Diary of a Network Geek

Not a bad idea at all…

Okay, so the runners have their iPod toys, it only makes sense that someone would come up with a wireless iPod dock for your bike. It’s not quite as “feature rich” as the Nike Plus  product, but it does have the charm of making your ride a little safer than earbuds would if you want music for your ride. And, since my doctor suggested bike riding is better for my knees than running, I’m actually thinking about this. Sadly, it’s not available until sometime in 2008, even though we know it’ll cost about $150.

A “new” technique that’s more than three years old.

Huh. So, there was this article on MSN recently titled Lock Bumping: A new burglary threat. Now, I remember reading about this in 2600, the Hacker’s Quarterly a really, really long time ago. And, I seem to recall it was a topic at DefCon a number of years ago, not to mention that Bruce Schneier talked about it in 2005.
But, what gets me is that the article itself mentions that the technique was mad popular by a video in Germany back in 2004.

So, how is this a “new” technique again?

Today is Wallace Shawn‘s Birthday.

Wallace Shawn is an avant garde playwright who was born in New York on this day in 1943. He’s the son of the former New Yorker editor William Shawn. I find him interesting, in part, because, even though his his friends took jobs writing for his father’s magazine, he didn’t. Instead, Shawn supported his playwriting by working as a photocopy clerk. But, and this is the idea that I like, he also got the idea of selling stock in himself, and managed to raise $2,500 from investors. To this day, he sends all those early investors a small annual check.

The other thing that fascinates me about Shawn is that you have probably seen him, even if you don’t recognize his name. You see, he wrote and starred in a movie titled My Dinner with Andre which came out in 1981 to much critical acclaim, which consists entirely of Shawn and the theater director Andre Gregory talking over dinner. I don’t know how well it did in the theatres at the time, but it became a cult classic.
You’re even more likely to know him as Mr. Wendell Hall from the movie Clueless, or Vizzini from The Princess Bride. Or, perhaps even as the voice of Rex from Toy Story. (For more of his acting resume, you can check out the Wallace Shawn entry on IMDB.)
I found it interesting that, for all his spot on timing in humorous roles, he claims not to understand what people find so funny about his acting or the characters he plays. He’s quoted on IMDB as having said, “I don’t happen to have a sense of humor personally, so I don’t know what’s funny about a character… This happens to be a feature of my life generally. I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they’re laughing.”

Anyway, he’s an interesting guy and I hope he has a happy birthday.

I’ve been doing some guerrilla blog marketing lately.

Nothing underhanded or even sneaky, but I’ve been doing some different things to promote my blog.
For one thing, I’ve been leaving comments on other people’s blogs with links back to mine.  Not the usual suspects, mind you, but new blogs that I haven’t really read before or read on a regular basis.  And, to find those places, those blogging “undiscovered countries”, so to speak, I’ve been following links in comments on blogs that I do read on a regular basis.  But, beyond that, you may have noticed the BlogRush widget on my sidebar.  I’ve been looking at blogs from there, too, in part because I’ve never read them, but also because they’ve probably never read me.  So, I go and, if they seem interesting or cool or whatever, I leave a comment with a link back to my blog, hoping that folks will find my comment interesting and come take a look.  No idea, yet, how BlogRush is affecting my overall traffic, though.  I like the idea in theory, but in practice… Well, who knows.  If it brings me even one more reader, that’s good enough.

The other thing I’ve been doing is leaving stuff with my blog’s name and address on it in physical locations.
So, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve had to go to the clinic a couple of times for various reasons and I thought it would be a good idea to leave business cards on tables with my blog information.  Again, if it brings even one more reader, why not, right?  Oh, and for those of you who are new, the “clinic” isn’t the free clinic to find out if I have a sexually transmitted disease, but the lymphoma clinic at M. D. Anderson.  Nothing to worry about, just blood work.
Yesterday, I left magazines with stickers on them that said “This magazine donated by: Diary of a Network Geek” and, again, gave the web address.  I left old copies of Men’s Health and 2600, The Hacker’s Quarterly in a couple of spots in the clinic waiting room.  Next time, I’ll have both Men’s Health and Wired magazines.  In fact, today I was sorting a couple of old Wired magazines and stickering them in preparation of the next visit to a waiting room.

Honestly, I don’t know that any of that will be very effective in driving my readership up at all, but, I have the old magazines and stickers and business cards, so, I figure, what can it hurt.
Have any of my readers done anything similar?  If so, what were your results?

Cheap is good, but free is better.

Okay, so I’m always looking for cheap or free tools that let me develop my various web sites quickly and easily. Well, I found two that sort of go together. First, there’s Firebug, which is a plugin for Firefox that lets you edit webpages. To compliment that, though, there’s YSlow for Firebug, which helps you diagnose problems with your website.

I know a lot of bloggers now.

I may not “power Blogger”, but I know a lot of people who do. One of them is very sweet, owns an adorable chocolate (aka brown) lab, and is a cracker jack photographer. She wrote a post you all need to read: Second Hands.
Also, read the comments. Sometimes, the comments say as much as the posts do on a blog.

