| jphaynes's profileHaynesSpace - Haynes of ...PhotosBlogLists |  Tools  Help |
|
HaynesSpace - Haynes of Helena MontanaHome for a blog about fishing and photos of Helena Montana May 19 SAP in the State of MontanaI closed my previous company called Terra Firma Solutions over a year ago because I took a job with a local company in Helena (it was the only way I could continue with my career working in SAP applications without having to move out of Montana). Now after gaining some more valuable experience and gathering together some of the most experienced SAP Basis administrators in the state, we are now forming a new company. Although not official yet, this new Corporation will provide consulting services for SAP applications (including SAP R/3, Netweaver, and Business Warehouse) within the State of Montana. Why Montana? Because we choose to live and raise our families in one of the most beautiful locations in the whole country. That's why we have selected Perfect Cast as the candidate name for our new organization. We are fly-fishing enthusiasts with over 9 years of Basis Administration experience, providing consulting services to organizations in Montana. February 20 Okay Wrong on one accountOriginally published 1-12-2005
There is one business that I do recommend. We just bought a car at Placer Motors and it was a great experience. I worked in the automotive sales and finance business in a big city for a few years. So I know first hand that the majority of America’s dealerships are full of slimy backstabbing gutless sales people. Placer was a pleasant experience from the first interaction. The salesman was not pushy. He gave me his card without verbally berating me into looking at other cars and left me alone to walk through the lot. Add to that better prices (Placer had cars about $1000 to $2000 less than the hot-shot GM dealer (read "Grimeys-McSuckerville") and generally lower miles. I cannot say the same thing about the local Helena Buick dealer. The idiot tried to talk me into a car I did not like and kept trying to pressure me through my wife. No thank you mister desperate gutless dirt bag. I do not want to buy an old Buick. I am still in my thirties and do not want a car that reminds me of an old blue-haired hag. And for gosh sakes retire the old bottle bound sales manager. Frankly, I am embarrassed that anyone would keep this Manhattan sucking beer drooling idiot around. But then again that says more about the way this dealership does business than anything else. No longer buying localOriginally published 1-12-2005
'I am no longer buying local! These small stores have been gouging and bilking the local yokels for so long that they forgot how to be competitive with other businesses. There is no decent pricing; there is no decent service and certainly no decent selection. Talk about prices and the local yokels just stare at you with that doe-eyed look. They then mention that the big stores just do not provide the same service. That is hogwash too. I have been in almost every business in Helena and very few have shown a service that I would call decent. Shadowing and nagging your customers every 20 seconds is not good service. I get enough nagging from the wife so I do not need it from some insulting ninny who survives only because a bunch of inbred yokels refuse to shop at chain stores. Bresnan is still a bad dealOriginally published 10-4-2004
'Bresnan is still a bad deal. I cancelled my high-speed internet but they have yet to disconnect it. The support imbecile mentioned that someone would be out the 21st of September to put a filter on the line that comes to the back of the house. It has been some 14 plus days since this phone call and no one has shown up at my house. I am sure glad I do not have to rely on them to fix the line if it was down. I cannot imagine how long it would take for them to fix something if it was broken (i.e., more bad service from a company that doe not hesitate to call me if a payment is a day late [mainly due to their poor bookeeping practices]). Dear Attorney General of the great state of Montana. When convenient, please look into the billing practices of Bresnan Communications. You will find the following: - sloppy accounting practices - utilization of \"bait and switch\" type billing techniques that force users to pay late charges for invoices that suddenly switch from paper to on-line - customer service representatives who vocally promise to record credit-card type transactions but who, again, fail to charge customers so late-charges can be added to the next statement - delivery of invoices printed days after a billing cycle so charges are again added to the invoice even though payment has been received As the sole elected official designated to represent customers against corporate entities, please protect the citizens of Montana from the scavenger like accounting practices of Bresnan Communications. As more such Enron and WorldComm like accounting practices come to light (a technique quietly demonstrated by Bresnan), we rely on your sound leadership to protect us from companies that take advantage of the Citizens of Montana. Thank you for your time. God bless America and the fine State of Montana. Bresnan is a bad dealOriginally published 9-3-2004
'Bresnan is a bad deal. Their network keeps losing packets and kills off my VPN connections. I brought this to their attention but they just responded with the usual carping about upgrading windows and turning off any firewalls.
