October 18th, 2010
I will try to explain wiring of a T1/DS1 circuit end to end; since so many people have emailed me on the prior T1 wiring article and wanted more. In this article you will find references to the standards and technologies that surround a T-1/DS-1 installation. I will start with the line coming in and ending with the device. You may not have access to everything I explain, but there is a benefit in knowing the technology.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Telco | 21 Comments »
October 2nd, 2010
Ever since I started brewing all grain beer, I’ve wanted one of those cool rotating fly sparge arms. They revolve around and distribute water on your grain bed so all the precious sugars are washed from the grains. There are two schools of thought; the first being don’t use it and just keep an inch of water on top of your grain bed and the other is better efficiency when fly sparging over a longer period of time. Whichever you prescribe to; this is a cool little project! Read on and I’ll show you how to make a DIY rotating sparge arm.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Beer, Brewing
Posted in Beer | 40 Comments »
August 24th, 2010
When setting up a secure server farm you always want to filter egress traffic. This means that all outbound traffic is blocked by default, including the web traffic from the servers. When surfing is required for drivers and downloads, this is usually handled by setting the proxy in the Internet Explorer options. However if you want certain processes / services like Windows Update to automatically retrieve updates and wait for manual approval, the next time you login. You need to set a proxy server up and force the Local Machine to use it. The setting in the IE properties page is for the Current User only.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: CMD, Microsoft, Windows
Posted in Windows | 7 Comments »
August 18th, 2010
I recently replaced my Blackberry Curve with a Verizon Incredible. I soon found that the battery life was the only thing that wasn’t incredible about the phone. Owning a smart phone like the Incredible, Droid X, Apple iPhone or even a Windows Mobile is a paradox; because the more you use the phone the quicker the battery drains. Newer smart phones make the phone more useable than ever before, which means after a few hours the phone is dead.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Circuit, Mods
Posted in Homebrew, Mods | 2 Comments »
February 24th, 2010
When you rename a Virtual Machine in VMWare’s Virtual Center the display name changes, but the files in the datastore do not. The .vmx, .vmdk, .nvram, etc… files retain the original name you gave them when the Virtual Machine was created. This presents a problem if you ever need to back track and figure out what the files are for.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: VMware
Posted in VMware | 1 Comment »
January 9th, 2010
Making sure mail is sent properly from a PHP website is a bit difficult when it’s not your server, like shared hosting. You never have access to the mail logs, so you can’t see mail moving. I host several websites on shared hosting and recently found my CMS was not sending emails to me. So I opened a ticket and I concluded it to be a SNAFU.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: php, Web
Posted in Programming, Scripts | 1 Comment »
January 7th, 2010
When you purchase a Dell server you can purchase the Open Manage software, so they ship you media. OpenManage is the software that installs the maintenance partition and the automated install of the operating system as well as firmware updates. However if you did not get media with your server or want the latest version of software; you might run into a problem if you download the software with Internet Explorer and never read the instructions.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Dell, Microsoft
Posted in Windows | 1 Comment »
December 14th, 2009
I had just finished working on a project where I needed to programmatically get a web page and save the HTML to a file. I started toying around with some code I used for parsing XML and totally rewrote the code. I found that I kept getting an error of “Microsoft VBScript runtime error: Invalid procedure call or argument”. I couldn’t understand what was going on. I was passing the parameters correctly to the File System Object, but I kept getting the error. All FSO was doing was creating a file and writing the string out. So I checked the length and then started writing the left(string,number) and found it was a character that was in Unicode. So I wrote a Unicode to Ascii function that is not all that efficient, but it is very effective. The sample code below will get a webpage from Google and save it to a file.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Programming, Scripts | 6 Comments »
December 11th, 2009
The key to mastering permissions at the command line in Vista and Windows Server 2008 Server is learning the icacls.exe command. With the introduction of Windows Vista, you can no longer select multiple items like folders and files and apply permissions to a group of objects. The recommended way is to use the command line and the icacls.exe command.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: CMD, Microsoft, Windows
Posted in Windows | 21 Comments »
December 8th, 2009
Recently I found a problem when using Mac OS X and Windows Server 2003 R2 as a file server. The problem exists in the permissions that are applied to user folders. When applying permissions to shares you normally start out with a very restrictive permission structure at the top. As you create the folders you add permissions for users and groups to permit and restrict access for others. This structure of permissions is very common in dealing with corporate shares. We also share the folder with ‘domain users’ only having change or modify access to the entire share. This eliminates people applying their own permissions and locking everyone out including themselves. This is a common task for a network admin in setting up permissions.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Linux, Microsoft, OSX, Windows
Posted in Windows | 1 Comment »