Archive for March, 2007
OpenDNS and Local Host Names, a Work Around
Posted on March 30, 2007, under How To, Networking.
In a previous article entitled OpenDNS is a Better DNS, I explained some of the benefits to using OpenDNS. A brief recap for the boys a girls on what OpenDNS is:
OpenDNS uses its distributed network of DNS servers to speed up your Internet experience, increase reliability, improve security and make DNS smarter for users all over the world.
Since setting up OpenDNS on my networks router I have had some problems with local host names. For example my Network Attached Storage is called “NAS” appropriately. Well in some cases when using the logical name “NAS” to reference the box, it doesn’t work. I have to use the IP Address to access it. There is a relatively simple way to have the best of both worlds. The benefits of OpenDNS and the usefulness of being able to use host names.
What we are going to do in this work around is tell your host file to map logical names to certain IP Address. Your host file is used to look up the IP Address of a device on the network, a sort of mapping from IP Address to host name. So here we go:
1) Obtain the IP Addresses of the devices you want to map.
2) Navigate to “C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc” or “C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc” depending on your version of Windows.
3) Edit the file “hosts” in Notepad or your favorite text editor.
4) You want to add a line for every computer you wish to map in the form of “IP HOSTNAME” separated by a space. So if your IP Address was “192.168.1.50″ and your host name was “BigBadMachine” you would add a line like this “192.168.1.50 bigbadmachine”. Your host file would then look like this
[ftf]
# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a ‘#’ symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.1.50 bigbadmachine
[/ftf]
5) You can add as many lines as you wish to the end. You will need to restart to see the results working.
This work around works best if you have static or “sticky” IP Addresses coming off of your router.
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Ask a Ninja Gone Mainstream
Posted on March 29, 2007, under Podcasts.
The latest Ask a Ninja is extremely funny. They did a special “interview” with Will Ferrell and Jon Heder for the new movies Blades of Glory. It’s great to see a home grown video-cast become large enough to do main stream interviews. This has to be one of the funniest episodes I have seen in a while.
Not much else from here, back from traveling so I am catching up on email and work.
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Behind the P2P: Where are They Now?
Posted on March 28, 2007, under Networking, P2P.
When writing the article yesterday about backup solutions, I cleaned out a whole bunch of old software from my archives. A lot of old P2P applications that I guess I was holding onto for historical purposes. I was very intrigued with where these companies/software projects were these days. In an shameless rip from VH1’s Behind The Music and Where Are They Now I sent to find out.
Original Naspter: Ahh Napster… single handedly taking the MP3 format off of the IRC and FTP servers and into a easy to use desktop application. The surge started in college dorm rooms and soon was being use by every teenager in the United States. Just looking at the website from those days takes me back. Napster put Shawn Fanning on Time Magazine and in court rooms. Napster has shifted through many hands over the years, and is still alove and kicking and recently struck a deal with AT&T.
WinMX: Remember WinMX? Amongst the original Napster days when Shawn Fanning was on the MTV music awards in a Metallica TShirt. Long before the Bit torrent days, WinMX was one of the fastest ways to download you music and warez. Located at the now defunct www.winmx.com domain. So where is it now? Well, gone! Along with it’s FrontCode parent as well. From Wikipedia:
On September 13, 2005, Frontcode Technologies received a threatening letter from the RIAA demanding that they either implement filters to make it impossible for users to download copyrighted material from WinMX, or shut down. On September 21, 2005 the network and the WinMX homepage were officially confirmed as offline.
Grokster: Grokster, another P2P application from the good old days is interesting. The website, now in control of the studios, “logs you IP Address”and warns you about file trading on the Internet. As if this is suppose to scare you. Visiting a website is not illegal, and every website you visit logs your IP Address… they are called server logs. Anyway, Grokster was shutdown as well:
On 27 September 2006, Judge Steven Wilson of the United States District Court for the Central District of California granted summary judgment to the Plaintiffs as to StreamCast’s liability. The court rejected StreamCast’s argument that the Plaintiff need show specific instances of infringement resulting from StreamCast’s acts, holding that “Plaintiff need prove only that StreamCast distributed the product with the intent to encourage infringement.”
