribe and it's worth many times that if you work with multiple computers. If you don't want to pay, do a Google Groups search for information about the error. To do this, go to the Google home page and click on the Groups tab above the search box.
Now put in your exact error message and many times you will find that a fellow computer user not only had the same issue you did but got a resolution for it.
Next try using the Google search engine to search the Microsoft Web site. Click on Advanced Search [to the right of the search box]. In the box marked Only return results from domain, put in Microsoft.com and again, your exact error message. This method is often more effective than using Microsoft TechNet or other resources.
Lastly, you need to do a bit of research in your own memory. Ask yourself, when was the last time this system worked properly? Remind yourself of what you loaded in between [when it worked and when it stopped working] and first begin by uninstalling that software.
Updated applications, especially virus definition files, can also be the culprit in bogging down your system, so you may not think that you've installed anything when, in fact, your system has been updated with new files.
I've already thanked Jim Dinkey for insisting that we install and use Mailwasher on our machines. I'd been putting it off for a long time, but Jim's insistence, and his offer to be sure it was set up correctly, made me do it. There are some things I don't recall Jim mentioning, but which increased my enthusiasm for Mailwasher.
I can have Mailwasher check for new messages at regular intervals and alert me when there's a new one, without downloading it.
I use Outlook Express as my primary email handler. Long ago, I turned off its automatic checking for (and downloading of) email, because I didn't want to inadvertently open a message that had been downloaded while I was working on other messages. This meant that I'd check for messages manually, on an irregular basis.
Mailwasher allows me to preview a message without downloading, simply by clicking on the message in Mailwasher.
Mailwasher and Outlook Express work independently. I can use Mailwasher without OE, or vice versa--but I'm aware it's best to use Mailwasher BEFORE I use OE.