Aisle 10 . Net

Reason #306 why I hate Windows and Microsoft

Filed under: Computers, Hardware

Late last week, one of the computers in the design department died, and it turned out to be because the hard drive went.

This particular person had a bunch of documents and such saved in her My Documents folder that would be sorely missed. A couple months back, I came accross a application suite that is supposed to be able to recover data from “fucked” drives. (my words not theirs). Even to the point were the hard drive is making that deathly clicking sound. I have used it with much success both of the times I have needed it before this.

The downside is that the application ONLY works in windows. The suite lets you read data from a variety of file systems, NTFS, FAT(32), Mac crap, UFS, ext2..etc. Basically it can read anything that has Windows, Linux, Mac crap, or Solaris on it. Why the manufacturer chose windows as the platform of choice? no idea, but hey, it works so get over it right?

So I put the IDE drive in a USB case and plug it into the USB port on the computer I had to install windows on, and let it run. The program takes a while to weed through the disk looking for stuff, and since by the time I had found a computer to use, installed windows plus all 567 patches from windows update, it was already friday afternoon, so the program was still analyzing the disk when I left work at 5:30.

I come in today after the long weekend, and the computer is sitting at the login screen. After it starts up, I see a pretty litty information box informing me that Windows has to install an important update, and automatically rebooted the computer for me.

Oh thank you! I definately couldn’t have done that myself. It’s not like I updated the computer with every patch available before I even started analyzing the drive on friday. So, now I get to start from square one again.

It takes a good 3-4 hours for this program to analyze the drive.

Microsoft is a bunch of dirty dirty whores.

And yes, I know that turning off automatic updates is an option, but that is not my point. My point is that if an application is open, maybe it shouldn’t automatically reboot the damn machine.

Also, the application suite is called Stellar Phoenix. I highly recommend it. It hasn’t failed me once, and one time I had a 200 gig drive filled with everything I could think of, and I got almost all of it back after the drive died. It’s a bit pricey though

Microsofts stupid windows update as ISO’s idea

Filed under: Computers

Security And Critical Updates Available On CD Image FilesMicrosoft now releases ISO-9660 CD image files that contain all the security and critical updates that are released on the Microsoft Windows Update Web site for Windows and for other Microsoft products. The ISO image files are released at the same time as security and critical updates are released on the Windows Update Web site. The ISO image files are intended for corporate administrators who: Manage large multinational organizations…

This just seems like a near pointless PR stunt. The only time I could see this being useful is if your Darren and are downloading files over a 14.4k internet connection.

If your involved in updating the windows machines in a “large multinational organization” and don’t have your own internal windows update server, I think Microsoft should be handing you one of those “how to write your resume” cd’s instead of all the updates on an ISO.

good ‘ol qmail

Filed under: Administration, Linux

I decided I would start being more “vigilant” in finding some consulting work, and I came a fairly easy one that basically involves installing qmail.

That will be in another post because I have a bunch to say about consulting work and the likes.

Anyway, I was looking through the Makefile for qmail, and saw line and it made me laugh:

OS_SPECIFIC=#-DSOLARIS_STUPIDITY
yes, this entire post was disjointed, ran all over the place, and probably has spelling errors, but that is what makes me special.

Mail spool full on a Postfix mail server

Filed under: Administration, Linux

The default maximum mail spool size in postfix is 51200000 bytes. Since I get a trillion emails a day and only delete the small amount of spam that sneaks through my works spiffy mail filter, I apparantly went over the limit today. That is really sad considering I almost emptied my inbox maybe 2 months ago. I guess that goes to show that noone at my work uses the ticketing system like they are supposed to. Which is why I like them all so much.

Anyway, if you want to change the limit to a differant value, you just have to change one line in the postfix config and restart postfix.