OpenNap: OpenNap was and still is an open source version of the original Napster server. During the whole shutting down of Napster, OpenNap servers were popping up everywhere. I really enjoyed this project, being a developer and all. I remember sifting through the source code, and learning the Napster protocol with it’s big endian - little endian ways. It was kind of cool to see similar work to what Shawn Fanning wrote way back in the day. You know Shawn’s got a copy of the original source just lying around, would love to see what that code looks like. The project is located at SourceForge but looks like it hasn’t been updated since September of 2001.
BearShare: Still seems to be around, but it has gone through it’s fair share of legal battles as well. According to Wikipedia “Since BearShare 6, the program is malware-free and cannot be used anymore to download arbitrary files. Instead, BearShare offers paid music downloads in the DRMed WMA format as well as free content in MP3 format. The free MP3 content is shared by users and is automatically verified by BearShare not to infringe. This verification is done using an acoustic filter.”
Kazaa: Kazaa was kind of the new found hope after Naspter was shutdown. Everyone migrated to Kazaa, and file trading continued. Kazaa was loaded with malware back in the day. Shareman networks settled a series of legal suits over the years. Kazaa is still offered in the 3.25 version, but copyrighted materials are no longer available on the service… not a surprise. Some of the founders and developers have moved onto other ventures.
Limewire: - Limewire was a fairly popular service, and is now open source. They even have their own blog. The service still appears to be functioning, not sure on the state of copyrighted materials.
Looking back is kind of funny now. Bit Torrent long passes any of the old methods of file sharing in speed, performance, reliability, etc. I wonder where Bit Torrent will be in five years, and if it will still be the king of P2P. It’s also kind of interesting to think that P2P applications brought spyware and adware into the mass circulation, because most of the “free” P2P applications would bundle this junk in just to make a dollar or two. I guess they didn’t make enough to cover the lawyer fees.
Well, hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane. If you have one on the list I forgot, and failed to mention let me know in the comments. And as always, I do not condone or encourage the downloading of illegal or copyrighted works - Smokey the Bear Says: “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires”.
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The Road to the Perfect Backup Plan
Posted on March 27, 2007, under How To, Software.
I recently took some load off of my file server and got a NAS device, no not the rapper. Previously my file server had a bunch of internal hard drives setup up in various RAID arrays. Now my NAS has all of my hard drives and my file server runs the Subversion server, backup software, iTunes Media server, and hosts the hot swappable drive used for off site backups. I have a strict backup routine, I got burned once a long time ago and ever since then have a strict backup plan.
My backup plan goes something like this. On a daily basis all of my computers, databases, websites, etc. are backed up to the NAS device. It is setup that when my laptop connects to the network, it will initiate a backup of the laptop as well. Once a day a data dump of my NAS is backed up to a hot swappable drive. That hot swappable drive is swapped out with another drive in my safe deposit box at my bank. Paranoid? Excessive? Yes, and maybe, but when I have hard drives go down I never get that sinking feeling in my stomach thinking “Oh $#!^, was that backed up?”.
So what are some tips for making a backup solution of your own ? Here is a small list:
- Take Advantage of Compression: Hard drives are cheap, well some of them, but that’s no need to just throw away valuable space. Most backup software has compression options, use them. You will be amazed at how much space it saves on your backup devices.
- Burn a Copy of Your Backup Software to CD: Whatever software you use for backups, burn it to a CD and keep it in a safe place; off site if possible. If you loose a hard drive and need to get an archive off of your backup, you do not want to be looking for the exact version of backup software you used to create that archive.
