Yes, the question is: Where have I been!? During Covid, I was running out of ideas to write about. I switched jobs and I’ve pretty much become lazy about writing.
COVID Aftermath
Why did covid feel like we had been locked down for 5 years? It seemed like so long, but it wasn’t that long. It has only been 3 years since we started going to restaurant drive thru. When I go out, I don’t feel like covid is a concern anymore. I do notice people wearing masks more than I have pre-covid. I have lost the fear about being outside my house and in public places. My only concern is my boy and his nasty habits. I’ve lost count at the number of times he’s put his hands in his mouth after touching hand rails. What the!?
We only had covid once. We have been through many tests and tried taking precautions, since we live with a immunocompromised individual. She didn’t get it that bad when she was sick. I’m hoping that we can continue to keep it away from her.
New Job
I am now working for a local company that is a startup. Several co-workers all came over, with big dreams to all work together, but that has since died. We are down to two of the six, but we won’t talk about all that drama here. If this were a private blog, I’d delve into that.
Summer is coming
There are only a few more days left of school. I’m hoping the boy can stay active and happy during this summer. I’ll be working, so I’m leaving it up to the wife to keep him busy and out of trouble this summer. I’m hoping this will be easy!
I have a bit of an update on the Amazon fiasco I talked about in the “Work is Fun“.
We have been trying to get into that AWS Machine for sometime now. The client contacted Amazon, but they would only do so much unless you paid for a “Premium Plan“. He was on the Developer plan, but they wanted him to go to the Business or Enterprise. The Business price is pretty pricey and the Enterprise is even more! If you have some time, I would check it out. Looking at the Business plan, you can see how crazy your bill could get.
Amazon Premium Business Plan
First Attempt
On Monday the Amazon support gave us a link to try, but I was too busy to try. The next day, Tuesday, I started attempting this fix.. Half way through the page, I came to the realization that this is exactly what I tried before and it wasn’t going to help much, but I was willing to give it a shot. I was sure they understood the problem and gave good advice.
I shut down the site and started copying the VM and doing as instructed. The whole process took about 2 hours to complete, due to a lot of paranoia and double checking. The client was contacted and he switch his account to the Business account and summoned someone from support to call me. Of course, when they called it said “SCAM LIKELY” so I was a little reluctant to answer.
Lets try and fix your problem
The person on the other end talked to me and was trying to understand our problem. He wanted me to try the process again, because the tech who send us that list must have known what he was talking about. The support guy even offered to READ it to me. Feeling a little annoyed, I said to him:
Me: “Sir, my goal here is to try and recover the admin password, right? Do you see anything in these instructions that will help me accomplish my goal?”
Support: “Oh.. You are right. Let me check something”
He later came back with nothing that could help. He did see that we were now on the Business plan, which allowed the case to be escalated to the people who have the technical skills to help. Come to find out, He explained that he was in accounting and he couldn’t help anymore than he already had. I had to wait for someone to call me.. .. Oh great.
Trying to sync up.
Tuesday night, We were getting the boy ready for bed and I looked down at my phone and noticed I was getting another call but it was from an “Unknown Number”, so I let it go to voicemail. The voicemail had some guy from amazon saying he was calling about our case. What the heck!? Why would they be calling me from an Unknown Number? That is ridiculous. I turned off all spam blocking on my phone and allowed all unknown numbers to come through. (read: ANNOYING)
The next day, Wednesday, I sat around waiting for another call. About 3 in the afternoon, I emailed the client asking if I should just be waiting for a call, or what was going to happen? He got on the site and summoned Amazon again and they called right away, from an “Scam Likely” number. Of course, I answered the phone. It was the same people in accounting. They looked over the case and said they would put in a note to have the tech call me during MY work hours (9am – 5pm), not theirs so we could hook up. They were informed that the number had to come from a legit number, or it wouldn’t get answered.
The call.
Thursday morning around 10:10am, I was sitting in a weekly call with a client going over some recent changes and I get a call and the caller Id read “2”. Just the number 2? That was pretty odd, but I had to answer the phone. The phone call was from Amazon and he wanted to work through the problem right then. The decision was made to do it right then and skip the other meeting, so we proceeded.
