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Showing posts from 2012

Adventures in backups and restores - StorageCraft Shadow Protect

After taking a new client over recently I have been working with StorageCraft's Shadow Protect backup solution for servers:  http://www.storagecraft.com.au/   Initially I was just checking that the damn thing was backing stuff up to somewhere and trying to work through a multitude of other issues. Since these problems have settled down I've had more leisure to examine this product.  The server solution has a wide range of backup capabilities - full backups, incremental backups and continuous incremental backups. The incremental backups can be performed every 15 minutes and up from there. These are keyed back to an initial full backup of the server and are a sector by sector backup. This means we can mount the backup image as the next free drive on the server. One can simply copy across the lost files and then dismount the backup. It's elegant, simple and works well. There is a very nice extension to this as well - the Granular Recovery for Exchange. When needing to recov

Adventures with the HTC One X

Just a week and a half after espousing the wonders of my One X the damn thing had to be replaced. Yep - the autofocus on the camera wasn't working. If I stopped and restarted it several times it might work, but eventually failed completely. After searching the net for "HTC One X autofocus not working" and several other permutations of this, I found it's a hardware error. The local Optus dealer, to whom I'm deeply indebted swapped it without issue. The new phone works brilliantly and I'm happy to say that I'm taking plenty of snaps with it. I have also purchased it wallet type cover for it - I think it will protect the screen better than some of the other types of protectors out there. I do of course have a screen protector on it, but this won't necessarily stop keys or change in my pocket from damaging it. On to the next adventure with it!

HTC One X Review

So I have taken possession of my new phone, bidding a fond adieu to my beloved Nokia e72. Originally I was considering getting the One S, not the One X - as a cost thing more than anything else. At any rate, I've chosen the One X on a new plan only marginally more expensive than my previous plan, with slightly more included calls after some excellent selling by an uber efficient sales lass. Rather than re-type all the specs you can find them here:  http://www.htc.com/au/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs Key things to note are are the Quad core 1.5GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. The device itself is quite large - much bigger than the iPhone I use for work and it makes the iPhone seem quite a small phone. It makes the e72 even littler by comparison. The speed and the gorgeous screen make up for those slight detractions though. 4.7" Super LCD2 - oh so very bright, clear and lovely to look at. Reviewing photos taken by the 8 mega pixel camera is a joy, and taking pho

Exchange 2007 Send As from a different domain

Imagine this scenario, it may be one you've come across: the organisation you're working for / consulting to has a single Exchange Server (be it standalone or part of SBS) You have it receiving multiple domains e.g. example1.com and example2.com Users would like to send from name@example1.com and  from name@example2.com Exchange does not support this without either  adding an additional mailbox for example2.com to each user's Exchange account or  implementing some expensive third party software.  There is an easier way to do this and it has two separate parts to it: creating a relay for example2.com via the Exchange server, and setting up a dummy POP3/SMTP client in outlook to send as the second domain using the "From" drop down in the create email window in Outlook. Part 1 - Setting up an additional SMTP Relay to avoid the dreaded 550 5.7.1 Unable to Relay The Exchange server won't necessarily allow mail from a different domain to be relay

Samsung Galaxy Tablet 2 Review

Recently, through sheer blind luck, I was able to get a hold of one of these excellent little devices. A friend sent it down (he prefers his iPad) so I was able to play with it a bit before handing over to the wife for her amusement. The Galaxy Tablet is a 7" tablet, much like the Google Nexus I recently reviewed and use almost continually. At first blush here are the differences I noted: the user interface is different (naturally). I feel that the Galaxy's is more polished, looks crisper but is a lot more busy. The QWERTY keyboard interface for example has the numbers above it and the keys are smaller on screen than the Nexus. SD Card slot - upgradeable storage is a nice thing indeed. Weight, size and battery life appear comparable. My wife loves it. She wasn't convinced initially about a tablet and didn't think she could find a use for it. As a non-technical person it seemed like another gadget to her. Now though she uses it for Pinterest, Facebook, eBay, emai

