Sunday, April 25, 2010

Playing Catch-up

Despite all my best wishes and efforts, I’ve really been under a tremendous production load of projects at work lately.

Hours stretched, long drives into field office locations for “in-the-trenches” work. Stuff like that.

I have still been checking my RSS feeds and building the linkage piles, but goodness, no time for weekend link posting of late.

One small benefit of the delays is that I will often go back now and re-consider that pile of 20+ links and after a week, find that some just weren’t worth posting comments on after all…so they will be struck.

This slow-simmering seems to result in a much tastier collection of tools and utilities.

So here you go.  About a month’s worth of slow-home-cooking served up for your dining pleasure.

Networking Link Portals

One of the things we have been doing lately is doing site-wide network traffic monitoring and analysis.  Our great network team has developed a pretty easy and deployable process to initiate a remote traffic capture and then internal analysis of the traffic/files.  Nothing super sophisticated but we can now pretty clearly generate a response report in record time.  That’s a small miracle in itself.

Here are three “portal” locations for great linkage and reference materials on Network traffic and analysis.

  • Cheat Sheets - Packet Life. Great collection of free PDF-formatted reference sheets on many things network traffic related. This Wireshark Display Filters (PDF) page alone has been very useful.

  • Network Monitoring Tools – Amazing collection of links maintained by Les Cottrell at Stanford.  Be careful. You could easily loose hours looking through the resources documented and organized here!

  • WinPcap Network Tools and Links – Lots of great tools, reference materials, and what-not all lined up and linked regarding WinPcap-supported tools.

Remote System Auditing Tools

In aftermath of yet another incident project, I began looking for an efficient way to remotely audit the physical status and configuration of remote systems in our network.  We haven’t really had a need in the past to do so, and in the past year have only now been running post-deployment audit reports on systems that we initially set up to capture/document key hardware items. However it has become clear I needed the ability to do ad-hoc surveys and reporting on the status of Windows systems long-since deployed in the field.  Our network management infrastructure software can (in theory) do this, but it is non-intuitive and burdensome to do so.  In addition, it requires the workstation objects to have been correctly imported to the container in the first place to access.  Not done so?  No data.  So obviously I could have some big holes in my site/system audit reports.

So I started looking for a simpler reporting solution.

I found a number of great (and free) tools to do so but they were either much more robust that I needed, or required a client/server model of deployment, or the reporting was just not customizable out for rapid site-wide auditing and exportation for additional analysis in Excel/Access.

Some of those tools that “almost” fit the bill but eventually fouled out were:

  • Total Network Monitor – freeware – Softinventive Labs.  Pretty full featured and awesome.

  • Remote System Information 3.0 - (shareware) – nice and had much of the system hardware auditing stuff I needed but the reporting wasn’t robust enough nor was the fact it was shareware and I couldn’t find where the developers were still in business.

  • Network Manager (NINO) - (open source) – Located this one on SourceForge and looks like a really heavy-duty network monitoring tool.  Ended up being too beefy for my targeted needs.

  • OpenNMS – (Open Source) -  Another very robust network management platform.

  • Lan Sweeper – (Free/$$ versions) – I really, really liked this one.  It covers so many of the mission-critical system auditing and monitoring points.  However it is based on a client/server type of model.  I wanted something that didn’t require me to deploy clients on all our systems in addition to the existing network client infrastructure in place.

  • Zenoss – (Open Source) – Another very mature and polished network/systems monitoring platform.  Again, too robust for my needs.

  • Network Inventory - (shareware/$) – Very nice but ultimately not free/OpenSource and cost is king now.

  • Network Inventory Advisor - (free-trial/$) – Also nice, especially in that it was not agent/client based but again, the free trial period is limited and there is no $ in the budget for this project.

  • AdvancedRemoteInfo - (freeware)  — Pet project of Matthias Zirngibl at masterbootrecord.de.  This was an unexpectedly special find from Germany.  Still in development, this beta level utility really has a lot of great bells and whistles.  It provided extensive information about remote system hardware/software and data-points.  It also allowed for some useful remote interactions with the target system and reporting was much better.  However, again, I needed something that let me manage reports on a site-wide number of systems, not one-system-at-a-time reporting.  Still, this is a great tool and I’m going to be keeping an eye on it in the future!

At this point, after almost an entire week of looking for just the right tool, I was almost ready to give up.  I checked in with Michael Pietroforte over at 4sysops.  He referred me to his lineups of Free Windows Networking Tools and Free Windows Inventory Tools  (in fact see his full selection of categorized Free Windows Admin Tools – 4sysops). However, none of those offerings were fitting the bill either.

