Officially Back Online!

Sorry for being off the air for so long. The past 7 weeks have been extremely busy. I apologize in advance, this will be a LENGTHY post. A lot of good, not so good, and terrible things have happened since my last post before the blog decided to kill itself.

The home hosting stuff I was doing just wasn’t working out. Constantly being attacked over the WWW. Nothing ever happened, it would just periodically slow down my server.

I’ve been off of work the entire week, and I had a LAUNDRY list of things to do. Getting the blog back up was saved for last as that’s the hardest thing because since I’m hosting externally, I don’t control certain aspects.

I spent all morning editing the SQL file so it would import properly into the new hosting provider. This is the “structure” of the blog.

The content part … well. Originally what took the blog offline was a bad upgrade. Something in the process ended up deleting half of the content off of the blog website. Luckily, before I upgraded, I backed up the entire server just in case. That’s what saved the blog.

After massaging the SQL data for 2 hours to get it to import properly, then I had to make DNS changes (how you get to the blog). While that change was propagating, the blog is 1.7GB. So I spent about an hour FTP’ing everything to the webhost.

Once the DNS changes finally propagated. The hosting provider provides free SSL certs, but this broke the blog. It needed my SSL cert. after fumbling around in the cPanel for an hour, I finally found the spot where I could upload my cert, and apply it to both the blog and gallery websites.

And just like a flip of a switch, it came alive. All the posts are here. Nothing is missing. Even the hosting provider recognized that I was doing WordPress, and asked if I wanted them to take over the maintenance / management of the blog.

THATS A BIG FAT YES PLEASE!

I don’t have to constantly update stuff. The plugins, the themes. Making sure content is backed up. Making sure the SQL database is trimmed, and backed up. Upgrading WordPress/Jetpack every time a bug is found.

If you don’t pay attention to these things on a daily basis, that’s how things get exploited. Since I was hosting it off of my server at home, that’s a huge risk to take.

It was just a lot of maintenance, and time, and attention span. Having the hosting provider do all that for me automatically? Thank god I’m free from having to do this all the time.

This week has been a lot of work even though I’m “off” from work. I’ve been helping a friend get rid of a very nasty infection called Pegasus.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

To give you the backstory of Chad, I met his brother Troy back in 2002. When I was first getting into DOCSIS, and doing “internet” stuff. I met Troy as he was the internet provider for the building. Of course how all my good friendships start, started with a heated argument. We weren’t getting the speeds at the building. We were supposed to be getting 6Mb/s (yes. You read that correctly), however we were only getting 1.5Mb.

I kept telling Troy it was how his router was configured. His only reply (all the circuits are green). I asked him to log into the router and dump out the config so I could look at it. Sure enough. It was the config of his router. He had the T-1’s configured not in a bundle.

So I showed him how to change the other side to bundles first, then we configure the bundles on our side. Boom. 6Mb. Then the most amazing friendship began. We worked together on several Internet deployments throughout Wisconsin. I helped him harden his network to make sure people couldn’t breach his network. I did it all for free. It was fun. I was learning new things. Troy would ALWAYS challenge me in ways I could never think possible.

When I left for Chicago, our friendship got closer. We always talked. We would meet up periodically (meeting halfway) since he lived in the Madison area, and I was in the burbs of Chicago, it was always fun to catch up.

I attribute my approach to fixing problems / providing solutions to how Troy constantly would always task me with these “impossible” problems. But as I always told Troy, if I stare at it long enough, I’ll figure it out.

When I told Troy I was moving to Denver, we met in person one last time. Told me of his brother Chad. Gave me his number. Told me to “keep an eye on him”. At the time I didn’t think much of it.

About a year after we moved to Denver, the text messages stopped between Troy and I. I was always texting him stupid shit (as I always did). But no replies. Nothing. For about 2 weeks.

Then I get a call from Chad out of the blue. “He’s gone man”. It was like someone ripped out my heart. I considered Troy to be my brother. I would always help him no matter the ask. It was a tough loss for me to process. Those same feelings when my mother died in 2012 returned. I went silent. Just kept my head down at work. Only spoke when I needed to. His loss hurt. He has been one of the few people who helped forge me into the engineer I am today.

After Troy’s death, I continued to talk to Chad. We both needed it. The fucked up part, is Chad sounds EXACTLY like Troy. Same mannerisms. As time went on, I inherited Chad as my older brother. Doing what Troy told me to do. I was “keeping my eye on him”.

So that’s how I met Chad.

So late last January I got a distressed call from Chad. He was hurting. He found some “questionable” things on his wife’s phone. It felt his pain. I talked him off the ledge of that cliff you can’t come back from. Using my logical approach, I started to question him. About a lot of things. The relationship. Her behaviors. From every answer he gave me I dug deeper and deeper. Seeing that I took psychology during my employment during the Arris days, I thought it would be best to just listen to him for awhile.

The more he talked. The more questions I wrote down. One thing I’m good at is identifying behavioral patterns (from a previous relationship), and correlating people’s “behaviors” to those actions those “certain” people make.

