March 2006 Archives

Have you ever ran a "netstat -na" to get a list of open ports only to wonder what was listening on udp port 800?

# netstat -lp

netstat -lp is your friend - it will give you a list of the open ports and the pid that opened them.

I was troubleshooting the gremlins (more on that later) in a system with a new LTO2 tape drive attached to the system. The drive was detected on boot, /dev/tape symlinked properly to /dev/nst0, "cat /proc/scsi/scsi" showed the device and finally "mt status" properly queried and returned information on the drive. However when I actually went to write data to the device it would give an Input/output error. Further investigation into dmesg gave this error:

st0: Error with sense data: <6>st0: Current: sense key: Aborted Command

I won't go into the troubleshooting steps and go straight to the resolution. The Adaptec card in the system (specifically the 39320D) by default configures all SCSI IDs for 320MB/s transfer, go into the bios and change the transfer speed to 80MB/s. When you do this some other options will change, don't worry about that. Next change "Enable Disconnect" to "no". After you do this you should be able to read/write to the drive without problems.

I had the exact same thing happen to me this year. My wife and I decided it was time to pay off one of our credit cards. When we did I made the mistake of assuming that what was normally a 1 to 2 day process when you use an online ACH transaction would be completed. We found out when the card was frozen that in fact we had been placed on hold pending an investigation to make sure we weren't terrorists. The lesson I learned that day - instead of sending in one large payment, send in 4 smaller ones.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

See: http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=RAISEALARM-02-28-06 and http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/the_terrorist_t.html