- Backup Open Files: A lot of your important files are locked when you backup scripts are running because they are in use. When looking for backup software, look for one that support “Open File Backup”, which will backup open files even if they are in use. This may be an add on or part of a higher package during sale, but it is worth it in the long run.
- Backup Mail Files: This kind of goes with the above above category, but sometimes overlooked. Your mail file is important, unless you delete every email. Me I save all of my email, not sure why, just do. Backup your mail file! Again a lot of backup software have features for doing this exact task.
- Data Clean Out: I have a software repository that contains software I have purchased over the years and have stored just in case I need to reinstall it. Recently I actually looked in the repository and was shocked. There was so much old software, software that probably wouldn’t even run correctly these days; that’s how old it was. I went through an cleared out over 75Gb of old junk. I figure if ever need a copy of this very old software, I haven’t needed in years, I can probably find it our on the big bad internet somewhere. Better yet, the latest version probably has much needed and wanted bug fixes and improvements.
- Off Site Redundancy: It’s been mentioned several time before in this article, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Keep a copy of your data off site; a safe deposit box, girlfriends house, friends house, behind a bush, anywhere away from the actual data. If your house burns or something else horrible along those lines, hardware care be replaced, but data can not. Do not trust your data to common fire safes, most of these safes will still get hot enough to ruin hard drives and other media. This is why insurance companies say to print your pictures on plain computer paper, because photos paper will ruin in those fire safes. Fire safes get very hot on the inside, not hot enough to destroy papers, but photos and media are more sensitive to heat. Online storage is also another good thing to look into.
- Encryption: This is an acquired taste. If you are only backing up pictures of Fido, you will probably not need encryption in your backup solution. However, any sort of banking, or financial information, use at least some sort of encryption. Most backup software will offer encryption options. If you are doing backups for a business, please, please, please use encryption. I hate hearing stories about how some department store lost millions of customer data that was unencrypted on a hard drive or laptop; there is no excuse in these situations.
- Don’t Be Lazy: Backups are a lot like home alarm systems, they only work if you use them. It may be annoying, it may not be fun, but it will be better than losing you data. Try to automate the process as much as possible, but setup alerts and notifications to let you know when backups are happening. Check your backed up data every other day to make sure it’s actually there are current.
There are a lot of solutions to backing up your data, you can get a cheap external hard drive for under $100 which will be good for most as a “one touch backup solution”.
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Mark Russinovich in His New Role at Microsoft
Posted on March 26, 2007, under Blogging, Development, Operating Systems, Software.
If you haven’t heard of Mark Russinovich that you need to take a look at Wikipedia to brush up on some history. Mark’s former company he starter Winternals was acquired by Microsoft, and Mark is now a Technical Fellow in Windows and is a member of the Windows Core Architecture team. What does this mean? Well only good things for Windows. Mark has an interview over at the Channel 9 blog, that is a great little interview.
Not much else from me today, it’s a Monday and tomorrow is a travel day so it’s busy.
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Why Digg and Other Sites Should Use Google Search For Their Site
Posted on March 23, 2007, under Podcasts, Search, Tools and Services.
You know it’s bad when you get better results by searching with Google, than searching on a particular site. Take Digg.com. First, let me state I have no problem with Digg. I am a loyal Digg user and loyal Google user, and the symptoms in this article have happened a hand full of times and are not limited to Digg.
I listen to Diggnation and often they have a particular article in the podcast they I want to see on Digg, so I head over to Digg and search for the words I think would bring up the article. But no go, so I type them in Google and more often than not the results are in the first eight results. Let’s take a look at an example. There is an article on Digg that was very popular about a tourist paying $200 to launch a rocket launcher in Cambodia for fun. So I search for “Cambodia rocket launcher” in Digg and Google. I can’t find the results in Digg, here they are. But in Google, the result is #6. If I add $200 to the beginning of the query, it’s #1 in Google and still no where to be found on Digg. And these results are not even site specific using “site: digg.com” in Google. So why is this?