The guy wanted to send me a link so he could see my screen. I’ve heard this before, where they want to steal all your stuff after they take control, but this was Amazon calling and they wouldn’t do that right!? No, they wouldn’t, but the thought went through my mind.
I was sent a link through the AWS Console, attached to the case, and it was pretty safe and actually really cool! He could see my screen, but had no control. He had a pointer that would show up where he wanted me to click. It was quite cool. He guided me through each step to try.
Come to find out, I had found a video earlier that didn’t work, I had a few things set up from that video that helped us accomplish our goal. All we had to do was turn on some Management stuff and pull up a Powershell window and we were on the machine.
Changing the password
The first thing we tried was resetting the Administrator password, but that failed. It looks like the previous company had deleted the Administrator account, which I think is valid. It makes it harder for someone to break in.
The second thing we did was add a new user with Admin privileges. This was super easy and slick. After creating the account I was able to RDP into the machine without any problems!
The work begins
I was able to get in and the client was super excited when I reported back to him. The process of learning the system and making some important fixes begins now. It doesn’t help that I’m super swamped at work, but i’m going to do my best to try and make this client happy. It is a fun project that I’m excited to work on.
I’m super impressed with the amazon support. It may be expensive for support, but it seemed worth it. Especially since I wasn’t paying for it!
We have the most interesting parking lot. I’ve tried to mark up the map, but it didn’t turn out the best, so bear with me! As you can see we have a big parking lot. We are located on the border of Orem City. If you go down the back hill you end up in Provo. There is a path that leads down the hill, where a ditch runs north to south. If you cross the ditch, you end up in the back of a house and onto a street in Provo. The path is frequently used by people that stop at the bus stop or …something. There is a pawn shop near by and various other places that some might frequent. We use to think it was just a shortcut that people used until we started noticing the same odd people hanging around.
The Fight
One day we noticed an individual, Jacob (I know his name, because one day I went out to question him), come up from the hill with a backpack on and he went out by the Bus Stop and took his shirt off, put deodorant on and put on another shirt. A nice mustang pulled up later and they chatted for a bit. Then the mustang left after giving him some groceries. It was an odd sequence of events, so we were curious what was down that hill. Jacob took his groceries back down the trail.
The Adventure
On April 8, 2019, we decided to go on an adventure for lunch. The spring rain made it hard to explore a ditch, so we had to pick a dry day. The trail down to the ditch was a little sketchy. The hill is steep and the dirt is compacted, but there is a chain link fence to hang on to. We crossed the ditch and were checking out the house (See “Meth House” on the Map). and some lady stuck her head out of the window and said “Can I help you”. We were a little shocked, so I just said “Yeah, where does this trail lead? “. She replied with “People take it to the Mall. You can go through our yard if you want”. It was interesting, but she was the one that we keep seeing on the trail and going to the “Bus Stop”.
Walking up the trail to the “Mall” seemed like the best way to go, and it required us to dodge twigs and puddles. There were several strange things we ran into, and a few are the reason why we call it the “Meth Trail”. We found some gloves, which we thought was very strange! Then we turned around and found a giant bottle of “Fernox Antifreeze Protector Alphi-11”, Bucket, and Broom. “What The!?!?!” It was an interesting find. We finished walking up the trail to find a big tunnel under the road, but decided not to follow it any longer. The tunnel was full of spider webs and bird nests. The mission had to be aborted, so we got out of the tunnel and took the road back to work. The whole trip was about 3 miles, so it turned out to be some good exercise! 🙂
Meth Route
We have put camera’s in our windows to try and watch the activity of these people and it has provided many hours of entertainment trying to figure out what is going on. The lady living in the house has pretty much stayed the same, but there are new guys walking back and forth with her. They tend to do shady stuff in the parking lot on the weekend. I know I’m convinced they are selling drugs and doing other stuff.
Nefarious Corner
We have the Meth Heads and over the summer we started noticing a guy that would pull into our parking lot and sit for hours in his car. Of course, we started getting curious and started watching him. We noticed that there was always a trail of water that would be flowing down the parking lot under his car. We would joke that he was using the bathroom on his tire, because he was sitting there so long. This guy has been coming round for about 6 months or so.
The Confrontation
On Tuesday, the guy was there from 9:30am until 5pm. We were watching him during a meeting. He gets out of his car and smokes and throws his empty pack of cigarettes on the ground. We tried to see if he was relieving himself out there and it looked like he was, but we couldn’t tell. We went to lunch and walked by the car and noticed a puddle, but was it snow? Who knows.
