Scott.Buffington.me

Microserver, a photo by Scott

About a year ago I posted about my MacZFS pool that was comprised of multiple Thermaltake BlacX Docking stations connected via USB 2.0 to a Mac Mini Server. Despite many naysayers, this solutions worked perfectly for me over the past year. I did not encounter a single strange ZFS error, the drives were always available on boot and I streamed video and audio from the ZFS pool with no issues. From my experience, if you absolutely needed to use a cheap method such as this I would say go for it. I wanted to continue using ZFS, I wanted to upgrade my solution, I wanted a neater solution and I wanted it to be low cost.

While MacZFS has been rock solid, the ZFS version seems to be stagnant, though there is some talk on the mailing list lately about progressing the project. I started to price out a solution including the possibility of using Ten's Complement Zevo ZFS for Mac. Ideally I would have to also purchase a Firewire or Thunderbolt JBOD solution in order to have better disk read/write speeds and a more robust supported solution. Sure my USB solution was working okay, but it was a mess of wires and power adapters, I believe one comment on the picture I took of my old solution commented on how visually ugly it was. Using ZFS on Mac right now just looks to be an expensive investment and there is really no JBOD solutions for Thunderbolt and if there was, it would be expensive. All the Thunderbolt external drives are very expensive, if money were no object Thunderbolt would be fun to experiment with ZFS.

A lot of folks on the MacZFS mailing list were singing the praises of BSD and to get the most bang for my hard drive buck, I decided to take a look at FreeNAS. I used FreeNAS successfully back in 2008 with TimeMachine and my Apple and Linux desktops. At that time I moved away from FreeNAS because I had a similar ugly setup with USB drives connected to an old Dell desktop. If memory serves I believe I would occasionally have issues with connectivity, ZFS was also not supported or at least not fully supported at that time. Upon downloading FreeNAS and testing it on some old hardware I realized right away that FreeNAS had come a long way.

What I liked about FreeNAS was that I could install it on a USB drive or a flash drive, leaving any internal disks to create my ZFS Pool. If I went with FreeBSD or one of the open source Solaris builds I would have to install on an internal disk. Best of all, when I researched hardware for FreeNAS I stumbled upon a lot of folks using the HP ProLiant MicroServers. These Microservers offer a cheap and small footprint and are an impressive little chassis. Optimally I wanted a 64bit architecture with 8GB of memory so that I could take full advantage of ZFS. The HP ProLiant N40L met my ZFS requirments, has 4 SATA drive bays, and lots of USB connectors if I wanted to utilize any of the variety of USB attached storage I have sitting around the house.

Upon getting the HP ProLiant N40L, my only complaint is that I had to remove cables from the motherboard in order to max out the memory. The cables were extremely tight and were difficult to remove from the motherboard. Otherwise the HP ProLiant N40L has exceeded my expectations. There is a USB connector directly on the motherboard so I installed FreeNAS on a thumbdrive plugged in on the inside of the microserver, this avoids a wart from sticking out of any of the USB connectors on the front or back of the server. I had a lot of drives around the house so I was able to fill the N40L with 2TB Western Digital Green hard drives. The total investment was far less than it would have cost me to build a machine or buy new Mac hardware.

I went from having four USB connected drives with wires and plugs to a solution entirely housed within a chassis that has a footprint only slightly bigger than that of a Mac Mini. I was able to easily create a ZFS pool and I created some ZFS datasets for TimeMachine, my home grown backup solution and other odds and ends. Despite using a set of homegrown solutions built on rsync I do still utilize TimeMachine backups for my Macs. I just created a 1TB dataset so that TimeMachine would remove old backups once it used all of the 1TB I assigned for it's use, thus keeping TimeMachine from eating up my entire ZFS pool. The reason I continue to use TimeMachine is that the backup solution is the Apple approved backup and in the event of some sort of issue with one of the Mac computers I wanted TimeMachine backups for any Apple hardware that is under warranty.

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day, celebrated annually on the last Friday of July. A lot of you that read this blog are sysadmins like myself or you qualify as being recognized for your work on keeping the computer systems at your place of employment running smoothly. To each of you, Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day! Here is hoping that today finds you drinking a free quality coffee, feasting on free goodies or better yet, a free lunch with a craft beer for the road.

Recently a news article appeared regarding ZFS on Mac again, but this time rather than from Apple it was from startup Ten's Complement. This post is not about the work Ten's Complement is doing, but if you are curious you can read the article here. What caught my eye in the article was the kernel level project, MacZFS, which is the continued work on the open source code that was available from Apple before they shut their project down due to Sun's CDDL open source license.

When Apple dropped ZFS I no longer closely followed news on ZFS as it no longer fit my home setup, which has a Mac Mini Server at it's core. I briefly had an OpenSolaris server installed with ZFS, but the hardware was an old Dell desktop and when Oracle acquired Sun I lost confidence in OpenSolaris. With two of my primary computers being Macs I was content with sharing an external drive across my network for TimeMachine backups and rsync backups from my Linux computers. But now after learning more about the MacZFS project, I seriously considered making my backup solution a little more robust with a ZFS pool of disks. I was nearing capacity on my TimeMachine disk and decided that now was the time to risk a small investment in some hardware and explore ZFS again.

My goal was to purchase hardware that I could repurpose if my ZFS experiment failed. External multi-bay enclosure disk vaults did not fit my needs because these devices seem to always want to do RAID for you. There does not seem to be a home solution that is just a JBOD, at least I could not find a solution. It seems to me there is a market for this type of device. The reviews on all the disk vaults seemed mixed and locking you in to their proprietary RAID seemed like a big risk if something went wrong. Lots of horror stories exist about lost data on the proprietary RAID devices. I have been around tech long enough to know that a lot of bad reviews are from folks who did not know what they were doing. That being said, my goal was ZFS and for that I just needed connected raw disks.

Over the past two years I have been using a Thermaltake BlacX Docking Station with a Western Digital Green drive along with TimeMachine and rsync without a single problem. I leave the Thermaltake BlacX plugged in 24 hours a day and TimeMachine on all my Macs has worked wonderfully as well as rsync from my Linux computers. The Mac Mini Server has five USB connections and four of them were not being utilized as my Mac Mini is semi headless or I suppose in my case armless. I decided to purchase three of the Thermaltake BlacX USB 2.0 Docking Stations and three of the 2 TB Western Digital Green hard drives. The total cost was less than I would have paid for most, if not all of the vault enclosures alone, those vaults (Drobo for example) do not come with drives. I did not want to use standard USB external hard drives because from my experience these devices contain cheap hardware and are prone to failures. The Thermaltake BlacX and Western Digital drives have a proven record of reliability for me, and I knew I could repurpose this hardware if I ran into issues with ZFS over USB.

My only real concern was that my ZFS pool was going to be running over USB 2.0. I researched how well USB and ZFS work together and I found others that were running ZFS on the Mac quite successfully using USB attached hard drives, some folks using more questionable hardware than I was planning. Meaning that quite a few folks were using the standard USB external hard drives I was avoiding. Deciding to use ZFS on the Mac is something I would only recommend for folks who are system administrator types, mainly because there is some house cleaning you should do on a regular basis. I schedule daily snapshots taken of my filesystems and a weekly scrub of the ZFS pool to make sure everything is working correctly and is healthy and happy. For those wondering, the snapshots are sort of like TimeMachine with a lot less space overhead.

Some advantages to using ZFS are that the filesystem will assure files do not slowly degrade, something called bit rot. I have my entire ZFS pool using ZFS compression and some would argue that file access with ZFS compression turned on is faster than with compression turned off. So my music, video and photo library are kept on my ZFS pool and I run a daily rsync from each of my Linux and Mac computers to a backup filesystem I have on the ZFS pool. As mentioned earlier I have snapshots taken so that I could restore any files that might need restored to my ZFS pool.

Now you might be asking, what about TimeMachine? I opted not to use my ZFS pool as my TimeMachine backup, there are plenty of folks who do use ZFS with TimeMachine. I am still running TimeMachine backups to my old TimeMachine location (the 1 TB hard drive in the picture above) and consider TimeMachine as another level of backup protection. I have setup TimeMachine for non-Apple filesystems before and you can find another post on this blog about my use of FreeNAS and TimeMachine. TimeMachine is awesome, but finding files inside a TimeMachine bundle after a machine has been retired can be time consuming. I can access multiple versions of all my files on all my machines easily directly from my ZFS pool.

As far as the steps I used to setup the ZFS pool, I followed the getting started entry on the wiki at the MacZFS website step by step and I think I would be doing a disservice to others by not pointing you to those instructions. I have had my ZFS pool online for a month and I have not encountered any issues, my ZFS pool is available at boot and has had no errors or performance issues. I am actually quite happy with the file access speeds despite being USB 2.0 connected. I have read numerous posts on the MacZFS list asking why a ZFS pool is not available at boot. The reason is that the person asking did not follow the instructions over at the MacZFS wiki. The only additional items I would add that were not on the wiki is researching ZFS compression, snapshots and scrubbing. My three 2 TB drives got me roughly 3.6 TBs of usable disk space using RAID-Z with ZFS. Using compression and having four computers completely backed up, along with my photo, video and music libraries still has me with over 3.2 TBs of available space.

I am hoping that in the future Apple has Mac Mini Servers with multiple Thunderbolt interfaces and the next ZFS pool I build is connected via Thunderbolt. I have plenty of space left on my existing ZFS pool and ZFS makes it easy to expand as well. So I have plenty of time to wait and see what Apple does in the next few years. In the mean time I finally have the ZFS pool that I have wanted since first discovering the amazing benefits of ZFS.

Earlier this week I decided to upgrade my virtual web server to the latest version of TurnKey Linux, which is based on Ubuntu 10.04.01 with long term support until April 2015. Why not just do my own minimal install of Ubuntu Server? Well, Turnkey Linux has an awesome tklbam-backup that made migrating from my old install of TurnKey Linux to the new one almost painless. Once migrated to my new virtual server I discovered a few other things, cookies have been broken with my CMS for probably a very long time and I had no 404 pages setup. It is amazing what you discover does not work properly when you dig into an old website, even if you do not change anything related to the site itself.

For anyone considering setting up a Ubuntu (Debian) based server for any length of time, you absolutely have to checkout TurnKey Linux. I started using TurnKey Linux in early 2009 and I have been very happy with my choice. That choice looked even better when they announced TKLBAM last year. In a nutshell, TKLBAM is an easy and powerful system level backup and restore that makes migrating from one server to another extremely easy. In literally a couple minutes I had my websites moved from my old TurnKeyLinux virtual server to my new TurnKey Linux virtual server. All my users were migrated, almost all my software that I had additionally installed was there, the exception being modpagespeed, which is updated from Google's repository, not a TurnKey or Ubuntu repository. I also had to move one admin directory that is non-standard and I use as a home for system administration scripts. There are settings within TKLBAM where I could have had the directory included and maybe even the extra software. The fact is, TKLBAM saved me hours of work and likely saved me troubleshooting small Apache settings that I would have forgotten about if not for such an amazing tool.

One item I wanted to look at after migrating was adding the ability for my CMS to do some sort of cache of pages requested and built using the various scripts and database lookups. While playing around with caching I had to make sure that cookies still worked okay and that is when I discovered cookies were not working before I ever started implementing any sort of cache. No one commenting ever mentioned that there did not appear to be cookies used on my blog and I myself never noticed it. Once upon a time before Twitter when there seemed to be more conversation on blogs there was a specific request that I add cookies and I did. As best I can tell, once I moved toward using PHP5 the extra settings available are apparently needed in order for cookies to work properly. I added a couple more settings to the cookie and like magic they were working again. For the record, my simple cache solution is working as well. Although unless something I write some day gets Slashdotted I might not ever be able to tell if it helps. Pages due indeed cache and additional requests are served as static html.

