There is a big virus that will be activated tomorrow. Yes, it is real. Apparently it’s authors have a sense of morbid humor.

World wide, network administrator and users alike are bracing for an April 1st attack from the Conficker worm.

What is the Conficker worm?

When the Conficker worm infects a computer, it checks the local network for any other computers to infect.  It also copies itself to any removable flash drives or storage.  It then connects to other infected machines and checks for a payload.  Past payloads have generaly just been newer versions of the worm, or other malwares.

The April 1st attack will likely be a new payload to be dispersed among infected machines.  This payload could do any number of things, possibility include;

• A DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, causing all infected machines to visit one web site, causing a huge load on that site and bringing it down
• A Spam attack, causing all infected machines to send out spam e-mails to anyone on that persons mailing list and/or a list contained in the payload.
• Steal information from the infected computer, including usernames and passwords, account numbers, address books, and the like.

or it could just simply be a new variation of the same virus, in an attempt to infect more machines.

How can you avoid the Conficker worm?

The first step is to make sure you have an up-to-date anti-virus software.   Having an out of date anti-virus software is almost as bad as not having any at all.     On-Site Computer Solutions recommends Norton Anti-Virus 2009.

Secondly, make sure your version of Windows is up to date.  A visit to http://update.microsoft.com will allow you to check and update any Microsoft software you have installed on your system.  Microsoft has released a patch to fix the security hole exploited by Conficker.

Lastly, treat e-mail and websites with a healthy dose of suspicion, and you should have nothing to worry about on April Fool’s Day.

Watch CBS Videos Online

On-Site is excited to have sponsored the recent AsylumLAN party. AsylumLAN is a quarterly event where computer gamers congregate at the Vanderburgh County 4-H Center to drink caffeinated beverages and play LAN games.

On-Site donated a “LAN party in a Box,” which contained a 5-port 3com gigabit switch and 5 patch cables.

On-site also sponsored a Spotlight Tournament of the Classic Unreal Tournament.

The day has arrived, and Microsoft has released the much anticipated Service Pack 2 for their small business voice over IP phone system, Response Point.

As a Response Point Specialist, On-Site is excited to announce the latest enhancements to our VOIP offering:

Read more about Response Point SP2 on the Microsoft Response Point Site:

http://www.microsoft.com/responsepoint/SP2/

Get all the Response Point SP2 Enhancements – SP2 Features Fact Sheet!

Request more information on Response Point from On-Site.

Well, it’s happened again – Microsoft has listened to the throngs of people asking to extend sales of Windows XP Professional. Windows XP Pro will be available now through May 30, 2009.

With Windows 7 in Public Beta as of tomorrow, I don’t foresee this date being extended again. By the way, Microsoft has announced the Windows 7 (The next version soon to replace Vista) will be available as a Trial Free download starting tomorrow, Friday, January 9, 2009. This is the first time that Microsoft has publicly released a Beta version of one of their operating systems. I hope that this advance testing will help with the stability and reliability of Windows 7 when it is officially released.

You can’t get XP Pro on your computer at traditional “Big Box” retailers, but you can still get it from guys like us.

Thank you Microsoft.

I recently saw a serious problem with Windows Server 2008, and network connection problems.

This issue occurs with a variety of network cards with Windows Server 2008. This happened to us with an Intel 5266DM Network card on a new Intel 3000 Series Motherboard. I have also heard of this happenning with a Dell Server using a Broadcom NIC. Initially, the Microsoft Drivers were loaded, and everything seemed to work just fine, but all was not as it seemed. We loaded the drivers off the intel CD as a matter of standard course. They were newer than the Microsoft OS packaged drivers, but they weren’t very recent.

Here was the symptom – Everything would work fine for at least 3 hours, sometimes close to 24 hours. Then everything would start to go screwy. Computers would start to drop off the network like flies. The sysvol share would become inaccessible to anyone on the network (including the server itself.)

There were Error showing up in the Event Log:

EVENTID: 1058

a) Name Resolution/Network Connectivity to the current domain controller.

b) File Replication Service Latency (a file created on another domain controller has not replicated to the current domain controller).

c) The Distributed File System (DFS) client has been disabled.

Once the error started occurring, it would happen repeatedly – every 5 minutes or so.

As it turns out, the Group Policy Error was just a symptom of the problem, but it was the only error message that we had on the server to go by.

Server Performance became sluggish, and it would take quite a while to even logon locally.

After 5 hours (or longer) on the phone with phone with Microsoft Business Critical India Support – we were no closer to finding the solution to the problem.

Rebooting the server would make the errors and problems go away for a while, but within a day, the problem would be back.

I was on the verge of downgrading them to 2003 server, when I made a call to my buddy, Ed Carnes, of Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Carnes Group, LLC, in Nashville. Ed had just seen these exact same symptoms with a Small Business Server 2008 Install on a Dell Server using a Broadcom NIC.

Ed had been fortunate enough to get a hold of a true Microsoft Engineer who gave him the solution to my problem. This symptom is caused by a flaky network card driver.

The Microsoft Engineer’s recommendation was to disable the broadcom nic install an intel Pro 1000 Network card and download the latest drivers from Intel’s website to fix this problem. We downloaded the latest Intel Drivers for the 5266DM chipset NIC, and everything ran completely smooth.

Thank you Ed!