Then while in the middle of our dialog, I found that an old-favorite had been updated with just the feature-sets I was looking for:

This ended up being perfect as it is a single, portable exe file based utility.  Though not “tiny” at 720K, it still packs an amazing feature set in.

I am now able to remotely run an IP scan against an entire network site range, and then can set WMI-based custom reports to pull data from the systems.  Because by audit is IP based, I’m much more likely to identify the devices on the network rather than those “objects” that were imported and calling home from a client/agent configuration only.

And the WMI-based reporting options are off the hook.

Look for a more detailed post soon on this project, but for now, I highly recommend checking it out.

The only potential “gotcha” is that WMI services and firewall port rules/policy must be configured, up, and running on the remote systems to get all the WMI-accessible data for your reports. If you have that in place, then you can easily run and export tons of highly detailed system audit report data.

Please look below for more useful WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) resources that are must-reads if you are not yet familiar with it and need to do some homework for deploying and accessing the data it can potentially provide.

New or Improved Fun Utilities

These remaining tools caught my fancy this week.  They “remain” from the many more that seemed interesting from this week but on additional look didn’t make the draft-cut.

Remote Desktop Trick

Windows Remote Desktop is a cool trick to access and manage a system across your network.  But what if you don’t have it enabled on the system? And either the end-user is totally clueless, rights restricted, or otherwise unable to initialize some other remote-control solution?  This might be a trick to try.

Chrome Browser

I’m still nowhere near ready to jump ship from Firefox to Chrome full time, but I do find myself using the Chromium nightly versions in a portable version much more.

Here are the very small set of “add-ons” that I have found useful to load on it.

I’m running a portable version of Chrome (Portable Google Chrome 2.0.172.23 or Portable Google Chrome 2.0.159.0) along with Dirhael’s (portable) Chromium Nightly Updater to keep the package frequently updated.  However, that has required unpacking and copying over the update packages into my the portable Chrome application folders.  No biggie but additional work.

So I was delighted to find that Carsten “caschy” Knobloch has recently started including an multi-build supported updater in his Portable Chrome package: Portable Google Chrome 4.1.249.1059 (German site) has the latest full portable packages for download or you can simply unpack it and copy the single exe updater file to your existing portable Chrome package and use it from there.  It automates the process to check, download, unpack, and install the latest Chrome release versions into you portable Chrome folders.  Way too cool!  See this post Neue Version des Portable Chrome Updaters (German) for additional info on the updater proper.

Firefox 3.7 Stuff

And the next iteration of Firefox is still marching closer to readiness.  I like what I am seeing, but I was surprised when my playing with a portable version of this latest release actually BSOD my Windows 7 x64 system.  First time ever that has happened.  Lots of fun stuff here but be careful!

More Cool Utility Toys and Tips – Part II

I hope you found something yummy for your Windows system here today!

Cheers!

Claus V.

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Thursday, April 01, 2010

Security and Forensics Roundup: Heavy Version #7

Oh my.  I may have bit off more than I can chew with this load of links.  I’m having a challenging time breaking them all down into meaningful chunks!

Incident Response

  • The Tiger and the Ghost – Nice and reflective thoughts on the changing landscape of incident preparedness from Hogfly over at the Forensic Incident Response blog.

  • Verizon Incident Metrics Framework Released – Verizon has published a framework for categorizing incidents and elements that comprise them.  One of many out there, nevertheless, it might provide some additional ideals for conceptualizing incident events and help guide you as you form narratives that analyze and summarize them for your audiences. Spotted via the TaoSecurity blog.

  • DarkReading Evil Bytes bloggist John Sawyer has posted a trilogy of articles on incident response as well as drive-imaging thoughts and techniques in that response; Adding Forensic Imaging To Your Standard IR Process, Using Hard-Drive Imaging In Forensics, and Drive Imaging Using Software Write Blocking provide an updated refresher on these topics. Good for a quick review particularly for the unfamiliar.

  • Responding to Incidents – Windows Incident Response blog.  Coming in at the anchor position is a great post by Harlan covering all the major points and issues on why establishment and execution of an organizational incident response plan for the IT shop is critical. If you don’t have one, it’s long past time to start building and implementing one.  Failure to do so comes with great peril.

