I Hate F’en Rodents!

So guess what I found in my Honda Pilot the other day?  I turned on the heater fan and it was making a very low thrumming sound.  I took apart the cabin air filter and found little bits of foam, leaves, napkins and other great stuff.  So I removed the blower motor and lookie what I found in the squirrel cage!  Looks like the little rat bastard mouse had a nice little home under construction.  I found a couple posts on a Honda site hinting that this can be a common problem with the Pilots.  Great.

Mouse in the Blower Motor
http://www.hondapilot.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14471

How to Change cabin filter (you will need to do this first to even get to the blower motor)
http://www.hondapilot.org/forums/showthread/t-20409.html

Nice house for a mouse

How to remove blower motor

DIG on Windows

There is no direct download of DIG for Windows (or Linux) from isc.org.  To get this program you must download the full BIND package and extract the needed files. 

1. Download the Binary Windows zip file from isc.org
2. Unzip the file to a temporary location
3. Create a folder for Dig and move the following files into the folder
4. host.exe, dig.exe, libdns.dll, libeay32.dll, libisc.dll, libbind9.dll, libisccfg.dll, liblwres.dll (if you don’t have msvcr70.dll you will need it - this file is part of the MS C runtime library).
5. If you stored DIG in its own directory with all the DLL’s (except msvcr70.dll) you should be able to run it directly without adding the directory to your environmental path.

Some DIG Commands:

dig [@server] [options] [name] [type] [class] [query-options] dig @server name type dig -h
 
server
The server to query. If no server is supplied, dig will check the nameservers listed in /etc/resolv.conf on Linux or in the TCP stack on Windows.
 
type
A (root level domain server responsible)

NS (authoratative name servers for domain)

MX (mail exchange record for domain)

NOTE: there are a shit-pile of DIG options, just google to find them all

Example:  check authoratative server for foobar.com using a Verizon DNS server

C:\Dig\Dig @4.2.2.2 foobar.com NS

# get the address(es) for foobar.com
dig foobar.com A +noall +answer

# get a list of foobar.com mail servers
dig foobar.com MX +noall +answer

# get a list of DNS servers authoritative for foobar.com
dig foobar.com NS +noall +answer

# get all of the above
dig foobar.com ANY +noall +answer

# check SPF record for foobar.com
dig TXT foobar.com

What more?  Check out this site:  http://www.madboa.com/geek/dig/

Don’t Piss Off an Engineer

Got this in an email the other day.  It made me laugh.  I wonder what the bank did about it?

Motorola Q9h vs ATT Tilt

I just got a new phone and I’m stoked!  The Motorola Q9h Global from ATT is the newest model of the Q line.  I moved from a ATT Tilt (made by HTC). 

I originally got the Tilt because I wanted to be able to run Citrix and have Wifi on my mobile.  However I found that in the 2+ years I had the Tilt (and the 8525 before that) I used this feature only once or twice.  I also found that I absolutely hated having a touch screen device for a primary phone.  Yes the tilt has the slide out Qwerty keyboard but for dialing the phone it was very awkward to use.  So instead you use the on-screen touchpad.  Argg!  Since this phone did have the slide out keyboard, the phone was a brick and was always sliding partially open when I was talking on it.

The Motorola Q9h rocks.  The phone is very light and thin which is a huge contrast to the tilt.  It is a bit on the wide side but I got used to that pretty fast.  The Q9h has a layout similar to a black berry with a full qwerty keyboard below the 2.4″ screen.  The keyboard has easy access to speaker phone, voice dialing and other often used functions on the keypad via some shortcut keys.  The is laid out nicely.  There is a automatically created menu on the today screen that stores your most recently used application and the pad rocker switch makes navigation easy.  The OS is Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard.

The screen is a 2.4″ non-touch screen.  Even though I hated the tilt touch screen for dialing, it did come in hand for navigation and working in apps.  So it was a bit of change going back to not having a touch screen, but the layout of the Q9h menus and the quick keys have made it workable.  The device seems pretty fast and responsive (processor TI OMAP2420 325 MHz, 256 MB Flash ROM, 96 MB RAM  .  It cranked open a 9 MB PDf almost instantly. 

The device doesn’t have 802.11x wireless but like I said I hardly ever used it.  It has an optimized Opera web browser and the 3G data seems pretty fast and responsive.  IE is also included.  The automated voice dialing works great on the Q9h.  I used the Microsoft Voice Command software on my Tilt and it never worked correctly, the Moto software is much, much better.

