[kwatt]

Nope, but it doesn’t dull the humour. 😉

K.

[kwatt]

LOL, you have no idea how glad I am now that I used a simple white background. 😉

K.

[kwatt]

Re: Web Site

Dave_Conway wrote:On the subject of bagpipes, a good idea to jazz up Ken’s site with some lovely music, click on the picture :wink:.

I’m guessing that you’ll pretty much guess my response to that. 😉

K.

[kwatt]

Re: Electrue/NESN

Bonzaco,

I can assure you that Service Force have not had a major boost here, maybe in areas of the country where the SF agent was willing to take and offered the work then yes, but that was on an individual and not a national level. If your local SF agent has taken the work, as I suspect, then that was a decision made there at the local level and they were probably offered the work after you and/or others turned it away or were forced to turn it away. The point is that you and others were obviously put in a this position where you had no choice.

Whether or not you wished to do the work for CDSL or not was a different matter.

In my opinion and it is only my opinion CDSL cut NESN out the chain for whatever reason, that bit is immaterial really and elected to ask the current providers to continue giving continuity to those service providers. That plan was thwarted by only one organisation by refusing to let those said SP’s continue as was.

K.

[kwatt]

Re: Site News & Updates

WOW! 😯

Busiest Month: January 2004 (100976 Hits)
Busiest Day: 29 January 2004 (5673 Hits)

WOW! 😯

K.

[kwatt]

Re: I got a contract!

Panther wrote:Well done 1200, you’re well out of it! These are the sort of people we have to condend with that give us a bad name. Could really do with a rogues gallery if that were at all possible…..
ar’nt we glad our friends have set this site up!!! (Did I hear anybody say free beers for that man..?) 🙄

Thankfully this site should allow us all to see some of the scams that go on in this trade and hopefully stamp some of the bad practises out, I think that’s great and a great thing to strive for.

As for a rouges gallery, I’d love to but I could just imagine some “gentelmen” in the law trade rubbing their hands at the thought. It is do-able, but it would have to be done very carefully indeed.

Thanks for the offer of a drink and I only have triples when Dave buys! 😆

K.

[kwatt]

E2 can be caused by up to 12 different faults I’m afraid but it is generally the side fill chamber. To be honest if you don’t know what’s been said here I’d advise you to get an engineer in that does as it’s not a two minute job to even explain it. 😉

Mostly the problem is caused by the appliance being installed in a closed plumbing system and not a standpipe as advised in the installation instructions. What happens is that gunk and grease from the sink etc. gets into the fill hose and flows down into the fill chamber causing the water to “lock-off” when filling. Hence the need for cleaning, or in extreme cases, replacement of the fill chamber.

If you leave your postcode area perhaps one of the guys here can help you out or alternatively you can call MFI, there is a link in the web links for MFI Service who will be able to help you.

K.

[kwatt]

Re: Web Site

Alex wrote:I’ve recently starting using a web host, he is very active in keeping us on the top of search engines, as he keeps our web site an a high profile for very little cost.

It is all good fun, but very time consuming.

Yes and doing the search engine optimisation yourself, although fairly easy, is hard work at times but it keeps the old grey matter busy.

As for time consuming, tell me about it!! 😉

K.

P.S. Alex, please, please, please get shot of that music it’s dreadful! 😆

[kwatt]

A web site is like a shop window to us, but you can do so much more with it than that and TBH I really, really need to find the time to update mine soon.

This format of a CMS site generally won’t work for us nor would many online commerce type sites work well, even for booking calls. There’s too many variables in our work and many problems as you all know can be solved on the phone without a visit. Also we are mostly all pre-diagnosing now, you can’t do that if you allow someone to book your calls for you, hence my objections to pre-booked calls in any format.

But what you can do with a site is save yourself a lot of grief, like uploading a copy of your current insurance, CORGI registration certificate and area maps of coverage which saves the hassle of faxing them to people. Easy, simple and effective. The point is to make life easier.

It can be a good advert, I too have had many enquiries from our site from all over the place and not just the UK. I would say it’s worth a bit of effort.

Now I’ll hide ’cause ours is shocking at the moment, I’ve had a new logo and designs in my head for it for months and no time to do sod all with it. 😕

K.

[kwatt]

Re: Electrue/NESN

Who knows Rudi, it’s a total mess! 🙁

I got some feedback from various places about the meeting on Wed. but I’ve resisted the temptation to say anything or even comment on some of the things I’ve been told.

Like apparently UKW is to blame for all this! Yeah right, like we held the repairers to a contract or shifted a massive contract about. How is UKW to blame for threats of legal action, veiled or not, against clients, former clients or even it’s own agents!? Somehow I think not.

All UKW members have done is to offer personal comment on events as they unfolded in an open trade forum without censorship, no more and no less. However it would appear that UKW is being used as a convenient scapegoat for other’s failings. So be it, I personally don’t care as anyone that reads this site wil be well aware that that is not the case, the information is there as the poster sees it from their own point of view what people do with that comment is up to them.