Timeline Merry-go-Round

Having some time ago been faced with the challenge of preparing a digestible incident timeline of a Windows system, I am now paying even closer attention to timeline issues.  Like many, I had reams of data, much of it all valuable. However, the real challenge wasn’t so much the capture and spin-out of the information, it was presenting the findings in an objective manner that successfully and accurately told a story to management and non-IT consultants.  What was of value to me understanding the sequence of events was less valuable to those who wanted the big-picture and major-plot-points.  It end up being as much the art-of-communication as well as art-of-examination.

It’s all about Analysis

  • Flock shepherds in a Life of Grime – Forensics from the Sausage Factory blog.  In which in this installment, we find DC1743 encountering the Flock browser, which is just a fancified version of Firefox geared to the social media experience.

Tools and Toys

Miscellanea: Don’t count out the value of small things…

Cheers.

--Claus V.

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April 1st link-dump

No. No April Fool’s jokes here.  All are refreshingly legit.

Cheers.

--Claus V.

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Sunday, March 21, 2010

WinPE Multi-boot a Bootable USB Storage device

Amazing!

Things like this keep up my faith in blogging and the blogging scene.

I’ve posted a number of articles related to WinPE as well as making portable storage devices (USB HDD/ USB flash sticks) bootable for use as WinPE boot media.

It was under that last, most recent post that I mentioned a trick I do to carry multiple WinPE boot.wim varieties on my bootable USB stick:

On my own bootable USB flash stick, in addition to the required “SOURCES” folder and contents, I also have a “SOURCES-ALT” folder.  In there I keep all my additional and scratch-space-adjusted WIM files.  So I have a  Boot-32.wim, Boot-128.wim, Boot-256.wim, and a Boot-512.wim file stored in there.  Typically, I have the 512 MB set scratch-space boot.wim file in my SOURCES folder to boot with.  However, if I know I need to WinPE boot a system that that wouldn’t work on, then I can delete the boot.wim file out of my SOURCES folder on the USB stick, and copy another more appropriate version from my SOURCES-ALT folder over into it, say the Boot-128.wim one.  Then I rename it to boot.wim and I am good to go!

In fact, once the contents of the WIM file are loaded into the scratch-space/RAM Disk, it is then released.  That means if you are going from a system that uses the 512 MB scratch-space, and then progress on to one that will require the 64 MB scratch-space version, it seems you can do the boot.wim delete/copy/rename routine on your USB stick still from within your WinPE boot session!  I’ve done this on a number of occasions.

Even more fun is making up not just different scratch-space flavors of the boot.wim file, but even wholly different versions of the boot.wim file itself!  You could have a custom WinPE 2.0 boot.wim file, a custom WinPE 3.0 boot.wim file, an AntiVirus PE Disk to offline-scan a Windows system, or maybe, say, a Win(FE) forensics build boot.wim, and so on…limited only by the size of your USB storage device and your imagination and efforts.  Even different WIM files with different hardware drivers injected for various system platforms.  Instead of carrying a mess of optical disks, just a single large USB storage may do the trick (assuming the system BIOS supports USB based booting).

Of course, you do have to reboot the system to then load whichever WIM file you have swapped out…but I’m sure you knew that already.  Just keep the originals safely and alternatively named in your “storage” folder location and delete/copy/rename the original boot.wim file as needed.

Brilliance = Bret ?

Well, there I was thinking just how clever a trick this was to sort-of “multi-boot” the WinPE’s off my USB stick.

Then Bret came and visited the blog and dropped an “outside-the-box” kind of comment that was bloody brilliant.

Instead of copying and renaming your boot-*.wim files, have you thought about using bcdedit to add entries to display a bootmgr menu with choices of each wim? You could keep all of the wims in your sources folder, too. I like to have a menu with a 4-second timeout to the default.

I read it and just sat there stunned.

Seriously.

Simple and elegant…and something I was already familiar with (in concept) from my earlier boot to VHD work.

Crap.  Now I’ve got yet another fun project to work on tweaking my super-boot USB stick.

In case you haven’t caught what Bret proposed, he is saying that we can just set the BCD file in the \boot folder to point to additional wim entries as well as the default boot.wim.  You can name then whatever.wim you wish and then when you boot from the USB device, be offered a nice multi-bootloader menu and select which particular flavored wim you want to boot from.

No swapping out/renaming of the extra wim’s you carry.  No rebooting to get the one you want loaded.

See?

Simply brilliant.

How To Resources #1

Amazingly, I didn’t find all too many references to this trick on the Net and forums.  There are a few, and they all seem to be pretty recent.

