ashleyknowles.net

I like to think I’m pretty good with the MacOS now, but let’s face it, there’s still a whole bunch of little things I’m still learning…

Take for example, how to boot up a CDROM or USB drive…

Turns out, a guy named Dan Rodney has compiled a list of frequently used keyboard shortcuts for the Mac, alot of which I seemed to figure out on my own, and then the rest..

Anyways, linky-dink  here – http://www.danrodney.com/mac/index.html

Still trying to find a way to send Page Up / Page Down / Home / End using VIM over SSH in Terminal… Instead, fn+Up Arrow (aka page up) scrolls the terminal window, and fn+Left Arrow (or maybe it’s right) mangles stuff up, instead of shooting to Home / End. Maybe Putty or something similar is the answer to this…

I had to install a PCI remote KVM card into a client’s server this afternoon. Oh how difficult that was!!!

So, servers these days, are 99% of the time modular in every single way… The problem I’m getting to here, is that, you no longer have separate cables for your power, reset, HDD, etc etc on the motherboard… Hey, that’s great 99% of the time, right?

Yeah… But what about that other 1%?

So I installed said KVM card, into a PCI slot, hurrah, no issues. KVM card in question has a pin header which you plug your old power switch and reset button onto, and then use the supplied “feature cable” to connect the KVM card to your motherboard’s pin header. In theory, that’s all just supposed to go like peaches and cream.

Here’s your 1%! The ribbon cable for the front panel’s pin header connection, firstly, was not long enough… But secondly, and more annoyingly, ALL of the pins are joined together in one “mega connector” encompassing all 16 odd pins in one connector to connect to the pins on the motherboard. UGH!

So we did a bit of a dodgey. The server in question now has no power button or reset switch, bar using the remote KVM software of course… In it’s replacement, we implemented the following:

1. Power state when mains power restored was set to ON. Essentially, your new power switch is the mains power switch. The server, provided it doesn’t lose its BIOS settings, will turn on automatically when you turn the mains power on…
2. We toyed with the idea of using the chassis intrusion switch as the new power switch, this failed, obviously, when you close the chassis, the switch is triggered, and 4 seconds later, it turns off. So chassis intrusion, I guess, could have just been reconnected as normal. No, we dodgied this up too. An old school (aka pre-SATA) IDE hard drive jumper was used to permanently short the chassis intrusion pins. Dodgy, yes, but the BIOS didn’t have any other option to turn it off… You do what ya gotta do, right?

Of note here, is the fact that ASUS servers, and chassis intrusion, REALLY SUCKS. We spent a good chunk of our time trying to actually get into a BIOS screen, but instead were told that the chassis had been intruded. It took multiple power draining exercises, battery removals, and generally changing everything back to how we had it to get anything to work. Suffice to say, if I never have to touch an ASUS server with chassis intrusion again, I would be the luckiest man in the world…

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen, considering their higher spec servers are just awesome value…

Back to my rant…

If you end up having this same problem, I suggest this… Buy a DELL/IBM/HP server with remote management capability. I liked the features of this little card we used, but the stuff around has totally put me off it, especially for whitebox servers. In future, spend the money and do it properly…

TeamViewer really doesn’t work too well if your connecting to a remote client and you need to test out their VPN connection…

Trust me…

As soon as that VPN connection is established, you lose your TeamViewer connection and have to wait for the client to re-establish it’s connection, before you can reconnect.

Heck, if you really want to get annoyed, reconnect, then disconnect the VPN connection…

Good luck, and happy frustrations!!!

p.s. you need to close TeamViewer completely and run it up again after disconnecting from a VPN, it doesn’t appear to recognise that the VPN has been disconnected, so doesn’t bother to try updating it’s session data with the TeamViewer servers…. BOOOOOOO.

p.p.s. I’m not 100% sure if this only occurs using PPTP style VPN connections, if I recall correctly, it also occurred with a Cisco VPN client IPSec connection…

I love AWStats. I literally look at the stats for this website, and my other’s, multiple times every day… Stat’s junkie much?

I’ve become quite analystic with my stats, noticing trends and changing my content to suit common searches, which I believe lead people to believe they are going to find what they are looking for. You could say I’m doing my bit to make my search results “useful” to web users…

But one particular search keyword caught my eye today…”-intitle” shows up in my search keywords… I went to my search phrases stats, and found this baby:

intitle resume for | intitle resume-of | intitle curriculum-vitae | intitle s-resume @ lawson or sharepoint or microsoft dynamics erp -intitle example -intitle examples -intitle samples -intitle sample -intitle submit -inurl edu -intitle templates -intitle -resume-parsing -inurl fake -postjobfree-com -resumebucket-com -dice-com -trovit-com

Interesting…

I’m curious if this is a new method taken by recruitment agencies and employers alike, to seek out new employees? Heck, I think it’s an ingenious idea, the amount of resumes posted on the web would outnumber Monster, Seek, and any all those other job related sites ten fold!