Google Nexus 7 Review

For my recent birthday I purchased one of these excellent devices. I had been eyeing one off for several weeks - in lieu of an Apple iPad or similar device. I picked it up from JB HiFi here in town and paid less than what I'd pay online. The basic specs of the Nexus 7 are: Specifications SCREEN 7” 1280x800 HD display (216 ppi) Back-lit IPS display Scratch-resistant Corning glass 1.2MP front-facing camera WEIGHT 340 grams MEMORY 8 or 16 GB internal storage 1 GB RAM BATTERY 4325 mAh 9 hours of HD video playback 10 hours of web browsing 10 hours of e-reading 300 hours of standby CPU Quad-core Tegra 3 processor SIZE 198.5 x 120 x 10.45mm WIRELESS WiFi 802.11 b/g/n Bluetooth USB Micro USB OS Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) FEATURES Microphone NFC (Android Beam) Accelerometer GPS Magnetometer Gyroscope General Information These specs come from the Google Website here:  http://ww

Further adventures with the HP N40L and Dragonfly BSD

Since my last post, I've tried a bunch of different things with this box. These include: Xenserver with the following virtual machines: Ubuntu Server Windows Home Server 2011 FreeNAS DragonflyBSD Ubuntu Server Linux Mint 13 Having the 2TB mirror has caused many of the problems. FreeNAS simply crashed and used 100% of CPU the as soon as I tried to copy a file. Dragonfly wouldn't install. Ubuntu took 4 days to build a software RAID and then when we had a power failure, the RAID failed to build again. There was a lot of frustration and perhaps a cranky swear word or two. Eventually I decided to follow this route: Installed Linux Mint 13 on the box, set up a software RAID for the large disks, and left the other disks simply as an install disk and an archive disk.  moved all the data from my Netgear Stora to the new server I've deployed it to replace my server and my media PC, allowing me to ditch two PCs, one UPS and the Stora. Yes I'm going a bit

Adventures with XenServer on the N40L Microserver

Since my last post (in amongst family and work and stuff) I've been playing with Xenserver and the N40L Microserver. Here's how it's gone down: The initial install went quite well, except I had configured two mirrored RAID arrays - one with 2 x 1TB disks, the other with 2 x 2TB disks. Xenserver saw neither of them. So I removed both arrays, set the SATA controller back to AHCI and went from there. After a quick re-install, I had an initial local storage of 1TB. Following this I added three more local storage devices and re-thought how I was going to do the installation of my VMs. Following the exceptional directions on creating an Ubuntu 12.04LTS server on Xenserver from http://www.invalidlogic.com/2012/05/01/deploying-ubuntu-12-04-on-xenserver-made-easy  I created a 12.04 Ubuntu virtual server - all went very well. In accordance with my plan, I also created a Windows Home Server 2011 using the Windows 2008R2 template. The WHS2011 server was so slow to install, setup

Adventures with my new HP N40L Microserver

I took delivery today of my brand new HP N40L Microserver. I plan to use it to replace my existing whitebox server, Netgear Stora and add to my network at home. The idea is to install Citrix XenServer on this little box, then virtual guests running Ubuntu 10.04LTS, Windows Server (of some variety - 2008R2 or maybe Windows Home Server) and if required FreeNAS or another *BSD product (for fun). The default N40L comes with 2GB of RAM, 250GB HDD and a 1.5GHz processor. I've updated the RAM to 8GB of RAM and I'll put a couple of 2TB HDDs in and probably 2 1TB HDDs disks as well.   The idea is then to set up two RAID arrays - one for the install of operating systems and associated applications, one as a storage pool for data (hopefully 2TB will be enough initially). I'll look into using 4 x 2TB disks in RAID10 and see what happens. Here we go!

