Diary of a Network Geek

My regular readers all know how much I love Linux.

Okay, I’ll admit that I don’t run it as my main OS, but I love it for servers. Truly, truly, I do. I use it for all kinds of things, including my own, home-grown imaging system. Sure, it’s not Novell’s ZENWorks, but it does work pretty well. Back in the days when everyone seemed to be coming out with their own specialized distribution, I always thought it would be fun to roll one of my own. Yeah, I know, I am such a geek!

Anyway, thanks to PC Plus, you can roll your own Linux distro. Hit the link to see their super-excellent tutorial.

I’m going to say this even though someone will no doubt call me a racist in the comments.

Oh, don’t think it won’t happen, because it did once already the last time the job market got tough. Here’s the thing, at times like this, when the entire world’s economy is bad, I think American companies should put American citizens, and legal residents, first, and in that order. Let’s not send jobs overseas just now. And, let’s not import any more foreign guest workers. Look, I know plenty of people who came over on H1B visas and that’s all well and good, but everyone in IT knows that this system gets abused regularly as a way to undercut the local IT people and keep them from earning a living wage. We all know that it happens and I’m sure any tech out there can site multiple sources for it. So, when I see articles about how Indian IT groups are worried about the H1B reforms currently being debated, I can’t help but wonder why they think U.S companies should put their workers’ needs above U.S. workers’ needs. Shouldn’t we take care of our own? I sure remember growing up being taught that we take care of our own neighbors before we worry about people some where far, far away. We make sure that no one we can reach is going hungry before we start looking in other cities, states and countries for people who need our help, too. Things are tough all over, but they’re tough right here. So, let’s take care of that first, then worry about our distant neighbors on the other side of the world.

Does that make sense to anyone else? Or am I wrong here? Should India and China give us work for their countries? Should we do tech support for Mumbai?

And, I’m not just saying this out of some jingoistic, hyper-conservative, knee-jerk reaction to globalism, either.  I promise you.  There are a lot of reasons I’m against this, not just the high level of unemployment.  There are also a lot of abuses of this system.  In fact, there have been so many abuses of the H1B1 system in the high-tech industry that the Federal Government is investigating and prosecuting the case.  So, this whole trend of either importing foreign workers or sending work overseas just doesn’t cut it for me.  First, we need to take care of our own, then reach out to the tired, hungry and poor of other countries.

So, what do you all think?

Ever wanted to carry your whole desktop in your pocket?

Now you can with PortableApps.
Also?  PC Magazine has some ideas about carrying your PC in your pocket.

I’m not entirely sure I’d rely on a flash drive to carry my life on it, though.  I’ve had too many flaky problems with flash drives and no warning when they fail, either.  Still, as a backup or a temporary, traveling desktop, it might not be such a bad thing to have.  In any case, it’s something to think about.

Oh, and these particular articles focus on Windows, just so you know.

I’m on vacation.

Yes, vacation.  Of course, for a one man IT department, “on vacation” means something a little different than normal.  I ran in on Saturday, after picking up a rental car, to get a couple things squared away.  I have a “backup” person, but it’s really not his full-time gig, so I tried to make sure that he won’t really have anything to do.  Hopefully, I’ve succeeded.  But, in case I didn’t, I should be in cell-phone range the whole time, and my hotel has high-speed Internet.  Probably won’t take time to post, except the regular, automagic post I already have queued up.  I do worry quite a bit about leaving the network and my usesers untended.  I can think of so many things that can go wrong and, frankly, they’ve become so, so used to me being there to make last minute magic happen that they’ve come to expect it.  Of course, maybe that’s the best reason to take a couple of days off.

Also, I’m not going anywhere that I anticipate being any particular fun or even deeply interesting; Lawton, Oklahoma.  Why?  Because my nephew is graduating from Basic Training as he joins the Army National Guard, full time.  Still, it will be nice to see family and I’m looking at it as a photo opportunity.  Not sure what kind of shots I’ll get from the road, but I’ll certainly take as many of him and the graduation ceremony as possible.  When I’m back, I’ll post a link to Flickr.

So, now, it’s time to grab the last bags, toss thee roll of toilet paper into the car, and head out.  Be good while I’m gone, kids!

(And, yes, while I was typing this, I got a call from the office about someone moving their equipment and not able to connect.  See why I worry?  That’s also, incidentally, why I always travel with at least a partial roll of toilet paper in the car.  You just never know what might happen on the road!)

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious."

Do you have more than one website or blog you need to watch?