Below are some of the best resources I located to help guide someone through the process.

Both of these techniques require comfort and skilled familiarity with the command-line bcdedit.

Just take a lot of notes and make sure you have pre-structured which wims you want to use before you get started.  Being organized first will save you a lot of headaches.

How To Resources #2

If you are just not a CLI person, then there is at least one GUI alternative to use: EasyBCD

The current version does allow you to work with PE files.

The trick is to first run the program then load the BCD (Boot Configuration Database) file on your portable WinPE boot stick located in the\boot folder.

However, I discovered that the EasyBCD 2.0 Beta Builds (free registration required to access) have even more robust and enhanced support.

With the latest version (2.0 Beta Build 86) You can actually not just add additional WIM files to your bootloader but VHD files as well. ISOs are another option but I’ve got enough on my hands for now to take in!

Using EasyBCD should allow you to back up your existing bootloader file before making changes.  Just be very sure you are on the USB drive \boot folder and not the one for your primary system.  If you get mixed up and start making incorrect changes, bad things could happen man.

Sure, with the base bcdedit application, you have all you need without extra software, but EasyBCD is very slick and just (basically) provides an advanced GUI wrapper for the bcdedit app at the core.

Choice is yours.

Here are some additional links that while not directly related to multi-booting of USB sticks, do have additional great examples of bcdedit in action for reference.

Final Thoughts

This is a really cool synthesis of concepts and even more could be extended from this on your USB device.  Really the only limits are the size of your storage device to hold the files, the memory of the system it is running on, and the speed of the hardware to make it usable.

You almost certainly don’t have to limit yourself to just WinPE wim files.

Imagine also if you had a VHD file of a full-blown specialized Windows 7 system  or Sever 2008 to pick from your bootloader list, and not just the WinPE flavors.  Awesome.

Spend some time poking around on Mark Wilson’s blog.  He’s got a lot of research and lessons learned on his and other sites he found that we can benefit from there.

  • Running Windows from a USB flash drive– Mark Wilson blog. .

  • Windows 7 and Windows Application Compatibility : Boot from Windows 7 VHD Boot without having any native Operating System.

  • Booting Hyper-V R2 off a USB stick – Virtual PC Guy’s weblog.

  • Create bootable USB drive for Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 – MSDN Code Site.

  • Boot from VHD – the joy of BCDedit and a nice hyper-v gotcha or two – James O’Neill’s blog.

  • My Boot-to-VHD experiment: found some tips, like it, but still haven’t found VM nirvana - Jon Galloway.

    • Anyway…you get the idea.

    I’m likely to stick to WinPE / WinFE wims myself but I’ve already got a project in mind once I get my own USB boot stick squared away.

    We deploy to our techs a bootable WinPE portable HDD.  It boots from the base WinPE boot.wim (32 MB RamDisk). None of the extras and we use it for imagex system image deployments.  I’ve stuck with the base boot.wim as it will work dependably on most all our desktop systems.

    The techs have been clamoring for me to switch out to the heavier customized WimPE image I provide them on a CD-ROM disk.

    I’ve declined as it just doesn’t work on some of our system-RAM limited desktops/laptops while the CLI WinPE base would.

    Now I can give them their cake and let them eat it too.

    Sweet baby jebus.

    All this because of Bret….

    Cheers!

    --Claus V.

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    Saturday, March 20, 2010

    Dealing with the Dell … 2010 Edition

    For the longest time, the Dealing with the Dell... post I did back in 2006 was a perennial top post ranker here at the GSD tech ranch.

    Most of that I have to credit to Tech Blog’ist Dwight Silverman and Ed Bott who both linked to the post.

    So this past week, I stopped by a senior friend’s house after work and set up his new Dell Inspiron 580 Desktop.

    My o my. How far we have come.

    Back in 2006, setting up that new factory-fresh Dell system took 4.5 hours.  In 2010? Just under two hours.

    Sure my experience has grown since then, systems are faster, and this user’s needs were more simple than before, but it was a very refreshing experience.

    The User

    This wonderful mentor of mine would fall squarely in the “senior” category.  Long since retired but still very active.  He continues to grow PC savvy and I usually function as the premiere pc support source he relies upon.

    He has had two laptops as well as a previous Dell desktop system.  All running Windows XP.

    He surfs the web, does financial management, is getting into digital photography (after many years as a film-based hobbyist) and prints/scans stuff.

    His XP system continued to experience crashes and while adequate, was showing its age.