I hope whoever searched for this found what they were looking for, in this case, they found me, someone who has barely delved into the joys of SharePoint… I hope my resume reflected that Perhaps resumes need to be indexed better, by recognising the relevance of “little experience with SharePoint” or SharePoint falling under the heading “beginner”, or something along those lines. Something to think about, Google…

My boss forwarded me some emails from one of our client’s servers, dead disk, the usual. Get to the server, and it’s got nothing on the screen, typical… Reboot, no logical disks configured on the pov Promise RAID controller… Great.

Luckily for us, we run Acronis TrueImage on this client’s servers, which practically does a full disk image of the hard drives in the server. Again, luckily, because I don’t have to rebuild the server from scratch. YAY.

Paul, my boss, made the smart decision a while ago to install an Adaptec 1420SA RAID controller in this server, so hopefully, we won’t have any issues – I trust Adaptec, as I run a 2420SA at home with a RAID 10 array, and have never had any issues in the past 2 years or so of it running.

Getting to it, the process is simple. The server has an additional, non-RAID disk, which the Acronis images are stored on. Whack in the Acronis True Image Echo Server Universal Restore Boot CD (yes it’s a mouthful), and it all loads up nice and quick and we can begin the restore. Here’s where I am stuck, because, even though Acronis sees the RAID array, the universal restore still needs drivers, so Windows can see the array when it attempts to boot up. The problem here, is that I’m lazy, and I’m on my Mac, and Adaptec’s drivers are .exe’s… Luckily, I have VMWare with Windows 7 RC on it… Burn these drivers to a CD and we’re back up and running again.

The Acronis restore procedure is running now, around 40 minutes to restore some 50GB of data…

— edit, now 5 hours later —

This all worked nicely… NOT. I’ve been stuck in this little closet near on 7 hours now… I’ve been abused, and been told by a podiatrist how to do my job, and am totally over it. The nice bones in my body are still pushing through to get these guys *cough* idiots *cough* back online, so I’ll continue.

We keep restoring the image to the RAID array, probably done it about 5 times now… Everytime we’ve restored, we’ve received either a “missing NTLDR” or “disk read error” message after the POST screen disappears and it’s searching for operating systems… We’ve tried everything – resetting the BIOS, different partition sizes, different RAID controllers, and completely wiping the disks / formatting them… We’re at wits end… Last chance, or we’re blowing it away… This was supposed to be a nice little article about Acronis and how cool it is, but clearly, I’m not pushing that message anymore. I still love it, and it’s not to blame for what’s happening here, but I’m still going to hold it somewhat responsible…

We have an Adaptec 1420SA RAID controller installed in this server – Acronis sees the array on this perfectly fine, and we can restore to it, perfectly fine… Except, when you go to boot, it says ‘disk read error’ – we suspect this is because of the partition size. Loading the Windows Server install disk, we attempt to load the drivers for the card, but it doesn’t even let us – it sees the Promise onboard RAID controller, but refuses to acknowledge the presence of the Adaptec… I’m not sure why…

I’m totally over it. This is my last update on this story. Let’s just pretend it all worked, and come tomorrow, I’ll post something else that’s somewhat interesting.

This is an ooooollllddddd video from May, not long after we got Bella, our new cat. She’s a Siamese cross Russian Blue, absolutely beautiful cat. Anyways, at this point in time she really took a shining to Jackson. Didn’t really last long, now she runs whenever she sees him!

I got linked to this from Cruising Brisbane, and all I can say is “wow”.

This thing looks amazing, and the amount of fabrication work and complexity of the stuff installed in this is just jaw dropping. They’ve gone and taken a standard old 350Z and transformed it into something you’d expect to see in the pits at a Formula 1 event. Let’s just cap off some of the “awesome” dropped into this beast:

• Greddy twin turbo setup – the position of these turbos alone is just crazy, yet the Japs have managed to do it, yet again – just check out all the heat wrapping and you begin to realise that no expense, or corner, was cut
• Exhausts dumping out through the back of the strut towers, down behind the front of the front fender and out through the sideskirts
• The engine internals are pumped up, with a 3.8L stroker kit and Cosworth pistons, amongst other bits and pieces
• Air jacks all round – I have a soft spot for these, being the DIY’er I am, I love this kind of stuff.
• Massive Endless brakes all round
• Upgraded fuel system, which of course is just one of those things you have to do, or over-do, like these guys appear to have done. I think I counted 4 fuel pumps in the boot!
• “V mount” radiator and oil cooler setup, just look at the size of the oil cooler and you know this thing means business… I’m running something 1/3rd the side of that in my S15…
• Custom panels all round, including the bonnet. The bonnet has enough venting to allow small low flying birds to shoot through the front of the car and out the bonnet, although this is an entirely unlikely scenario.
• The custom inlet plenum is a work of art – another prime example of JUN’s handy work…
• And probably the hardest part of all this – an All Wheel Drive (AWD) conversion, with parts sourced from the R32 GTR, and a Hollinger 6 speed transmission…

What else can I say? Crazy Japanese, I think the saying goes, “I think that’s just so crazy, it’d work”. And it is…