Likewise with CDSL, they’re not the ones screaming “legal action” about it, they only moved the work which is their right as it’s their contract. Now whether that suits the parties involved or not is immaterial in the end IMO. I’m not saying CDSL are angels but they’re not the ones making threats. The only threat I heard, or it’s been interpretted that way, is that if a repairer that was servicing this contract did not go with the changes that they would lose the area that they had. Well, turns out that (as far as I know) that wasn’t a threat merely a statement of fact and this has now happened in many areas. There are those no doubt aggrieved by this and I probably would have been as well, but in the end CDSL needed the work done by whatever means necessary and if that meant using an alternative repair agent then that was their only course of action. There again had I had to make the choice and keep people in a job I would have gone with the work.

But here’s a thing for you lot to think about…

Any WP can only take a contract from, in this case, someone like Service Force in one of two ways;

1. Offer better service.

2. Do it cheaper.

Now since SF are well geared and stocked to repair with a higher first fix rate than we would probably ever achieve outside of SF then obviously option 1 is out. And, let’s face it, Service Force for all it’s faults, are good at what they do.

Which leaves option 2.

The only way that the likes of NESN or other WP’s of that ilk can get this work is to do it cheaper. So, all this propoganda about us doing work direct and lowering the general rates for service in the industry is a total falicy. A lie really, since the only way that the WP can obtain the work is to do it for less than the OEM’s own service network. Think about that.

As for taking it’s own members to court for continuing to do work, well that’s a nice way to encourage your own network and entice people to join it isn’t it. I doubt that clients or potential clients will be too chuffed at the use of a company that acts thus either. Nuff said.

K.

[kwatt]

Excellent post Penguin, loads of info in there and more glaring examples of how we, never mind the poor customer, are being ripped off. I was talking about this breifly yesterday actually saying how the manufacturers have actually shot themselves in the foot to a large degree as, since the spares are so expensive no repairers will buy them for stock unless they absolutely must. But there again we’re the idiots running around ragged for a one-off fee irrespective of whether we have to return with spares or not.

K.

[kwatt]

John try Paul @ DATA as he’s gotten me a few bits for these with great success in the past so long as you have the info.

Phone: (01935) 433760

Fax: (01935) 433760

email: paul@datasparesonline.co.uk

K.

[kwatt]

No problem alf, fixed 😉

K.

[kwatt]

Re: UKW ‘abbreviations’ ?

Just for you Martin, from the downloads section and it was posted in the forums a while back IIRC 😉 :

Emoticons

Emoticons are really the next thing and there are literally scores of them, but the common ones in use are as follows:

😮 – colon/lower case “o” – surprise
🙂 – colon/end bracket – smile
😀 – colon/uppercase “D” – grin
:@ – colon/@ – angry
:/ – colon/forward “/” – frown
🙁 – colon/start bracket – sad
😛 – colon/uppercase “P” – tongue hanging out

Those are just a few of the vast range of emoticons out there, a simple Google search will produce loads of pages listing, in some cases, upwards of a hundred of them. Many are easy to work out and some are not, if you don’t know then simply ask as most people on IRC are more than willing to offer help.

Abbreviations

There are loads of these too, but the common ones are:

IIRC – If I remember correctly
ATEOTD – At the end of the day
LOL – Laughed out loud
LMAO – Laughing my ass off (also LMFAO, with F**king inserted
ROFLMAO – Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off (also ROTFLMFAO)
OTOH – On the other hand
STFU – Shut the f*** up
RTFM – Read the f***ing manual
AIUI – As I understand it
IYSWIM – If you see what I mean
SWMBO – She who must be obeyed
BTW – By the way
HTH – Hope that helps
OMG – Oh my God

[kwatt]

Re: Latest Virus Outbreak

I was kindly sent this official notice on the current virus, very bad indeed. 🙁

K.

——————————————————————————

MyDoom.B Rapidly Spreading

Mydoom.B is a new variant of the Mydoom worm and is about 29,184
bytes. This variant attempts to perform a Distributed Denial of
Service (DDoS) attack against Microsoft.com. Details regarding this
new worm are still emerging, but it has been validated as spreading in
the wild. Facts about the worm will be further qualified with follow
up reports following this initial analysis.

For the latest information about this worm from US-CERT, readers are
encouraged to visit http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA04-028A.html.

E-mails sent out by Mydoom.B are highly randomized. The From address
may be spoofed to include one of the following domains: aol.com,
msn.com, yahoo.com and hotmail.com. A randomized string value may then
be combined with these to generate new e-mails. This may result in
overload e-mail servers with many false addresses and auto-replies
associated with such traffic.

The subject is randomized to include one of the following
following:

* Delivery Error
* hello
* Error
* Mail Delivery System
* Mail Transaction Failed
* Returned mail
* Server Report
* Status
* Unable to deliver the message

The subject may also contain randomized data as seen in a recent live
sample: “RE: I still love you fLctv”.

The message body is also randomized to include one of the
following:

* RANDOMIZED CHARACTERS
* test
* The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has
been sent as a binary attachment.
* sendmail daemon reported: Error #804 occured during SMTP session.
Partial message has been received.
* The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a
binary attachment.
* The message contains MIME-encoded graphics and has been sent as a
binary attachment.
* Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available.

