Archive for March, 2010

iPad, To Buy Or Not To Buy ?…….

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

So, it’s almost here, but, do I actually want/need an iPad ?

This guy has created a handy little flow chart to aid in the decision, and while I guess it was intended as a stab at a bit of humour, for me it actually comes down to ‘do you have so much money you don’t care if it works particularly well or not ?’

While I have a lot of technology and gadgets, I purchase them because they perform some function that I deem I cannot be without. My PC, I simply can’t live without it. My laptop, well it’s my PC when I’m on the move. My iPhone, it’s so much more than a phone with the variety of apps available to me, but it also happens to be a phone too. And the list goes on.

But an iPad ? For my money, I have to agree with those of the opinion that the iPad is essentially a big iPhone that has no phone and no camera. It has also been described as a slightly smaller version of a laptop/netbook that cannot multitask and has no USB ports, again I can identify with that.

I also do not want to have to get the pocket of all my pants upgraded to loook like this

I swear I am not Apple bashing, I love Apple. I have a MacBook Pro and an Mac Mini in the home and they both serve essential functions. The problem for me with the iPad is, it doesn’t do anything I would consider essential that my laptop cannot already do……better.

I sure Apple are going to sell loads of them and no doubt I will look upon any I see with a degree of curiosity, but it will end at curiosity. Sorry Apple, but on this one I think I’m going to have to let this one pass.

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Posted in apple, ipad | No Comments »

SVG in IE9, Saving The World From Giant Otters…….

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Read an update today on the IEBlog site about the initial support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) in Internet Explorer 9.

Some pretty cool stuff, like being able to define SVG inline in HTML5, but the example they gave did make me LOL, they have used it to create SVG circle to highlight…..giant otters !

Admittedly, given the power and flexibility this offers, their choice of exmaple could have been anything, but still…..priceless :o)

I suspect I’m going to find this all rather useful when it becomes official and mainstream, as it’s a pain when trying to highlight stuff in documentation at work written in html. Now I can include an image of a screenshot and use inline SVG to draw shapes around bits I need to draw attention to, as opposed to my normal efforts which look much like below :o/

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Posted in ie9, microsoft | No Comments »

IIS7 HRESULT: 0×80070057 (E_INVALIDARG))…….

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

I don’t write code. Well compileable code anyway. Now scripting, I’m ya man, but anything that does stuff ‘behind the scenes’ is frankly a little bit beyond me.

So I was filled with doom when one of our web developers was getting an error every time she tried to load her dev copy of the site into her browser. IIS7 simply gave the very detailed but unhelpful message


HRESULT: 0×80070057 (E_INVALIDARG))

Along with a pretty error page and some bits of XML. Googling that error code led me to this site which thankfully explained what was going on, and more importantly, how to fix.

Seems that when you build/compile a .NET site, it takes copies of the binaries from your solution and copies them to a temporary folder. The site is then hosted from the files in this temporary location.

Should your system crash mid-build/compile (she was using Vista, of course it crashed !) then the file(s) copying at the time may not quite be up to scratch (i.e. corrupted).

For x64 bit systems the path in question is

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files

For x86 bit systems the path is

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files

Inside the ‘Temporary ASP.NET Files’ folder will be many sub folders. You can spend time trying isolate the exact subfolder containing the knacked files, but I just deleted all the sub folders and then rebuilt the web solution again and ‘Presto’ a working site

The site owner Dan Abdinnor credits his friend Patrick Fitzsimmons for working all this out. I don’t know who you guys are, but thanks, you possibly saved me from hours of diagnostic tools and head scratching on this one !

Posted in IIS, vista | 2 Comments »

Support FizzBin, Shorten Support Calls…….

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

After spending most of the morning on the phone with Dell technical support *to replace a faulty DVD drive still under warranty* I find myself whole heartedly behind Scott Hanselman’s ‘FizzBin’ initative.

I actually slipped ‘FizzBin’ into the conversation a few times randomly in the first half hour to see if we could get to the ‘I’ll send a replacement unit out to your now sir’ phase, but alas it fell onto deaf ears (or certainly ears not briefed on the ‘FizzBin’ keyword initative’).

This left me repeating the mantra ‘ The optical drive is broken and needs replacing’ to every question and test I was asked to perform until their will finally broke and they promised to send an engineer out with a replacement drive.

So come on people, get behind ‘FizzBin’ coz’ I really don’t think I can handle another one of those calls again !

Posted in IT, meh ! | No Comments »

Microsoft IT Curriculum Path

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Just found this skills learning map while on Microsoft’s website for a book to assist me in studying for the Windows 7 exam 70-680.

Nice concept, it certainly breaks down the steps involved in getting into IT (from a Microsoft point on view anyway).

Unfortunately, most of the people I know would fail before they have even hit the first fork in the trail, ‘Digitaly Aware Individual’. Given how much we have come to depend and trust in computers and technology, I sometimes find it a bit alarming how little some people know about how PC and their software work.

Modern systems are admittedly much more reliable than the ones of a decade ago, but when I first started out with PC’s and software, everyone knew about backups. These days I ask people about how they are safe guarding all their data that is ‘irreplaceable’ and they shrug their shoulders and look confused and mutter ‘it’s stored on the computer somewhere’.