When we got back from lunch, we two down from his car. He was fast asleep in his car with his phone in his lap. Not the best place to take a nap. We were curious about his story!? Why is this guy sitting out here all day? Is he OK? What is going on?
I left work a little after 5pm. He had moved his car 2 spots away from mine and still in there. I was determined to knock on his window and find out if he was OK! As I approached, I noticed that his windows were a little foggy. Something you’d expect when someone was in their car for a long time. I didn’t think anything else. I did start my phone recording audio to see if I could catch anything interesting when we chatted.
When I reached the car, I noticed he was kicked back in his chair, hands on his crotch pleasuring himself!!!! I didn’t know what to do! I knocked on the car and told him we had noticed he was parked there all day and asked if he was ok. He said he was fine. Of course he was, but I had just interrupted him. I turned away and said “BTW. You shouldn’t do that here anymore”. He took off. I was super scared and you can tell in the recording. Here is the recording so you can hear the interaction.
The audio. Lots of dead air at the first due to walking to the car.
…
I don’t think we will be seeing this guy again in the near future. He probably thought he had the perfect spot and I had to go ruin it!
I’m looking forward to more adventures in the parking lot this summer. It’s been pretty slow lately, because it’s hard to get up and down the hill in mud and snow. When spring rolls around again, I bet it will pick up!
It
has been a crazy week at work and with life. I have been working on
several projects at work. I currently have at least 4 projects that I
am working on. Each one provides a unique learning experience. It’s
always so fun (and stressful). For instance, this week I
had to try and recover an admin password for an EC2 instance on
Amazon. To make things worse we don’t have the public/private let pairs
for the machine either.
I can’t go into too much detail, but a little background on this project might help. The client payed someone to develop a system. They parted ways and now something is broken. They are paying us to try and fix the system. I’ve had to play detective piece a bunch of stuff together. The thing that is broken resides on a machine that we need access to. This machine is hosting a website and has passwords I need, and I’m pretty sure this is where the problem is.
I am NOT a professional IT man, and I can hack my way through things. Acting with confidence when mucking around with machines on AWS isn’t my strong point. This is probably something I need to work on. Full Stack developer? Is IT included in that?
I
did a lot of research and looking into how to change the password. I
found a lot of options, but none with clearly marked prerequisites. They
also use a bunch of terms, I have no idea what they are, so when they
do list a prerequisite, I fail to catch it. Needless to say, I ended up finding them after I had gone down the rabbit hole.
One
thing you may, or may not know about me is, I am a big worry wart. I
worry about things going wrong that may not go wrong. If I don’t own
the data, I get this super anxious feeling that everything is going to
break or blow up. My heart rate always skyrockets. Hopefully I can post
a graph from my Fitbit.
Not much in the way of cardio. Mostly stress.
A few attempts at getting the password was made earlier in the week, but nothing that required powering down the server. Thursday at 1pm was going to be the best time to make another attempt. The client had a few demo’s that he was doing. After about two hours of stress (cloning, moving IPs, installing software, etc), I get to the point a where I can run the software that allows me to change the password. EC2Rescue was suppose to be the rescue, but it failed miserably. There was a read/write permission issue. Nothing in the docs said anything about this. I don’t think I missed it… the stress level was elevated after this discovery.
Now it was freaking out out mode. I mounted the two drives from the machine I needed to get to, and luckily I could see files and I searched and found some of the things I needed
Time
was running out, so I set the IP addresses back to the old machine and
brought it back up. The client had a demo in the morning, so we tested
the site/apps to make sure everything was working. A new plan had to be
revised, because I didn’t want to waste any more time.
I was able to find some passwords on the drives mounted earlier. The passwords were useful to make the necessary changes to another system. Friday night the build started working. Excitement was in the air! Emailing the client the news brought me great joy! I have one more task to complete this week, but it requires a Mac, iPhone Emulator, and an Xcode expert. I will talk to that guy on Monday. We should be able to get everything working.
It’s been a crazy project, and I hope we get to work with this client more in the future. Coding is my first love, and solving complicated non-coding issues is second. I’ve learned a ton from this project!