The attachments have a randomized filename selected from one of the
following string values:

* body
* doc
* text
* document
* data
* file
* readme
* message

The randomized string value is then combined with a randomized
extension: .exe, .bat, .scr, .cmd or .pif. If the malicious attachment
is executed, it then opens notepad.exe and displays garbled data
(binary).

Once executed, the worm attempts to create the following files in the
Windows System directory: explorer.exe and dtfmon.dll. The Windows
registry is then modified to run the worm in memory upon Windows
startup:

HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
Explorer=C:WINDOWS SYSTEM DIRECTORYexplorer.exe

The DLL component is associated with a backdoor feature of this worm.
It is likely that this Trojan worms like the one in Mydoom.A. It scans
through a range of TCP addresses looking for inbound TCP traffic.
Inbound TCP traffic can be used to configure the infected computer as
a proxy computer or to install code of choice on the infected
computer. More importantly, attackers are already working on tools to
hijack Mydoom infected computers to install code of choice.

The DDoS attack of Mydoom.B is against http://www.microsoft.com. There is
information claiming that it may also be directed at sco.com, but this
is unsubstantiated at this time. It appears that the more credible
data is that it only performs a DDoS attack against http://www.microsoft.com,
though a previosu version of the virus is confirmed to attack SCO.

To spread over the KaZaA P2P network, Mydoom.B creates copies of
itself in the KaZaA shared directory with randomized filenames.
Filenames include:

* attackXP-1.26
* BlackIce_Firewall_Enterpriseactivation_crack
* MS04-01_hotfix
* NessusScan_pro
* icq2004-final
* winamp5
* xsharez_scanner
* zapSetup_40_148

A randomized extension is then added to the filename selected above,
being .exe, .scr, .pif or .bat.

Mydoom.B attempts to harvest e-mails from Temporary Internet files as
well as via randomized e-mails aforementioned. It does not include any
e-mails containing the following strings: abuse, accoun, certific,
listserv, ntivi, icrosoft, admin, page, the.bat, gold-certs, feste,
submit, help, service, privacy, somebody, soft, contact, site, rating,
bugs, your, someone, anyone, nothing, nobody, noone, webmaster,
postmaster, support, samples, info, root, ruslis, nodomai, mydomai,
example, inpris, borlan, nai., sopho, foo., .mil, gov., .gov, panda,
icrosof, syma, kasper, mozilla, utgers.ed, tanford.e, acketst, secur,
isc.o, isi.e, ripe., arin., sendmail, rfc-ed, ietf, iana, usenet,
fido, linux, kernel, google, ibm.com, fsf., mit.e, math, unix,
berkeley and spam.

Mydoom.B also opens TCP port 10080. The worm contains the following
string: “sync-1.01; andy; I’m just doing my job, nothing personal,
sorry”.

Alias: Mydoom, Novarg, Mydoom.B

Sources:

F-Secure Corp. (http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/mydoom_b.shtml),
Jan. 28, 2004

Bit Defender
(http://www.bitdefender.com/bd/site/viru … 1&v_id=186),
Jan. 28, 2004

iDEFENSE Intelligence Operations, Jan. 28, 2004 Sensible Security
Solutions Inc. (http://www.sss.ca/), Jan. 28, 2004

According to iDEFENSE, this new variant of Mydoom appears to have
different MIMI data for malicious e-mails. The content type appears to
be plain text and includes a ZIP extension. Mydoom.A had a content
type of application/octet-stream and multipart/mixed data. It is
likely that this newest variant of Mydoom will become very widespread
in the wild. The first variant had well over 3M interceptions by just
two sources in the first 18 hours of the outbreak.

Look for questionable files about 29,184 bytes. Look for notepad.exe
to be opened, displaying binary data (garbled text). Also look for the
Windows registry created by the worm.

Recovery: Remove all files and the Windows registry key modifications
associated with this malicious code threat. Restore corrupted or
damaged files with clean backup copies.

Workaround: Configure e-mail servers and workstations to block file
types commonly used by malicious code to spread to other computers.
Block ZIP and executable extensions on the gateway and groupware
level. Also monitor traffic on the network and block ports associated
with Mydoom, especially inbound TCP ports for the backdoor Trojan
component and the outbound TCP 10080 port data. Administrators may
also find value in monitoring traffic associated with the DDoS
component. Carefully manage all new files, scanning them with updated
anti-virus software using heuristics prior to use.

Vendor Fix: Anti-virus vendors will likely release updated signature
files to protect against this malicious code in the near future. Some
anti-virus applications may detect this malicious code heuristically.

Name of Malicious Code: Mydoom.B
Aliases:
Mydoom.B
Mydoom
Novarg
Size in Bytes: 29184
Subjects: RE: I still love you fLctv
Body: Error 551: We are sorry your UTF-8 encoding is not supported
by the server, so the text was automatically zipped and attached to
this message.
Attachments: message.zip

This document was developed based on material contributed by iDEFENSE.
Our thanks for their contribution.

[Author]

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