If you have some version of the default postfix config, edit the main.cf and look for this line:

virtual_mailbox_limit = 51200000
if it isn’t there, just add it to the bottom, that way in case you missed it in the config, postfix will read your new entry last and overwrite the pre-defined value that you missed. If it is there, make sure its not defined at later on in the config as well, because then your changes won’t make a difference

Change it to whatever you want the new max queue size to be. I decided an extra 50 megs would be good, so mine looks like this:

mailbox_size_limit = 151200000

Then save the file and type:

postfix reload

now you’re all set, and you can now laugh at all the stupid other people at work that are stuck using Lotus Notes and have to purge their mailbox every 30 days before it gets deleted….or “archived”

A massive mesh network

Filed under: Hardware, ranting

Since I obviously have a major say in the business decisions of companies like Clear Channel. I decided that since all their billboards are usually around normal building height, and almost all of them have power to light up the stupid signs at night, they should install WiFi routers, or any preferrably a better high speed wireless technology in all the signs. They could make a massive mesh network out of property they already own or lease, They could probably throw a couple cell phone repeaters in there as well, but for all I know they might be too low.

From the 30 seconds of research I did, Clear Channel alone ownes over 775,000 billboards nationwide. If I spent more time writing this I could probably mention how many other companies owne, but I figured this was enough information for someone to steal my idea.

In the end my only goal is for comcast to actually have some competition in the broadband internet access market so the market will force them to lower theirridiculously outrageus prices on their over-exaggerated bandwidth claims

how to run a dedicated server on the cheap

Filed under: Administration, Linux

Since I don’t have much spare money, and my site, along with the other sites I host don’t generate much income. Here is a guide on how to get your own dedicated server, reliable mail delivery, and reliable DNS service.

Getting the server:
There are a million differant server hosting companies out there, and a bunch of differant setups.

1. Virtual Servers: These are the cheapest, but have many disadvantages. You really don’t have your own server. You basically get an account on one big server that is sectioned off into a bunch of smaller servers. Each user has full control over their own section, but there are still plenty of ways where one users could inadvertantly effect the performance/reliability of your little server
2. Co-Located Servers: This gives you the most amount of control out of all the options. In this setup, you build/buy/steal your own server, and mail or deliver it to the hosting provider. They then attach it to their network, charge you a monthly fee, and then leave you alone.
3. Dedicated Servers: This is what I have, and in my opinion is the best bet for your average poor person, like me. This is basically like leasing a car. It’s your for as long as you want to pay for it, but as soon as you decide you don’t want it anymore, you’re left with no server to claim as your own. But other than that, a Co-Located and a Dedicated server are both the same.
4. Guerilla Hosting: This is where you take whatever computer you can find, and hide it somewhere in your works office or data center, and leach off of their network. This is the cheapest option, but it has its obvious implications

Where to install the server:

So now that you have your method of hosting your server picked out, now you have to find a place to put it. If you go to google and type in: dedicated server hosting (or whatever hosting choice you decided on) you will see there are hundreds of companies to choose from. All of the companies have their own advantages or disadvantages, but in my opinion at least, the biggest factors are

• price
• network perfomance
• specs on the server they give you,

So really who you choose is all up to you, but out of my latest search since I moved to my current provider, I looked through 30 or so differant companies, and settled on this on place that is based out of Germany. 1paket.com They are a real simple company. They do one thing, which is rent out dedicated servers, they have been extremely responsive about any problems I have had, and they had my new server up and running in less than a day.

Also, they only charge $75/month, which is pretty cheap.

Now on to the good stuff. Saving your ass

So now you have your server hosted somewhere, and you started setting it up. This brings up to the next 2 important things.

DNS: Unless you just want your server to only be accessible by its IP address, you’re going to need a reliable DNS setup. The first thing you need to decide on is who to make your primary name server.

