Long time, no see…

Yeah, I know I’ve been gone for some time away from here. But, things have been busy…

The Hills Are Alive…

…with The Sound of Music! We went to this production at Chanhassen Dinner Theatre on Sunday evening (the 10th). It was an excellent (and different than I’d expected) production of a well-known movie/story. All around I would have to give it high marks and would recommend seeing it done on stage at some point in time.

In addition to that, I’ve just been busy with the Subway scene…and awaiting preview scripts for productions. All that I’ve ordered have now arrived (the last of them arrived this afternoon). So, I’ll be busy working on previewing scripts and hopefully selecting a show.

As a final note…

…I’ve noticed serious ‘attacks’ heading for port 135 (the Microsoft RPC port) lately. Of course, this activity is filtered out by the firewall, but there’s on average one request every 5 minutes hitting my network, which is much more activity ‘from the outside’ than normal. Based upon a quick overlook at the Internet Storm Center (a very good resource for port security), this is not just happening to me.

What I particularly find disturbing about my particular log files is that over half of these requests are coming from the same class B network that I’m on…and when doing random reverse DNS lookups (name from IP address) on these IP addresses, I find that many of them are from the same upstream provider (e.g. my ISP’s parent company — a local telco) or from their upstream provider. This means that this has hit somewhat locally…and is not ‘someone else’s problem’…

Today’s Lesson: Make sure to keep your systems at least relatively up to date. Not necessarily installing patches the minute they come out, but for sure within a week, especially for major issues like this.

It is times like this when I’m glad I’m not in charge of Windows servers.

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07