Bauer-Power- Information is Power!

Digg v4? WTF?

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:00:00 +0000

I haven’t been on Digg.com too much lately. I used to frequent it pretty regularly when I as submitting a lot of stuff there, and fellow Bauer-Power contributor FreedomChicken and I decided we would try our hands at creating a Digg army, and try to game the system. I stopped hanging out there when they got rid of the shout feature. After that I found it was just too hard to try to game the system.

Well lately I have been seeing a lot of activity on Twitter. Mainly it is directed at Digg founder Kevin Rose, and almost all of it is really negative! I was wondering what was going on, so I decided to check out Digg. There it was, Digg version 4! With this new version they have tried to make it so that Power Diggers cannot possibly control the front page. In fact, just about all of your stories come from RSS feeds from other popular sites like Mashable, Engadget and others. The rest are articles of the people you are following on Digg. Did I say following? Sounds Twitter like doesn’t it? Well it is exactly that, a complete rip-off of Twitter!

Now if you go to the site, you see a bunch of Reddit submissions dominating the front page. If you didn’t know, Reddit is probably Digg’s biggest competitor in social news. These submissions from Reddit are of course in protest to the new fangled Digg v4. in fact one article boasts that Digg v4 has caused Reddit traffic to spike, and registrations to soar!

Besides the changes that sort of make Digg different than what made people love it in the first place, it is also full of bugs. Logging into it this morning I was greeted by numerous errors, and problems. Here is one of them:

I think I can push through the changes. In fact, this might be good for gaming Digg again because in theory, the more followers to can acquire, the more diggs your submissions will get. Also, you can add your site’s RSS feed to Digg so that your stuff gets auto-submitted.

What do you think? Do you like the new changes? Do you hate them? What is your least favorite feature of the new Digg? Let us know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: digg,v4

How To Restore Multiple SQL Databases At One Time

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:00:00 +0000

At my day job we are getting ready to move our hosting environment from one colocation facility to another. Sounds easy enough right? Well it is if you can afford some down time, or of you have some money to buy more equipment to replicate your environment. If you are working on a shoe string budget though, then you have to get creative.

One of the things I have been working on lately is migrating SQL data from a very large Microsoft SQL server that has multiple instances, each with about 100 databases or so. These four instances were originally stored on one physical server with no redundancy. Bad idea right? Well, at our new data center I have configured two fail-over SQL clusters to house all of this data. I am moving two instance per cluster. I would have built two more clusters, but I just don't have enough SAN space at the new data center yet. Anyway, In order to migrate the data relatively quickly, I hooked up a USB hard drive to the physical SQL server and created a maintenance job on each instance to backup all the databases to the USB drive. Now with all that data on the USB drive, I drove it over to the new data center, and hooked it up to a server there and shared it out. Now the tricky part, restoring all those friggin' databases! All friggin' 400 some odd databases!

Now I'm not a DBA, so I don't know T-SQL scripting at all, but I was able to figure out something. If you go through GUI (Microsoft SQL Manager) and go through all the steps to do the restore, right before you restore there is an option so save that job as a T-SQL script! Boom!

So now that I have gone through the motions of restoring one, I get a little bit of code similar to this:

RESTORE DATABASE [DB_RESTORE] FROM DISK = N'\\<FILESERVER>\<FILESHARE>\DB_Backup.bak' WITH FILE = 1, MOVE N'DB_Backup' TO N'E:\MSSQL10_50.SQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\DB_RESTORE.mdf', MOVE N'DB_Backup_log' TO N'E:\MSSQL10_50.SQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\DB_RESTORE_1.LDF', NOUNLOAD, STATS = 10

GO

Cool, now all I had to do to restore multiple databases was to copy and paste the above code (Before the GO line) over and over again, and changing the database information to match the other database names and backup files. For example, restoring three databases at once would look like this:

RESTORE DATABASE [DB_RESTORE1] FROM DISK = N'\\<FILESERVER>\<FILESHARE>\DB_Backup1.bak' WITH FILE = 1, MOVE N'DB_Backup1' TO N'E:\MSSQL10_50.SQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\DB_RESTORE1.mdf', MOVE N'DB_Backup1_log' TO N'E:\MSSQL10_50.SQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\DB_RESTORE1_1.LDF', NOUNLOAD, STATS = 10

