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Author Message
25 new of 547 responses total.
tod
response 250 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 15 23:34 UTC 2003

This response has been erased.

other
response 251 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 16 00:45 UTC 2003

No, no.  NORTH Huron!  (Grex moved to Ypsi...)
spooked
response 252 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 16 01:24 UTC 2003

*smiles*  We guard it by BIG nasty dogs - they won't get too far :)
gelinas
response 253 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 16 02:17 UTC 2003

Dan, yes, even if the disks were scrubbed first.

I know folks with lots of spare time on their hands.  I know folks
who have written their own disk-recovery software.  (To the best of my
knowledge, the intersection of those two sets, BTW, is the null set.)
I can see someone with the time and interest using the grex disks as an
experiment base for their own efforts.  (They'd probably settle for *any*
disk, not just grex's.)
lk
response 254 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 16 04:30 UTC 2003

Who's in charge of offing people who find out the address of the Pumpkin?

Mark, don't freak out, but I have your address. See that car parked
outside your house? The dark van, with the tinted windows? That's my
sister. She's Mossad so you might not be able to spot the van. Nonetheless,
since you have the new disks, it's only a matter of time before you deliver
them either to the Pumpkin or to someone else who will ultimately take them
there. Don't look over your back, she's following you. Take my word for it.
And then, when we discover the location of the pumpkin, we'll contact
G Gordon Liddy to break in and steal the tapes. Er, disks....

Actually, I got a good laugh from Walter's comment:

> it's reasonable to assume that any data on grex worthy of such
> efforts has already been stolen

So we're just discussing how wide to leave open the barn doors. (:
(Though obviously, some horses are still inside.)
aruba
response 255 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 16 13:12 UTC 2003

So *that's* why that woman was following me yesterday.
jhudson
response 256 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 16 15:46 UTC 2003

What's the matter guys, can't figure out how I know the address
even though I am ~2000 miles away.
tod
response 257 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 16 16:16 UTC 2003

This response has been erased.

cross
response 258 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 16 16:34 UTC 2003

It depends on whether Leeron's sister is smoking or not.  Leeron,
got a picture?  Nyuk nyuk nyuk.  Beware those Israeli women, though;
though they smoke, they're heart breakers.

Regarding #253; Joe, if you know someone who can recover data from a
properly scrubbed disk, I'd almost be willing to say, give them the
disks and see if they can get anything off of them.
lk
response 259 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 16 17:13 UTC 2003

My dad wouldn't let us drink colored food items in the 1960s, long
before the FDA would ban them. So despite all those bad influences
outside the house, none of the kids smoke and we all detest it.
As a child, when I was offered a puff (by an "uncle" who since died
of emphezyma), I exhaled to make the tip glow (every 8-year old is
a pyro).  Like Clinton (or not), in never occured to me that I was
supposed to inhale and ingest the smoke....

To this day I tell my clients that, if they love their computers,
they shouldn't smoke around them.

Which brings us back to the subject (whew!). Instead of scrubbing
the computers clean, can't se smoke them dirty?
aruba
response 260 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 16 17:37 UTC 2003

I installed the SCSI disks today - the controller and fdisk recognized them
right away, with no problems.  I'm running surface scans now.
jhudson
response 261 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 16 18:36 UTC 2003

good, can't beat w98 scandisk for that (though why I don't know)
gull
response 262 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 17 00:35 UTC 2003

Re #253: I've written disk recovery software, too, for retrieving
*deleted* stuff.  But that's different than recovering data from a disk
that's been wiped, because the electronics in the drive are unable to
read the data at that point.  Recovery is then a matter of removing the
platters in a clean room environment and using sophisticated equipment
to analyze the magnetic patterns left on them.  I *seriously* doubt
anyone is going to go to that expense with a home disk from Grex so they
can read a bunch of archived spam mail and obsolete copies of eggdrop. ;)
aruba
response 263 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 17 00:43 UTC 2003

I ran surface scans of all four of our disks (3 SCSI and one IDE), and there
were no bad sectors on any of them.
gull
response 264 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 17 01:15 UTC 2003

Good deal.