I possibly am a little extreme about this sort of thing. I know exactly where my data is, and I have backups of my backups (well, certainly optical disc burns of the really irreplaceable stuff, photos of events past, my library of system administration scripts that I so painstaking have amassed over the years, archived email conversations that I like to look back on from time to time). But, given that anyone you ask will tell you their data is essential to their plives and completly irreplaceable, you would think they would invest a little time into researching how best to make sure it does not all end in tears later down the line.

Anyone can drive a car, the act of driving is not the hard part. The lessons and the reading, the written exam, the highway code and the actual driving test itself merely allow you to drive the car (simple) without posing a danger to yourself or to others (the more difficult part).

In the same way you are not allowed to drive a car without first passsing a test, maybe there should perhaps a mandatory training course that you must attend before being allowed to purchase a PC that covers the basics enough so that you can pull away from the curb without loosing your entire baby picture libarary and wedding day mpeg collection and winding up a teary eyed wreck at your local branch of PC World.

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Posted in IT, microsoft | No Comments »

Enable The ‘root’ User Account In Ubuntu…….

Friday, March 12th, 2010

I like consistency. It makes things easier, and me faster and more accurate/efficient/amazing to watch etc. etc.

As Ubuntu is the 4th Linux distro I have ever had to work with (first being OpenBSD, the FreeBSD, then Red Hat) I was getting a little annoyed that after an install ‘su’ did not work as I was previously used to.

Ubuntu chose instead to lock the root account out and force you into using the ‘sudo’ command. This means that to do anything as ‘root’ you use

sudo <command to run>

The system will then prompt you for *your* password and, if you have sufficient permissions in the sudoers file, will execute the command you provided with root level permissions.

There are of course some benefits, mainly centered around security. But there are also some drawbacks such as having to maintain the sudoers file, and command output redirection. But given that OpenBSD is considered one of the most secure Unix operating systems around and they don’t feel the need to do it this way, I like to change this behaviour immediately after the first post install reboot.

To enable the root account, logon to the system with your account and run

sudo passwd root

The system will prompt you for *your* password. It will then prompt you to enter a new password for the root account, and then to confirm it a second time. Once this is done you can just switch to the root use using the plain old ‘su’ command.

Oh, and if you’re worried about being able to log directly onto SSH as the root account, simply edit

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

and change the line

PermitRootLogin yes

to

PermitRootLogin no

This will ensure that you have to login as a normal user and su to root from remote connections.

If you wish to revert back to the default Ubuntu behaviour, simply run (under your own logon)

sudo passwd -l root

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Posted in openvnp, ubuntu, unix | No Comments »

Cisco creates router for Next Gen Internet

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

I followed a tweet today that claimed that Cisco had created a router for “The next generation of video rich internet”.

Low and behold, the story led me to the page for the Cisco Carrier Routing System 3 (or CRS-3 for short), an industrious looking chassis with a capacity of 322Tbps. Watching the demo video they put the capacity into context by stating that it could “allow the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second” (it did not mention how long it would take to first upload all this data though !!) or, for the non Americans among us, “allow every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes.”

Wow !

Pricing starts at a mere $90,000.

Obviously I would love to have on for the home, but I am running a little short on cupboard space right now, and from the pictures and the video, it’s a big mutha :oO

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Posted in cisco, internet | No Comments »

Make Nagios Web Interface Read-Only…..

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Even though we’re not a massive company (less than 50 butts on seats) we do have quite a bit of kit in an environment that is growing ever more complex.

To help we use Nagios to monitor key systems and services and to alert us via email when issues arise (and hopefully we can correct them before the masses notice)

My boss decided he wanted to share our Nagios screens with others (well, his boss) and so I installed a workstation with x2 flat screens lofted up on high so they could be seen from a distance.

But, I had a slight snag. We use authentication on Nagios and the account used for viewing the web console had enough permissions to be able to execute the host commands listed on the right hand side of interface (shown below)

This meant that should any passer by wish to, they could click the url link to say, turn off a check that was failing (not that any of our users would do such a thing !). So I needed a way to make the web interface either not display those links or be read-only for those links, essentially prevent people from altering the configuration.

Peeking through the config files for Nagios, it seems my predecessor had the same idea at some point, but had not quite managed to pull it off. Inside the cgi.cfg file (which was located at /usr/local/nagios/etc/cgi.cfg) are the following lines


default_user_name=
authorized_for_system_information=
authorized_for_configuration_information=
authorized_for_system_commands=
authorized_for_all_services=
authorized_for_all_hosts=
authorized_for_all_service_commands=
authorized_for_all_host_commands=

The ones of interest are :

authorized_for_all_services=

authorized_for_all_hosts=

By adding a user to these x2 lines *only*, the urls on the pages for running commands and viewing/modifying the config do not work and give a permissions error

You will also need to add the name you add to those x2 line to the /usr/local/nagios/etc/htpasswd file as well

Now, even though you can still see the command urls on the pages, you get this if you try to click them

nagios says no

So, how far had my predecessor gotten ? Well, something I take for granted that I guess he did not know, the list of names supplied should be comma seperated with no space between them

Easy when you know how :o)

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Posted in unix | 1 Comment »