The company network had gone down over the holiday and we got it working again yesterday but it went down again soon after. After some checking and testing, the problem was traced back to my machine – it would suddenly start broadcasting a large amount of data and so would crash the router :p I couldn’t figure out what was wrong for a bit but then I suddenly realized that it could be Sapphire – the recent worm that had affected MS SQL servers! I have at least three different databases – Oracle 9i, mySQL and MSDE – installed on my machine and I had not realized that MSDE was vulnerable to Sapphire too (or had totally forgotten that I had MSDE installed – things get a little bit hazy after the fact and I’m not sure what is what :p). So my machine had not been patched and it suddenly had become infected – the problem with the Sapphire worm is that you can’t prevent it infecting your machine even if you have good anti-viral software since it attacks your machine directly via one of the ports used by your MS SQL installation. So I shut down MSDE and started downloading all the patches for it through the day and our network went back to being normal.
What with all the excitement of finding Sapphire, downloading patches and reading up on the worm, I didn’t much in the way of work done yesterday. But I did spend some time on trying to find a solution for my problems at home too since I can’t seem to run web applications using the .NET framework on my machine at home. If I used a dropdown .NET control for instance, all the choices would get displayed on the page as text but I will not see the actual dropdown control. I had thought that this had been due to the fact that I had installed XP SP1 and then installed IIS and Visual Studio .NET but I couldn’t find anything on that – or maybe I didn’t look hard enough. But I did find that they’d released SP2 for the .NET Framework and so I downloaded it and brought it home with me and installed it. Still no luck 🙁 I’m not sure what else I can do except to download XP SP1 again and install it but I’m not sure that I want to go through all that again. I hate problems like this!
*sigh* Saphire is your friend! *sigh*
Don’t worry man…we bit the bastard last Saturday too. I personally don’t think it was the same from the week before, since we did have all our updates on our servers already. We did need to knock about 75 people off the network that had it installed illegally though. Got us for 15 hours of downtime though. At 9.5M an hour for 13 hours…damn that hurts my wallet thinkin about it. Hard to believe 75 machines can knock down 5000+. Oh well…back to the security drawing board.
much better, this smaller font 🙂