Interestingly I also looked at the way I was presenting pages not found, a not very well thought out method of redirecting anything not found to my main page which had bots returning to urls that did not exist. I decided instead to present this as it should be and register the page as a 404, not found. But I had to be a little smarter, due to my cache, if the page was requested again Apache was presenting a 404 to the user but was using the cache and returning a 200, which is a page found. This might not seem like a big deal, I mean a user would see the 404, but it would be bad to return to a bot that the page existed. So I made sure to not cache a url that returned a 404, so multiple requests continually return a 404 just as it should. By the way, do I get geek cred for my 404 page?

I recently picked up a laptop that was an absolute steal. My primary need for the laptop was a portable computer I could put Linux on for programming and some microcontroller programming projects I have planned. As part of the deal the laptop came with Windows 7 64 bit Premium edition, there were no other options. I decided I could dual boot the laptop, using Linux to get work done and Windows 7 to play games and exercise my VB.NET programming knowledge. Everything went smoothly, until I decided to setup backups for the Windows side of the laptop. I had heard praises from those in the Microsoft community that the new Windows Backup feature was as great as TimeMachine is for the Mac and based off the constant commercials one would think Windows was all about using the network. Well, this all depends on whether you have the right version of Windows 7. Remember, I had no choice with the Windows 7 OS I received with the laptop, which was fine because gaming would be the primary use of Windows on the laptop.

Microsoft continues to distribute, not two, but three versions of Windows for home users and there is an additional enterprise version as well. That is four versions of Windows 7 and I might be missing some others meant for the business side of the house. Apparently the geniuses at Microsoft when deciding on naming conventions decided that Windows 7 Premium would be their crappy distribution, the distribution they would cripple, put on most machines and thus hopefully lure customers into buying multiple versions of their overpriced operating systems. You see, Windows 7 Premium edition has this aforementioned Windows Backup feature, but to use it you have to backup to a USB drive or burn a backup to a DVD (yes that is really an option and all you will see if you do not have other storage physically attached).

I have had a Mac Mini Server running OS X Snow Leopard Server for about two years and it has served me wonderfully, no matter if I were using one of my Linux machines, Macs and even OpenSolariscomputers. I have always been able to connect to the server and run backups to the server. OS X Snow Leopard Server has Samba to enable it to play nicely with Windows clients and sure enough I easily connected my Windows 7 Premium computer to the Samba share. I was able to read and write files just fine, but for some reason I did not see an option to backup to the shared drive when I opened Microsoft's powerful Windows Backup software. I just did not understand why I was not seeing any location except my DVD burner as a backup solution, that is until I looked at help, and I read this:

You can only save your backups on a network location on Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise.

There is absolutely no explanation that Microsoft can give why this is the case other than that they chose to cripple the feature in their operating system most commonly installed on new computers. I was able to map my Samba share to connect at each boot, so this is obviously not a shortcoming of Windows 7 Premium with connecting to network shares. This type of crap started with Windows XP and is why I happily left Microsoft in 2005 and have never looked back. This small taste of what running Windows is still like makes me happy that my home is filled with computers running other operating systems.

Imagine a family on a budget buys a new computer and a router capable of sharing a network drive out with the intent to backup their precious family photos only to find out that they need to shell out an additional $90 to upgrade to another operating system to use their network attached storage. You know with Microsoft constantly running their "to the cloud" commercials who would expect the operating system coming with their new computer not to do something as arbitrary as backup to a network share?

Rather than complain further I thought that I might instead offer a solution for others facing the same issue. At first I thought about writing a backup script but then found a free download from Microsoft that enables you to setup your own network backup on Windows 7 Premium edition. You can download SyncToy 2.1 from Microsoft that will give you the functionality that should have been built into Windows Backup software on all Microsoft's operating systems. Once you install the product, follow the instructions under the applications Help menu for setting up a Task Scheduler to automatically run any number of backups you want to setup within SyncToy. Hopefully this saves some of you the additional $90 Microsoft wants you to pay for enabling a feature that should be there out of the box. If you did not receive the operating system with your computer like I did, I would instead encourage you to use another operating system.

If you type about:flags in the omnibox and press Enter of your Chrome browser or on the Chrome OS on your CR-48 some experimental features are exposed to you that you can enable. Some seem to work now, others do not yet seem to be fully operational. The available experimental options are fewer on my CR-48, but there are some interesting features on both the browser and the operating system that are worth checking out.

Update: Anyone get the command line terminal VT2 to work? Wondering if that is for Cr-48 laptops switched to developer mode.

When I first began to dig into virtualization, other than z/VM and AIX virtualization, it was with VMware Server. Over the years I still toyed with VMware, particularly when the Windows guys need help getting around ESXi from the command line. But I had really moved to VirtualBox for a lot of my virtualization needs, which includes the hosting of this blog and my other websites. I am not very keen on Oracle however, especially their dismantling of OpenSolaris, so I decided to start using VMware again. My home server is a Mac Mini Server and I have always run a virtual machine that is the only piece open to the Internet. This meant that I needed to go with VMware Fusion, which is not free like VMware Server and VirtualBox.

While I want to move away from Oracle I did not want to drop a lot of money, especially since I was only using VMware Fusion for a Linux server. I beta tested VMware Fusion back when it was first released and I picked up the original VMware Fusion for a very reduced price, I no longer had it installed on my Macbook because I no longer had any use for any Windows programs. Thankfully VMware had an offer to pickup VMware Fusion 3 for $9.99 for past VMware purchasers. This was excellent news because the only computer I have powered on 24 hours a day is the Mac Mini Server, it is quiet and uses a lot less power than just about any other desktop. So if I am going to run a web server at home, it is going to be on this hardware.

The other issue I was having was that there was no way for me to import my VirtualBox VM, I tried several tools offered by VMware for OS X and I just kept getting errors. I am however using the excellent minimal Ubuntu Linux builds provided by the folks at Turnkey Linux. Better yet, they recently released a wonderful backup and migration tool called TKLBAM. I was able to backup my configuration, download a new VM from TurnKey Linux, start it in VMware Fusion and used TKLBAM to entirely restore my configuration. The only thing I had to do was copy over an administration directory that I always create for my root tools. All my websites were working right after the restore and have been running on the new VMware Fusion powered VM for the last 24 hours.

My next hurdle, worth mentioning because the specifics were not easy to find and most of the so called fixes were not what I was looking for, was running the VM headless and starting the VM at boot with no user intervention. My Mac Mini is a server and if it were to be rebooted I want all processes to restart along with the server. I was easily able to do this with VirtualBox and I had read some complaints that VMware Fusion 3 lost the method of starting a VM headless. I was able to modify my original script that executes at boot to execute the following command, which worked perfectly.

nohup /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmrun start /path/to/vmware/vmx_file/porter_ubuntu.vmx nogui

Overall I am perfectly happy with VMware Fusion and it is nice to know that if I someday have a need to integrate Windows onto my Macs I can do so nicely. After-all integrating the Windows desktop onto a Mac is where VMware Fusion really shines.

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day, celebrated annually on the last Friday of July. A lot of you that read this blog are sysadmins like myself or you qualify as being recognized for your work on keeping the computer systems at your place of employment running smoothly. To each of you, Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day! Here is hoping that today finds you drinking a free quality coffee, feasting on free donuts or better yet, a free lunch with a craft beer for the road.

Recently I was looking back over posts from years past and stumbled upon the results of my Internet connection speed test from Speedtest.net. Not that I have not used Speedtest.net since that post back in 2006, I have used it a few times every year since discovering the tool. What I did not realize I had, was a history of results dating back that far.

I found this history interesting so that I could see what, if any progress has been made since 2006. The results I am displaying here look pretty good, nearly 40MB download and and a nearly 2MB increase in upload speed. Before anyone gets too excited, this was the best result out of several that I ran. Mostly my download speed finished below the 2006 result. Although in Comcast's (or is it Xfinity) defense I noticed each test initially spiked over 30MB download speeds at the start, probably the speed burst they advertised heavily a while back. I noticed every test initially spiked at the start and then fell to a steady speed sometimes around the 2006 result and other times just below it. The upload was consistently and always greater than 2MB. As someone who hosts their own domain from their home I would actually like to see more of an increase on that upload speed, but to be honest my website has been stable and fast loading over the few years I have hosted from my home server.

It is worth noting that the 2006 result was run from my existing home with my existing cable modem. Also worth noting is that I ran the test to a Speedtest.net server out of Frederick, MD rather than Washington DC. I did however run some tests to the Washington DC location as well and experienced the same results, I just so happened to have the best overall result from the Frederick, MD server. The ping latency was always in the 20ms range, where in 2006 it appeared to be much higher.

It will be interesting to try and remember to continue testing this in the years to come to get an idea if we are continually getting faster download and upload performance or perhaps slower performance.

I remedied the issue with slow backups on the iPhone 3G a while back. It seems if you leave pictures on your iPhone and build up a library your backup during synchronization would begin to run really slow. In addition I have an application, iCamcorder that allows me to do video on my iPhone 3G. The not very well documented fix for speeding up the backup was always to migrate the photos and video to your computer and delete it from the iPhone. While building up a fresh collection of photos I mostly closed the backup procedure during synchronization with iTunes. The upgrade to iOS 4 requires a backup that if you cancel out of will cancel your upgrade. Before upgrading I first waited a few days, I usually always do this so the kinks are worked out, I then research the issues people are having. Surprisingly a lot of iPhone 3G users are having this slow backup issue and no one is providing them the correct fix.

If you have an iPhone 3G and you are experiencing the slow backup issue, just import all your photos and video if you have video into iPhoto or whatever program you use. Afterwards, delete all the photos and videos from your iPhone, then synchronize your iPhone with iTunes letting the backup run. The backup will run much faster and you will need this backup so that the update procedure can restore all your settings. After the synchronization is complete, initiate the Update of your iPhone 3G. Once I removed photos and videos the backup ran smoothly and the entire upgrade was completed in about 30 minutes.

Hopefully this post will help any remaining iPhone 3G users out there with the slow backup issue. As of the time of this post, I have been running iOS 4 on my iPhone 3G for over 24 hours and everything has been running great!

I have five perfectly functioning Ubuntu releases installed at the moment. Four LTS servers and a desktop that I wrestle with and complain about sound issues following every new release since 2008. There has been multiple times where I tell myself that I will not upgrade when the next release comes, but with each release I go ahead and update the desktop. This time I will be upgrading the servers as well as time permits, though I cannot ever recall having an issue with my server installations and in all likelihood I will be doing new server installs and migrating to the new server installs. I am admittedly a geek, but mostly I am probably more an operating system geek, so I know I will upgrade my desktop once again and in all likelihood I will be left troubleshooting a sound issue again. My son will be asking me why the sound does not work again and following a night or two of hacking at the computer I will have him happily computing again. I hope my existing settings are maintained and all is well, but I am also a realist and this has been the pattern over the past two years. I hate fixing things more than once, but I do like Ubuntu and usually feel the need to check out any new features. So, in a couple weeks, you know what I will be doing.

After a few hours of playing with skipfish, the Open Source web application security scanner from Google, you can color me impressed.

The first thing you want to do is download the 1.09 BETA Version. After just a couple days Google went up several beta versions and 1.09 worked awesomely for me. I was going to compile Skipfish on Mac OS X, but the requirement of libidn was so easy to meet on Ubuntu that I decided to compile skipfish on Ubuntu. The primary reason being is that I do not like to use Macports and I read about some folks having issues even after compiling libidn on their Macs.

Here are the commands (on Ubuntu Linux) to compile skipfish:

wget http://skipfish.googlecode.com/files/skipfish-1.09b.tgz

tar zxvf skipfish-1.09b.tgz

mv skipfish-1.09b skipfish

sudo apt-get install libidn11-dev

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

cd skipfish

make

cp dictionaries/complete.wl skipfish.wl

./skipfish -o skipfish_out http://www.yourdomain.com

(this creates an skipfish_out directory -- and make sure you put a domain to scan that you actually own.)