RESTORE DATABASE [DB_RESTORE2] FROM DISK = N'\\<FILESERVER>\<FILESHARE>\DB_Backup2.bak' WITH FILE = 1, MOVE N'DB_Backup2' TO N'E:\MSSQL10_50.SQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\DB_RESTORE2.mdf', MOVE N'DB_Backup2_log' TO N'E:\MSSQL10_50.SQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\DB_RESTORE2_1.LDF', NOUNLOAD, STATS = 10

RESTORE DATABASE [DB_RESTORE3] FROM DISK = N'\\<FILESERVER>\<FILESHARE>\DB_Backup3.bak' WITH FILE = 1, MOVE N'DB_Backup3' TO N'E:\MSSQL10_50.SQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\DB_RESTORE3.mdf', MOVE N'DB_Backup3_log' TO N'E:\MSSQL10_50.SQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\DB_RESTORE3_1.LDF', NOUNLOAD, STATS = 10

GO

After I had my script in order, all I had to do after that was to create another maintenance job on the new cluster to run my T-SQL script above. I had to set the timeout to about 60000, and just let it run. After about ten minutes or so I had all the databases restored! It actually took me longer to generate the script than it did to restore all the databases!

Make sure that if you are using the above code to change it to fit your environment!

Now if you know of an easier, or better way of doing this, I am all ears. All though creating the script was fairly easy, it was tedious as a mother f**ker to copy and paste all the info needed for 400 some odd databases. Please let me know in the comments if you have done this before, and did it differently.

Technorati Tags: how to, restore, multiple, many, microsoft, sql, databases, at once, script, t-sql, maintenance plan

Tech Chop! Ep. 2 How To Securely Wipe a Hard Drive Using Linux

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:10:00 +0000

Since the month is basically over, I decided to go ahead and release episode two of Tech Chop. The email in this video actually comes from a former co-worker of mine who was looking to use Bauer-Puntu to wipe some hard drives on servers before donating them to a local charity. If you didn't know there are two utilities that you can use to do this in Bauer-Puntu. The one I show you in this episode is called Shred.

The reason you want to securely wipe a drive before donating it, or selling it on eBay is that if you don't, the potential for the next owner of your equipment obtaining your financial records, or finding your secret stash of porn vids is pretty good. Simply formatting your drive isn't good enough to prevent this, as most of the data still exists on the drive. The only way you can make sure people can't recover that data is to over-write the drive multiple times with random 1's and 0's.

Now that you have a basic idea of what the show is about, here is episode two of Tech Chop!

What do you like to use to wipe hard drives? How many passes do you usually do? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: how to, securely, wipe, hard drive, hdd, linux, ubuntu

Permaban for players with Halo: Reach

sundance.mcclure@gmail.com (TheEpicChocobo) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 07:15:00 +0000

If you have downloaded the leaked Halo: Reach and play it on Xbox Live watch out: Microsoft will kick your ass from Xbox Live forever.

Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft's director of Policy Enforcement for Xbox Live, said they’ll permanently ban anyone who plays the leaked game on Xbox Live.

He posted on his Twitter acount. "as with all unauthorized play on Xbox LIVE, anyone playing any unauthorized title runs the risk of account permaban and console." And "remember, legit store bought copy runs no risk of ban. Key word: UNAUTHORIZED. We have ways of knowing. :>."

Toulouse did not say if they have or have not already banned some people, but it's clear that Microsoft is acting quickly to deter players from pirating the game.

Halo: Reach is set to be released on September 14. Last week, copies of the game started coming up on P2P (torrent) sites like The Pirate Bay.

Now that’s not to say if you disconnect yourself from Xbox Live and play the game that they will be able to catch you at all. So you can always download and play it to get the upper hand on all your friends that wait for the official release.

Photo Credit to Bungie Studios

By: FreedomChicken

SQL Error: The Given Network Name is Unusable

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

I was setting up a SQL 2008 R2 Failover cluster the other day in VMWare. We are currently using VMWare 4.0 Update 1. I had previously setup my failover clustering in Windows using my instructions here: (Setup a Failover Cluster in VMWare). After setting that up, I thought everything would be smooth. Well, not so much.

Setting up failover clustering in VMWare isn’t that difficult, but it is time consuming. I thought that with the hard part behind me, installing SQL would be a piece of cake. With Murphy’s law in full effect, I guess i was wrong. You see, while going through the installation wizard for Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 I would get to the Instance Configuration screen and I would get the following error:

The given network name is unusable because there was a failure trying to determine if the network name is valid for use by the clustered SQL instance due to the following error: 'The network address is invalid.'