I have several websites and blogs and, honestly, sometimes, I don’t visit them all in a given week. And, while my webhosting provider is amazingly good and stable, especially at the reasonable rates they charge, sometimes, one or more of my sites go down without warning. So, what’s a bottom-feeding web entrepreneur like me to do? Enter Are My Sites Up! This website will let you monitor your sites and get an e-mail or SMS message to your phone if any go down. And, as usual when I recommend something, it’s free. They may charge eventually, but right now, it’s free.

Enjoy!

Seems like these might not be all they’re cracked up to be.

I’ve wondered about these since first reading about how they worked. Basically, these solid state drives, or SSDs, are giant flash drives. And, apparently, just like flash drives, they tend to slow down with use. Maybe I’ve just had too much bad luck with flash drives going suddenly strange and needing a reformat, but I wonder what else might go wrong with them in time?

Right, so this weekend I upgraded my laptop’s internal hard drive.

My trusty Toshiba Satellite, which I used all through my chemotherapy treatments almost two years ago, came with an 80 GB hard drive and was starting to fill up. All the pictures I take add up, I guess, especially when I shoot in RAW format. So, I decided that with drives being as cheap as they were, it was time for an upgrade. As I wrote Monday, I scooted over to MicroCenter and picked up a 500 GB Seagate 2.5inch, mobile, SATA drive on Saturday. They were on sale for $115, which is, I think, a pretty damn good price. I got a couple other things, too, since the drive upgrade and a previous memory upgrade makes my laptop the most capable machine in my house, outside of the servers upstairs. (Why are so many non-tech people surprised when I mention that I ran cable and have a server room, with servers?) Oh, and before I get too far, let me mention that you can click on any of the pictures here for larger versions if you want a closer look than the thumbnail. Just click back when you’re done admiring my work.

The other essential piece of hardware to start out with is an external USB drive adapter of some kind. I bought the Kingwin EZ-Connect, pictured here. I got that at an earlier trip to MicroCenter, with whom I do NOT have an endorsement deal, by the way. I just love their store. In any case, I got this particular one for two reasons. First, it was under $30. Second, it could handle the three major types of drives that I’m likely to encounter on a regular basis.

What you get in the box, as you can see, is a USB cable, a drive adapter, a power adapter and a power supply. Oh, you also get a small CD that has some drivers, which you don’t actually need if you’re using Windows XP, and some simple backup software. I didn’t actually use this software, but, rather, I went to Seagate’s website and downloaded their free utility called DiskWizard. There were a number of reasons why this made sense for this situation. For one thing, I didn’t want to just back up the drive, but I wanted to make a bit-for-bit mirror copy of the drive so that I can replace the old one and still have a bootable, working computer. For another, I’m familiar with Seagate’s utility and have successfully used it before.

So, after installing DiskWizard following the default prompts, I hooked up my new drive via the USB adapter.

I did install the included software and the drive was immediately recognized. Then, again, I simply followed the DiskWizard prompts with a single false step when I had to go back and change an option in the cloning configuration to make sure the new drive was set to be bootable. I cannot stress that enough! When doing this, you absolutely must make sure that the new drive is being configured to be bootable, system drive. If you don’t do that, your machine will not boot when you change out the drive. If you use DiskWizard, it will require a reboot. In fact, after setting your configuration, the software will prompt you to reboot and, after the software reboots your machine, it will automatically launch and start the cloning process. The actual drive cloning took about an hour or two. I was running around doing other things, so I didn’t get a good time on it. Best just to allow several hours and, like I did, do other things to amuse yourself while you wait.

Now, it’s important to remember to both unplug your laptop and disconnect the battery. Just unplugging won’t be enough to make your laptop safe to work on. As long as that battery is in there, you could suddenly have a jolt of electricity jump through the circuits and make any planned upgrades pretty much useless. Also? A little jolt of juice can bite you pretty hard, especially when you’re not expecting it!

The next step, obviously, is to remove the old drive.

In my case, it was pretty easy. In the past, on some laptops, getting the drive out required taking the whole machine almost totally apart. I’ll never forget having to take a laptop’s entire keyboard off the top of the case to get to drive bay! I had to take the screen off at the hinge and everything! It was a dangerous, delicate mess! But, on today’s laptops, you mostly just have to take off a single panel, as you can see in the picture. The drive was in there really snugly, thanks, in part, to the rubber, anti-vibration sleeves meant to keep the drive quieter in a laptop. What I found interesting, however, is that there were no screws holding the drive itself in. No cages or straps or anything outside of the SATA connections and the tightness of the fit. Because, the drive bay door fit very snugly and I had to apply pressure to get it in place correctly and screwed shut again.

On the right, you can see the drive bay still open with the new, freshly cloned drive in it and the old, small drive laying next to it.