My scan ran about 47 minutes, at the conclusion of the scan you will have an index.html file that you can view from your browser within the skipfish_out directory. This will be the results of your scan nicely formatted. This is quick and dirty, the README file is quite helpful and there is a very informative wiki as well.

I have been an OpenDNS user for a few years now and I have been very happy using OpenDNS instead of Comcast's default DNS servers. While I noticed a improvement with how quickly pages loaded when switching to OpenDNS; some folks likely will not as mostly the change would be within a few milliseconds. However when I switched Comcast's DNS seemed to be having some problems with name resolution and it was well documented that Comcast's DNS servers were unpatched and vulnerable to a well known hack. I also liked the anit-phishing, malware and botnet protection. I recall at least one instance where the anti-phishing features saved a family member after clicking on a link in an email. There are numerous other features to like about OpenDNS as well, including web content filtering that will likely come in handy as the kids get older.

A few months ago Google announced that they were also providing public DNS, though they were skipping some of the extra features OpenDNS provides and opting instead to go with DNS that followed the standards exactly. This is still generally a nice alternative to what your ISP is likely providing and Google Public DNS does protect from malware. So while Google chooses not to offer any filtering they still have a secure and for many, faster DNS service.

I also use a number of Google services and I generally feel pretty comfortable with what Google offers. Although I do not have one complaint with OpenDNS and certainly have had no issues with my DNS experience. I decided that it might be worth looking at how fast Google Public DNS is compared to OpenDNS. I used this bash script which uses dig to test the speed of both DNS services. If you run from Linux, be sure dig is installed, dig ships installed by default on Mac OS X and BSD. The script will also provide results for your current DNS settings, so you will know if your ISP DNS settings beat either Google or OpenDNS.

#!/bin/bash
isp=$(dig +noall +stats 2>&1 | awk '$2~/^SERVER:$/{split($3,dnsip,"#");print dnsip[1]}');
m="-------------------------------------------------------------------------------";
s=" ";
h="+${m:0:25}+${m:0:12}+${m:0:12}+${m:0:12}+";
header=("Domain${s:0:23}" "My ISP${s:0:10}" "Google${s:0:10}" "OpenDNS${s:0:10}");
echo "${h}";
echo "| ${header[0]:0:23} | ${header[1]:0:10} | ${header[2]:0:10} | ${header[3]:0:10} |";
echo "${h}";
for i in "yahoo.com" "identi.ca" "twitter.com" "brutaldeluxe.us" "google.com" "bbc.co.uk" "scott.buffington.me";
do
ii="${i}${s:23}";
echo -n "| ${ii:0:23} |";
for j in "${isp}" "8.8.8.8" "208.67.222.222";
do
r="${s:10}$(dig +noall +stats +time=9 @${j} ${i} 2>&1 | awk '$2~/^Query$/{print $4" "$5}')";
echo -n " ${r:${#r}-10} |";
done
echo -ne "\n${h}\n";
done

While this probably is not an optimal test, I have to believe it gives a pretty accurate result for the speed of each lookup service. It appears that here in Lower Swatara Township, Pennsylvania that OpenDNS is faster.

+-------------------------+------------+------------+
| Domain | Google | OpenDNS |
+-------------------------+------------+------------+
| lifehacker.com | 27 msec | 19 msec |
+-------------------------+------------+------------+
| identi.ca | 27 msec | 18 msec |
+-------------------------+------------+------------+
| twitter.com | 30 msec | 19 msec |
+-------------------------+------------+------------+
| brutaldeluxe.us | 28 msec | 18 msec |
+-------------------------+------------+------------+
| google.com | 48 msec | 17 msec |
+-------------------------+------------+------------+
| bbc.co.uk | 27 msec | 20 msec |
+-------------------------+------------+------------+
| scott.buffington.me | 28 msec | 17 msec |
+-------------------------+------------+------------+

UPDATE 12/2/09 - Reprieve earned, I decided to try some quick trouble shooting on my son's computer. I used the Pulseaudio configuration tool to select the SoundBlaster on my computer and sound now works. Actually sound works better now that my card is properly selected than it has on any of the recent releases of Ubuntu that I have tried. I still feel that the installer needs to do a better job at properly identifying sound cards and selecting the correct card. Especially when your audio and video section of your support forum is loaded with unanswered inquiries as to how to fix sound.

UPDATE 11/09/09 - Hey look the exact same reaction from another person that just wishes Ubuntu would stop breaking sound and blaming the user.

I have gone on record in the past criticizing and praising releases of Ubuntu Linux. The Ubuntu Server edition has worked flawlessly for me for a number of years and I still use it to host my websites. I have administered Red Hat and SUSE flavors from a Server perspective and I find Ubuntu's Server to be right up there with those other enterprise flavors. It is with the desktop and Ubuntu that I have had a love hate relationship. The latest release is no different and it is totally because of the same issues I have been fighting with for the last year and a half. I had swore to a friend of mine that after I got the last version working that I would not upgrade ever again on that computer. The technology geek in me could not resist though, so I clicked the button to upgrade Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 and as expected I am sorry I did it.

Over the last year and a half every upgrade of Ubuntu meant that I spent a week trying to get sound to work. In the more distant past I had issues with wide screen resolutions, but I have not had those types of issues in over 2 years. But sound has been a thorn in my side for over a year on all my Dell desktops and I swore after getting sound working on Ubuntu 9.04 that I would never upgrade the computer again. Well, obviously I did and again the sound is gone on the computer, everything else works flawlessly. I am usually fine with trouble shooting these matters but the sound settings look to have changed a whole lot from the last version and some of the quick fixes I tried did not work at all. I think I am officially done with Linux on the desktop until I have a newer computer to put it on, and that is no guarantee sound will work. The same old replies in the support forums show up every time this occurs, either your hardware is too old or too new and you have to perform step 1 through 15 which may or may not work (usually does not work). I heard the same exact thing when I had issues with Windows 7 and I am sorry but a computer from 2005-2006 is not obsolete and Dell is one of the most widely used brands all telling me that it should be among the first to have supported hardware.

The computer I was running Ubuntu desktop on is the computer in my son's bedroom and the web browser with Flash is just about the most important application needed on that computer. Flash of course works, just no sound, which is sort of the same as Flash not working. It is just not Flash that has no sound, the computer plays no sound period. My son is now running OpenSolaris, and trust me OpenSolaris has it's problems as well, but once something is working or hardware is supported, that support is not removed the way it is with Linux. I have upgraded to the latest builds of OpenSolaris almost as soon as they were released over the last six months and so far have not been left with a non-working desktop even once.

About six or seven months back I tested a list of five or six different Linux distributions and every one of them left me with a desktop with no sound. I have had it, at least for now. Perhaps when the time comes where I replace a desktop and I do not do so with a Mac I will buy a machine with Linux installed. I hesitate to even try to build a desktop from this juncture because I cannot say with confidence from my experience I would know which sound cards are fully supported by Linux. I keep hearing that Pulseaudio is not the problem, well what is? I see the long list of people saying they have no sound with every release but there seems to be no fix, just a recurring problem. I understand getting an operating system to work on the variety of hardware that Linux does can be a challenge, I suppose I have grown tired of trouble shooting the no sound issue and quite frankly I have never been clear on what I did to fix sound on the prior releases. In most cases after trying a whole slew of different suggestions and rebooting 10 times it would suddenly just work. That never gave me a warm fuzzy feeling. As of now this is a OpenSolaris and Mac OS X household, I hope to welcome you back someday Linux.

UPDATE - I have to say, after upgrading I was less than excited.

If you would like to try Google Wave, comment or use the contact link to let me know. The email address you use when posting a comment or you use on my contact form will be the email address I send the invitation to. I have 20, so I have more than a few.

Seems I mostly write about technology more than anything lately, even though I seem to have less time to work on the technology than ever before. I am still working on completing my degree and the kids are providing more than enough other tasks for me to concentrate on. Still, I am managing to consolidate and improve the technologies I use here in the home. Recently I upgraded my home network, primarily the wireless side of things, as well as consolidated my home servers to one instead of two using OpenSolaris, VirtualBox and Turnkey Linux.

My wireless network while functional was in need of some tweaks. Previously I had tried running a mixed wireless G and N network and the results were never stable. To resolve this I setup a router that broadcast both a wireless G and a wireless N signal on two different channels and the results have been fantastic. I have a few older devices that use wireless G and I wanted to take full advantage of my wireless N devices. I also bridge my wireless network to my entertainment center and spent some time updating the DD-WRT firmeware on the bridged router. In addition I also setup a guest wireless G network for anyone visiting that needs to get to the Internet. The result of this effort is wireless coverage in every room of the house including the patio and back yard.

For the first time since starting the BDFL fantasy football league in 2003 I managed the entire draft over a wireless connection. I had two people using my guest wireless network, a Skype conference call with four participants and a remote chatroom with three users all while drafting dynamically on FleaFlicker.com. Over a four hour period we did not have any connection drops and our Skype quality was perfect. This was the first year where we did not have connectivity with the chatroom or Skype. Though none of those issues ever involved my connectivity, the chatroom problems last year were directly related to either Internet Explorer or the Windows Operating System (Sorry but this is accurate) and the Skype issues seemed to be another users hardware setup. I think everyone would agree that despite a late start due to weather related late arrivals, everything worked wonderfully.

Also over the past couple months I consolidated some of my hardware so that I could power down a server. Using some of my existing hardware I have installed OpenSolaris using ZFS, ZFS being the most revolutionary filesystem to come along in years. Currently I am using a couple 500 GB drives for a mirrored setup providing SSH filesystem shares to my entire home network. Depending on budget I would like to build something bigger next year, but for now this machine is providing an excellent home network server. I am also running my webserver for this same hardware using a Turnkey Linux Appliance within VirtualBox.

This was all pretty high level about some of my home technology projects that I have been playing around with over the past couple months. If you made it this far in the post and your interest in reading my blog is beyond technology, I am planning my first batch of homebrew in about a year in the next couple weeks. I will definitely blog about the upcoming batch of homebrew and likely provide some pictures.

When I purchased my first Mac in 2005 I had three primary wants or needs that I wished to be met. I combined those wish list wants and made a choice as to what operating system I would steer toward when purchasing new hardware to meet my computing needs. I of course decided on Apple back then and although I have been happy with my Apple purchases I am pretty far from being an Apple fan boy. I see signs that Apple may be pushing me away from their product line in the future, specifically with the handling of the iPhone and the operating system on the device.

August 2009 marks the 40th birthday of the UNIX operating system. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, used the monthlong absence of his wife and son to sit down and code some of the most important software ever. Thompson spent a week each writing the operating system, a shell, an editor and an assembler for what would eventually be called UNIX. Thompson and colleague, Dennis Ritchie, began coming up with ideas for UNIX earlier in 1969, but it was in August of 1969 that my favorite operating system of all-time was given life.

Remember your System Administrator this Friday, July 31st, 2009. Without a system administrator you would not be able to read this blog post, your email, check Facebook, Twitter, use your phone or well use any electronic media that travels across wires and is controlled by a computer.

More so than ever before Virtualization could be extremely useful for my personal use. Over the past few months I have been trying to come up with scenarios to reduce my need for multiple computers being used as well as multiple computers being powered on for extended periods of time as servers. Over the past couple years I have often used two computers acting as servers within my home, OpenSolaris and VirtualBox on one machine could replace both.

I kind of forgot about my LDAP server. Oh well, seems to be working just fine.

(w1mvsun01-root: /:129)-> uptime
8:49am up 542 day(s), 20:45, 1 user, load average: 0.07, 0.06, 0.06

I mentioned online backup services, specifically SpiderOak, before and I do think there prices are relatively reasonable. But in the current economy it can be difficult to warrant spending $10 or more for off-site backups. If you have a trusting friend who does not mind you borrowing some of his bandwidth at 3am, you can opt for my solution.