Related Links

• http://racer-m.blogspot.com/2009/07/jun-awd-hyper-lemon-350z-r.html – original blog article I got sent to
• http://www.pbase.com/damond/making_of_jun_z33 – “the making of”, aka buildup, photo gallery

Checking through my stats, I’ve seen alot of hits from Google related to TeamViewer. I’m going to attempt to answer a few questions that I have seen results for, purely for traffic purposes

Authenticating with Windows Username/Password

I actually had to use this last week, cause for some odd reason, the password we configured for our custom TeamViewer app wouldn’t work for this particular client… Odd…

Firstly, this only appears to be available on Windows – I tried doing this on my Mac TeamViewer client but it wouldn’t work… Booooo. Might just be an old version, I couldn’t be stuffed checking right now…

That said, on your Windows TeamViewer client, after entering the Client ID and connecting, click the “Advanced” button on the Authorization screen to bring up a bunch more options. You should now have a “Authentication” drop down box, with TeamViewer and Windows as your options. Selecting Windows gives you a familiar, “Username, Password, Domain” style screen. Simple. Enter the details and click Log On. You’re done!

Blocking TeamViewer Access

This is probably something I’d not ever want to touch, purely because I have clients I NEED to connect to, but I understand that some systems administrators might feel the need to block their employees from setting up TeamViewer on their machines for remote access purposes, or just to stop outside parties from soliciting internal users into starting TeamViewer sessions…

The first way I can think of to block TeamViewer access, is by using Local Security Policies, or Group Policies. There is a nasty little policy option that enables you to block an application from running, if it matches a certain filename – obviously, use this with care!

The option you want to look for is located in User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Don’t run specified Windows applications.

Enable this policy, and simply add the TeamViewer executables (TeamViewer.exe, TeamViewer_Setup.exe, etc etc) to the “List of disallowed applications”.

Obviously, renaming the files is going to circumvent this… So moving on…

A quick NetStat on my Vista machine with the full TeamViewer client installed yielded the following result:

TCP    192.168.1.10:53039     server904:5938         ESTABLISHED
[TeamViewer.exe]

The answer is quite simple – block outgoing connections to TCP port 5938… This will stop the TeamViewer client from connecting back to TeamViewer’s central servers, which is necessary to generate the client ID, and to punch a hole through the firewall to allow people to connect in the first place.

You could probably set this on the local firewall, using Windows Firewall or perhaps by using your chosen centrally managed endpoint security package (Trend/Sophos/Symantec etc all have firewall options with their antivirus clients).

Today’s weird tech problem, I had to replace a network card in a client’s machine today. Simple, right? The card was a Netgear GA311, running a Realtek 8169 chipset. The chipset probably wouldn’t matter much, if I didn’t have so many bloody problems.

So I installed the hardware, and booted up into Windows XP. The card detected, I whacked in the CD, and let the Found New Hardware Wizard do it’s thing… Or die trying!

No matter what I tried, I continuously received the “Cannot find the specified file” error message. I did a search around and found numerous people having similar issues.

One such user on the Netgear forums posted that he manually copied the required driver files into the Windows\INF and Windows\System32\Drivers folders, but this had no effect on our install. Another user mentioned the Realtek drivers, which unfortunately, again, resulted in the same error.

I was quite annoyed at this time, ready to put my fist through the client’s touch screen LCD…

Then I found a tiny little registry hack courtesy of someone who had the patience to actually call Microsoft about it.

1. Backup HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network
2. Delete the “Config” key
3. Reboot
4. Reinstall drivers.

Hurrah! This worked a treat. Well sort of… I still had to install the Realtek drivers, the Netgear ones continued to error out… The Netgear drivers supplied on both the CD and on their website, both have a zero byte security catalogue file, which I suspect has something to do with it… Either way, I think I’ve seen similar issues with Netgear cards – from now on, I’ll be using Realtek drivers where there is one available, I simply don’t trust Netgear’s drivers anymore, especially considering they can’t bundle a working driver with hardware, or make one available on their website.

Windows 7!!!!!!

I’ve been using Windows 7 for a few months now, albeit virtualised, on my Mac, but I’ve been quite impressed with it. Running on a mere 1GB of memory, virtualised, it’s “nice”.

Today I upgraded one of our client’s machines to 7, using a fresh clean install of Windows 7 Pro, from REAL media. It was quite something. 7 seemed to install in around 20 minutes or so, and I had to comment “WTF, this just isn’t Windows like at all”.

I’m yet to run Windows 7 as an all day everyday platform, I can’t wait to be honest, but don’t think my work machine will be getting an upgrade anytime soon Given I use my Mac every other waking moment of the day, Windows 7 probably won’t see much life in my life besides what I’m subjected to by what my clients are using. I feel a little left out there…

I’ve also been looking in to the Windows Preinstallation Environment for Windows 7 (aka WinPE3.0), as I want to produce a “tech bench” disk we can use on our customer’s computers when they drop them in. Simple things like running Acronis TrueImage, and just being able to browse files on a drive, and edit the registry and run system restore tasks. We can get most of this functionality from the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4WIN) but I find it a little “clunky”, even though you can strip a lot out of it during the build stage.

Just another thing for my to do list