Munin for Monitoring

Lately I've been very busy with work, but I find that I still need to keep an eye on the Linux servers I have kicking around at home and at the office. I use Nagios for basic monitoring (ping, smtp, http) but wanted something a bit more fine grained on the actual host itself. I stumbled on munin when doing some Google searching. Munin's homepage is here: http://munin-monitoring.org and I'm running it on a variety of servers at them moment (mostly Ubuntu and Debian). It supports quite a few distributions and operating systems so check it out if you're interested in seeing what's happening on your servers. I like the many graphs that it produces to demonstrate what's happening and I also fell into the trap of trying to over-configure things. There are only a couple of basic things to change to suit yourself, restart apache2 and munin-node and it's slamming. It also monitors multiple machines - install munin-node instead of munin and  munin-node and confi

Further experiences with Virtualization - VMware ESXi and Oracle Virtualization

So continuing in the vein of trying out these virtualization options in the marketplace I looked into the big gun - VMware to see how that would go on my cheapernetwork. Alas, my attempts were doomed to fail. The initial installation of ESXi failed - it was unable to detect the hard disk drives in my HP virtual servers. It was a bit of a WTF moment - that a fairly easily available mainboard, with no special interfaces or anything like that. The disks were fairly standard SATA disks - Seagate drives both. 160GB so not small and not unusually large. At any rate, after trying different disks, going to the console prompt and looking there I gave up. dmesg didn't even detect the /dev/sd i  disks at all and the more I investigated the more I found that there were some hardware limitations. Given I have limited time, I abandoned my VMware attempts and instead looked into Oracle's Virtualization offerings. The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of the downloads for the com

Experiences with Virtualisation - XenServer

I have been experimenting with different virtualisation technologies lately. At work I already run a Microsoft Hyper-V server with two Ubuntu servers running on it. One is an OTRS (ticketing system) server and the other an FTP / DNS server. This server is a 1RU rackmount box with no virtualisation supported on the hardware. Oh well... it still runs reasonably well, however, I've found that under high disk / network load, the virtual machines grind to an absolute halt and I have to reset them. So I've begun expanding my horizons. Recently I searched for and found some small form factor desktops with support for virtualisation - namely: HP Compaq dc5750 Small Form Factor Black AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ Dua. I bought two (for the princely sum of $9 each plus postage so $130 (!) delivered) - they came with 1GB of RAM and 80GB HDD. I've upgraded the RAM in both to 4GB and I've got more on order. I also turfed the disk drives - one had a dodgy sector an

A simple script to use either robocopy or xcopy to backup files

Under various circumstances, I've found it useful to cobble together a script to do a sync backup across the network from one Windows server to another. Usually this is for files only and is for either a mirror or a daily, full backup of data. Obviously there are some great backup tools available that make something like this largely unnecessary, however, this is quick, simple and gives you an email output of what has happened. The first example below uses robocopy (Robust Copy) which is a very nice bit of kit indeed. It's a bit more useful than xcopy and handles larger numbers of files better. Don't get me wrong, I love xcopy, but it has it's limitations. I use rsync a lot on Linux servers and robocopy gives me many similar options for how I want to handle files. The destination directory could be anything - another folder on the same PC, a removable disk, a mapped share or even a straight UNC path e.g. \\server\share - flexibility is the key for this script, once th

The Fundamentals of building Client Networks

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the best way to help my clients understand and engage with their IT networks and systems. I have also been thinking a lot about how to best manage and look after these systems for my clients in a sustainable way. In order to do this I've been looking at the fundamental basic building blocks of my client base and considering the commonalities. The reason for understanding these commonalities is to put into place simple guidelines for developing and maintaining a network. Each network will of course have certain unique circumstances but if the fundamental infrastructure is well understood, these unique aspects of each network will be easier to manage. So thinking of all of these things, I've looked at the commonalities in my clients and found they can be grouped into several broad categories: sites with a single server, single location and a small (less than 30) number of users. They may have some mobility but generally only a sma

Understanding a network

Recently I've been spending time with several prospective clients and I've found a few quite horrible things. The common, awful things stem from a complete lack of disclosure by the incumbent IT support consultants. In one instance, one of the clients aren't even allowed to have administrator access to their systems! They can't add or remove users, or perform any basic administrative functions. They are being kept in the dark and spoonfed bullshit by the IT guys. So when they get a hugely expensive proposal to upgrade their systems, the first, maybe even the second time they fall for it and finally they call someone else in to look at it. What I've found is awful - barely ethical behaviour by the IT consultants, systems with non-genuine software and lies to the client. Networks that are probably capable of so much more being poorly managed - even by basic standards. For example, several of them have multiple sites with poor data delivery - but rather than look at

