Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Ransomware May Get Worse

    I’ve never had to deal with ransomware, but across the last couple years I’ve been surprised how many friends and customers have dealt with this. For those that are prepared, it’s a time sink and a hassle. For those that aren’t, there is the addition of finger pointing, anger, fear, and often lost data as well.

    I hope things don’t get worse, but I think this might be a sign they are. There is some speculation that criminal groups are working together, in a sort of computer hacker cartel. Apparently four criminal groups announced they would be working together. If that isn’t a sign of the craziness of the world, I don’t know what else would be. Criminal groups announcing they are collaborating? Apparently they must think they are businesses like the targets they attack.

    There has been some investigation, and there haven’t been signs this is a cartel, with no revenue sharing or coordination, but the fact that they are cross posting data and sharing techniques is bad enough. Helping each other out may help them find more targets and develop better techniques to get around security.

    The one concern I’d have with all of this is that these different groups may attack the same companies. Can you imagine getting through an attack, either paying a ransom or not, only to be attacked again? I do think that organizations ought to be worried about their security against ransomware, have good, air-gapped backups, and ensure if they are attacked, they plug any holes in their systems.

    Surviving one attack might be hard for an organization, but if there are two or more, I suspect someone’s career will be in trouble.

    Steve Jones

  • Daily Coping 29 Apr 2021

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag. 

    Today’s tip is to focus on check up on a friend and see if you can help them cope.

    One of the things I did early in the pandemic was to check up on friends. I’ve fallen away a bit, but I am still trying to remember to touch base. Recently I reached out to someone whose named I saw on Twitter, but I hadn’t seen them very active. Not many posts, not many blogs, just a bit quiet.

    I will usually send a short message like this one:

    Hi. I hope you’re doing well and coping with life. I hadn’t chatted with you in awhile, so I wanted to check in and make sure you are doing OK.

    I usually change this a bit, depending on who it is, or how I’m reaching out. Texts are usually shorter, emails maybe longer, but often just trying to make a connection with someone I haven’t seen in quite some time.

  • 2020 Advent of Code–Day 4

    This series looks at the Advent of Code challenges.

    As one of my goals, I’m working through challenges. This post looks at day 4. I’m going to do this one in Python here, though I did solve it in other languages in my repo.

    Part 1

    We have another string parsing operation. We get a series of lines that represent a passport. Passports are separated by blank lines. Therefore, we can get 1-x number of lines representing a passport.

    Ugh.

    Python seems like a good place to start here. I loaded the file and then started to concatenate rows of data until I found a blank one.

    file_handle = open('2020\day4\day4_data.txt', 'r')
    passports = file_handle.readlines()
    part1 = 0
    currpassport = ""
    for row in passports:
    if row not in ['\n','\r\n']:
            currpassport += row.replace('\n',' ')
    #print(currpassport.split(" "))
    else:

    At this point, I have a passport I can look at, with all the various sections. I used another split, this time into a dictionary to get each item separate.

    currdict = dict(x.split(":") for x in currpassport.split(" ") if x)

    Now, I can count these. If there are 8, or if there are 7 and CID is one of them, I have a valid passport. Adding these up gets me the answer.

    Part 2

    This is very similar, but each part now needs validation. So, I take the same structure, but once I have passports, I assume they are valid and start to check each section. It’s really a series of IF statements for me.

                valid = 1
    if ((int(currdict["iyr"]) < 2010) or (int(currdict["iyr"]) > 2020)):
                    valid = 0
    if int(currdict["byr"]) < 1920 or int(currdict["byr"]) > 2002 :
                    valid = 0
    if int(currdict["eyr"]) < 2020 or int(currdict["iyr"]) > 2030:
                    valid = 0

    These each could be functions, and I’d refactor that way, but I couldn’t come up with an easier way to do this. After checking if I have enough valid items, I tally another passport (or not).

    Overall, this felt like busy work, not hard, but just a grind through each set of validation.

  • Swimming Servers

    Microsoft put a data center on the bottom of the ocean, and it appeared to be a successful experiment, but now they’ve brought the water to the servers. Rather than sink a data center, which means cumbersome maintenance if there are issues, Microsoft is just sinking server boards.

    Their latest experiment takes liquid cooling in a new direction. In a vat of fluid, they have dozens of servers submerged. The liquid has a low boiling point and turns into a gas when contacting a CPU. The gas circulates like a miniature water cycle, condensing back into liquid when hitting a cool lid.

    I’ve always assumed all liquid would be bad on an electrical server board, but I guess this isn’t the case. I’ve heard of liquid cooling for home PCs, and my son actually added a system to his game machine, but I’ve always been nervous about doing so. I think my limited, and often error prone, experience with home plumbing repairs has be scared.

    I’ve rarely enjoyed being in a data center, especially the more modern designs that have a hot aisle and a cool aisle. Moving from one to the other is quite an experience, and one that I can’t think it good for your health over time. The older “cool” rooms I’ve been in weren’t much better, where I wore a winter coat all day when outside temperatures were 90F/30C and higher.

    I don’t know that this will impact me, or if I’ll ever actually see another server machine in my career, but I do know we continue to demand more computing capacity and capability. Perhaps at some point a data center for Azure or AWS will look more a like a warehouse for freezers and anything else. At least the people servicing the systems will likely have a better work environment when the entire space doesn’t need to be cooled down.

    Steve Jones