My buddy Scott Wood and I were throwing around ideas for off-site backups while chatting on instant messenger and we decided that the best option was to provide each other some space. He provides me some disk space and Secure shell authentication to his home server and I provide him some disk space and Secure Shell authentication to my home server. We are starting out relatively small for now, about 50 GB each, but it's free and a whole lot more than the 2 GB that the online services provide for free. If this solution works well we always have the option of sending larger disks to one another.

Provided you have a similar setup, you could use software like Unison, which works on Windows and UNIX (Linux, BSD and such) systems, to synchronize your files on two hosts. For the record, even if you do not have an off-site alternative, software like Unison is still worth looking into, Unison can even work with two disks on one computer. You might find other software that you like better if you take the time to search around.

On the Macbook my solution is to continue with TimeMachine for my on-site backups and I scheduled a AppleScript to run at 3am which calls rsync to synchronize my home directory with the backup at Scott's house. Since discovering rsync a couple years ago I literally have used it thousands of times. I used rsync to copy terabytes of data at work from an old filesystem to a new filesystem on the same machine which enabled me to initiate rsync off hours and stop it in the morning and resume where I left off later on. By using rsync I was assured that I did not miss any changes to any files as rsync updates any bits that changed with any file, rsync is an awesome utility and far superior to a standard copy for so many reasons.

"Now we're talking price. Snow Leopard will be $29 to upgrade for Leopard users. The Family Pack upgrade will be $49. It will be available in September, but the near-final developer preview will be available today." -- Bertrand Serlet

So, how much are we going to pay for Windows 7 which is just a fixed Vista? How long can Microsoft continue to run the cost commercials, nevermind every machine the people choose in the commercials are poorly reviewed junk. You get what you pay for folks, well you do from Apple anyway.

I have been actively using Facebook over the past few months and I have belonged to Facebook for years, mainly because almost my entire family is on there. I do enjoy keeping at least somewhat notified of what they might be doing. But also after using Facebook over this time I am not overly impressed with the interface. Facebook is much prettier than MySpace which should just die already, but the user interface on Facebook is still broken.

Facebook does not replace a blog, not if you actually want to write anything with any depth. The video sharing is not that great and the quality of the video saved is just barely acceptable. Photo gallery, it just does not really cut it in this category either. As far as a status updates, Twitter and my favorite Identi.ca are far superior. I view both Twitter and Identi.ca as being like a giant IRC channel allowing you to tune in and tune out whomever you choose. My first thought every time I check Facebook is that it is a cluttered mess. Maybe Facebook will find ways to remedy these issues, but for me they have a lot of work ahead.

Personally, the constant prompting spurred by my friend's use of every Facebook application under the Sun is very annoying. The utter onslaught of crap wanting access to my personal information makes it impossible to know if there are any Facebook applications that are worth using. I think everyone should be very wary of allowing each of these applications access to your personal information that may include your phone, email address and birth date to just name a few. I have mostly ignored all prompts, not because I do not care about some cause but because I have no wish to allow my personal information to be accessed by the owners of these applications.

Being a computer user who prefers UNIX and Unix-like operating systems I would be remiss if I did not point out that we are approaching an interesting number in UNIX time. On Friday the 13th of February, 2009 at 23:31:30, the UNIX time will be 1234567890. I am the first to admit this means nothing, and is no more interesting than when your car rolls over to 100,000 or perhaps 123,456.

So what is UNIX time? The simple and fairly accurate answer is that it is the number of seconds since midnight of January 1st, 1970. Of course with no way to measure leap seconds this is not entirely accurate, but you get the idea. There was similar interest in 2001 when the UNIX time reached 1 billion, coined the UNIX billenium by some and again in 2005 when UNIX time was all ones (1111111111). Arguably this is the last excuse for a celebration until 2033 when the second billenium is reached. If I am still using UNIX in 2033 and UNIX time is still around I will indeed be impressed.

Hey, it falls on a Friday night at 11:30pm. This seems to be a good excuse for me to pull one of my cellared beers from the basement and have a mini celebration. So get your little C programs or scripts ready to watch the countdown to 1234567890!

UPDATE: In the Eastern Time zone 6:31pm, my bad I should have realized this. Check it.

scotbuff@growler~/Scripts$ date -r 1234567890
Fri Feb 13 18:31:30 EST 2009

Or maybe Python is your style

scotbuff@growler~/Scripts$ python -c 'import time; print time.ctime(1234567890)'
Fri Feb 13 18:31:30 2009

Either way it depends on your Time Zone.

I thought a post was worth making on some recent technology thoughts and discoveries. A couple months back I posted on how I was using FreeNAS for my Time Machine backups. This solution worked fine and I was using it successfully up until this week. The reason I chose FreeNAS is because I was unable to use a shared drive plugged into the USB port of my old G4 Mac Mini, I could use USB attached drive on the Mac Mini but could not use it shared with Time Machine on my Macbook. I had hoped this was a bug or a snag in Time Machine and not some way that Apple was using to force their Time Capsule solution. Who knows with the way Apple has been behaving with some of their hardware and software recently. There have been a few updates to Leopard and some Time Machine updates included since I last tried this. I decided to give this another shot, mainly because I use my Mac Mini often and it uses a lot less power than the computer I had FreeNAS installed on. I attached a USB drive, shared the drive and accessed the drive from my Macbook. Accessing the drive from the other Mac is important, the drive showed up as a Time Machine option as soon as I accessed it from the Macbook. I was surprised, because this definitely did not work the last time I tried it, and I fiddled with it for a couple days. Thank you Apple for finally fixing this!

Over a year ago I posted about mine and others issues with Ubuntu 7.10 and I was really displeased with how Ubuntu was working out of the box. Since that time I have used versions 8.04 on an Eee PC and 8.10 on the same desktop I reference in the post in which I complained about Ubuntu's performance. I have also used 8.04 and 8.10 on several Web Servers. What a difference 2008 Ubuntu has been compared to 2007 Ubuntu. Color me impressed, the installations have worked flawlessly for me and version 8.10 on the machine from a year ago runs circles around the performance of Ubuntu 7.10 on the same machine. I can once again recommend Ubuntu as my distribution of choice for those new to Linux or for those that want a machine and operating system that "just works". I even started the practice of requesting CDs from Ubuntu again to distribute to co-workers and friends. People are sometimes more likely to try software if it is nicely packaged on a CD.

I have posted more than once about the things I like about the Xbox 360 console. The Xbox Live play, Xbox arcade and Netflix streaming are absolutely awesome. I am able to play the coop gaming that I prefer with friends all over the World. However, it is clear Microsoft has major problems with the hardware side of the house. As much as I feel the Xbox 360 is the killer console, especially with Neflix streaming, I would caution anyone buying this console to be ready for some frustration. My original console acquired the famous Red Ring of Death roughly six months after I purchased it; I made a mention of the Red Ring and getting the console repaired on this linkdump post. Almost a year and a half later, I again have another broken Xbox 360 console.

Since the serial number was different on the console that Microsoft sent back to me after the first repair I believe this was a brand new console and not a repaired console, but it could have been a refurbished machine. Whatever the case, I am forced to again ship my console to Microsoft, who thankfully extended the warranty to three years. Both repairs have been fully covered and I have not paid any fee for the "repairs" or the shipping, but I am still left without what is a major piece of our entertainment center for a month. While I usually only game on the console over the weekend, we do stream movies through the Xbox and it is our DVD player as well.

All of this leads me to believe that I will likely be left having to make a console buying decision as next Christmas approaches. The extended three year warranty will expire just before next Christmas and I am sure the repaired, or replacement Xbox 360 will break within the next year and a half. There are old console systems from the 1980's still working but Microsoft cannot make a console that lasts even two years. While I appreciate the extended warranty the frustrations of having to ship the console back to Microsoft will not soon be forgotten. I removed the horrible Windows operating system from all computers in my home over a year ago and have never looked back, do I have to rid my media center of Microsoft as well? I sure hope I am proven wrong and that the replacement console lasts, but I am sure you can understand that I am not very confident.

Thanks to another generous person I am now a Boxee member. I now have Boxee running on the AppleTV and a couple of my computers. Boxee certainly makes the AppleTV more valuable as well as any media computers you may have. If any of you would like a Boxee invite, let me know. Boxee does not yet have a Windows client, so you will need a computer running Linux, Mac Tiger or Leopard or an AppleTV.

In the age of computers and particularly Google who needs a reference book? If you have never actually seen the Pocket Ref by Thomas J. Glover you have never held so much knowledge in your hands. Measuring roughly 3 inches by 5 inches and containing well over 700 pages, you will find details on everything from Automotive to Welding. I do mean everything, including electronics, first aid, tools, knots, geology, weather and weights and measures to name just a few.

I cannot say that the first time I saw the book was on Mythbusters, but that show is where I became fully aware of its existence. It easily fits anywhere, from a toolbox to a kitchen drawer and could prove invaluable if you were without any other reference. Anyone could find useful information from this reference book, particularly if you are ever confronted with home repair of any sorts. If you have ever wondered which handsaw blade to use or what kind of bolt you need to replace that rusted one you have just removed, it is in the Pocket Ref. If you need an area code for Montana or Mongolia, the Pocket Ref has it. Need to know the birthstone of the month your wife was born, the Pocket Ref has it. Need to stop the bleeding in your hand after you cut it with the handsaw blade you just looked up, the Pocket Ref can help.

If there is one reference book that I will forever keep in my home, the Pocket Ref is it. In my opinion the Pocket Ref is the most useful book ever published and if there is one that is better, I want to know about it.

There are some simply amazing Network-attached storage solutions, Netgear and Drobo have awesome solutions. Although the cost is not horrible for these units, most times once your throw in all the drives you need it is a major investment. I am not saying it is not worth it, but not the kind of investment I am ready to make. Backups are essential, I have email and pictures with remote services, but I also keep a copy on my own media. My older Dell with two hard drives was more or less unused except for a test server. I have been thinking about a NAS for quite some time and have been thinking about many solutions. I looked to see if anyone had any luck with Time Machine and FreeNAS. I really wanted Apple's Time Machine to work with whatever solution I chose because I have two Macs that are my primary computers. At the same time I wanted to be able to get to the drives from Linux or even Windows if another Windows machine someday finds it's way back into my home. Jackpot, others had accomplished exactly what I wanted with FreeNAS.

FreeNAS is awesome because it is tiny BSD operating system and even if you use an internal drive, which you do not need to, the drive is still available to share. It is very, very easy to install and be up and tinkering in just minutes. Add in some additional 500 GB USB drives and you suddenly have some serious Network-attached storage.

FreeNAS is a free network-attached storage server, supporting: CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, rsync, AFP protocols, iSCSI, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, and software RAID (0,1,5), with a web-based configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 32 MB once installed on CompactFlash, hard drive or USB flash drive. FreeNAS is currently distributed as an ISO image and in source form. It is possible to run FreeNAS from a Live CD, with the configuration files stored on an MS-DOS-formatted floppy disk or MS-DOS-formatted USB disk. There is also a VMware disk image available. The minimal FreeBSD 6.2 distribution, web interface, PHP scripts, and documentation are based on m0n0wall. FreeNAS is released under the BSD license.

I used these instructions over at ReadyNAS to get Time Machine working, but the drives were available as soon as I created the AFP shares. You can share the same drives with multiple protocols and because you do all the work through the web interface the machine can sit in a corner somewhere with absolutely no keyboard, monitor or mouse. You can do everything through the web interface and an amazing amount of resources are available through the web interface. FreeNAS is awesome!

I still might someday pick up one of the fancier solutions that Drobo or Netgear offer. But right now, FreeNAS is handling my needs and if you have a spare computer, it can be really low powered, and any kind of drives I would recommend that you check FreeNAS out. It is always a good idea to keep another copy of your files somewhere.