1. Do it yourself - You can just install BIND on your new server and call it a day, but this has 2 big disadvantages. It is another service running on the same machine, which in the end is just another point of failure. If the machine goes down, any backup mail setup or anything like that goes out the window, you’re gone until you get everything back up. The second downside is that your introducing another hole for someone to sneak through and break into your system. Since there are other options available, it seems like that isn’t a decent trade off.
2. Pay for DNS - who wants to do that? on the other hand, you’re paying them to make sure their DNS setup always works, which might work out good
3. Use a web based DNS provider - Most of the dirt cheap domain name registrys these days offer DNS for free. Sometimes you don’t even need to buy a domain from them, but if you still need to buy one, it might not be a bad idea to get free hosting. I know mydomain.com does this, but I have had some problems with the reliability of their network, and the procedures they use to transfer domains. The site I currently use is XName. They offer completely free primary and backup DNS service, you can manage as many domains as you want, and they provide you with a company of the BIND config that you use, which makes restoring lost changes or even moving your DNS server elsewhere extremely easy, and as I said, they are free. However they will happily accept PayPal donations, and I strongly recommend taking that option. Their setup is better than most of the web based services I have seen, including ones that you pay for. Then get secondary DNS hosting somewhere else. This way, even if XName goes down, your domains will still resolve because your secondary DNS provider is still up and running somewhere else. RollerNet is another great company. They offer mail and backup DNS services for completely free, and if you send them $30, they give you a bunch of extra features as well.

Mail: Just like everything else, there are plenty of web based providers, but most of them cost money, and most of them don’t offer the large range of features that I need. So in my opinion the best setup is to host all your mail services locally, using Postfix or something similar, and then setup a backup MX record that points to a provider that will hold the mail until your server comes back up in the event of a crash or network outage. For this you should go back to the company I mentioned earlier…RollerNet. They offer a ton of mail serving features, including store and forward, which lets you make them your primary and backup mail host, and they deliver the mail to whatever mail server you tell them to, making your real mail server hidden from the public. Spam control, DNSBL, SPF, along with a ton of other features.

So, you should go check out:

1paket.com - extra cheap and reliably server hosting

RollerNet - reliable free mail and free DNS hosting

XName - reliable free DNS hosting

Is MS Windows ready for the desktop?

Filed under: Linux

Read this:

Is Microsoft Windows ready for the desktop?

This is a real funny article. Looking past all the sarcasm and humor, sadly it’s all true. Especially the part about “Non-Voluntary Contributions” or “NVC” for short.

whois and traceroute suck. WhoB, and LFT are where the party is

Filed under: Administration

Last night I was trying to track down why all these odd HTTP requests were going to a server I am working on. It looked like the server got listed on some web proxy list or something, because basically every request that came in was in the form of

GET http://randomsitename.com

What was even more weird was that every once of those crazy requests was for either a random little search engine, or a bunch of popular 3rd party ad servers.

Either way, the end result was that I had about 280 IP addresses that all these requests were from, and I was trying to find some kind of link to why all these IP’s were sending requests to this one random server that hasn’t even been put into production yet.

looking at whois output gets real boring after a while, plus most whois clients don’t handle bulk processing very well, and I wasn’t really interested in sitting around and either manually running whois queries on 280 IP’s or staring at the output of all those whois records going by.

Then I found this little tool called WhoB. WhoB is a really handy little command line whois client that is designed to product all its output on 1 pipe delimited line, which makes it really easy to use with grep or awk. Also, WhoB uses a variety of sources to get its data. It primarily looks up information derived from the global internet routing table, as opposed to the standard whois client, which sucks unless you specify which whois database to use (and you need to know its address), which makes things really inconvenient if the addresses you are researching are scattered internationally.

You can look WhoB manual on how to use it, by just typing this line:

for ii in `cat fulllist`; do whob -o $ii;sleep 10; done|tee ./whoisoutput

I was able to save all the output of the file, watch the results scroll by in the meantime, and have some nice easily grepable output, which after it has finished, told me that all the requests were from 2 very large networks in China. Also, in case you were wondering, I added the “sleep 10″ line because the ARIN database apparently cut me off because I was querying it at least once a second, and apparently they don’t like that.