WTF is that? It turns out the problem is with VMWare tools. in fact, the Shared Folders option in VMWare tools is the culprit here. To fix I I had to cancel the SQL install and do the following on both nodes in the cluster:

Start vSphere Client and connect to either ESX server running the VM or to vCenter server managing the ESX.
Find the problematic VM in inventory and then select Install/Upgrade VMware Tools for the VM
Select Interactive Tools Upgrade
Connect to the console of the problematic VM and run VMware Tools setup from mounted cd-rom
Select Modify program maintenance
Uninstall Shared Folders from VMware Device Drivers (anyway this feature is not used when a VM runs on ESX host)
Restart Guest OS
Install SQL Server 2008 R2 based cluster

After I did that, I was able to install SQL without a hitch!

Did you run into a similar problem? Did you solve it differently? Let us know in the comments!

[Via Andrei Maier]

Technorati Tags: sql 2008 r2,failover,cluster,error,vmware,tools

Alternative To Ninite

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

A while back I wrote about one of the coolest applications I have ever seen. The reason it was so cool was because it is such a time saver! The tool was called Ninite, and in just a couple of checkmarks later you will be given a free installer that will automatically download and install all of your favorite freeware programs!

Now every time I have to rebuild a Windows workstation, one of my first stops is to the Ninite website to download an all-in-one installer for my favorite free programs. Well, Ninite isn’t the only game in town any more.

If for some weird reason you don’t like Ninite, then there is an alternative. It is called FreeApps, and can download just as many, if not more apps in an all-in-one, one stop shop. According to their page, you can install your favorite apps in three easy steps:

Easy, Fast and Safe Way for Downloading Freeware!
1. Choose free apps you like best
2. Get FreeApps installer
3. Have a cup of coffee and all work will be automatically done in a few minutes

If Ninite, and FreeApps can do this, there must be others. If you know of any others let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: alternative to,ninite,freeaps,all-in-one,installer,freeware,open source

Download Music From Pandora… And Other Sites

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure if this is legal or not. In fact, i am pretty sure it isn’t. I don’t want to be that guy who shows you something really friggin’ awesome, and doesn’t tell you that there is a slight possibility that you may be breaking the law. Anything you do using this software is on you, not on me. get it? Good!

So anyway, I was surfing around the interweb when i came a across a pretty nifty piece of software. Before I go any further, I want to find something out. Please raise your hand if you like to listen to music. Please raise your other hand if you like to listen to free music. Now raise your foot if you like to listen to said free music on Pandora. Now raise your other foot if you’ve ever wanted to download the songs you hear on Pandora! I hope you were sitting down…

This really cool tool I found allows you to do just that! It is called Orbit Downloader and will let you download your favorite songs directly from Pandora! That isn’t all though, it also lets you download music from other music sites like Yahoo Music, MySpace Music, Bebo Music etc! Besides music, it also lets you download videos from just about every video site on the internet as well. you can download videos from Youtube, Metacafe, Veoh, and others! You can even download files from Rapidshare with it!

From their page:

Orbit Downloader, leader of download manager revolution, is devoted to new generation web (web2.0) downloading, such as video/music/streaming media from Myspace, YouTube, Imeem, Pandora, Rapidshare, support RTMP. And to make general downloading easier and faster.

There are many free video and music downloaders out there, but few of them offer a one-stop-shop experience that allows you to download from multiple sites all in one convenient package.

Do you know of a similar software? Know of any ones that are better? Let us know about your favorite in the comments!

Technorati Tags: free,download,music,video,pandora,youtube,yahoo music,myspace music

Hide Your Torrents in Plain Site

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

I was surfing the internet the other day when I came across something pretty interesting. I know the idea isn’t knew per se because I have blogged about doing something similar before, but this new twist seems pretty cool. It’s cool because it basically lets you trade torrent files in plain site, and the bloodhounds at the RIAA and MPAA can’t search for them. Go ahead and say it, “F**K the RIAA (or MPAA)”!

The thing I came across allows you to convert a simple torrent file of 250kb or less into a png image that you can post anywhere. Flicker, Facebook, basically anywhere you can share images. Then people can find that image, and using this tool, can convert it back to a torrent and download their stuff. Simple!