    A few weeks earlier he asked for advice on what to look for in a desktop system and I gave him my basic spiel.

    Then he called me to come set it up and swing his data over onto the new system.

    The System

    The Dell system he purchased came with a quad-core, 6 GB of system RAM, a 500 GB SATA drive, and a new wide-screen LCD monitor.

    It was loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium running as x64 bit flavor.

    He had gone ahead and purchased the MS Office 2007 Student Teacher edition which was pre-loaded.

    It also came with a trial McAfee Security Center.

    The Setup

    I didn’t have much work to do on his current XP system.  It had BSOD and (knowing I was busy with a work project) had elected to have a local PC shop work on it.  They “solved” his problem by saving his My Documents folder and a few others, overlaying XP as a fresh install, then porting his “My Documents” folder back into the fresh profile.

    Great.

    Gone were the Outlook Express data stores that were kept in a non-My Documents location along with a lot of other data.

    Fortunately all of the key stuff was still present and he had religiously been backing up Quicken data to a USB stick and CD media.

    Lessons learned…call me.  Really.  If I’m so busy I can’t look at it I can give you advice.  Anyway…

    Shut down the old system.  Pulled all the cords/cables, etc and strung the new ones out of the box.

    Cordless mouse and keyboard now.  Sweet.

    In about ten minutes it was unboxed, cabled up, and powered on.

    I quickly set up the single user account on the system and rebooted.

    It was wicked-fast.

    I checked the add/remove programs list and it was refreshingly clear of any and all crapware and third-party software add-on bloat.  Both the x32 and x64 bit Java versions had been loaded and were current.

    No need for deployment of the awesomely helpful PC Decrapifier (recently updated to version 2.2.1).

    Quick and deeper system reviews using Process Explorer and Autoruns found everything ship-shape.

    Flash and Shockwave got installed and updated.

    I uninstalled the McAfee trialware package.

    I made sure the Windows 7 Microsoft Firewall was on and set correctly before plugging it into the DSL modem. (for some easy Win7 alternative firewalls see this The Best Free Firewalls for Windows 7: Top Firewall Options Compatible with Windows 7 Including Software from Comodo, Sunbelt, and Outpost) post.  More on why I stuck with this one later..

    Windows Updates took quite while to download over DSL. (Cable broadband has spoiled me silly.)  I think there were about 32 Microsoft updates as well as maybe three hardware driver updates.

    Microsoft Security Essentials also got installed and configured for daily scans about this time.

    I had to enter the MS Office key and activate it.  No problems.

    I installed the ACDSee Photo Software trial so our budding digital photographer could try this semi-pro application out, having learned that he wanted something a bit more sophisticated than the FastStone Image Viewer could provide, particularly in regards to photo image management.

    I also tucked away downloads of ShowMyPC as well as TeamViewer Portable so we would have remote support options in place prior to any future calls for assistance to me.

    We quickly loaded the latest version of Quicken which he had purchased.

    Then came the HP Printer Driver update.  Windows 7 did pick up automatically the base drivers for the device, but I had to download the full x64 bit software package to realize the scanning and other advanced features his HP printer offered.

    All done with no issues and in no time flat.

    Using my Rosewill RCW-608 USB2.0 Adapter I finally yanked the IDE hard-drive from the XP system, connected it up to the new system, and in just over five minutes had copied over almost 20 GB of user documents, photos, music and tucked them away in their proper Windows 7 library locations.

    After a quick review with the x64 bit version of Recuva as well as DiskDigger I was hopeful I could recover additional files that had been nuked, in case they were needed.  I advised my mentor to keep the drive in a safe place, out of the old system. If he found something very important later we could arrange for a data recovery at the sector level.  Othewise if all ended up being good, we could arrange for a secure wipe of the drive before he donates or tosses the old system.

    Then came the Mail Client

    As mentioned, he had been using Outlook Express.  I had done my homework and was all set to root out the .dbx files buried in the C:\Documents and Settings\your user name\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{your Windows user identity number}\Microsoft\Outlook Express location.

    Unfortunately, the “crack” local PC support shop tech had only focused on the “My Documents” folder and not bothered to save the entire user-profile folder with all it’s hidden system and application files and folders.  Oh bother.

    Outlook Express doesn’t come available for Windows 7.  I could have gone with Thunderbird or another email client, but to keep things simple as possible for this user I just set up Windows Live Mail (which turns out was pre-installed on his system with most of the other Windows Live items as well).