I haven't found bad sectors on a new disk in a long time.  Modern drives
have "spare" sectors they remap to hide bad ones, so by the time you
start seeing bad sectors on a disk it's already pretty sick, and
probably has been getting worse for quite a while.
janc
response 265 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 17 01:42 UTC 2003

Excellent, Mark.
cross
response 266 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 17 05:27 UTC 2003

Hooray!  So am I correct in understanding that all the hardware has
now been acquired and installed, and we're ready to go with configuring
NextGrex?
aruba
response 267 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 17 21:18 UTC 2003

Yup, that's correct.  All the hardware is in one box, and everything works.
cross
response 268 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 17 21:46 UTC 2003

Excellent....  Eeexxxccellet.  Proceed with the next phase of
the...operation...number two.
aruba
response 269 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 17 22:16 UTC 2003

BTW, I know we don't need them, but it looks like our OpenBSD CDs shipped
last Tuesday.  At least our credit card was charged then - I haven't
received a confirmation email.
valerie
response 270 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 18 22:41 UTC 2003

This response has been erased.

jep
response 271 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 19 03:04 UTC 2003

re the responses to resp:246: I'm not going to embarrass anyone by 
posting the messages I got in response to my e-mail to staff, and I 
think some were humorously intended anyway.  It took me 18 minutes to 
get an e-mailed response with the address of Grex.

I was asked to not post the address.  With all due respect, I think 
it's not a meaningful request.  However, I do have a lot of respect 
for the Grex staff and since they asked, I won't post it.

Certainly, anyone wishing to obtain anything from Grex could do so 
much more easily and certainly than by trying to recover data from a 
formatted hard disk.  Eric's concerns were well-intended but not a 
realistic concern.

If anyone really wants anything from the old Grex hard disks, enough 
to use data recovery techniques, Grex might entertain competitive 
bids.  If they gave Grex half the money they'd otherwise have to 
spend, there would never again be a financial crisis.  The staff could 
be paid, the Board could be paid, and if I were given an appropriate 
commission for coming up with the idea, I would never have another 
financial concern.
cross
response 272 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 19 04:16 UTC 2003

Yeah, true.  Also, Joe earlier posted some odds for getting data off
of a scrubbed disk.  He made it clear he was doing so without real
data, but I want to get those numbers closer to reality; he said
something like 15% odds of getting something good for a casual attacker,
30% for a determined attacker.  However, in both cases, the attacker
isn't expending a lot of financial resources; only time and clevernes.
No access to fancy clean-rooms or the like.  In that case, I'd give
a casual attacker something like 0.00001%, and a determined attacker
something like 0.0001%.  Note that determination gives you an order
of magnitude advantage.

Those numbers are probably conservative; real numbers are probably
a lot closer to zero.
janc
response 273 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 19 04:38 UTC 2003

Well, we had another Next Grex Meeting, somewhat sparsely attended - Mark
Conger, Joe Gelinas, John Remmers, Valerie Mates, Jan Wolter.  Steves Weiss
and Andre' called to say they couldn't make it.  Mark brought along the Next
Grex, which we set up temporarily and tried booting off an OpenBSD boot floppy
that John had brought along.  Mostly looked good, but although it found the
SCSI controller, it did not find the SCSI drives.  So we went about the proper
businesses of sitting around and talking about the computer.

After everyone left, I moved the machine down to my office, where it can be
plugged into the LAN and tried various things.  Second thing I tried was one
of the other OpenBSD boot floppies.  There are three in the distribution. 
One for standard systems, one with extra drivers for SCSI and raid and gigabit
ethernet, one for laptops.  John's was the second one, the one with SCSI
stuff.  I tried the standard one, floppy33.fs, and that found the SCSI drives
without a problem.

I have volunteered to take a first cut at partitioning the drives and
installing OpenBSD.  When I've done that, I'll get it on my LAN, open an
SSH portal to in through my firewall, and advertize it to staff.

I'm currently scratching my head of partitioning options, having had somewhat
less input from others than I would like, but I'll do something plausible.
If it stinks, we'll redo it.
aruba
response 274 of 547: Mark Unseen   May 19 04:44 UTC 2003

Thanks Jan - enjoy those seven fans. :)
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