I know this is about ten days old, but I am still catching up from vacation. I have concerns with a bandwidth limit whether I am currently close to that bandwidth limit or not. I have additional concerns that I am not being provided with how much I am consuming currently. For decades we have been provided with how many minutes we on our phone bills, there is absolutely no excuse for Comcast not providing all their customers with their current usage statistics while charging for going over some limit. I have no interest in installing programs on mutliple computers or my routers. Comcast obviously knows what your usage is, your usage statistics should appear on your statement or online when logging into your account.

To say that under 1% of their users approach the bandwidth limit does not calm my fears. With devices like the Xbox, Apple TV and Roku about to explode all of us are about to use much more bandwidth. I know for certain that the amount of bandwidth I consume is going to increase quite a lot when Netflix on the Xbox becomes a reality this Fall. I suspect that more devices that are always online will be entering my household in the next few years. As my kids get older they will be online more often, we may even have multiple devices streaming movies into our house.

My opinion is that if I am told I can only use so much a month I need to know how much I am currently using each month. If it were not for the fact that Comcast does not block any ports, I would seriously consider looking at Verizon. It is frustrating that we have so little choice for broadband.

I spent eight days totally unplugged last week. No cell phone, no computer and no iPod. Sure I watched some TV in the evenings, but otherwise I was more unplugged than I probably have been since 1993. Including work emails, I am working on nearly 2,000 emails and nearly 1,000 Google Reader items.

I love technology, but I loved being unplugged last week. It will take me all week to get caught up, but it was worth it.

I am a long time Comcast customer and while I have had some issues over the years I have mostly had good service. Some recent experiences and changing times with digital television have caused me to come up with some ideas on how Comcast could better serve their customers, both business and residential.

Last weekend a friend of mine had his Comcast Business installed, although I use the term installed loosely. Comcast actually uses the term install fee and after deciding with my friend what service would meet his needs Comcast sent him the agreement. They apparently gave him a deal by only charging him $99 dollars for the installation rather than the standard $250 fee. Shortly after the installer showed up, 5 minutes later than the three hour window they told him they would be there, it became evident this guy was just a cable TV contractor who knew little to nothing of what he was installing actually did. Short of plugging it in and making a phone call the installer did nothing, anyone can plug in a device and make a phone call. My friend was left unable to connect to the Internet at all and the only documentation was his list of hand written IP addresses, subnet mask and DNS servers. Let me stress, these were hand written and not very well. That was it, there was no booklet and he could not get to the Internet to begin searching for help.

I have several problems with this, by default Comcast should leave their Business customer with a booklet and a quick start guide suggesting several setups for their customers. Please explain the installation fee when you are only plugging in a device and making a phone call to a support site telling them to turn the service on. These fees are excessive when from a customer point of view you’re doing nothing for them but breaking their current Internet access. Most of the Comcast Business customers are small business owners that would have no clue where to begin with this equipment, but most could certainly plug in the device, a computer to the device and make a phone call, which is all the installer did. I really need an explanation of why you would have a setup fee of $250 and leave the customer with a broken setup.

A small business is going to choose Comcast Business as an affordable option, they do not then want to be without Internet until they can hire a networking guy to set up what Comcast should be doing or at least providing some sort of documentation. I read countless posts on networking forums with customers experiencing exactly what my friend experienced. I was able to setup the environment for him but I did have to do some research on the type of gateway Comcast was providing and I had to do so with no booklet. The entire experience was not very good and my friend made several calls to Comcast customer service. When he was connected with the outsourced customer service he could not understand the accent and the suggestions were horrible and just wrong for getting him set up the way he wanted.

Regarding the digital switchover, this is not so much a complaint of Comcast’s service; the switchover is barely going to affect me. I understand I will lose a few channels with the televisions I do not have hooked to a cable box. Which I also understand would not have to happen, sounds to me like Comcast is taking a little bit away to persuade customers to pay for their boxes. Comcast, if you are serious about customer service, why not at least include two digital boxes to paying customers. Most if not all cable subscribers have more than one television in their home. We currently have four in our home with only one hooked up to a digital HD/DVR box. The time has come where one additional standard digital box should be offered for no additional charge. This would be an excellent way to stay ahead of the competitors, if they are not already offering this type of option

The bottom line is that it is clear to me that Comcast appears to be the same old small town cable company that all of us have spent many hours waiting to show up, only to have them show up late or not at all. Comcast business is supposed to be an operation with businesses, yet you are providing no documentation and hand written notes with critical information that is barely legible. From a a residential point of view, Comcast clearly does not understand that other options exist, rather than take services from your existing customer, the Digital switchover provided an excellent opportunity for you to cater to the customer and come out looking nothing like the old cable company. From my perspective, you are failing on both the business and the residential front.

I have been considering returning to school for a while now and finally decided that this might be the time to take the necessary steps. In preparation for some online classes I thought I would dual boot one of my computers with a Microsoft operating system. At a Microsoft event a few months back I was given a free copy of Windows Vista Ultimate edition. I still have Windows XP laying around, but thought I would give Windows Vista a valid try.

So over the weekend I spent some time installing, configuring and using Vista Ultimate edition. I can say with absolutely no bias, Vista is really crap. Believe it, and I hope for your sake you do not have to experience it. The firewall is a mess and confusing or apparently lacking any standard outside of Redmond. Even when you allow connections they might not be allowed by the machine, the network seems non-compliant with anything that is not Microsoft. I ended up turning the firewall off completely, the router is enough for the little bit I will be using Vista. Also when the firewall takes an error, you are told you cannot see the error without switching to this other screen, stupid and left me wondering why. Using the Vista desktop reminded me of using Linux back in 2000 when it was not ready for the desktop. Nothing seemed to work well together or without extra clicking. Vista is a huge step backwards as far as a graphical user interface. Also, when installing something I had to okay the installation at least twice for everything I installed in the event I changed my mind in the last second I suppose. In reality I think I clicked more than twice to allow the installation before I was finished. The entire experience is horrible. Seriously, Windows XP is like a dream compared to Vista. During my prior use on a virtualized machine I never really did anything with Vista. Now that I actually started setting the thing up for use I can honestly say it feels unfinished. Which if it had not been out for something like two years I could maybe understand. At this stage, should it feel that way? I remember being impressed with Windows 95 and even liking XP when it first came out.

The network seems to be among the biggest problems. I have had absolutely no trouble accessing my Mac or Linux computers from one another, but for the life of me I cannot properly remote connect to the Vista machine from the Mac or Linux computers. If my kids are going to be using a computer I want to watch their use from my computer. Within the walls of my home you are not in America, you are in Buffland, a dictatorship run by me. Vista is interfering with my parenting and I AM NOT running another Microsoft operating system just to get to another Microsoft operating system. I spent enough time over the years repairing Microsoft computers ruined by teenagers to know that when it comes to family computers freedom is bad. If you monitor your kids behavior they will not be chatting with one of those weirdo’s Chris Hansen always exposes. I would not even consider keeping Vista on this computer if I had not been given a free copy from Microsoft. If I had paid for this, wow, I would have to say I would feel like I was sold a lemon and seriously pursue a refund. Even now I am considering reloading the computer with Windows XP.

Let's continue on with the GUI, yuck, the graphical interface, yuck, even with all the graphics turned on, yuck. Does anyone actually think this works? It resembles a bad OS X rip-off. Who came up with that design? It looks like a poorly designed webpage where someone found widgets from all around the web and embedded all of them. I switched to classic view, which still has problems. With all the bells and whistles turned off Vista uses over 500MB of memory. In regards to the behavior of the GUI, I have to click on everything to accomplish anything; nothing is done for me as it was on prior Windows operating systems. To go into programs I have to click the folder and to expand program folders I have to click each of them. This feels broken and old. I am used to just hovering and each would open. Thankfully I always set up the Quick Launch toolbar to access almost all my programs. Task Manager has been routinely hanging in a way that the close button disappears. I have to find task manager in the task manager list and kill it. This is a NEW install with all the updates, what the hell? More on Task Manger, why as an admin do I have to tell it to show me all the programs running? If I am left to do all this clicking and killing of programs, what is Vista doing with all that memory?

Every operating system has pieces you would like to see function differently, but never have I seen any group literally cripple their operating system to the extent that Microsoft has done with Vista. Vista Ultimate, I would really hate to experience the five other versions and learn what they are lacking. Perhaps in the next week I might get to do some actual computing, if I can stand it. Now we know why Microsoft has extended XP support until the release of the next Windows operating system. Vista deserves all the flak it is getting and it probably deserves more.

While trying to think of some ideas to introduce or spur a passion for Science in my kids I recalled launching model rockets growing up. One of my older brothers toyed with this hobby and me and some friends did also. The Estes kits are still widely available and I had a lot of success making my own rockets with cardboard and masking or duct tape. I only recall one incident where we had a pretty bad malfunction; a wing fell off the rocket during launch.

While I feel Ubuntu has done a lot for the growth of Linux on the desktop and I still have two computers running the Long Term Support, Hardy Heron in my household, it is time for me to branch out and try another operating system. While a tweaked Hardy Heron runs nicely on the Eee PC and the Hardy Heron Server Edition is powering a headless (no console and no desktop installed) older Dell that I only ssh into, I have grown tired of ATI graphics issues with Linux. While I understand the difficulty of supporting the loads of hardware that Linux does and I realize the manufacturers do not think of Linux first from the driver perspective, I have decided to try another road. With the official release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 a few weeks ago, I decided to give it a whirl.

First things first, I probably would not yet recommend OpenSolaris to just any user, but I am a long time UNIX guy and I am fairly confident a few of the Linux variants are still the best option for many users looking to escape the clutches of Microsoft or even Apple if they are too proprietary for you also. The last two or three releases of Ubuntu have just not worked well enough graphically on a few of my computers. This is largely due to the ATI video cards in some of my computers. OpenSolaris seems to do a much better job of supporting the ATI video card I have, the first test was that it could actually run the screensavers, something Ubuntu would do less than 10% of the time. Was the lack of screensavers a big deal to me? No, but the crashing of applications, the desktop and the beta web browser was. After a week of use, OpenSolaris has worked without any of the aforementioned issues. I simply used the screensaver test to determine how well the graphics card was supported and OpenSolaris performs better job for my computer.

Overall the entire system seems to run more solid and perhaps a little faster than it did with Ubuntu installed. I have run no official benchmarks, but I have not been asked for a week why something was not working on the computer by my son. My Hardy Heron install was a fresh install and I had the exact same issues I had after initially upgrading the system. Within the first day an educational game my son was playing hung, the desktop crashed a few times over the past couple weeks and I was not entirely happy to see that a beta web browser was the officially packaged browser. Yes I am aware I could install another browser, that is not the point.

OpenSolaris met my conditions for the computer in question, good graphics support, office documents support with Open Office, package management with IPS, virtualization possible with VirtualBox and nice entertainment software for the kids. OpenSolaris also has the same Gnome desktop that Hardy Heron has by default and a current but stable Firefox version. With DTrace and ZFS being extra technology perks, I am feeling even more confident on my decision to welcome OpenSolaris into my fold.

I have heard Samba takes some work to get working and for some users that could be an issue for some folks. Also the amount of packages does not come close to Linux, but almost certainly everything that most users would need is there. Besides, I have no problem compiling software if I am trying something out of the ordinary. For the first official release OpenSolaris looks nicely polished and meets my needs without me having to troubleshoot graphical issues. If you have had similar issues as myself, you might want to give OpenSolaris a try. I suspect Ian Murdock, the Debian GNU/Linux founder hired by Sun, is a very big reason for the quality of the release.

This is a NEW list of software for Mac OS X that I consider "must-have". The software on this list is software that I use frequently, but the list should be considered dynamic in nature, it may change at anytime. This list is additional software that does not come with the operating system and is updated for Leopard. I had this update sitting around for a while and rather than edit the original post which was geared toward Tiger, I thought I would put up a new post.