I’m really happy with this phone.  Currently it is available from ATT only and is very new.  If you’re looking to ditch the brick, you should at least look at the Moto Q9h.

Google (aka Cyberdyne) Captcha Verification

As good as google is with most everything (short of actually removing any product they have from beta status), I’m amazed at how hard to decipher their Captcha verification is (Link).  I usually don’t have a problem with these but I swear it took me 10 attempts to create a new mail account.

Just so they don’t blacklist my site I’ll throw a compliment in this post about Google.  The technology they are using to suggest and preview recent searches is amazing.  I realize the ability to cache lookups is easy, but the ability to match text as you are typing and to do it that fast is absolutely amazing.

And in case you’re wondering why I call them Cyberdyne Corporation , it’s a reference to the Terminator series of movies and what Google will morph their systems into (Skynet).  (Link)

Cisco ASA 5505 - Setting telnet password using ASDM

I went to set the Telnet password on my Cisco ASA 5505.  To my surprise it wanted to know the old password before I changed it.  This was kind of curious since I was logged into the ASDM with the exec user and I didn’t recall ever setting up a Telnet password in the first place.

Luckily I googled and found that the default telnet password is cisco.

Cisco ASA 5505 - How to access internal web server

Although I spend lots of time using Cisco routers and switches as part of my job, I haven’t spent much time using their PIX firewalls.  Most of the firewalls I’ve used in the past were Sonicwall, Watchguard, Netgear or some kludged together linux box.  Usually I’ve been able to quickly set up access to my internal servers with a couple quick nat entries.

This Cisco ASA threw me for a loop.  It took some reading to figure out how exactly to forward access to my internal web server.  On the ASA this is a two step process.  You have to add an acl first and then a corresponding NAT rule.  I used the ASDM tool instead of the command line.  ASA ver 8.0 (3).

Step 1: Set up ACL on the external interface

ASDM > Configuration > Firewall > Access Rules

• Click Add
• Interface: Outside
• Action: Permit
• Source: Any
• Destination: Any (I tried limiting this to the internal IP I wanted but this didn’t work)
• Service: http (or whatever port or service you want to allow access to)
• Logging Level: whatever you want.  I choose default.

Above Rule in CLI {access-list outside_access_in extended permit tcp any any eq www}

Step 2: Create the NAT rule to translate

ADSM > Configuration > Firewall > NAT

• Click Add
• Static NAT Rule

Original

• Interface: Internal
• Source: IP of internal www server (or server you want to allow access to)

Translated

• Interface: Outside
• Use interface IP Address

Port Address Translation (optional)

• If the servise is running on a non standard port either internally or externally you can turn on PAT.  If for our example www is 80 on both external rule and internal server you don’t need it.

Above rule in CLI {static (inside,outside) tcp interface www 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.255}

Trouble shooting

• If you get no warnings when you create the rules above, but you cannot access the server from the outside, make sure your access (step 1) is listed as source any and destination any
• If you get the following error when setting up your NAT rule [WARNING] static (inside,outside)  interface 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.255 tcp 0 0 udp 0
    static redirecting all traffics at outside interface;
  WARNING: all services terminating at outside interface are disabled.  Make sure you have enabled the Port Address Translation section and have the ports filled in.

Moving from Money to Quicken

Ok, I’ve stuck with Microsoft Money for long enough.  I used to love this software!  When I first stared using something to manage my money, I tried Quicken and hated it.  I went to MS Money and never looked back.  Every year I’d upgrade to the new version and all was good.

Slowly however, things began to change.  First they “suggested” that you use a MS passport account to sign in to Money (now called Live).  After digging around I found there was a way to bypass this feature, which involved creating a brand new ms money file.  This was the only way to get a file that didn’t want a passport login.  Then you could import you old stuff .  However, MS Money still pulled in a bunch of stuff from the Internet without asking me and this was annoying.  Then came MS Money 2008.  No way to get around using a Live ID now.   F that, bye.

I tried out Quicken 2008 Deluxe.  I was very impressed.  The interface and layout was greatly improved from the previous versions I’d used.  Great, I’m in!  Now to figure out how to import 7 years of data.  Opps, no friendly direct import path.  Great.

Quicken has a procedure on their site, but it gave me lots of problems.  Well paranoid mike comes to the rescue.  If I ever see this guy in a bar, I’m definately buying him a drink.  Check out his blog for the workarounds for the quicken procedure.  I worked great.  I’m now a very happen Quicken user.

http://paranoidmike.blogspot.com/2008/01/converting-from-microsoft-money-to.html

Quickens Procedure

https://quicken.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/quicken.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=5521