The Greatest American

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The Discovery Channel is running a series about deciding who the "Greatest American" is, and we, the people get some voice in deciding. To me, it's all bogus though, as their list of nominees doesn't even include Norman Borlaug.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work in increasing wheat yields, and is widely credited with saving more human lives than anyone else in history. I'm not talking about saving a dozen people, or saving a thousand people, or even saving a hundred thousand people. Norman Borlaug's work has probably saved the lives of more people than live in your entire state. His work is what has kept millions of people from dying of starvation worldwide.

To see that somehow Borlaug isn't even ranked in the top 100 Greatest Americans is extremely depressing. To see Borlaug left off in favor of Tom Cruise, Bret Favre, Mel Gibson, Michael Jackson, and Donald Trump makes me profoundly sad.

We, as a society, value two religious nutjob actors, a football player, a pedophile weirdo, and a slezy real estate developer more than Norman Borlaug? Where's the "culture of life" crowd now?

Did I also mention Borlaug is originally from Iowa?

Frustrating Tiger Bug

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I've encountered my first frustrating Mac OS X 10.4 bug. This bug is driving me nuts at home, where I have three base stations covering my house. When I roam between them, I suddenly lose my connection and have to reestablish it. This better be fixed in 10.4.1 or I may be going back to OS X 10.3 until such time as it is, as it really sucks to be in the middle of an instant message conversation or file transfer and suddenly wind up disconnected. I can also try going back to just one wireless AP to cover my house, but I've had problems getting a solid connection throughout the whole house on one AP before.

VectorWorks portscans on port 30999

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While testing Symantec Client Security for possible use on our network, I noticed two machines tripping the portscan IDS signature on port 30999. A quick Google search revealed that this was port was primarily used as a back door by the Kuang2 trojan, so we disabled the network ports of the two workstations and sent some techs to check it out. They couldn't find any malware on the machines, but since no one could tell me what was portscanning our subnet on 30999 from them, I told them to wipe them anyhow. As one of the techs was setting the machine back up, it tripped my firewall again, and I immediately called him and asked him what he was doing. He said he's just installed VectorWorks, so I asked him to run it, and sure enough, that's when the machine portscans on 30999.

I searched Google, the manufacturer's web site, and their support forum, and none of them mention that port, so I e-mailed their tech support and got this response:

Dear Nemetschek North America Customer:

Thank you for your inquiry.

VectorWorks does do a network check to see if any serial numbers are duplicated and are used at the same time. It can not be prevented since it is hard coded into the software.

If you have any other questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to contact us at (410) 290-5114 (tel) or (410) 290-8050 (fax) or tech@nemetschek.net (e-mail).

Respectfully, Technical Support

So, it's legitimate (annoying) behavior. The kicker is SCS will disable all communication with the "attacking" machine for 30 minutes by default. So, you can launch VectorWorks, then find that all the machines on your subnet running Symantec Client Security refuse to talk to you for half an hour. Congratulations, you've DoSed yourself!

Obviously, the best solution here is to run a firewall that filters your outgoing packets, and deny VectorWorks the ability to talk on your network, or better yet, configure your managed switch network to not allow all port 30999 communications. Or, even better yet, stop using VectorWorks until they decide to trust you as a customer.