Useful script for unrar files in multiple directories

A friend of mine recently asked me to help with a problem he had. When he downloaded files from the internet, no doubt legitimate, many of them contained nested directories with an rar file and associated components in them. Some of these downloads look like this (for example): Main Folder Sub-Folder 1 Sub-Folder 2 Sub-Folder  n  etc This is really tedious to go through each sub-folder and unrar each archive so I wrote a simple script for him to run straight from the linux/*BSD command line: angus@server: ~# directory=/path/to/directory ; for dir in $( ls $directory ) ; do cd $dir ; unrar e *.rar ; cp *.avi /path/to/end/directory ; cd .. ; done It seems to work relatively well. An expansion of this as a bash script: #!/bin/bash # Script to extract RAR files downloaded in torrents - usually TV series type torrents # This is the directory your torrents are downloaded to echo "Please input torrent directory: " read -r "input_torrent"

rtorrent - the friendly torrent application

I use rtorrent for my legitimate torrent requirements. I find it extremely useful and here is why: I run it on a linux server I have under a screen session so it's always available it's set to have an upload and a download limit for torrents stops after I've uploaded double what I've downloaded reliable easy to drive Of course, getting it to this point wasn't totally straightforward. I had to set up my .rtorrent.rc file in my home directory to get all this stuff to work properly. It isn't using 100% of the capabilities of rtorrent, merely the ones I find most useful. For example I don't have it set to check for new torrents in a particular directory - I add them manually for an additional measure of control and so torrents I'm finished seeding aren't accidentally added back in. It does send me an email when a download is finished, retains info about where each torrent is up to and stops if diskspace becomes low (which it occasionally does)

Restoring OTRS on an Ubuntu Server

Some time ago I relocated our OTRS server from a failing server to a virtual machine under Microsoft Hyper-V. While the change to a virtual machine ran smoothly and I used the details in a previous post to set it up, after a month I noticed some strange errors creeping in to the installation - the nightly log emails had inconsistencies in them. Fortunately I was able to run a full backup of the OTRS installation using the built in backup tool and very shortly thereafter the server fell in a heap. Rebooting it caused a complete failure of the virtual disk. Now, how the hell something like that happens is beyond me. It was like the virtual disk dropped a head or something.... Ridiculous I know, but the fsck I ran basically told me the disk had failed and corruptions crept in to everything on the disk. Realising that I was fighting a bad fight, I decided to create a new virtual machine and transfer the data back across. The recovery procedure, described here: http://doc.otrs.org/3.0/en/

Service Delivery in bandwidth poor locations

Being in the country presents some interesting challenges and one I find that I come up against frequently at the moment is, as the title suggests, getting needed services into various remote sites. Although ADSL is quite widespread, and where not available various wireless services (NextG and the like) are able to cover the connectivity issues. But in the case where one is attempting to link sites via a VPN, 512/512Kbps is really not enough for modern applications, particularly if you're pushing internet as well as mail and remote desktop connections over that particular link. Even an ADSL2+ link with speeds up to 24Mbps/1Mbps is not really adequate for the task at hand. So how to get around this? I'm thinking along the lines of a division of service, decentralising where possible and using cloud technologies to take the burden off the VPN links, that is, push email out to the cloud and whatever other services available out to the internet, thereby reducing the outgoing band

Skyrim issues

I really like playing the Elder Scrolls games - I've played and completed Morrowind, Oblivion and now I'm working through Skyrim. The issue I've got is frequent freezes. Now I play it on the PlayStation 3 and do that for a very specific reason - I don't have to worry about compatible hardware or any of that jazz, I just want to play the damned game. So when I find that a game, configured for very specific hardware crashes like this it's extremely irritating. I've got both the PS3 and the game patched to the latest updates so that's all current and I'm not missing any potential fixes. Generally I find the gameplay very good, enjoy the skill system and the levelling. I try to avoid using online walkthroughs or FAQ's - that's cheating! This means I occasionally screw things up and go back to a recent save (of which I have a lot because of the afore mentioned crashes) it costs me in time. In the 45 minutes I've played today it has crashed twice