Here is a sample of the output:

222.79.29.118 | origin-as 4134 (222.76.0.0/14) | CHINANET fujian province network

The -o option tells WhoB to display the organization name on file at whatever registrar for who owns that IP.

Also, WhoB comes in the same package as another really useful tool that I found last night as well called LFT. LFT is …

short for Layer Four Traceroute, is a sort of ‘traceroute’ that often works much faster (than the commonly-used Van Jacobson method) and goes through many configurations of packet-filter based firewalls. More importantly, LFT implements numerous other features including AS number lookups through several reliable sources, loose source routing, netblock name lookups, et al. What makes LFT unique? Rather than launching UDP probes in an attempt to elicit ICMP “TTL exceeded” from hosts in the path, LFT accomplishes substantively the same effect using TCP SYN or FIN probes. Then, LFT listens for “TTL exceeded” messages, TCP RST (reset), and various other interesting heuristics from firewalls or other gateways in the path. LFT also distinguishes between TCP-based protocols (source and destination), which make its statistics slightly more realistic, and gives a savvy user the ability to trace protocol routes, not just layer-3 (IP) hops.

LFT it a lot more useful than the normal traceroute command, I won’t say it actually ran any faster though.

Also, LFT/WhoB is available as a package in debian. If you’re using Ubuntu, you need to tell the package manager to use the “universe” package database, otherwise you will have to go to the LFT/WhoB website and download the debian package from there.

ubuntu on the Sun Utra20 with dual displays

Filed under: Linux, Ubuntu

After getting my Ultra 20 up and running, I didn’t like the pre-installed version of Solaris, and Windows XP 64bit sucked (although it did run, it was just incredibly buggy….suprise!) my new plan was to install Ubuntu, which is my current linux distro of choice, and my dual head display working, and install a vmware instance of Windows XP for when I want to run something that is windows only, like Google Earth.

So, after spending a couple hours on it, this is exactly what you need to do to get a dual head display working in Ubuntu on a Sun Ultra 20.

This quick howto assumes a bunch of things.

A. That you already installed Ubuntu and are able to login successfully and connect to the internet.
B. That you know how to use the vi editor (or at least know how to edit, save and quit) if you don’t, replace anywhere that I mention vi with whatever editor your comfortable with.
C. that I didn’t type anything wrong

Lastly, before we get into the good stuff, this probably will work with any install of Ubuntu where you are using teh nVidia Quadro FX 330 or similar card. You can get the the drivers mention later on by going here:
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/1.0-7676/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-7676-pkg2.run

These drivers should work on a good amount of nVidias product line, you can see if it works with your card by looking at the compatibility list here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_18897.html

Now onto the the how-to

1. start up ubuntu.

2. when you get to the gdm login manager, hit control-alt-F1 to get to a terminal window and then login.

3. type:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

4. put the Sun Ultra 20 supplement CD into the cdrom drive, and type :

sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

5. now type:

sudo vi /etc/ld.so.conf

before the /lib32 and /usr/lib32 lines, add the following:

/emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib

then save the file and exit

6. type:

sudo /sbin/ldconfig

8. now you will need to install a bunch of ubuntu packages that are not included by default.
linux-headers-2.6.12-9
linux-headers-2.6.12-9-amd64-generic
linux-kernel-headers
libc6-dev
gcc-3.4-base
linux-source-2.6.12
make
binutils 2.16.1-2ubuntu6

I installed them all one at a time because I didn’t know what I really needed at first, but you should be able to install them all at once by typing this at the prompt:

sudo apt-get linux-headers-2.6.12-9 \
linux-headers-2.6.12-9-amd64-generic \
linux-kernel-headers libc6-dev gcc-3.4-base \
linux-source-2.6.12 make binutils 2.16.1-2ubuntu6