Internet and communications

Adium

Adium X is the best multi-protocol instant messenger client, and supports the major transports, such as AIM, ICQ, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more. The interface is very nice and the software is free.,

Firefox

I have used Firefox, well since it was called something else. Firefox has a handful of extensions that keep me using the browser, it is a good web browser but minus the specific extensions I could happily use Safari as well. As matter of fact, I mostly use Safari.

Fugu

Fugu is an open-source FTP and SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer) client and browser. Fugu has not been updated in a while, but it does everything I need and is free to boot. Transmit is wonderful software, but paying for such an application with Fugu available just seems silly to me.

Multimedia and Graphics

VLC

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. I used it on OS X and Linux and it even streamed Alex's ogg vorbis stream on the Mac when all others failed.

Audacity

Audacity is a free, open source software for recording and editing sounds in Mac OS X, Linux and other operating systems. I use this application to record my side of the podcasts, which I then export to FLAC format. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality.

Flickr Uploadr

The Flickr Uploadr provided free from Flickr is all I need to get my photos to Flickr. I drag and drop from iPhoto to the Flickr Uploadr where I can apply tags, descriptions and even create sets or add photos to existing sets. Recent releases have improved functionality, so if you have not checked it out in a while you might want to.

Gimp

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. I am in no way a graphic artist, GIMP serves this amateurs needs.

Productivity

NeoOffice

NeoOffice is a Mac-only port of OpenOffice.Org. It is a free and excellent office suite that meets all my office suite needs, and enables you to work with Microsoft generated office documents too. If you are using OpenOffice on the Mac, NeoOffice is what you should be using.

BuffSched

Buffsched is a command line scheduling application I wrote in shell script and is currently compatiable with Mac OS X, Linux, AIX, Solaris and HP-UX. A simple text file holds all your scheduled appointments and ignores any entries that are not in the BuffSched format. This is so you can keep a todo list, an address book and any other information you deem useful in the text file. I carry mine on a thumb drive so I can access and change my schedule at work and at home. I mostly use BuffSched on my servers as a replacement for Message of the Day and include the program in users default profile. I can easily keep users posted of scheduled maintenance with BuffSched.

MacVim

MacVim is a port of the text editor Vim to Mac OS X that is meant to look better and integrate more seamlessly with the Mac than the existing Carbon port. After trying other Mac Text editors, I am back to Vim. The bottom line is that I can install Vim on all the other operating systems I use and it works the same. Being an old UNIX jockey I am familiar with vi on the command line. There can be no argument, Vim is the best!

svnX

SvnX is an open source GUI for most features of the svn client binary. SvnX allows you to browse your working copies, spot changes and operate on them. SvnX can also browse logs and revisions of your repositories. I have been working with a Subversion server hosted on AIX and svnX has worked wonderfully.

System Tools

TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt is free open-source disk encryption software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. I use TrueCrypt to encrypt my thumbdrives and with TrueCrypt I can access the drives from my employers Windows machine or from any of my Linux or Mac computers. I needed a solution that I could use with all the major desktop operating systems, TrueCrypt is that solution. TrueCrypt is an awesome encryption solution even if you do not use a Mac.

VMware Fusion

I purchased VMware Fusion during the beta phase. VMware Fusion runs the only Windows installation found in my home and is useful for trying different distributions of Linux. Vmware Fusion has been running Windows Vista Ultimate edition on my Macbook just fine. Though I confess that I really have not had a reason to boot my virtual Windows guest in months.

Iomega Zip Drive Parallel Port
Originally uploaded by Scott B.

I must have lost the initial post that mentioned the Iomega Zip Drive when I converted my blog to my own blogging tool (some posts did not make it). I know once upon a time we discussed the Iomega Zip Drive here, sometime around July of 2004. My friend and I purchased the Zip 100 Parallel port models when they were initially released so that we could easily transport data back and forth from one another's home. This was around 1994-95 and we used the devices quite heavily through the late 1990's. During this time other models of the Zip drive were released and Iomega used cheap manufacturing practices and the device turned out to be a real lemon. The "Click of Death" was coined to describe what would happen to the Zip drives in a fairly short time.

I however had tremendous success with my "first" generation model of the Zip Drive. Although at one time the 100 MBs seemed huge, I remember installing games onto the disks rather than my hard drive to conserve space, now I struggle to find a use for my Parallel port Zip 100 Drive. Due to a shipping mistake, myself and my friend ended up with a supply of Zip 100 disks that I have never had to replenish. I still have disks that have never been written to waiting to replace disks that finally fail. I currently have the Zip Drive hooked up to my Linux backup webserver. Each night when I run my synchronize script to synchronize the website and MySQL database on the Mac Mini I place a dated gzipped copy of my databases onto a Zip Disk. This is one of three backup locations I use, this is not my mission critical backup but simply a use I found for my old Zip Drive.

The complaints about the majority of Zip Drives is very well warranted. I just find it amazing that the company apparently made a damn good product initially. My buddies Zip Drive no longer works, but it did still work well into the 2000s. Because of most folks experience, the Zip Drives have made countless "Worst Product" lists. Amazingly, my Zip Drive is still functioning 14 years after I bought it. I have no idea how much longer the drive will work, but I will likely hold onto this piece of hardware for nostalgia. When it does finally die, I have thought about retrofitting the device with a USB flash drive.

I felt this post was worth making since my late Saturday night, Sunday morning linkdump is going to contain a link to these very good instructions (discovered via Don Becker) for updating your Dell's BIOS, your computer's Basic Input/Output System. This refers to the firmware that is used to identify and initiate your hardware, in short it prepares everything for your operating system and other goodies. Anyway, I have probably done firmware upgrades hundreds of times over the years and I know better than to be distracted or hurry through this process.

Well, I hurried through this process with my Dell 8400, which is the computer I call brutal. I went through all the steps prior to turning in for the night, all except the warm reboot. I was updating via SSH from another room and something took me away from the task at hand. I went to bed and then the next morning I remembered that I still needed a "warm" reboot. This is where you tell your computer to restart, not power off. As I fed the dog, packed Jake's lunch and readied myself for work I decided to quickly reboot the computer. Stupid, not paying attention Scott selects power off, well the Dell 8400 did not like that and apparently the current firmware did not have any failsafe to fall back to the current firmware. Some computers when faced with this predicament will boot to the previous BIOS and boot right up, not the Dell 8400. The reason you need to do a warm reboot is because the new flash of firmware is held in memory, if you power down, your memory is cleared.

I knew I had to clear the CMOS and sometimes this can just involve pulling the CMOS battery, but I read that Dell uses jumpers for clearing the CMOS. I did not find specific instructions, I really did not look that hard, but I did read about a PASS or PSWD jumper or a CMOS jumper. I found a PASS jumper and a CMOS jumper, I pulled the CMOS jumper and powered the computer on. I then powered off the computer, replaced the CMOS jumper the machine booted telling me that the clock was not set. Nice, it worked.

I again followed the linked instructions, and this time properly did a "warm" reboot and my Dell 8400 is back in good working order. This little mistake allowed me some time to blow the dust out of the inside of the computer case with some canned air. The Dell 8400 is running quieter than it did previously, seemed the BIOS update slowed down the fan on the back, yes it is still running, but not as loudly. I will have to keep an eye on the machine and make sure it does not overheat, currently I am thinking that the fan was running way too hard anyway. Hopefully, my dumb mistake can help someone else avoid an error or correct their BIOS if they make a similar mistake.

Otherwise my blogs popularity has exploded. Over the past year or so I have generally rolled along with around 50 subscribers, according to Feedburner stats anyway. Today I noticed that my subscriber number jumped to 535, yeah I think their numbers are skewed today. It is fun to imagine that I have that many subscribers, and more believable if the number climbed over a period of time, rather than one day. If I really had that many subscribers I would need to make a better effort at posting. Anyone else getting weird results from Feedburners statistics?

I have not hacked the iPod Touch yet, but I will be adding applications. Awesome little gadget. Thank you Julie!

I felt it was worth noting that I applied some upgrades to the blogging software (Buff) that I use here at Nitevilla. For a few years now I have had the FCKeditor built into the software on the Brutal Deluxe website. Over that time I have always just handcoded the HTML when I needed to use it in posts. Having a few friends who seem remotely interested in possibly trying out my blogging software, I felt it was time to cleanup the configuration of the scripts making up Buff as well as doing some standardization of the tool. On more than one occasion I have also made a few errors with my HTML causing posts to display correctly. The nice thing about the FCKeditor is that I can still display or write my posts using HTML source if I choose and I can preview my post.

A few of the benefits of upgrading. I can much easier type up ordered and unordered lists. I can stop using the PHP function nl2br to format my posts. For posts that did not have any markup, this method worked quite well. But whenever I wanted to post something with markup, I had to assure I had everything merged into a giant block of code. This made it difficult to update the post later. So I recoded Buff so that now when I make a post, all new lines are removed. This also seemed to be the best choice so that I can still use the nl2br function to retrieve old posts, which rely on those new lines for the post to format I wanted. I did not want to try and convert the 500 posts I have made here at Nitevilla.

Another benefit is that I have all the configuration mostly in one file. This will make it much easier for me to apply future updates, mostly I should just be able to drag and drop updated scripts to any domain using Buff. While I say mostly, I am still doing some individual tweaking of post display on each website where I use Buff. This is because I do not always use HTML heading tags for the title of my posts on all my websites. I have no one to blame for this but myself, when creating the various web templates and CSS for all my domains I rarely use similar standards. In the future this will be something I pay more attention to detail while performing a website redesign.

Lastly I am considering turning on some HTML tags for comments. My simple spam prevention has worked wonderfully, I do not remember the last successful spam comment that made it through and well over 600 attempts have been made in the last few weeks alone on Nitevilla. Other than allowing markup within comments I am happy with the state of my blogging tool.

This past weekend while trying to keep the programming juices flowing for this aforementioned project that will be kicking into high gear over the holidays. I decided I needed to do some code cleanup and enhancing to Buff. While poking around on Brutal Deluxe I was noticing many pieces that no longer needed to exist and were no longer functioning since moving our fantasy football league to AOL's fantasy sports service. Without me really paying much attention, the Buff engine mutated into two separate branches a few years ago. Over the last couple weeks I noticed continual hits trying to post comments to one of my other websites powered by Buff.

I started the cleanup of some of the features on Brutal Deluxe and the branching of the site engine became even more evident. Actually Buff was three branches now that I think about it, but the third branch lacked the functionality of the other two branches (on purpose) and was left with my former employer. They owe me money for that work since I worked on it during my off hours, but they have enough to worry about right now, karma is a wonderful thing. :) The Brutal Deluxe branch spawned from me needing to create an easy to use interface for the team owners, as well as maintain a multi-user database. I hope I succeeded in doing that, only they could answer that question. Funny thing is some of them are still using the news (blog) for league purposes as opposed to the feature offered on AOL. I thought only Alex and I would use it for podcasting, but I am happy to see it still used for other purposes. I will probably keep these branches somewhat separated, as long as others continue using it anyway.

Those continual hits trying to post comments, well those were spam bots trying to break my very simple picture challenge that no human would have trouble with. Sure a person might have a mistype now and then but it would not continue for hours. The reason such a simple method works is because the spam bots have no idea how to attack a tool they know nothing about. I decided that I would start to track these, beginning with here at nitevilla. If you are curious, in the lower portion of the left hand column you will see how much spam Buff has eaten in the last day or so. That is the CMS consuming spam, not me.

