I’ve noticed a lot of attempted break-ins on our servers during the last week. Mostly trying to use the rpc.statd buffer overflow. Looks like another wave of massive, automated cracking going on. Might be a good idea to disable or block access to rpc.statd where possible.

Meanwhile, we’ve been upgrading one of our few Windows boxes from NT to 2000. The first half dozen installs didn’t quite work but we’re begining to get closer. One of the problems in installing 2000 seems to be that you have to completely wipe out any traces of previous version of Windows or it will try to merge bits and pieces of the old installation in with the new one and the result is not pretty. Formatting the install drive will take care of that problem but it appears to not be possible to actually format the hard drive using the 2000 installer. If you select the target partition and ask 2000 to format it, you get a screen that seems to show the drive being formatted (complete with bar-graph and percent-done indicator). However it doesn’t actually format it if it’s already formatted as NTFS from a previous install, it just scans it and then installs on top of whatever was already on the disk. We finally had to use Partition Magic to wipe out the existing contents, and then wiped the MBR manually with FDISK by booting from a floppy with DOS on it. After all that, we got a clean install and things started working right.

What I really found amazing is that the last couple of Red Hat Linux installs I’ve done were actually quite a bit easier. I think we’re getting real close to the cross-over point where Windows is going to start falling behind Linux in ease-of-use.

And one more thing. I keep seeing Windows 2000 referred to as Win2K – but wouldn’t that equate to Windows 2048?