Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

Warning:- rare non Oracle security post!

Its been a while since my last post to this blog. I have been taking a couple of weeks rest and of course it was christmas so with my wife and a young child my time was better spent not in front of a laptop and writing about Oracle! - That said I have also had a disaster with my laptop and hence I am now writing my first blog post from a brand new laptop, a sort of christmas present to myself, slightly cheaper because of the sales. I rather stupidly decided to upgrade Windows XP to service pack 2 on my old laptop on Christmas eve and it was all going swimmingly until the install crashed and said it couldnt copy a file. I had shut down everything first, all services, system tray etc and also backed up all of my data. Anyway it crashed and would not be coaxed back into life, in the end i had no option to turn it off and then back on. The disk started to check it self and then hung, it wouldn't start in safe mode and the recovery CD wouldn't let me boot to Windows, it only offered the chance to restore it back to 2.5 years ago. What use is a Windows recovery CD??

Anyway after a bit of fishing, editing via caldera DOS I managed to get it to boot (not safe mode, it still would not come up in safe mode) into Windows where it announced that it was unstable and would I like to uninstall SP2, of course I would!! - so i did and the uninstall instead of restoring the machine to its previous state left it in a mess. All the toshiba hardware was not recognised, all devices were trying to re-install themselves.....

So after a couple of long evenings I managed to get it into a workable state. The screen has been loose for some time, so we decided after all my repair efforts that I should go and buy a new laptop, so that was two days ago. I have spent the last two evenings copying everything across and re-installing all my software, moving email accounts etc (why is it not trivial to move Outlook from one machine to another??)

So I am back in business now, just my old demon email account still to move, then I will secure delete the old laptops harddrive and pass it on..

I want to wish everyone a belated (if that is the spelling) merry christmas and a very happy and successfull new year. Hope to see you all here in 2007.

So back to Oracle security..