Something wasn’t jiving. Things weren’t lining up. Dawn is a stay at home mom. Taking care of the kids, while Chad works. He did admit to “not spending enough time” with her, but he’s a good husband, and father. Whenever Chad would talk to me before, he was always talking about Dawn and the kids. But that sense of pride was gone from his tone.

As I talked him through this more and more. What he thought was happening. Wasn’t.

He found some weird shit on her phone. All hidden in a Remote Desktop session. With a ton of weird Internet history. It felt .. fake. That’s when I told Chad to have the conversation with Dawn about it directly. Dawn had no idea any of this was on her phone. Chads a nerd just like me. Had a proxy server at home. And noticed that all of a sudden, he wasn’t seeing any traffic from her phone. He would periodically “see” her phone on the network, but couldn’t see where she was going.

Which was when he found this weird VPN/Remote desktop session on her phone. I told Chad straight up (sorry no offense Dawn) “Chad. Dude. She ain’t that smart to setup something so elaborate”. Like it was impressively setup. So I told him to just wipe her phone and don’t restore from backup.

For the next 3-4 weeks. He could see everything. He was also “working” on his relationship with Dawn. Things were better. Then. Weird shit started happening. Her phone had the shit back on her phone. Weird traffic patterns on his network, but now the kids’ devices are behaving the same way.

As time went on, Chads paranoia got worse. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to keep him “focused”. But at this time, was when I was really sick. Getting worse each day. Our calls became texts. Our texts became irregular. I couldn’t maintain myself and what was going on at the same time. As I was withdrawing into survival mode. Then radio silence for 3 months. My texts to Chad became green. I thought the worst.

Then about mid summer. After the 2nd Mastoidectomy, I got a text from Chad from a different number. I was relieved. He said things were way better relationship wise, but he was still seeing the weird shit. I think Chad switched numbers at least 5-6 times until my heart attack. After we moved out, that’s when Chad hit me up again.

He was starting to get locked out of his devices. I told him to start disconnecting things. Something that I was suspecting previously, was that he was compromised. But I couldn’t put my finger on what.

Chads paranoia became worse. My clarity was coming back. It was like parts of my brain I was locked out from, I was gaining access to again. The fog was lifting. I could actually breathe again. The recovery from the STEMI was NOT fucking easy. The constant tiredness. Having to move. Going even further into debt. All because Parc at Cherry Creek valued their bottom line over our safety and well being.

During my time home recovering, I decided to make projects for myself. Just to exercise my mind. Which was the home server project. Which as of now, it’s a super solid setup.

At the same time, for months I was asking Chad to send me content for the Plex server. I needed something to do. I was getting bored. Quick. Between doctor visits, and just laying low. I was just. Out of things to occupy my time, and exercise my brain.

He took Jarvis (his Plex server) offline during this network nightmare that was unknown to the both of us at the time. In the shipment, with a hard drive with “Jarvis” he sent me this:

It was a sign. That was a bad day for me. It brought up a lot of the trauma and PTSD I’ve been through the past 5 years of this chronic illness. Memories of Troy. The rotten divorce. The things I experienced.

I broke down that day. Twice. It was the same day that I had reconnected with my uncle Gary (mom’s brother).

Before I hooked up the drive, I scanned it for you guessed it. Viruses. Malware. That scan took almost 3 days to complete. 18TB is A LOT of data.

In order for me to store my content, and all my mission critical data, I had to re-build WOPR again. As I copied data to my old USB drive, the drive failed. Which set me back 3 days, as it was 20 minutes from finishing copying everything from WOPR.

The new drive came, and I took a big risk moving almost 10TB of data to the new drive. Last December, when I rebuilt WOPR, I only had 18TB of useable space, this due to me dedicating a slot in the chassis as hot spare. Should a drive fail, it can immediately rebuild.

So another week goes by and finally. 29TB of storage was ready to go. As I moved everything to its new home, I got a weird cryptic text from Chad. Saying that he knows what’s going on. That he has an infection of Pegasus. At this point, Chad is texting me from a different number every week. Or his wife’s phone.

He even got a burner phone. That broke the minute he connected to the house WiFi. That was the proof I needed. I sent him a new cable modem, router, and firewall. All preconfigured. Told him to connect nothing to it. Just get stuff provisioned. And to buy a MacBook.

There was a delay between us syncing up, and he had already started to connect things. Wham. Infected immediately. I asked him what the fuck did he hook up? I told him not to plug ANYTHING into the router. Well he plugged in his tv. And that spread the infection all over again. Even hit his new iPhone, and Mac within 30 minutes.

So take 3, he finally realizes how bad this is. We setup a brand new network. No wifi. Had him get the router I had. Return the Mac. Get a brand new one.

AND THATS THEY ONLY THING YOU PLUG IN

After I got Asus-Merlin setup on his new router, with all the defense mechanisms in place. We got his Mac online first. Then his new iPhone / new number / carrier. It’s finally gone. I’ve been monitoring his stuff for a week, and I think I can safely say his year+ long saga of Pegasus is over.

