One Reason You should hate Anti-Virus companies

Darn. After I signed up and downloaded the trial version of their product. It never stops sending me this stupid reminder, everyday. To stop this, you need to click a relatively small hyperlink at the bottom of the email to unsubscribe yourself.

It's a curse right?

Apa Macam Ni?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI is investigating a hacker attack on Citigroup Inc. that led to the theft of tens of millions of dollars, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Citing anonymous government officials, the Journal reported that the hackers were connected to a Russian cyber gang. Two other computer systems, at least one of connected to a U.S. government agency, were also attacked.

Citigroup denied the report. "We had no breach of the system and there were no losses, no customer losses, no bank losses," said Joe Petro, managing director of Citigroup's Security and Investigative services. "Any allegation that the FBI is working a case at Citigroup involving tens of millions of losses is just not true."

The Journal reported that the attack on Citigroup's Citibank subsidiary was detected over the summer, although it may have occurred up to one year earlier. The FBI, the National Security Agency, the Homeland Security Department and Citigroup worked together to investigate the attack.

Cyber crime is of increasing concern to businesses and the federal government, with President Barack Obama calling it one of the "most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation."

Obama is expected on Tuesday to announce the appointment of Howard A. Schmidt, a former eBay and Microsoft executive, as the government's cyber security coordinator.

Think Out of the Big Box

A bank customer of us was requesting helps to solve a sudden problem dealing with their IBM DWE server. Apparently from certain date onwards, all the processes executed within the DWE console were failed as shown in the following figure:



Interesting because there are few applications running in DWE and some of them already run for more then 2 years without any problems and now all of them failed at once?

Looking at the logs, obviously db2cmd.exe is throwing out a return code of 5 with exception code SQL1042C which means:



And oh shit, what the hell is the meaning of return code 5?

Tried to google, lookup IBM forums, contacted IBM Support and no one can tell me the definition of code 5?

The real fun is almost all other DB2/DWE components are running fine. db2cc, db2hc, db2start, db2stop, db2licm and many others I tried works. It seems like db2cmd.exe being cursed.

I did many other novel investigations. To name a few:

1. Rule out Windows environment variables
- Open up an instance of command prompt, clear off every environment variable.
- Run db2cmd.exe, still failed with the same error message.

2. Rule out Windows registry
- Open up regedit, throw away \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\IBM and one under Current User(Of course, you backup it first)
- Run db2cmd.exe, still failed with the same error message.

3. Rule out corrupted files #1
- Copy db2cmd.exe and all the necessary dll files from my machine into the server.
- Open up command prompt, and point every thing to my new db2cmd.exe folder
- Run db2cmd.exe, still failed with the same error message.

4. Rule out corrupted files #2
- Reinstall DB2 Admin Client (Same FP)
- Run db2cmd.exe, still failed with the same error message.

5. Rule out corrupted files #3
- Reinstall DB2 everything (Latest FP)
- Run db2cmd.exe, still failed with the same error message.

6. Trace through AD GPO/Windows stuffs
- Use gpmc.msc, gpresult, gpedit.msc and many windows tools
- Trace into event viewers
- Look for suspicious items. Nothing found

7. Diagnosing DB2 #1
- Set DB2TEMPDIR to non-existing folder/folder where current user don't have security right to access/write
- db2cmd.exe normally will throw DB2CMD.EXE -> 0, Access denied message.
- Nope, still DB2CMD.EXE -> 5

8. Diagnosing DB2 #2
- Put DIAGLEVEL to 4, restart db2, run db2cmd.exe
- Nothing useful in db2diag.log

9. Diagnosing DB2 #3
- Use db2trc, turn it on, run db2cmd.exe, turn it off.
- Nothing useful.

10. Diagnosing DB2 #4
- Execute db2setcp and db2clpsetcp independently with success.

11. Diagnosing DB2 #5
- Fooling around using db2set, removing settings, changing value to bogus one and adding things.
- Still Error code 5 with db2cmd.exe

12. Finding what the heck is error code 5
- Open db2cmd.exe with notepad, look for any potential hints. Found a list of API used. Cross check API name with return code 5 using Google.
- Seems like return code 5 is usually associated with Access Denied error.

13. Finale
Google again "db2cmd.exe -> 5" +SQL1042C. Found one related post in a china forum. Apparently the fella who faces the problem is a student who was trying out DB2 for some homeworks or so. No solution from the post either.

Very interesting... What is the connection or similarity between a student machine in china and a production level server machine in Malaysia? Indeed, I found the answer to this question and yes, it solved the problem!

Any idea? :D

Pelikan Warehouse Sales 2009

Pelikan should definitely send out flyers to all its shareholders about any incoming warehouses. I never aware of such an event until I accidentally saw it on TheStar newspaper yesterday night.

I've long wanted to get myself a decent Pelikan pen because my current one keeps failing on me with its loosely aligned cap.

Me and my bro reached Puchong around 9am+ then we stopped by at some restaurant to have our breakfast. PappaRich sucks because apparently there's no breakfast set. I need to fork out extra bucks by making each item order one by one. It sucks.

We arrived at Pelikan warehouse around 10:30am. They actually used their cafeteria as the venue for this sales. Well, not really as crowded as some of the warehouse sales I been to but still I'm having some hard time try to squeeze myself into some of the boothes. One of the discount bin was emptied, not sure what goodies were in there before being deserted.





You pick up the items you wanna buy, then you proceed to the check out booths. Once each item being checked into the payment list, you can move on to the payment counter and settle it once and for all. See the payment counters below?



I got myself a Pelikan Tradition R215 Rollerball Pen and a K7 pen along with some refills. It costs me near to RM300. One thing to comment is that the higher end product lines showcased during the sales are pretty limited. R215 comes with 3 years warranty.





All my looted goods are inside this picture :D



Total damage is RM600 for the day, Phew....