Well for Digg there are several problem:
- The “quick” search box in the header of Digg by default only searches through the last 7 days. I understand that this is probably done for performance reasons, but the chances are what I am looking for is further back than a week.
- The second problem I spy is Digg search is not a smart as Google’s search. There five options when searching through Digg stories. That’s too many, by now users are use to the search engine doing the thinking for them. And if worse comes to worse have search shortcuts like to set the search parameters in the query. That way with one query I can specify I want to search further back than 1 week, without having to first search and then set my options.
Digg is not alone on this island, many sites have clunky search that do not return the wanted results most of the time. I find myself searching with Google the majority of the time. So why should sites use Google Search for their site, well here are a couple reason I could think of.
- Saved resource: I can’t even imagine the CPU resource nightmare that Digg has. I have heard Kevin Rose speak of their server growth rate. Every time Digg orders a server from their provider they get a little foam Linux penguin, Kevin states that the Digg office is littered with the little squeezable guys. which gives on a good idea that they are always needing more power. If you offload search to Google, you can save a good chunk of resources on your server. Furthermore you will not have to set restrictive default parameters, like 1 week with Digg.
- Google is good at search: By now it’s obvious that Google is very good at search, and can return better results than what most services can. It’s as simple as that. There is not need to reinvent the wheel, when the wheel is already really good.
- Get some extra bling: With Google search on your site you can generate income on the ads that Google displays. The page is completely brand able, so the look and feel can be the same as all of your other pages. With the amount of page hits and search queries that I can only imagine Digg serves up on a daily basis, they could generate some serious income.
Yes there are some pitfalls to using Google search:
- Competitor ads and search results if the user is not searching site specific.
- For services like Digg, you will not be able to search through comments, members name, etc. These service specific options are useful in some cases.
- General lack of control can also be a problem, it’s not home brewed so there are limitations on what you can do with the search.
With the type of traffic that some of these services bring in, I am sure they might be able to strike a deal with Google for a more fluent and controllable search. I may be wrong, but in the mean time I have setup Firefox search extensions for services like Digg that use Google for searching as a pose to Digg. No harm no foul.
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VNC vs. Remote Desktop vs. Others
Posted on March 22, 2007, under Development, Software.
I love remote connections, be it either Remote Desktop or VNC. Being able to control something remotely is invaluable these days, I would put this under the same category as Virtualization in the helpfulness department. So which one do you use Remote Desktop or VNC? Well there are pros and cons to each, and even though they accomplish the same basic thing they are indeed different.
Remote Desktop:
We use Remote Desktop at work for all of our web servers and SQL servers, and it works. Jeff Atwood has a great write up on some of the well known pitfalls of Remote Desktop. The biggest for me is that Remote Desktop treats every connection as a new session. When I am on the server, and multitasking my connection will timeout and I will have to re login in and kind of start from scratch. There are settings on the server side you can tweak in order to make this period longer, but it’s just not what I need/want.
VNC:
I use VNC at home for my file server that has no monitor or keyboard hooked up to it. This is a pitfall itself because if I I ever need to get into the BIOS or do things before Windows is loaded, I have to drag a monitor and keyboard from the closet; but for the most part it sits there and runs. VNC is great for my purposes, especially during my daily backup regime. I can log in at any time and check the status of the backups, close the VNC window, login later on and have the same thing in front of me. A live snapshot of the desktop is perfect for when there are not more than one person utilizing a login. The other benefit of VNC is the variety, there are many projects out there that have great software. Some even make clients for Mobile devices. VNC is still actively moving forward, where Microsoft seems like they have bigger fish to fry.
Copilot:
In kind of a side category I have used Fogcreek’s Copilot product which is perfect for trouble shooting a computer for a friend or family member. The whole connection is setup on the website, initiated through email, each party downloads a personalized client,and it just works! Instead of typing out long emails with step by step instructions, it takes less time to just remote in and fix it. We have used this at work to get into customers computers, with permission obviously, to trouble shoot our products when they are acting strange. A quick way to gain access when you do not want to setup a permanent remote connection.