While adding this simple feature I noticed something that came to my attention some time ago. I really need to start at the beginning of my code and walk all the way through it and tidy the code up a bit. Because I added features here and there and everywhere throughout it's original inception, I could really clean some of the functionality up. I do not want to go into detail necessarily but I am sure some of you that created similar projects know exactly what I mean. I often have thought that Buff would be something I might consider releasing as opensource. I actually think some folks would be interested in using it instead of Wordpress and the like, especially with it being much smaller and simpler. Tinkerers like myself could add features and generally hack together a nice blog or CMS. The other solutions are so bloated, I suppose they need to be because with blogging being so mainstream most of the folks using them are not technical and they want easy ways to make plugins without coding. Or some simply do not want to code their own tool, even if they could. Which is cool, but since I can do it myself, I see no reason not to use my own solution. Buff does everything I need it to and it is definitely not bloated, mostly powered by one script. Buff is easy to extend and is less vulnerable, somewhat because of less bloat and mostly because it is not used by enough people for any nefarious individuals to care about hacking it.

I have had a few problems over the years on my websites with script kiddies (these kids are not intelligent, just socially inept) using someone else’s tools to scan for known vulnerabilities in various opensource software. The root of all my problems was always Flashchat, which I utilize for draft purposes on Brutal Deluxe. I have seen similar complaints regarding script kiddies about other popular opensource software. All the tools I wrote on my own have never had any such problems, which is a big reason why I continue to use my own solutions. As far as releasing Buff as opensource, huge code cleanup, administrative documentation along with installation scripts would need done. Supporting the CMS could suddenly become a chore rather than an escape from chores. Buff might then become vulnerable to script kiddies as well as known to spam bots that might try and attack my anti-spam measures more intelligently. Sure I still want to tidy up the code, but I really think opensourcing Buff would be a bad idea. In Addition I would likely be told just how ugly the code is. The code is probably not that bad, but I know there could be more elegance.

Internet and communications

Multimedia and Graphics

Productivity

System Tools

ADDENDUM: I owe Google an apology, Google was being blocked by my free DNS provider. I did not ask why, I only asked them if they were blocking Google. They responded that the sites were no longer being blocked. Perhaps to cut down on traffic maybe? Apparently the Yahoo crawler was not blocked. I left my original text below in tact, perhaps it will help others if they notice similar symptoms. I am actually glad I was wrong about Google not including me for some other reason, I am a fanboy after-all. :)

I have to admit, I am a bit of a Google fanboy, but that might be changing for at least their search engine. First off I love the things I hear about their company, secondly I love Gmail and I have always preferred their search. Recently however I noticed something about their crawler that has me baffled. Google refuses to crawl the websites I host from my home, claiming that the domain name cannot be resolved. Yahoo search, has no such issues and many topics I wrote about on CPUUG shows up in Yahoo searches. So am I asking this question just because I am being shunned by Google? Partly, but mostly this got me thinking.

I think the reason Google is refusing to crawl my privately home hosted domains is because of my dynamic IP address. Which is just stupid in my opinion, perhaps someone else can let me know if this is the reason or if it is something else, perhaps my DNS provider. I would guess this is Google's way of trying to stop some type of abuse, but if so, dismissing this type of website could be dismissing a large percentage of valid search results. The best example of this is the instructions I wrote for Compiling Apache, MySQL and PHP on AIX 5.3, which are the best instructions for accomplishing this task. I know, because I helped plenty of people do it and plenty of others used pieces of the documentation I wrote. Keep in mind, this is my second writing of instructions, the first post was over a year ago. On Yahoo, my post is the number one search result, just as it should be. On Google, my website does not appear, and I have submitted it to Google.

All this got me thinking, if I have good documentation out there and Google's crawler or their rules do not allow them to include it, what else is Google missing? I certainly cannot be alone in this, so I will most certainly have to start checking Yahoo first and only using Google if I do not find what I need using Yahoo. Better yet, I hate all the Yahoo clutter, so I can just use AltaVista, which is minimalistic like Google but uses Yahoo's search engine.

Perhaps I am missing something obvious, so what gives with Google? Anyone? I am certainly no expert on Google's rules of engagement and why they will not include my privately home hosted domains.

A couple weeks ago I switched my router over to start using OpenDNS and I have to sing the praises of the free service. The most simple way to explain DNS is that it translates the URL that you type into your browser into the IP address of the web page that you are visiting. I am a Comcast customer and I suppose I was so used to the delay while Comcast's DNS resolved the hostname lookup of the web page I was visiting that I grew used to waiting. Recently I started to really notice this delay had worsened and wondered if a change in DNS would make a big difference. For me the change with the speed pages loaded was noticeable immediately after switching to OpenDNS.

Several years ago I had set my DNS to not be Comcast's slow DNS servers, at that time the servers seem to just go AWOL now and then. Along the way I changed routers a couple times and lost the DNS servers I had been using. I ended up just using the default for the past couple years and really did not give much thought to changing my DNS. A while back I heard about OpenDNS but just never looked into using the service. When I noticed web pages were resolving very slowly as of late, and since it seemed to be the resolution of the web pages name I was pretty certain it was a DNS issue. The first thing I really liked about OpenDNS, there was no need for me to signup. The setup and DNS server IP addresses were right there for me to grab. With family members sometimes using my computers, I liked the idea of the phishing protection.

I encourage anyone on Comcast especially to give OpenDNS a try. If you use another ISP, you may not notice any speed increases. Comcast has been notorious for having bad DNS and obviously from my experience they have not improved. By the way, if you are considering trying OpenDNS, just make the change on your router, not on every computer you own. Really the only way there is an advantage to changing the DNS directly on your computer is if you own a laptop and are always on the go using different networks. I would be curious to hear others opinions who have tried OpenDNS or perhaps another DNS service.

Last Summer during an electrical storm I lost my router. If you look through the comments you will see some discussion on the series of Linksys routers that allow for their firmware to be updated. Linksys actually released the WRT54GL, a return to their old skool routers that were highly hackable. After researching various routers I decided on the WRT54GL with the specific intent of putting the DD-WRT Firmware on the router. For whatever reason I never got around to actually doing this.

The Linksys WRT54GL worked great for me right out of the box and it mostly met all my needs. The most notable piece lacking was an option for static DHCP, the method of DNS I prefer to use. This way I can easily have friends access my network by just plugging in their machine, while having most of my machines assigned a permanent lease so that their IP addresses are always the same. Last night I was on baby duty, so I figured that as long as I was going to be awake most of the night, I might as well be productive.

I expected a few minor issues after reading through the DD-WRT wiki, but to my surprise I really did not have any problem. I set the Linksys back to factory defaults and proceeded to update the firmware using the Linksys web interface. I think most of the problems the folks encounter on the wiki is that they fail to disconnect and reconnect their computer to the network. Remember, your network when starting is connected via the Linksys firmware, as soon as that fails to exist you need to get a new connection and lease from the new firmware. I merely disabled and enabled my network and I was able to access the router via telnet or the web browser. I of course disabled the telnet and enabled SSH, now my Linksys router is an accessible very small Linux machine.

Lately I wanted to do a lot more with my internal DNS and those wants spurred me to move forward with finally updating the firmware on the Linksys router. When I found that DNSmasq was the software powering the DD-WRT DNS functionality, I knew that it was time to move ahead with updating the firmware. My internal network is now a lot more robust and it operates a lot more like I think a network should. I can also get a lot better idea of the load on my Linksys router, most of the command line goodies are here. The web interface is far better than what comes with the Linksys as well, with a host of fantastic status information to go along with the plethora of new features. I highly recommend the Linksys WRT54GL and DD-WRT, especially if you enjoy digging into how your hardware is performing and functioning.

#1. Packard Bell PCs (1986-1996) When PC World decided to name the ten worst PCs of all time, it was a virtual lock that a Packard Bell machine would grace the list at number one. The only question was, which model? It was an impossible choice.
Part of the problem was Packard Bell's strategy of selling nearly identical systems under different names, depending on where they were sold. So the Packard Bell Legend 406CD hawked at Circuit City was more or less the same as the Axcel 467 on the shelves at Staples or the Force 480CD sold at CompUSA, making apples-to-apples (or in this case, lemons-to-lemons) comparisons impossible.
But in other ways Packard Bell was maddeningly consistent. Between 1994 and
1996 the company was a perennial bottom dweller in PC World's reliability and service ratings. One out of six Packard Bell machines sold at retail was returned by dissatisfied customers--more than twice the industry average.
And odds are good that if you bought a new Packard Bell system in 1994 or 1995, at least some of its components had been previously owned. The company was sued several times for selling used parts as new, ultimately paying out millions of dollars in settlements.
After Packard Bell merged with NEC in 1996, things got a little better. But when Packard Bell exited the US market in 2000 to focus on selling machines to European consumers, few users on this side of the pond shed any tears.

Shane, Kurt and myself must have all been lucky, because I do not remember any of us having problems with our computers until well into their lifespans, and my issues were more Windows related, not hardware. My Packard Bell was retired sometime in 2001 when the harddrive finally died, at that point it was not worth fixing the machine as I was not fond of poking around inside the Packard Bell, I do remember that. Otherwise the machine served me pretty well and spent it's last few years running Linux. My Packard Bell was the first computer I installed Linux on, a fond memory.

For the record, my 1993 purchase of a Comtrade computer, a Pentium 66Mhz, was a far worse purchase in my experience. Pretty much right away I spent my time replacing CDROM's and memory to name but a few. Shane seems to be my computer historian because I could not remember the brand name of this computer and he emailed me with the name.

First Generation Trackman Marble
Originally uploaded by Scott B.

Almost three years ago Logitech announced it had sold 500 million pointing devices. We talked about it on the Nitevilla forums. During the discussion I mentioned that I used a very old Logitech trackball. A testament to how well this device was made, I am still using it today as my main pointing device.

To be exact, the trackball I own is a first generation Logitech Trackman Marble Trackball, the first optical trackball on the market. This device uses a PS/2 connector and I am able to use it with my Ubuntu desktop and Mac Mini by using Synergy. Since the Mac Mini only has USB connections, I would need an adapter to use my favorite computer peripheral without using Synergy.

I have no idea when I bought this Trackman Marble, but I know it was pre 2000 and that I bought it as soon as it was released. This peripheral never misses a beat and goes down as the best designed and built computer peripheral I have owned. Do you have a mouse, keyboard or other peripheral that has seen many years of use?

• Spell checking support for about 50 languages
• Intelligent completion for C, HTML, Ruby, Python, PHP, etc.
• Tab pages, each containing multiple windows
• Undo branches: never accidentally lose text again
• Vim script supports Lists and Dictionaries (similar to Python)
• Vim script profiling
• Improved Unicode support
• Highlighting of cursor line, cursor column and matching braces
• Translated manual pages support.
• Internal grep; works on all platforms, searches compressed files
• Browsing remote directories, zip and tar archives
• Printing multi-byte text

Deceiving title for those that know me. The improvement I speak of is the improvement of the site CMS engine. I added a few features that I saw elsewhere that I liked, or that I felt made features more usable. The improvements were basically stat changes that some might find interesting. The first change I made is viewable in the lower right corner. What is interesting about this feature is that this site has existed for almost five years, and the post count is relatively low. Probably due to the existence of a forum.

I have made 266 blog entries, an average of 0.14 entries per day. I average one blog entry every 6.6 days and have collected 559 comments.

While experimenting with this piece of code, I came across a question that I could not find a good answer for. Perhaps any MySQL folks who come across this post might be able to enlighten me. Is this the best way to obtain a count of entries from my database, meaning is this the least resource intensive?

// Query the database and get the post count $result = mysql_query("SELECT id FROM buffsdatabase"); $num_rows = mysql_num_rows($result);

The other feature change I have made is the creation of a tag or category cloud in this case. After much thought I have decided for my blog that I prefer categories over tags. But I do like the tag clouds that you see around the Internet. Now when viewing my archives you will see the categories listed in what is called a cloud format. You may have to refresh your window to get the new CSS. I like the cloud format because there is less whitespace, rather than having the categories listed down the left side of the page, they are grouped and marked on how many posts exist for each category. Of course all this is relative, what I think is an improvement is merely a change for most. I have to find something to do while waiting for the homebrew. ;)

I have actually tried other web browsers for the Mac than just the standard Safari and Firefox browsers. But I had no idea there were this many browsers. Of course there are more too, like my never to be released, Buff Browser. Granted, these are not all stand alone web browsers, but still, there are more than enough browser choices for even the most picky user.