Besides, I don’t want to write it again.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right."
   --Henry Ford

This time, we’ll restore the image we made last time

mkdir /tmp/server
mount -t smbfs -o username=my_user_name   //server_name/share /tmp/server

Now, this assumes that you don’t have anything installed on the new pc yet and are working with just a blank, unformatted hard drive. First, I restored the partition table and the master boot record:
# sfdisk /dev/sda < /tmp/server/images/cad1r-sfdisk-sda.dump
# dd if=/tmp/server/images/cad1-sda.mbr of=/dev/sda

And then the partitions. Since I had several files produced by split for my primary partition, I needed to take them all, in the right order of course. Now, keep in mind that when we used split in the last post, it added “aa”, “ab”, “ac”, etc. to the end of the file name.

# ls -l /tmp/server

will help you check which files you need for the next step.

Now, again, this all assumes that you had a single partition on the original machine and are restoring a single partition. First, change to the directory where the images are:

cd /tmp/server

Now, we restore the image files with the command below. You’ll have to “cat” all the files in the image directory on the server. Notice the pattern of the file names? That’s what split did for us. Now, rather than do the work manually to restore them, I used a little bit of shell code and a variable reference to save you the need to type the names of all the files. Also, the little “-” at the end of the line does matter, so don’t forget it. Oh, and this command should all be on one line.

cat cad1-sda1.img.gz_a[a-z] | gunzip -c | ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/sda1 -

Reboot into your new Windows XP clone.
It’s just like magic, isn’t it?

Hey, I get paid to be a geek, right?

So, I’ve been having some issues with my network and several Windows XP machines. In a nutshell, these machines seem to lose connectivity after approximately nine hours and fifteen minutes from the last restart. In other words, when my crazy-dedicated engineers work past their ninth hour, their machine slows to a crawl and eventually locks tighter than a Catholic school-girl’s knees. In any case, after weeks of troubleshooting this issue, I’ve come up empty. The best that I’ve got for these guys is either a) Don’t work such long hours or b) Reboot the machine at lunch.
In a further attempt to fully understand what is happening and at what level, I’ve gotten one of these machines and I’m going to install Windows 2000 on it. If we have the same issue, I know it’s hardware. If I don’t, I’ll be certain, within a reasonable percentage of sureity, that the issue is some arcane aspect of Windows XP. Either way, I should be closer to a real answer.

But, before I wipe my current experimental machine, I decided I wanted to back it up. Naturally, I turned to my old friend, Linux. A quick Google turned up a blog entry titled “Cloning XP with Linux and ntfsclone“. So, with a few modifications for my own environment, I followed the instructions there. Incidentally, I used the latest version of Knoppix as a boot CD.

First, open up a terminal/shell session and create a mount point with the following command:
# mkdir /tmp/server

Then, because my DHCP server didn’t give the Knoppix virtual machine the right DNS information, add your server to the /etc/hosts file.
Next, mount the network share that you want to dump the images on.
# mount -t smb -o username=administrator //server1/share /tmp/server

Check how your live CD sees the partitions you want to save with the following command:

# cat /proc/partitions
major minor  #blocks  name

8       0   78150744  sda
8       1   76211608  sda1
240     0    1939136  cloop0

I want to save that 80 GB disk sda, which has a primary partition sda1. First I saved the partition table and the Master Boot Record this way:

# sfdisk -d /dev/sda >/tmp/server/images/cad1r-sfdisk-sda.dump
# dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 of=/tmp/server/images/cad1-sda.mbr

and then the partitions:

ntfsclone -s -o - /dev/sda1   | gzip | split -b 1000m - /tmp/server/images/cad1-sda1.img.gz_

Note that this saved disk image in 1G files, in case the way I mounted the share to the network server didn’t allow for large files. Sometimes that can get tricky going from Linux to a Windows 2003 server and back, so I decided not to take any chances. It makes a mess of files, but at least it took the guess-work out for me.

Coming soon, the restore process! Keep an eye out!

I can cook, damn it!

Okay, mixing a sauce together may not constitute actual cooking, but I did put it over asparagus.
Remember two weeks ago, I mentioned the Men’s Health Grocery List? Well, last week Thursday I finally got around to shopping and I got most of the things on the list. Since that included asparagus, that meant I had very limited time to cook it before it went bad. Today was pretty much the limit, even if I wasn’t all that interested in cooking tonight. In any case, I made a quick sauce with stuff from the List that turned out quite well.

Uncle Jim’s Super Easy Quick Sauce:
Combine three heaping teaspoons of reduced fat mayo with two heaping teaspoons of dijon mustard and a single heaping teaspoon of horseradish sauce, for kick. Blend in an exotic spice in the cabinet that smells good with what you have so far. (I used the McCormick’s Gourmet Collection Szechwan Seasoning because it was there and, honestly, had the right color to it.)

I spooned that over the asparagus tips that I steamed in the microwave and added my left-over chicken and rice from the weekend. I was so pleased with myself that I even lit candles!  Oh, and that sauce?  To die for!
Ah, well, now it’s back to the writing. I have to figure out how to get my characters out of the room they’re in and the conversation/interview they’ve been having.
Pray for me.

Today, someone found my website using the search terms “proofing the sponge”.

And, what sort of sour, un-American kind of person doesn’t like ice cream enough to put “none” as a flavor?  Why, you’d have to be a damned inhuman …  Oh, right.
Never mind.

Oh, and I know I’m off to a dismal start on NaNoWriMo, but I did some research today and actually have a plot all of a sudden, so I have high hopes that my word counts will start to improve.  Of course, as I write this, I’m stuck at work, so, we’ll see.