    Turns out Windows Live mail is very slick and has a very simple interface.  He felt quite at home in it and it reminded me of a minimalist version of the full Outlook application.

    I was all set with my Verizon email settings to manually configure it.

    But I was amazingly surprised that after we had put in his Verizon email address and proceeded, Windows Live Mail had automagically pre-configured all the settings correctly!  Sweet!

    Fortunately for us both, we had never set his former Outlook Express client to delete messages off the server once downloaded, so all 9500+ of his emails were still living.  Down they came (and continued long after I left).  So we were lucky that though the Outlook Express files had been nuked, they were “recoverable”.  I showed him how Windows Live mail offers to “add contact” up at the top by each email sender’s name so he can quickly rebuild his contact lists.  We reviewed the junk mail settings/folder, the calendar and how to change views and add items. Easy peasy.

    Wrap up and Final Thoughts

    I have to confess we have come a long way since the last time I had to set up a factory Dell system for a home user.

    The process was faster, the setup was simpler, and Windows 7 alone makes a large improvement.

    Because of the precipitous XP system failure/reload, I didn’t get a chance to use any of the various user/system migration tools/utilities I had brought along to the setup party.  That was good for me but clearly not a representative experience for most users moving from one physical XP/Vista system to another Windows 7 system.  Being a sysadmin I did feel very comfortable with the manual user-data transfer process and having a drive adapter made it rocket-fast.

    You will have noticed also that I stuck with many Microsoft products for the security protection and web-work.  No I didn’t load Firefox.  We stuck with IE 8.  I went with MS Security Essentials and not VIPRE or AVG Free or avast! Free Antivirus or even Comodo Free Anti Virus. I didn’t even use a more robust third-party firewall with anal-retentive outbound traffic monitoring/blocking.

    Why all this stock Microsoft stuff?  Clearly there are “better” browser, email, and security options out there.  I know because I use them all on my own systems at home and work. 

    The answer is complex and easy at the same time:

    This was not my system. 

    I knew my friend and how he had used his PC over many years.  I needed to keep it simple, consistent, and easy for him to use.  That in turn will result in less need for troubleshooting and support.  The fewer deviations and more transparent the systems and software applications, the easier it would be for him to enjoy it and still remain acceptably secure.  Too much security was a bad thing as the block/allow notices from the previous firewall under XP often led to many safe and necessary things getting blocked by accident and causing support calls to me when software “just wouldn’t work right” anymore.

    Sometimes hardened security options leads to more problems and frustrations.  That ends up with it being turned off.  Even worse.

    Dell seems to have successfully come a long way, at least based on this system, on removing all the crapware and bloatware that used to bog down their systems.  Alas this isn’t the norm with all factory systems, but in my experience, those purchased direct from the OEM’s seem to have way fewer bloatware/crapware than those picked up at BigBox outlets and office supply stores.  And even then, in many cases even these systems seem more dialed back now with that nuisance stuff than in years past.

    Yes…and given the options when setting up a new factory-fresh system and porting the old data over, on an after-work worknight, I’ll take this brave new 2010 PC world over that of 2006 anytime!

    And I have to chuckle.  This still-youthful senior friend is ripping away now on a quad-core, 6 Gig RAM, 500 GB SATA drive running a x64 bit OS that is so fast we both might need to go to confession after using it.  It seems sinfully fast and robust for a simple middle-of-the-road home desktop system.

    Yes indeed. How far we have come.

    Cheers.

    --Claus V.

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    Not there yet, but if I click my heels together three times…..

    Spotted this the other day and it gave me hope, even if I’m not there yet on the salary data presented:

    image

    ..caught via The Best Jobs in America – Sociological Images Blog – Context.org

    Super-big graphic and expanded list of fields at Best_Jobs_in_America

    For the full list of jobs, including details on us poor Information Technology Project Manager folks see the

    What they do: Keep big tech projects like software upgrades running on time--and on budget. "We bring order to chaos," says April Ellison, an IT project manager in the San Francisco Bay Area.

    Drawbacks: Hours (and hours and hours) of meetings. Aggressive project timelines. Staff jobs can be outsourced to consultants.

    Fun and challenging but yes, long hours and bad-crazy timelines on projects seem to be my norm of late.

    I really like what I do most days; a mix of SME work, incident response, advanced desktop troubleshooting, IT project management, and policy development. 

    The trick is applying all the tricks such as those at Zen Habits, zen family habits, and the very tiny but digestibly filling :mnmlist blog to keep things in personal balance and harmony so I stay sane in the process.

