No, I Don’t Want iTunes Installed. You can quit asking.

I don’t like software vendors that try to sneak software onto my computers. I really don’t like software vendors that don’t pay attention to my requests to not run in the background at startup.

This evening I came home and saw the Apple Software Update popped up on my Vista desktop:



Problem one: iTunes is check marked by default. I don’t want iTunes. I don’t need iTunes. And I don’t like having software vendors try to sneak software onto my computers. This isn’t unique to Vista. Apple does the same thing on OS X. It’s annoying enough that I’ll probably uninstall Quicktime and throw away the $29 that I paid for it.

Problem two: I specifically instructed Apple’s Quicktime to not automatically update, and I specifically have disabled the Quicktime service from running at startup, but somehow it ran anyway.



I’ve also checked the Software Explorer in Windows Defender and the ‘Run’ registry keys for Apple related startup programs & didn’t find any. I’d sure like to know what’s triggering the Apple updater so I can nuke it.

Something makes me think that the only way I’ll get rid of this malware infestation is to search and destroy all Apple related registry keys.

Availability & SLA’s – Simple Rules

From theDailyWtf, a story about availability & SLA’s that’s worth a read about an impossible availability/SLA conundrum. It’s a good lead in to a couple of my rules of thumb.

“If you add a nine to the availability requirement, you’ll add a zero to the price.”

In other words, to go from 99.9% to 99.99% (adding a nine to the availability requirement), you’ll increase the cost of the project by a factor of 10 (adding a zero to the cost).

There is a certain symmetry to this. Assume that it’ll cost 20,000 to build the system to support three nines, then:

99.9 = 20,000
99.99 = 200,000
99.999 = 2,000,000

The other rule of thumb that this brings up is

Each technology in the stack must be designed for one nine more than the overall system availability.

This one is simple in concept. If the whole system must have three nines, then each technology in the stack (DNS, WAN, firewalls, load balancers, switches, routers, servers, databases, storage, power, cooling, etc.) must be designed for four nines. Why? ‘cause your stack has about 10 technologies in a serial dependency chain, and each one of them contributes to the overall MTBF/MTTR. Of course you can over-design some layers of the stack and ‘reserve’ some outage time for other layers of the stack, but in the end, it all has to add up.

Obviously these are really, really, really rough estimates, but for a simple rule of thumb to use to get business units and IT work groups thinking about the cost and complexity of providing high availability, it’s close enough. When it comes time to sign the SLA, you will have to have real numbers.

Via The Networker Blog

More thoughts on availability, MTTR and MTBF:

• Estimating the Availability of Simple Systems
• Availability, Complexity and the Human factor

NAC or Rootkit - How Would I know?

I show up for a meeting, flip open my netbook and start looking around for a wireless connection. The meeting host suggests an SSID. I attach to the network and get directed to a captive portal with an ‘I agree’ button. I press the  magic button an get a security warning dialogue.

It looks like the network is NAC’d. You can’t tell that from the dialogue though. ‘Impluse Point LLC’ could be a NAC vendor or a malware vendor. How would I know? If I were running a rouge access point and wanted to install a root kit, what would it take to get people to run the installer?  Probably not much. We encourage users  to ignore security warnings.

Anyway – it was amusing. After I switched to my admin account and installed the ‘root kit’ service agent and switched back to my normal user, I got blocked anyway. I’m running Windows 7 RC without anti-virus. I guess NAC did what it was supposed to do. It kept my anti-virus free computer off the network.

I’d like someone to build a shim that fakes NAC into thinking I’ve got AV installed. That’d be useful.