Migrating to Blogger

Previously I had been using Google Sites to host www.ryv.id.au . Sites is great, don't get me wrong, however the main purpose of my webpage is to host this blog and I don't think that sites do it well. For example, it doesn't list the entries in date order, rather in alphabetical order on the left hand side. While this is OK for a webpage, it makes it difficult for a blog oriented site to be easily navigated. My other webpage - www.zenpiper.com  has a similar issue, only I also have other content on there not so easily migrated to Blogger. It's horses for courses naturally. I've used Blogger previously and been reasonably happy with it. I'll stick with it for now and review what's happening with Google Sites as I go. Naturally, as a Google Reseller, I'm trying to keep up with it to the best of my ability to offer it to my valued clients. AB out.

Adventures with OpenBSD - OpenBSD 5.0 on Sun Blade 1500

The scenario: Installation of OpenBSD 5.0 on an Sun Blade 1500. I've replaced the default XVR-600 piece of proprietary junk video card with a Sun PGX-64 PCI Video Graphics card that uses the mach64 chipset for rendering things. Instantly I had a much nicer console and a far more workable X configuration. The only trick was getting the bloody thing to use 1280x1024 with 24bit resolution on my 19" Dell monitor. Here are the notes from the exercise: Default installation man afterboot Dell E198FP Sync rates: 30 kHz to 81 kHz (automatic) 56 Hz to 76 Hz Make sure to copy the above into the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and also add: Section "Screen"         Identifier "Screen0"         Device     "Card0"         Monitor    "Monitor0"         DefaultDepth    24                 SubSection "Display"                 Viewport   0 0                 Depth     24                 Modes   "1280x1024"         EndSubSect

Further adventures with OpenBSD - XFCE vs Gnome

So continuing the great adventure - recently whenever I've used Gnome there is a string of "Starting file access" or something similar that appears in multiple tabs down the bottom. This continues endlessly and the load on my Blade 1500 gets up to about 5 which is unacceptable. So I hit the net and looked into using something different. I found a great blog (which I neglected to bookmark or make any other notes about)  that explained a bit about how to do it. Basically I did this: # pkg_add -i -vv pkg_mgr which is an easy way to do searches and install large number of packages and then go to X11 and pick all the XFCE packages. How easy is that? Download and install and off you go. The load on my machine is: angus@blade:~$ w 11:43AM  up 13 days, 21:04, 3 users, load averages: 0.71, 0.63, 0.59 With 792MB of RAM in use (of 2048MB) and this is with Firefox running while I write this entry.  Overall I find XFCE to be more responsive than Gnome - which is hardly surprising and

Configuring an Ubuntu server under Microsoft Hyper-V

It's fairly straightforward to make this happen. Do a basic config of the system and then: $ sudo vi /etc/initramfs-tools/modules      & add below lines hv_vmbus hv_storvsc hv_blkvsc hv_netvsc Save the file, then:  $ sudo update-initramfs –u $ sudo reboot $ sudo ifconfig -a $sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces      Add below lines for dhcp:      Auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp      Add below lines for static IP: auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 10.0.0.100 [IP address] netmask 255.255.255.0 [Subnet] gateway 10.0.0.1 [Default Gateway] Now restart networking service & reboot: $ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart $ sudo reboot And you will be good to go!

Further adventures with OpenBSD - Encrypting Files systems

So I decided to create an encrypted folder on my workstation to use as a storage device for work related files (which typically have passwords etc located in them). After some trial and error I found the way to do it. Blog entries and the like that reference this material mention using the svnd0 vnode device for the encryption but it doesn't work. I'm not sure if this is an OpenBSD 5 peculiarity or something to do with my Sparc install but I eventually sorted it out. Note: do all commands as the root user - it's a lot easier . I created the sparse file to be encrypted:      # dd if=/dev/zero of=/location/of/secret/file/.cryptfile bs=1024 count=1024000 Note that it's 1GB in size and has a preceeding "." so it's at least a little bit hidden from a casual ls search. I have to mount .cryptfile somewhere so I created a folder for that too:     # mkdir /media/crypt (or wherever you'd like to put it) I have to check what vnodes are available:     # vnconfig -