    It definitely is a work in progress.

    Speaking of clicking of heels together, Dr. Isis has some crazy reds highlighted on her most recent Dr. Isis's Shoe of the Week.

    Wouldn’t look good on my tootsies but Lavie likes.  Maybe she can get us both there if we hold hands while she clicks them for us…

    Claus V.

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    A Census 2010 Drive By…

    Just in case you have been living under a rock for the past two months, the radio, television, and news outlets have been rife with warnings and PSA’s about the March mail-out of the 2010 Census form.

    Completing of the Census is mandatory.  Regardless of you personal feelings and perspectives on the gobermint asking for all this personal info, it does help determine some critical baselines and information that might qualify your community for additional benefits and representation.

    Anyway, for the past few weeks I was a bit confused about this.

    As I said, the PSA’s were all saying how the official 2010 Census form would be arriving in the mail in March.

    Only I had filled one out in early February.  A really long one, that I had ignored for some time until they sent it to me a second time along with more than a few letters reminding me I had to fill it out.

    So I did, and it asked all kinds of personal household questions and details and took about fifteen minutes or so to finish.  It was really big.

    Then about three weeks after mailing it in, I got a phone call from someone official like saying they were from the Census and needed to clarify a few of my answers.  I did so and got a big laugh when they confirmed that my salary was not in fact 100 times higher than what I actually earn.  (Not much, btw as doing my 2010 income tax made painfully clear).

    So I didn’t think much about it; mostly.  I had done my civic duty.  But why were those PSA ads saying I would get the official census in March by mail?

    And when it did arrive last week as promised in our mailbox…my heart sank.  Had I been royally scammed?

    US Census Scams

    I would like to think that I practice very good skepticism towards my mail and email boxes.  I perform due diligence to vet the authenticity of requests for personal information; particularly of a id or financial nature.  It doesn’t take but a moment’s relaxation of guard to get whomped.

    In this case the mailers seemed legitimate, they had all the right words, the pre-paid return mail envelope looked accurate, the fact that I got several follow-up mailers as well seemed positive factors.  The form itself seemed professionally composed (spoken as a sociology major). And the call-back indicated an acknowledgement of my submission.  All the parts fit.

    So why was I getting the official 2010 Census form in the mail?

    What happened?

    Was a victim of one of these?

    Digging Deeper

    Regrettably, I had shredded the 2nd survey form I had received and all the associated mailings.  Bother.

    So I got to digging on the Net and started to see if I could find out any information on the possibility that maybe I had received a Census “Long” form survey.  I remember Dad got one once while I was a kid and it took him quite a while to fill it out. Maybe that’s what it was?

    Nope:  2010 Census: What Questions Will They Ask Me? Why Should I Fill it Out? - Associated Content.

    2. When and how will I get my 2010 Census form, and how lengthy will it be?

    Census forms for the 2010 Census will be mailed out in March of 2010. These forms are short and to the point, and will "less than 10 minutes to complete." Whereas one in six households used to get a census long-form to fill out, in 2010 there will be only short-forms for everyone. This should serve as an encouragement to you. The 2000 Census long-form asked nearly ten times the questions per person as the short-form.

    Now I was really getting concerned.  What had I done!

    I was starting to feel like Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men.

    Uncovering the Perpetrator; ACS

    Finally, after additional digging and refining my search I started to flesh out the corpse that was my pride.

    My first clue was this How the 2010 Census is Different - Population Reference Bureau tidbit.  From that post…

    However, for the first time since 1940, the 2010 Census will be a short-form-only census. This is because the decennial long form has been replaced by the American Community Survey (ACS). The ACS is a nationwide, continuous survey designed to provide reliable and timely demographic, housing, social, and economic data every year. The ACS will replace the long form in 2010 and thereafter by collecting long-form-type information throughout the decade rather than only once every 10 years.

    That led me to this Wikipedia post: American Community Survey

    The planned sample will be 3 million housing units and group quarters in the U.S., in every county, American Indian and Alaska Native area, and Hawaiian Homeland, and in Puerto Rico annually (250,000/month). Data will be collected primarily by mail, with Census Bureau follow up.

    The Department of Commerce has stated that those who receive a survey form are required to provide answers to a long list of questions about themselves and their families, including their profession, how much money they earn, their source of health insurance, their preferred mode of transportation to and from work, and the amount of money they pay for housing and utilities. Those who decline to answer these questions may receive follow-up phone calls and/or visits to their homes from Census Bureau personnel, and are threatened with prosecution and fines up to $5000.