They, like the rest of the companies, have seemingly gone out of their way to hire morons to staff their support lines. Call their service and you get a trained monkey who receives a banana-chip if they can just hound you off the phone in two minutes or less. There’s absolutely nothing helpful about the support from any modern company. You’re on your own like that stupid starving bastard that got wrecked on the island from the fed-ex plane. So I’m moving on tO a new Internet provider. This should provide me with a self-imposed dose of good will toward internet companies. Well, at least until they screw something up and I need to call them and rant until they realize that I’m just not some schmo complaining about slow internet speeds. Okay. I’ve ranted enough. I purchased an old Cisco 678 off ebay since the tech I talked with at my new provider mentioned that this is a way better router than the ones they are selling (for access). The thing showed up without cables and a power supply (which is okay since I got it for really cheap). So I hacked my own management cable (using a diagram from Cisco’s site) and bought a new power supply at Radio Shack (it’s a 5 volt job used for digital cameras). The management cable wasn’t too hard. It required a link between a standard DB9 serial port and a RJ45 dealie-bob. For this I took an old serial mouse and cut the tail off. Then I used my multi-meter to find which wires went to which little socket holes. Then I shoved the newly identified wires into the RJ45 thingie and crimped it down tight so I wouldn’t have to go through this whole mess again. And, *** sob *** if the thing didn’t work right off the bat. I sat staring off in space enjoying my rare moment of technical glory. I had conquered some stupidly complex thing and somehow felt that my skills had something to do with the result. I immediately celebrated by drinking some Moose Drool (a local beer) and telneting into the router. Of course I found that I couldn’t login but that was just a few surfing instructions away. Details: Turn power off Turn power on wait for red warning light hit ctrl-c in HyperTerminal type es 6 to erase memory containing password type reboot to start the thing over and enter without a password February 13 TrojanedOriginally published 8-22-2004
Note: I was responsible for security for both clients and the company for a period of 3 years. During that three years no computers I was responsible for were hacked. So I could concentrate on a clients SAP inplementation I had to relinquish this responsibility to someone new. This was a person we brought in who boasted of knowing quite a bit about security and felt obliged to tell everyone he knew. Apparently, that knowledge about security did not include the need to patch current Linux systems which led to the main server for the consulting company being hacked. We spenT about a week updating systems and watching for further intrusions all the while charging the client for more of the consulting firms stupidity.
Two older Linux servers within our company were compromised by a root-kit. We started noticing some weird reports from the main server (we track changes made to any binary files). The first was some SSH logins using weird names like ’admin’ and ’test.’ We ignored these first alerts since we couldn’t find anything changed on the system. After another day or two we noticed that something or someone had loaded a module for CD-ROM drivers. We tightened up the settings on the server a bit (using tcpwrappers and so forth) and removed the modules that were being loaded. Later in the week, we noticed that a different module was being loaded. One of our programmers noticed the same weird behavior on their server and spent some time looking through the directories. She found a file in a lib directory that contained passwords that she had used for various systems. This was tracked back to the main server, which was found to have the same type of file. The trojan, similar to poiuy, had loaded a module that hid its appearance from any programs such as ps and netstat. It was ’sniffing’ most of the passwords from outgoing SSH sessions (and did quite a good job at it!). It was also recorded both the queries and results made against MySQL database. Luckily, it was a test database that was in the process of being setup. We immediately took down both servers and changed the passwords on all the systems that had been recorded. Then we changed the passwords on the remaining systems in case any previous passwords had been ’harvested’ off the machine. The infected systems were older Slackware systems. They had 2.2.19 kernels and version 3.4 of the SSH daemons. The systems that were not infected had newer kernels and version 3.7 of sshd. Now we are replacing our systems with new installs of linux. All remaining systems are being updated with newer versions of software (apache to 1.3.31, SSHD to 3.7). Lessons learned: - immediately react to strange alerts - setup remote logging to counteract the clearing of logs - tighten up access to SSH with tcpwrappers - set a standard practice of checking SSH certificate signatures - re-install all older Linux installations to newer versions of slackware - patch current versions as patches become available - cover more directories with integrity checkers (such as tripwire). She died on meOriginally published 8-9-2004
