The Dell computer arrived Tuesday, one day late by my reckoning, and on time by UPS’s. Amazon hasn’t weighed in on the matter, in spite of saying to me in the vaguely apologetic email: “To make sure your issue is fully resolved, I’ll follow up to you until you received your order.”
To be fair to Amazon, it’s not clear at all what the above, grammatically challenged, sentence means. Anyway, they haven’t contacted me.
Typical Dell setup — and that’s a good thing — with a few twists.
My first difficulty was opening the computer. I was trying to open it from the hinge side. When did Dell invert the logo? I know that Apple started the trend many years ago, figuring that the long pole in the tent was how the compute looked to anyone watching it being used, rather than how it looked to the user, but I missed it when Dell started to follow along. <windmill tilt on> Let me go on record as not liking this, whether done by Apple or Dell. I prefer to think of my laptop as my tool, not a small billboard for which I paid. I would to be the focus. <windmill tilt off>
I checked through all the boxes, and the machine came up. I inspected the Desktop for shovelware. Dell has been exemplary in this department in the past. I set up a Dell laptop (purchased directly from Dell) last week that had a nearly-clean desktop. Not so much on this one. An Ebay link? Recycle it. A few others? Likewise. The Kindle reader. That, too. And what’s this? An Amazon icon – shudder – in the tray! Dell has crossed a line. It’s one thing to strew gratuitous icons all over the desktop, but the taskbar should be off limits. I know, I know; Microsoft has parked IE on the taskbar by default ever since there was a taskbar. But still…
I wonder if Dell has a special system image for Inspirons that get sold by Amazon, with the Amazon and Kindle apps installed, with icons front and center.
Since the new Inspiron was intended for a sacrificial application, I named it Lamb.
I was unable to register the computer. The form was missing some of the address fields and Dell said to go back and fill out the form completely when I tried to submit it. Catch 22.
Creating and verifying a factory restore USB stick took an hour and almost 10 GB. I did it again with another stick just to make sure, since this machine was going to go in harm’s way. I fired up IE long enough to download Firefox, then used Firefox to download Wireshark. Its installation was chatty, but quick.
I let Windows Update have its way (It didn’t offer Windows 8.1), rebooted, did a backup, and was ready to put the computer to work. I put the machine in airplane mode to kill access to the LAN side of the firewall. I installed a switch between the router and the WAN side of the firewall, and plugged Lamb into the switch. But how were the packets from the router to the firewall and vice-versa going to get to Lamb. The switch would only send packets to Lamb addressed to it, wouldn’t it?
I opened Wireshark and told it to start capturing packets. Yep. None of the router/firewall traffic was there although people (or more likely, bots) were already probing Lamb’s defenses, looking for vulnerabilities.. What to do to get Lamb to see all the traffic? If I had a 100 Mb/s hub I could install it instead of the switch, but I haven’t seen one for years. I looked on Amazon, and nobody makes one anymore. What about getting a managed switch and setting it up to mirror the traffic to and from the firewall to Lamb? That should work. I ordered a Cisco SC300 ten-port switch from Amazon. They say it will arrive on Saturday. We shall see.
I tried to ping Lamb from inside the firewall, and got no response. I took a look at the McAfee default settings — Lamb came with McAfee installed — and, sure enough, it wasn’t responding to pings. It was pretty easy to fix that, and now I could ping Lamb. I shut it down for the time being; there’s no point in letting it sit there and be a target for longer than I have to.
I don’t think AT&T will be ready for me until Monday, so, since I missed the Tuesday window, I won’t have lost any more time.
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