1. Using regedit.exe create a new registry key named Server under the existing entry :

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols\SSL 2.0]

2. Under the registry key just created, “Server”, create a DWORD value with the name ”Enabled” and change the value data to 0×0000000.

3. Reboot to apply the changes.

A quick check around and I found this notice from HP:

Notice: (Revision) VMware ESXi 4.0 – CUSTOMER ACTION RECOMMENDED To Obtain
Optimal Disk Subsystem Performance on ProLiant G6 and G7 Servers Configured with
Smart Array P410i/P410/P411/P412/P212/P712m Controllers Running VMware

After ordering up a battery backed write cache kit for this server and dropping it in things were back to normal.

Download and install (or in the Mac world, drag it to your apps folder), make sure your Android tablet is unlocked, connect the USB cable and launch the Android File Transfer program from your Applications folder to view the file system from your Android device. Drag and drop your files to transfer to and from your device.

What’s the issue? Internet Explorer, again! The jQuery fade transitions work by step adjusting the opacity on the target object. IE 7 and 8′s opacity filter has an bug that translates color #02050A to transparent so that nearly black shade in my slides was showing the light gray background color of the container div. One option I used was to open the images in Photoshop and replace the color of the pixels that were set to #02050A to a variation close enough so that the eye can’t really tell the difference. That was okay in my case as the impacted pixels were few. If you have large regions or your graphics designer just really doesn’t want you messing with their images than a second option is to wrap the image with a div and set that div’s background color to #02050A. Either way your jQuery fadeIn/Out transitions should look the same now in IE 7/8 as they do in every other browser.

Dear Valued Customer:

In the normal process of reviewing our system activity, our Security Team discovered that an unauthorized third party may have viewed your account information, including payment card data. We immediately took action to protect our customers, including notifying federal law enforcement authorities, who have since seized the computing equipment and records of the single individual suspected of this misconduct. The criminal investigation is ongoing, and we will continue to assist the authorities in working toward a successful prosecution.

The security and reliability of our platform is fundamental to our business, as is the trust and faith that our customers place in us. We have completed a rigorous audit conducted by a leading security firm. There were three important findings that lead us to believe the situation has been contained:

1. The method utilized by the suspect to gain access has been identified and remediated.
2. It appears that the suspect’s sole motive was to acquire free services from us. We have no evidence suggesting that the suspect was targeting customer infrastructure or payment cards.
3. We have no indication that any customer information was shared with any other unauthorized parties or that there has been unauthorized use of any cardholder’s data.

In addition, we are instituting a series of new measures designed to further enhance security. Any information that you may need in order to comply with these measures will be communicated through the user portal and the support ticketing system. As an added precaution, affected cardholders will receive a letter in the mail offering credit monitoring services at our expense.

…

Last week 77 million Sony Playstation Network accounts were compromised including logins, passwords and credit card information. In early April an Epsilon hack exposed millions of e-mail addresses from well known companies, although not technically confidential information it puts their security practices in question. The list goes on. To read more about these events and stay up to date on events as they occur, check out DataLossDB.org.

You can read more of the details here.

The real problem here is that Amazon themselves either did not fully understand the complexity of their own infrastructure or at least the sales and marketing group wasn’t fully communicating with the engineering and operations team. Amazon’s availability zones were supposed to be independent of each other and thus able to tolerate and isolate system component failure in any single specific zone without crossover effect on others. Their Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service which is the persistent storage layer (disk) in the AWS stack however was not so autonomous and it’s failure or more specifically, capacity congestion triggered by likely the loss of heartbeat traffic between nodes which caused the storage nodes to begin establishing HA pairing with other nodes by re-mirroring their volumes, the result was complete backplane and raw storage capacity starvation, to the rest of us the effect was no response from EC2 and RDS instances for two plus days now.

How will this affect the rush to the cloud? In the short term it will slow down the pace of new migrations as business managers compare the risks versus fiscal costs of moving from proven private datacenter models to the budget conscious cloud model and Amazon is surely to feel fallout from this event through migrations from AWS to other platforms such as Rackspace, one of, if not the other enterprise class provider currently in the market (there are dozens of other cloud providers, Rackspace however is the closest service competitor with AWS). Then the question becomes how will Rackspace or others hold up to the short term pressure of this new customer base, a problem that AWS might have been facing due to the significant growth in their customer base in the past four months. In the long term this event will just become a faint memory, cloud models make too much sense for business cost controls, shifting technical responsibilities to technology companies and not maintaining the small silos of “IT” staff, often under trained and over worked, along with high costs for small scale datacenter operations can’t hold up over time, there is too much to gain from computing as a utility. Time will tell.

There certainly is a lot to ponder here as to the net effect of this “Disaster in the Cloud” but I guess we all have some time to do that while we wait for the Amazon to bring our systems and data back to us.