Come On! USPS!!

The US Postal Services has been losing money for years and years. It seems to they just can shake the bad karma.

I am trying to send a flat-rate first class package. I remember I could fill out the forms and print shipping labels online. So online I went.

I registered a personal account -- I want to support the government, I do, then filled out forms, and here is what I got:

We're Sorry

We're sorry

Our system is experiencing problems. Please try again later.

I think I am probably the one feeling sorry: It seems that they are reenforcing people's perception that the USPS can't do anything right. They seem to be letting someone else' incompetence drag them down the drain.

To all those who say The government is the problem, my suggestion is that they need to take a course in basic logic. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that the government doesn't have problems -- It's just that we all do. With regard to problems in the government, like the one shown in the screen shot above, the problem is not the government. The government doesn't know how to build a website. In this case, I don't really blame the USPS. I would rather see whomever contracted to build this website gets exposed. I would like to see every contractor's name printed on every government website ever built, so we the people can get to know who those idiots are: They seem to have no problem taking the money from the government, the tax payers' government and the tax payers' money, but they seem to lack the basic decency of trying to do the job.

So, how about that, the USPS? Whoever built this broken website, print the names of the contractors, the company, the project manager, the project team leads, on the website, so they can take pride in what they have done with our money.

[Solved] At a Lost with Windows 2012

In trying to get the Splunk tech add-on TA-nessus from Hurricane Labs to work on a pair of Windows servers, I created some DOS batch files that works fine when manually run. They also run fine on a Windows 2008 R2 server running a Splunk Universal Forwarder. Here is one of batch files, update_plugin_lookup.bat:

@echo off

rem -- To get rid of cygwin's complaints about DOS style path:
set CYGWIN=nodosfilewarning

E:\cygwin64\bin\bash.exe "%SPLUNK_HOME%/etc/apps/TA-nessus/bin/update_plugin_lookup.sh" %*

Then the shell script, update_plugin_lookup.sh, is modified to this to work with Cygwin's bash and python:

#!/bin/bash

#unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH

export PATH="/bin:/usr/bin"
cygpath=`which cygpath 2>/dev/null`
if [ "$cygpath" != "" ]; then
    splunk_home=`"$cygpath" "$SPLUNK_HOME"`
    export SPLUNK_HOME=`"$cygpath" -w "$SPLUNK_HOME"`
fi
export PATH="$PATH:$splunk_home/bin"

#cd $( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" ) || cd "$splunk_home/etc/apps/TA-nessus/bin"
cd "$splunk_home/etc/apps/TA-nessus/bin"

./update_plugin_lookup.py $*

The problem is, on a Windows 2012R2 server running a Splunk search head, the scripted input running the update_plugin_lookup.bat command only generates a line in the splunkd.log file that reads:

09-23-2014 04:15:00.013 -0400 ERROR ExecProcessor - Couldn't start command "E:\Splunk\etc\apps\TA-nessus\bin\update_plugin_lookup.bat": The operation completed successfully.

I checked file permissions for the local SYSTEM account on the 2012 server, as I suspected that may be a factor. But that did not seem to be the issue.

I have downloaded the PsTools from SysInternals and manually run the batch command as the local SYSTEM user. That worked without a hitch.

I am at a lost of ideas to try at this point, so I am going to post this to Splunk Answers and other forums to beg for help.

[Edit - Problem resolved] :  This turned out to be a file permission issue, after all. I thought I did grant executable permission to local SYSTEM on the 2012R2 server. But I did not succeed in doing that. Then because I was able to run the batch command file as local SYSTEM with the help of PsExec, I let the suspicion slip out of my mind.

Why is Adobe so Sneaky?

Adobe has been doing this for quite some time:

For whatever reason, I guess some kind of financial gain, they decide to it is a good idea to sneak in a copy of McAfee Security Scan Plan on one's PC when a person is not watching carefully when installing or upgrading the Flash player.

What I don't understand is: McAfee? Really, Adobe?