I also made him buy Norton360 for the phones and Macs. And little snitch. Which is a strict firewall for Mac that I’ve used for YEARS.

I told him that anything that was on the network before is to be thrown away. Or traded in. He’s slowly been adding devices 1 by 1. All brand new. With 1 caveat.

No. More. Windows.

Sorry but I gotta say it. Microsoft really dropped in quality since windows 10, and has continued to get worse. Meanwhile Apple has been focused on securing the OS.

So. Chad asked, “How much do I owe you?” I told him for all the hardware I sent, just cover that and the shipping. It was the least I could ask for. I then jokingly said, you can also buy me a new MacBook, and buy my old one. I was 100,000% joking.

He said absolutely. I then told him I’m just kidding. Whatever you think is right/fair. He got me my dream machine:

• 14″ MacBook Pro M3 Max
• 64GB of Unified RAM / 2TB of storage
• 16 Core CPU / 40 Core GPU

I couldn’t believe it. He got me this, and zero’d out one of my credit cards. Which was $300 a month in JUST interest.

I can’t believe that this actually happened. I know Chad is relieved it’s gone. So am I. We spent an awful amount of time getting rid of it. This has probably been on par with iLoveYou, or Welchia. Those viruses were the worst to get rid of. Pegasus on the other hand, infected EVERYTHING with an IP address. Nastiest thing to DATE I’ve ever had to deal with.

Work during the past 8 weeks has been crazy busy. Last year I spent over 900 hours of my own time writing a video class on how it’s done in the cable world. It covered everything from content acquisition to it displaying on your TV. Also covered all the “inside” transactional things that need to happen in order for all that to work. The final slide count was 232 slides. My first dry/beta run took approximately 20 hours to give. So when certain things happened at work, that enabled me to give it company-wide. Which was MUCH needed.

I spent the month prior leveraging all my relationships I’ve built over the years at work to nail dow. A training schedule, where over 110 students were signed up, and partook in classes that ranged from 3-4 days, with a comprehensive 70 question exam at the end. Only 3 students failed the exam, I couldn’t have been more happy. Both Juniper and Cisco partnered with me to hand out swag, and incentives for the students.

I hand-made over 125 student guide books which cumulatively probably took me a solid week to make them all. 28lb paper, binders, pens, and highlighters were included. Attendance was tracked via sign in sheets, and at the end of each student book, there was a small survey each student filled out anonymously. Those surveys alone told me this was the right thing to do. Everyone loved the class. I kept things fun, non-boring. Tried to make the students excited to learn how it really works end-to-end.

In the end, I collated, scanned, graded everything to a single binder to be distributed to leadership showing them, that this type of training needs to happen. Everyone loved it. Not 1 single negative comment about class.

However during all this, Chads thing is going on, drama for one of the students that required the attention of HR. My father’s health declining as each week went by. By May 8th, my father transitioned from hospital care, to palliative. Things were rapidly declining. Both my aunt and uncle kept me abreast of everything that was going on. Unfortunately, on May 10th, my father passed at 8:30am. A lot of mixed feelings from this. Death brings out the worst in some people who don’t understand certain aspects of the “relationship” between my father and myself. It was a day of reflection, emotion, and some unfortunate reactions by someone who I didn’t expect to come from. Unfortunately this gave me no choice but to take a VERY large step back from that relationship.

As this occurred, the HSV infection has been just causing a rollercoaster full of pain. The ketamine has been an absolute godsend. I’ve been trying to stay ahead of the pain, and utilizing my ketamine appointments to help “get me through” the past 10 weeks of “hell” I guess we could classify it as. My last Ketamine treatment I spoke to my father. It was strange. Even though he was gone, the closure I needed to have where we “talked” out the letter I wrote to him, but never sent it. The outcome of that session is I forgave him. Even though he didn’t hear it from me, in a way, he did. My father’s death allowed me to finally let go of certain aspects of my “rough” upbringing. I’ve been able to finally put it behind me, and more importantly look beyond it.

I have been trying to reach out to my sister the few weeks prior our father’s death. Only short conversations, but at least some sort of dialogue has started again since the “situation” of 2021 occurred. Hopefully in time, we can try to put that “behind” us both and move forward.

Apart from everything that’s transpired, I did make the decision to take Anies last name. During my week of “being off from work”, I just quite simply, ran out of time on how to research how to get it accomplished. It’s still on the to-do list. Eventually I’ll get it done.

Throughout this ordeal. I want able to fill my Dilaudid as there is/has been a national shortage. So finding pharmacies that could actually get it in has been a challenge.

Then I also found out that my Ketamine is no longer being partially covered by insurance. I reached out to Klarisana to escalate to billing. They did approve the first Ketamine treatment of the year, so I have no idea whats changed. I did check Athem’s website and they are still “In-Network”. So I will see if we have to change the D codes they are using on the bills to get some of this covered. At this point, I hate insurance companies and doctors that love to play these little “games”.

Whatever.

It’s just nice to be back. I’m really happy I was able to get the blog back up and running again. I’ve sorta missed it.