The circle of life

Yesterday was my daughter's second birthday. Of course she loved all the attention and the presents and had a wonderful time. Today, my grandmother passed away after a long life. So, like me, Katie will not remember her great-grandmother, though she'll have a few photos to look back on. The coincidence of timing led me to think about the passing of time and how one generation gives way to the next. I don't think I have any brilliant insights to share here (though it did give me an idea for a future post), so for now, I'll just say farewell to my gram - rest in peace.

Symantec 10.1.6 breaks SMTP

There's been a mysterious problem with users sending mail at work for about a week now and we finally figured out what the heck was happening on Friday. A new version of Symantec Antivirus, version 10.1.6.6010, occasionally manages to block all outbound connectivity from a Windows box to TCP port 25 (SMTP). This appears to be some bug in the feature that scans outgoing email for viruses. This Symantec forum post has a reference to this issue.

Microsoft patch removes RPC port settings?

Hit an interesting problem at work this morning. It appears that one of the July Microsoft patches may remove the Windows registry setting that can be used to restrict the range of RPC ports that Windows uses for communications. This is very bad if you have host or network firewalls that depend on those port ranges. Unfortunately we have not isolated exactly which patch caused the problem. There have been some reports of issues with MS07-040, but I don't have any idea if that one was the culprit in this case.

Edit: There's a small reference to this problem at the end of this SecurityFocus mailing list post. However, the patch is described as an RPC patch, and there were none in July.

First Post

Well, time to test this puppy. This will be the world's most exciting blog post.