Well. The main server I was using for my web server croaked. All I had available was the AMD K6 based machine. Which is fine because it runs a bit quieter and seems to work without too much trouble. I’d like to split of the database stuff to another machine. But that will come with time. Actually, I need to setup my own MAX DB server so I can get used to cranking away on the commands. We use MAX DB for the SAP systems and it would be nice to learn a bit more about the command line. The worst thing about MAX DB is there is little documentation that I can peruse. To feel comfortable with a new database I need some materials to carry around so I can soak them into my system. That’s been hard with MAX DB because the material is hard to read (translated from German) and I just don’t get the same feeling with a PDF. Yeah. It’s lame that I just don’t print these out and read the hardcopy. But I’m just stinkin lazy and would rather have a book. That stupid old machine just shuts down after a few hours. No warning. No lines in the logs. It just shuts itself off. I have not figured out if it is the hard drive or just a flaky motherboard. So I’ll just update the OS and see what happens. Okay. I just noticed that that stupid old machine won’t even boot. It gets to the point where it tries to create a console and it just fails with one of those kernel panics. Great. Now I’ll have to go all the way back through that install process and see if I can do something different. Yuck. I hate when that happens. Stupid old motherboard February 11 Review of SAP ConsultingOriginally published 4-21-2004
We just went through an implementation of SAP R/3 with Sap Consulting and here’s a quick review of my experience. For the most part, most of the consultants brought in by SAP were professional and somewhat knowledgeable. They helped us through the installation of SAP systems on RedHat Linux servers without any glitches. I say the consultants were ‘somewhat’ knowledgeable in that they know only a small part of SAP. When it came time to find more details about the software, the consultants spent their time researching the SAP sites (all accessible by customers). Their usefulness was even more limited when we wanted to expand the features of SAP. Consultants spent much of their time trying to convince us that a feature wasn’t in SAP because we needed to adapt the way the company does business to the way SAP works. Which is complete BS since much of what we wanted are regular features found in any basic accounting software (balance reports based on cost centers is one example). Lesson learned: don’t expect the SAP software or their consultants to be flexible. This lack of flexibility showed up on almost every occasion where we were looking for features in the software. Even worse was the consultants wouldn’t work with us to make use of current features within the software. On several occasions, we had to strong-arm the consultants into admitting that yes, we could possibly do it that way (loading negative numbers into statistical key figures). One consultant in particular was especially irksome. Dubbed the ‘shirkmeister,’ this one consultant spent her time passing blame for implementation problems to almost everyone but themselves. Issues came up as budget data was being loaded into one of the test systems. The load failed completely because master data (account numbers and so on) had not been loaded into this particular system. This was the responsibility of the ‘shirkmeister’ whose immediate reaction was to blame the customer for trying to load bad data. As the problem was reviewed, we found that the missing master data was the source of the errors. This problem by itself is serious enough. But taken in the light of SAP’s philosophy of using separate systems for testing, this is a huge mistake. In an SAP system, there are three systems used in a solution. One is a development system where all changes to the solution originate. A second system is used for testing these changes against test data. That test data is to include master data and some transactional data (GL entries and so forth). But the ‘shirkmeister’ decided that the second test system didn’t need any of this information. This expensive consultant who works directly for SAP decided to forgo testing and originate all testing within a production system! Lesson learned: SAP Consulting consultants do not fully understand the SAP product and are prone to making huge philosophical mistakes with your implementation. Other mistakes within our implantation point to the lackluster job given to blueprinting. We had spent months creating documentation that outlined the processes used in the previous accounting procedures. This information was ignored by SAP Consulting only to be re-created later. What they did instead was to create their own blueprint. They spent a whole day talking to different department heads and used that as a blueprint for the implementation. The result was a blueprint woefully short on details and extremely short on scope. We found out much too late in the process of implementation that key processes had been left out. A customer should not find out after the software has gone live that fax reports on electronic transfers to banks (covering hundreds of thousands of dollars) were not created because they were not included in a blueprint created 5 months earlier. Lesson Learned: SAP Consultant blueprints do not provide complete solutions for customers. Grades on different consultants from More BleedingFirst Pubished 4-14-2004
Well. I’ve bled the brake system 3 times and it still doesn’t seem to get any better. I will try a 4th time and see if things improve. Power Hungry CowardsThis was first published 4-14-2004
Yes. It’s true. You’re instincts are not failing you. Our country is involved in another Vietnam. Hostages, POW’s, the list of similarities to Nam is striking.
How did our country get involved in this? How could we forget how easy it is to get pulled into an awful conflict that has no graceful end? The answers seem so easy. People who have no immediate experience with past wars are only bound to repeat them. We now call a person who shirked his duty in a past war a hero. We call him a leader. What a shame that our country cannot figure out that we’ve been duped by a dope. Is our country so self-involved at the individual level that we rationalize the stupidity of the current situation?
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
Send a private message
Tell a friend
Add to My MSN
Add to your network
Sign up for alerts
|
|