How do you prefer your remote connections? Remote Desktop, VNC, Go To My PC, something else?
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Speedtest.net More Than Just a Bandwidth Test
Posted on March 21, 2007, under Development, Networking.
I am a bandwidth whore. It’s true, I pay good money for my bandwidth and I am not a happy camper when I am crawling along. Where I live, I pay extra-extra money for the “Broadband Plus” package from my ISP. This will give me speeds up to 15mbps, with ideal conditions. There are many broadband tests out there, but Speedtest.net has been my favorite for since it arrived on the scene a while ago.
A little background, Speedtest.net makes great use of Flash giving you that sexy eye candy while testing your bandwidth speed. That’s just the beginning of the goodness, as Speedtest.net is loaded with features and functionality. They have servers to test all over the world, and have been continuing to improve the service. Speedtest.net will also keep your test history, a feature I personally love.
One thing I recently noticed was the amount of data that they make available for you to view. You can compare your test results with people in your area, but even better yet you can see the break down of ISP’s for anywhere in the world.
This information is incredible useful. There are a ton of websites and services out there that will give you information about ISP’s in your area, but this data is from people taking the bandwidth test on those ISP’s pipes. The data will give you a really good picture of what an ISP can offer you. ISP’s will use tricky language and marketing by saying you can get “up to” a certain speed, when in reality you will probably never see those speeds as they are best case scenario.
I have been sorting through some of the data here, and the difference between what DSL and cable can offer is great. I have always been a fan of cable internet over DSL, even though it’s shared bandwidth it’s just always been faster. A coworker has FIOS, addition he has a redundant connection with a Cable internet connection (drool); not sure when FIOS is going to be available in my area, I have been told not for a long time.
Anyway take a trip over to Speedtest.net and run a test, see how you measure up to others in your area. Post your results here in the comments of your speeds, I would be interested in where everyone stands. I am going to go back and sort through some more data.
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A Better Way To Add Syntax Highlighting to WordPress
Posted on March 19, 2007, under Development, WordPress.
There are many ways to add syntax highlighting to WordPress, and I have tried a good portion of . Most all of the plug ins available will give you good results, some are easier to setup than others. Before recently I used Dean’s Code Highlighter which is based off of the Geshi Syntax Highlighting project. The biggest setback with Dean’s Code Highlighter, and other similar plug ins that output HTML code is that they do not work well in RSS feeds when you truncate the post down to a summary. Currently I have full articles in my RSS feeds, however I still find that when some feed readers truncate the full article the syntax highlighted code gets all messed up.
I recently came across Flash Text Formatter, which instead of using PHP to syntax highlight source code uses Flash. Here is an example:
[ftf]
if (empty($wp)) {
require_once('wp-config.php');
wp('feed=atom');
}
header('Content-type: application/atom+xml; charset=' . get_option('blog_charset'), true);
$more = 1;
?>
‘; ?>
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xml:lang="”
>
In other news, I am not meaning to turn this into a Wordpress blog there will be more diverse content coming soon. I spend my days with C++ code, so by the end of the day I enjoy converting over to the web world.
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Is That Chris Pirillo?
Posted on March 19, 2007, under Blogging.
I get a bunch of magazines, too many. I always have a back log of magazines because I acquire most of my information from syndication, and just do not have enough time in the day to sit down and read a a magazine. I should probably allocate more time for that.
I was reading through a magazine today, when a friendly face came across the page in an advertisement.
(sorry for the blurry picture I do not have a scanner… his shirt says “I know storage”)
Is that Chris Pirillo? I am a big fan of Chris and his many, many, many, many projects. (I am not sure how it juggles it all.) But tell me I am wrong, that’s Chris! Take a look at a side by side.
I swear that’s Chris. I am not saying they stole his likeness, but as I was sifting through the pages it just popped out. You be the judge.