9. Now you should be ready to actually install the drivers. cd into:
/media/cdrom/drivers/linux/display/64bit

10. then type:

sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-7667-pkg2.run

there are a bunch of command line options you can give it, so that you don’t have to use the wizard, and you can essentially let it just autoinstall the entire thing, not asking you anything.
This should get you real close:
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-7667-pkg2.run \
–accept-license \
–no-questions

11. Now, all that there is left to do is edit the xorg.conf config to use the new driver.
But first we need to backup the original config incase something explodes
so, type:

sudo cp /etc/X11R6/xorg.conf /etc/X11R6/xorg.conf.orig

12. now edit the config…. type:

sudo vi /etc/X11R6/xorg.conf
Look for the following 2 lines in the config, and either delete them, or comment them out. Both of them should be in the “Modules” section.
Load “GLcore”
Load “dri”

13. Now go to the “Device” section
and replace the line that says:
Driver “nv”
with
Driver “nvidia”

14. under the Driver “nvidia” line that you added a minute ago, add the following 2 lines:
Option “TwinView”
Option “MetaModes” “1280×1024,1280×1024″

The first one enables Nvidia’s “TwinView” mode. This tells the video card that you have 2 displays. Enabling this means that you don’t have to bother telling X anything really about the second display.

The next line tells X what graphics modes to use for both of the displays. In my case, I have 2 Dell LCD’s and they can only handle about 1280×1024. The first resolution is for the first display, the second is for the second display. They can be completely differant resolutions if you want.

Now save the file and exit.

15. All you have left to do now is restart gdm and hope nothing went wrong. type:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

if anything goes really wrong, you should still be able to hit control-alt-F1 to get back to the console, where you can stop gdm again and try to see what went wrong.

If you run into any problems, or want to enable other features or whatever, Nvidia included a pretty useful readme file on the Sun supplemant cd

A quick tour of the Sun Ultra 20

Filed under: Hardware

The other day I got my new Sun Ultra 20 workstation for my desk at work. Sun did a pretty good job putting it together, and if I wasn’t poor, I would probably buy one for my house. However, since I have no money, i’ll just pretend I own things through what my work provides me. It came with a gig of memory, onboard RAID, sound, ethernet, SATA, and an AMD Opteron 148 CPU. The hard drive is something like 74 gigs, and this model also included the optional nVidia 3D digital dual head video card.

The case is all metal, and has 2 firewire, 2 USB ports, a mic jack, and a heaphone jack. I noticed already that the headphone jack on the front of the computer (there is also the normal one on the back of the computer) has a ton of interference. You can hear hard drive noise, and even interference from the mouse every time you move the mouse or do anything.

On the back of a the case, there is nothing at all special going on, its as normal looking as you would expect. The fans, are real quite and are some of those fancy smanshy smart fans that powers up and down depending on how busy or hot the computer is, so during normal operation, you can barely notice that it’s even on.

The picture kind of sucks, but you can see that I got the optional 3D digital graphics card, which comes with an adapter that supports a dual head display. Also, the workstation has 3 PCI-X slots, and 3 normal PCI slots. It’s kind of dissapointing that there are no DB9 serial ports, which I often need, but I didn’t pay for it, so I guess I don’t really care. Also, I could always get a USB-DB9 serial port converter and be just fine.

I was real happy with the fact that Sun used the same hard drive mounting rails they use on virtually all of their servers/workstations nowadays. The motherboard has built in support for hardware base RAID, and uses those new spiffy SATA drives.

This is so much cleaner looking than old IDE or SCSI cables.

To further going along with the “no screws involved” plan, the CD/DVD-ROM uses some quick-release contraption for those days when you are on the move.

You can see there is a ton of empty space in the case. You can actually see right through from the front to the back of the case from the outside, and look at the fancy baffling setup that the CPU fan has.

Look at the 2 character LCD display in the middle of the picture. Instead of using horrible speaker beeps or those dumb color coded LED’s to tell you about hardware problems, it just displays the error code for you to go cry about

That’s my little tour of the Ultra 20.