Choice is a great thing!

Speaking of the list, the Shiira Project is very interesting to me and I have actually thought of giving this browser a chance. Check out the screenshots, scroll down and look at the page transition effect. How cool is that? The bookmark integration is cool too, recognizing both Firefox and Safari.

If you are using Windows and you are still using Internet Exploder, you need to click on the button at the top of the page and download Firefox now. When I see people surfing with IE, I really realize how much functionality they miss. Not to mention that webpages just look better in Firefox.

In recent weeks Google seems to be releasing a new application of some sort every single week. Interestingly the amazing amount of web space and the continued look, feel and use of Gmail is starting to make more sense. Today I gave Google Reader a try and although initially I was a little confused by the user interface, I see value and potential in the product. Google basically mimicked a lot of features from Gmail, which I absolutely love and geared it towards an XML feed reader. So far it seems a tad slow with the updates, but it has to be absolutely getting pounded by others testing it out. A few feature I like but have not really fully tried yet, is the "starring" of posts from your feeds. How many times have you seen a post which you were interested in, and want to read later, only to forget about or somehow lose the post? That happens to me, now I can star the post and easily find it later. With the announcement this week of Sun and Google planning some type of browser based Office product. I could finally see why Google was continuing to give you all that free web space, and who is providing them with the massive about of machinery and storage. Most likely, Sun, with a you rub our back and we will expose your product to our massive customer base. Google Talk came onto the scene a few weeks ago, and anyone with a Gmail account was auto magically on-board and the rumors continue to fly around about a Google OS. It seems they, meaning Google, have nearly provided folks with the most popular tools that are used by standard computer users in this day and age. While I probably will not love everything Google does, they are displaying some amazing innovation and a lot of the whys of what Google has been doing with Gmail are being answered. Love them or hate them, you have to give them credit, and I imagine some folks in Redmond are more than worried, especially with the price tag currently on their big Office application. Things are certainly getting interesting. BTW, when I heard of the Google/Sun Office, it made me think of this post regarding Earth Day and Sun Ray. You see, Sun already has experience at distributing a desktop, like they say, where ever Google works, perhaps that was a clue of things to come.

Earlier this week I began experimenting with Synergy, a cross platform software that allows you to share a keyboard and mouse across multiple computers. I wanted to free up some desk space, while still maintaining both my displays.

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all.

Synergy is a KM solution not a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) solution. However, future versions will probably support KVM. I am now able to use my wireless Mac keyboard on my Windows machine just by rolling my trackball off the side of the monitor right onto my Windows desktop. One of the coolest features is doing a cut from my Mac or Windows box and pasting the output on the other machine.

Hopefully if a Synergy KVM solution comes to fruition you will have the option on whether you want particular machines to share the video. Judging by the current configuration file, I would guess that you will be able to specify this feature. That would enable me to drop the VNC solution I use on the Linux and BSD machines I have in the basement and instead use this excellent software instead.

If you have two or more sweet displays or perhaps a laptop you would rather use your desktops keyboard and mouse with. I highly recommend giving Synergy a try, it is network based, so a router is necessary. This is also a nice option if you have multiple displays and do not want the cost of a KVM switch, Synergy is free.

Finally, someone gets it and puts a song to music. I just posted about System Administrator Appreciation Day and what do we have, a guy singing it in from Vegas. Personally I would have added a few UNIXy type references, but the great thing about the song is that anyone who has ever used a computer can get it. Give your sysadmin a pat on the back. ;)

Since getting my Mac I had not been on my Windows box. I only have one monitor these days and my various machines are at different locations in the house. So my KVM switch has done me little good. This week I decided it was time to fire up the Windows box so that I could start making some early preparations for the Brutal Deluxe 2005 Season. FFLM only runs on Windows, and it is updated so frequently I am stuck keeping my Windows box as is and available. I decided to install TightVNC Server on Windows so that I did not need to keep it near my monitor. TightVNC is very cool and works fantastically in a web browser, enabling me to make league updates from my Mac through my web browser.

In addition to adding new owner, Daniel Yohe and his team to the website, I wanted to work out the league finance page. This being the second year for the BDFL being a pay league, I needed to add logic to compute league dues after taking into consideration money carried forward. I simply wanted to provide some automation to let the team owners know how much they owe for the 2005 season or how much they have in excess. Once again this season you can mail me your dues or use PayPal.

While mucking about with PHP code I discovered a neat little conditional expression for the Scrambled Word of the Day game. If memory serves me correctly, Streeter pointed out the lack of printing correct plurals for tries at guessing the word. I remedied the problem with this simple bit of code.

print "You got it with $guess " . ($guess == 1 ? 'try' : 'tries') . '!'; Depending on how many guesses it took you, you are greeted with either: You got it with 1 try! or You got it with 3 tries!

Being only a hobbyist programmer, I find simple little solutions like this quite interesting. Not that I could not have corrected this in other ways sometime ago, I could just never muster the enthusiasm. Upon discovering such a simple conditional expression, I just had to fix the issue.

Last Friday was Earth Dayand this morning there were some articles I read that could directly correlate to energy conservation and wastefulness of our technology resources. Chuck pointed out that it is TV Turnoff Week, the intent is for families to find other activities to entertain you this week. Very good idea, and spending some time being active should be a big part of this week, and every week for that matter. Jonathan Swartz points out the waste that his company Sun sees throughout the world in datacenters. This all got me thinking about my home computer technology and my past and current work technology.

The first thing I thought about when I read Chuck's post was that we should include computer turnoff along with the TV turnoff. I log many more hours infront of a computer than I do infront of the TV. So this week, I will be spending less time infront of the computer, it would be nice if the weather would cooperate.

After reading Jonathan's post it spurred some thoughts I have had through the years. When I first started in IT, a computer at each person's desk was rare, usually the desk just had a CRT connected to the mainframe. Once they started to rollout computers to each desk, I many times asked why. A lot of folks who do call center work have no need for Internet access, word processors or any of the other tools a personal computer gives them. All they need is a direct link into the application running on a server or mainframe somewhere. I had also read through the years that companies were working on ways to distribute a personal computer like desktop across a company from one central powerful computer. Everyone would share this desktop, hmm.. Multi-user computing environment, sounds like UNIX and Linux. Jonathan points out Sun's product, Sun Ray, advertising it yes, but it is an excellent solution for a large majority of companies, saving lots of wasted computing power.

Last week I had a technical rundown of IBM's Power5 eServers of which we have the P5 595 Server, a server that looks more like a mainframe than any before it. The reason this machine is so amazing is because you can Micro-Partition, something you cannot do with Intel Partitioning or countless other partitioning solutions. You can have partitions as small as 1/10th of a processor. In layman's terms, this is big conservation of computing resources, because you undoubtedly have servers sitting around nearly idle for the majority of the day. With a machine like the P5 595, you can run up to 254 micro partitions on one machine. All with dynamic movement of resources to meet processing requirements for processors and/or memory. If you were wondering, our P5 595 is replacing our SP2 that I mentioned in this post.

Without even thinking or trying I have conserved resources at home also. The Mac mini I recently purchased, uses less energy and runs significantly cooler and quieter. I have not thrown out my old computers though, they are excellent Linux or BSD alternatives, those Operating Systems require much more modest hardware requirements than Windows does. That being said, a co-worker of mine is switching all of his home computers to Linux. His family surfs the net, checks email, uses word processors and chats via instant messenger. All tasks that Linux can do right out of the box. He has simply grown tired of cleaning spyware and adware off his computers at home. Never mind the extended use he will get from these personal computers being able to run a Linux distribution on them for years to come.

Deep Blue Meets Scott UPDATED
Originally uploaded by Scott.

The iteration of the Deep Blue computer that played Gary Kasparov was a 32-node IBM RS/6000 SP high-performance computer, which utilized the then new Power Two Super Chip processors (P2SC). Each node of the SP employs a single microchannel card containing 8 dedicated VLSI chess processors, for a total of 256 processors working in tandem. Deep Blue's programming code is written in C and runs under the AIX operating system. The net result is a scalable, highly parallel system capable of calculating 100-200 billions moves within three minutes, which is the time allotted to each player's move in classical chess.

Geek alert! This post may bore some of you, but I felt compelled to post it. Dave Taylor, whom I mentioned before, blogged about Sun Microsystems CIO Jonathan Schwartz's open letter to IBM. Schwartz seems to be upset that IBM has not wholeheartedly jumped on the Solaris 10 bandwagon with WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products. Being someone that works closely with all the software mentioned on both AIX and Linux on the Big Iron, I think Dave Taylor makes excellent points, including his response to a commenter defending Sun's complaint. I almost fell out of my chair when the commenter suggested IBM Open Source their WebSphere suite. As I said, I work closely with everything mentioned and it is quite obvious to me that the WebSphere suite is the butter on IBM's bread right now. It is big, big, big. Dave also does not miss pointing out that the blogging software Sun is using is not exactly state of the art. Which I noted the mention of a trackback system, something I have been tossing around adding to my own blogging software. Although I left Solaris with my last employer (Hanover Direct), I might start watching some of the Sun weblogs. Another problem I noticed with the Sun blog and I am guessing here because I do not feel like looking at the source, but I think they are missing meta tags pointing to their XML feed. I did not get the standard Firefox notification that a feed was available to subscribe to.

Something happened on Wednesday and Thursday night that has never happened before. My homegrown weblog was figured out by some spambots. I received a total of three comments, that really were not as effective as they are on some sites. Mostly because I do not allow html within my comments and I never will, as I really fail to see the point. So the URL's and so forth that were dumped within the comment field were not as effective as those who wrote the spambots would have hoped. But I do allow those commenting to place a URL within a text field while commenting and this of course translates into an active link.

The lack of the comment spambots hitting me prior to now has nothing to do with any great feat on my end. The bots are programmed when visiting pages to recognize the popular weblogging software. Buff is not popular, so the many spambots that had always previously hit my websites, when seeing no known weblogging software, would leave causing no harm. Comment spam is one of the biggest reasons why I like using my own homegrown software and I have now taken my first simple step to stop it.

I utilized a very simple question and answer method that I first saw WebJones use. So far so good, no new comment spam. While upgrading Brutal Deluxe I added the simple feature on both Brutal Deluxe and Nitevilla.

After experiencing a total loss of a harddrive you begin to really appreciate services that offer free storage. Whether that service is for large email storage or photos I am really becoming a fan of the services. I have heard on more than one occasion complaints of lost email and lost photos after a harddrive failure. Housing email and photos with a service whose job it is to backup their customers data is my kind of free service.

I highly recommend you backup locally in addition to using these type of services. Using cloud services as your only backup is just asking for trouble. I specifically use a Gmail or a Flickr because I want an offsite backup of my email and photos in addition to a locally backed up copy. My first hardware crash since using these two aforementioned programs only strengthened my love of both. Do you have other services like these that you use? If so, I would love to hear about those services as well.

Friday July 30th, 2004 will be the 5th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. This is not the first time I have mentioned the annual event. Despite posting the event on our department intranet site and mentioning it here for three years running, I expect this year will be spent the same as previous years. :)

I decided this year that I would give any visitors that are feeling creative the opportunity to nominate me in the ThinkGeek 2004 Sysadmin Pageant. If you are feeling energetic, feel free to write something creative about my administration of or . Maybe after three long years of vying for a free lunch, I will finally have that free lunch, err... Or other geeky prize I have longed for. ;)

I also wanted to point out that Don Becker seems to have a similar experience with System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day. System Administration happens to be what I do for a living and prior to 2002 I had no idea there was a day honoring System Administrators. My hunch is that no one else has any idea either.