    That seemed to fit my experience.

    Fortunately, the article had additional links at the bottom to follow, including the money ones;

    And finally the final verification, a sample form on-line to match the one I completed.

    Whew.

    But really?  What a load of confusion!

    Recommendations, Lessons Learned…and Not

    This still needs some way-additional public relations management improvement.  In a flood of media saturation about the 2010 Census and the importance of it, I didn’t hear one single mention of the ACS.

    None.

    It took quite a bit of Google work after the fact for me to track down just what was going on and why I was getting “two” census forms when the media PSA’s only seemed to indicate one.

    It would be nice to see some wider public media attention provided to the ACS as well.  Maybe they are trying to avoid confusion by not mentioning the ACS, but the sword cuts both ways and I feel like I’ve been halved right down the middle.

    Think I had a hard time with the ACS?  That’s nothing compared to the work in 2008 that Robert Hueston went through.

    His posts and analyses are still spot-on, over two-years later.

    If they really want me to fill out this survey, or the 2010 census in two years, they really should:

    • Provide a way I can authenticate that the survey came from the US government. Giving me a phone number is useless; anyone can get a phone number these days. Instead, the instructinos should provide something more authentic, like the URL of a web page, based off of census.gov, that confirms the survey is authentic.
    • Provide a way I can ensure that my data is really going to the right authorities, for example, on the web site list the address that should be on the return envelop.
    • Encourage, no mandate that everyone visit the web site, and verify the address on the envelop before they mail their response! Anything less is just encouraging people to believe whatever they get in the mail with an official-looking seal; it's tantamount to abetting identity theft.
    • Allow people to fill out the survey on the web. Personally, I trust ssl encryption far more than I trust my local mail carrier. On the other hand, I don't really trust the government to secure their servers, so maybe that's a bad idea, too.

    Finally, I thought to google '"po box 5240" jeffersonville', and got a hit. Looks like this is a real survey from the Census Bureau, albeit conducted in one of the most shady, disreputable, and hard-to-authenticate manners possible.

    Two weeks after mailing in the survey, we started to get phone calls from a mysterious 800 number. No name on the caller id, just a number.

    After, literally, hundreds of these unanswered calls, we slipped. I was traveling and my wife answered the call, despite the anonymous caller id, thinking it might be from a hotel or calling card. But it was someone claiming to be from the Census Bureau wanting to "verify" our answers to the American Community Scam. If these calls were really from the Census Bureau, why would the caller id name be blocked? Obviously, this is a follow-on scam.

    (snip)

    Ironically, the US Department of Justice, has a web page on Identify Theft and Fraud. On that page, the DOJ gives some good advice about avoiding identify theft at home, including:

        * Start by adopting a "need to know" approach to your personal data. A person who calls you and says he's from your bank doesn't need to know information if it's already on file with your bank; the only purpose of such a call is to acquire that information for that person's personal benefit.
        * If someone you don't know calls you on the telephone and asks you for personal data -- such as your Social Security number, credit card number or expiration date, or mother's maiden name -- ask them to send you a written application form.
        * If they won't do it, hang up.
        * If they will, review the application carefully when you receive it and make sure it's going to an institution that's well-known and reputable.

    Based on the guidance given us by the Department of Justice, it's clear that we should all discard the American Community Survey if we receive it in the mail, and hang up when they call.

    …the Census Bureau has rolled out a new home page with a link called Are You in a Survey? This new web page gives the following information and advice:

        * The address that the American Community Survey response should be sent to, so you can verify that the data you provide is going directly to the Census Bureau.
        * If you have received a telephone call from someone at the Census Bureau, and you have any questions, you may speak directly via telephone or e-mail with an employee of the National Processing Center (at 1-866-226-2864).
        * If a person claiming to be from the Census Bureau comes to your door, ask to see their identification badge and a copy of the letter that was sent to you from the Census Bureau. And if you have any questions about their authenticity, call the National Processing Center.

    All of this is good advice, and helps to ensure that your personal information is only going to authenticated, and authorized, individuals. Interestingly, these are all things I suggested in my recent posts.

    I’m not bashing the substance of the ACS, and (once I eventually tracked it all down) they do have quite a lot of information on the US Census home site about it.

    It was just a very inopportune time to be one of the few who were randomly selected to receive it, right before the official and primary 2010 Census surveys were mailed out and publicized.

    Know we know better.

    --Claus V.

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