This was actually a pretty simple upgrade to make. It was what I generally refer to as a “one screwdriver job”. By that I mean that I could mainly have done it with the tiny pocket tool I carry with me in my pocket. Though, in this case, I used the old, cheap red-handled screwdriver in the picture. It’s a freebie that is often used as a giveaway by tool companies. I’ve had that one since my first IT job, back when I worked for Hyatt Hotels. It’s a little beat up now, but it can still handle a nice, easy job like this.

As you can see, the formatted drive is a little smaller than advertised. Also, they tend to round up a little and bytes and megabytes and gigabytes aren’t round numbers, so the math gets a little funky. Oh, and there was a special 251Meg partition that couldn’t be clearly identified by DiskWizard, even though it cloned the partition just fine. So, when you factor in all those things, you can see the nice, big partition, which is mostly empty and waiting for me to fill it up with great pictures!
Well, that’s the plan at least.

In any case, now you have some idea how to change out a laptop hard drive if you should ever want to upgrade for yourself. I really left out a lot of the nitty-gritty detail that I felt was either self-explanatory or that you should really know how to do before attempting this in the first place. Perhaps not the best tutorial, but at least a good step-by-step overview of how to get it done!

This is a quick and clever idea!

Okay, so you remember a week ago the Internet was supposed to melt because of all the problems with this Conficker worm? Did you even notice anything amiss at all? Yeah, me neither.
But, still, if you’re like me, you stay awake at night worrying about all the potential worms and virii that might be sitting on your computer, waiting silently, hiding from the security software that you most certainly keep updated, waiting until your guard is down to pounce! Well, okay, maybe it’s just the full-time, professional geeks like me that worry about that. And, yeah, maybe I worry about it happening on my work network more than I do at home, but, still, you get my point. So, how can you know? Well, thanks to Lifehacker, I bring you the Conficker “Eye Chart”.

The principal is simple, really. Conficker blocks access to several security sites so you can’t download updates or removal tools that would clean it from your system. The Eye Chart simply links to graphics from those sites, and several others as a control set. So, if you can’t see images from the security sites, you know that you most likely have Conficker and have to get the removal tool from somewhere else to clean your system. Pretty neat idea, I think. So, go ahead and click the link to the Conficker “Eye Chart” and check for yourself.

Now, if you do have it, I suggest going to either the Microsoft page about Conficker and its removal, or download the Symantec removal tool from another PC and then take that to your infected PC via a USB drive and run it. Though, to be honest, I think the whole thing was blown out of proportion by a few alarmists in the media. (Though not Houston’s Dwight Silverman, I might note! Which is one of the reasons I follow his blog!)

But, just two links.

Okay, so I’m kind of cheating with this, but, still, if it gets some of this in front of people who can use it, I think it’s worth gaming the system a bit.
First, I have a link to the Search Engine Journal post on Link Baiting, or How to Build Links in ANY Niche. For those of you in a hurry, I’ll summarize: write really, really killer content, if possible with tie-ins to other major blogs. (But, to read the article anyway.)
Secondly, the other 29 tips and whatnot are all at ProBlogger. Sure, the post title is 29 Tips, Tutorials and Resources for New Bloggers, but there’s plenty there for old-timers, too. (I keep meaning to read the ProBlogger book, too, but, it’s hiding under an exercise book, so I haven’t gotten to it yet.)

Okay, and yes, I’m hoping that the search engines will find this post and jostle me up a bit in the rankings. I am Googlerank whore. There, I said it. Happy now?

Are you worried about this?

So, this whole “the Internet is going to melt and your computer is going to explode on April 1” thing has really reached a fever pitch. Are you worried? Should you be? Look, I know that 60 Minutes did a thing about it, but, honestly, I think it’s mostly been blown out of proportion. For one thing, it takes advantage of an old, well-known flaw in Windows that was patched back in October, which was months before this worm got out into the wild. So, if you’ve been doing your updates like you should, chances are that you’ll be fine. And, if you haven’t, well, thanks to a couple of security researchers, there are some tools to take care of the problem.

So, if you haven’t done it yet, update your antivirus programs. And, then do your Windows updates. The rest should pretty well take care of itself.
Oh, also? Don’t open e-mail from strange people, especially if the name on the e-mail sounds a little off. Don’t go to shady or sleazy websites, either. Those warez sites all are just as likely to have infected programs as they are “legitimately” pirated ones. So, just don’t use them.

As usual, the press are making a really big deal about this, but most people probably won’t be effected. Just do your updates like you’re supposed to and don’t break the law, no matter how you feel about copyright and software prices.

So, uh, stay calm and carry on.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"If God is for us, who can be against us?"
   --Romans 8:31 (NIV)