The tool is called Hid.im. It also has it’s own Firefox extension so you can convert torrents to png, or vice versa anywhere! From their page, here are some sample Hid.im torrents:

sameer verma - olpc photo dvd.torrent
legaltorrents collections - web development icons superset.torrent
politics apocalypse - oppressed by the authorities remix sources.torrent

Pretty cool right? Now this only keeps the authorities from finding your torrent files online via search, however once you convert it and start downloading whatever it is you are downloading, it will not prevent people from grabbing your IP address from the tracker. So make sure you are only using this for legit torrents ok ;-P

Know of any other interesting ways to hide your torrent activity? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: hide,torrent,png,hid.im

My New Favorite Open Source Alternative to Ghost

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

I periodically will write about cool free disk imaging tools I find. There are many free ones out there, but only a few are worth mentioning in my opinion. For deploying images to multiple computers at once, I have written about Fog which uses Partimage as it’s disk cloning tool.

Another free tool I have written about that is also based on Partimage is P.I.N.G. or Partimage Is Not Ghost. That one is good because you can quickly boot off of a live CD and create an image to USB, or even create a pxe environment to use in a server like situation. If you have the right tools you can even make self-bootable ghost DVD’s which can come in handy. The only problem I have with P.I.N.G. is it’s requirement to use answer files in order to get the job done.

Well today I had to take some disk images of two HP Proliant servers, and I wanted to try something new. I have heard of this tool before, but never got around to using it until today. It is called Clonezilla! Instead of using Partimage, it instead is based on Partclone. Not that it really makes a difference.

Clonezilla comes in two flavors. A live version for quick imaging to USB drives, or a server edition for multicast cloning. Here are a list of features from their website:

Free (GPL) Software.
Filesystem supported: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
Grub (version 1 and version 2) is supported.
Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massively clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
Based on Partclone (default), Partimage (optional), ntfsclone (optional), or dd to image or clone a partition. However, Clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.

I liked Clonezilla because it was fast, and it didn’t require the different files like P.I.N.G. did. I just booted up, selected my USB drive as the destination and followed the prompts. It couldn’t be easier!

What’s your favorite Linux based cloning solution? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: clonezilla,free,open source,linux,disk cloning,symantec,norton,ghost,alternative

Bittorent Tracking

sundance.mcclure@gmail.com (TheEpicChocobo) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:23:00 +0000

So I was online looking for “The Daily Show” online. I know I can just watch it on comedy central’s website, but I was also curious how many people were downloading torrents of it. Sure enough there are some people. Normally just using ThePirateBay they didn’t have to many. So i did a more broad search and noticed that there were some at Torrent Reactor with a Lot of seeders. That seemed a little odd. Even more odd I saw a torrent for the current day’s Daily Show episode that hasn’t aired yet. I knew it was a trap but I was just to curious as to see what came with the file.

Sure enough the next day I got the following email below from my ISP got from the tracking company. Lesson learned, if a video looks odd, don’t download it even if you’re curious what is contained within the file and stick to good places like vertor and the pirate bay.

Email:

Dear Sir or Madam:

BayTSP, Inc. ("BayTSP") swears under penalty of perjury that it is authorized to act on behalf of Viacom International Inc., Atom Entertainment, Inc., Black Entertainment Television LLC, Comedy Partners, Country Music Television, Inc., Network Enterprises Inc., 51 Minds Entertainment, LLC, and Mindring Productions, LLC (collectively, the Rights Owners), one of which is the owner of exclusive rights alleged to be infringed herein. BayTSP's search of the protocol listed below has detected infringements of exclusive copyright or trademark interests on your IP addresses as detailed in the below report.

BayTSP has a reasonable good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of in the below report is not authorized by the Rights Owners, their agents, or the law. The information provided herein is accurate to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, this letter is an official notification to effect removal of the detected infringement listed in the below report. The below documentation specifies the exact location of the infringement.

We hereby request that you immediately remove or block access to the infringing material and ensure the user refrains from using or sharing with others the Rights Owner's materials in the future.

Further, we believe that the entire Internet community benefits when these matters are resolved cooperatively. We urge you to take immediate action to stop this infringing activity and inform us of the results of your actions. We appreciate your efforts toward this common goal.

Please respond indicating the actions you have taken to resolve this matter. The provided link has been assigned to this matter. http://webreply.baytsp.com/webreply/webreply.jsp?customerid=337&commhash=64ae75fb9e55ff932d95db1b6d697d1d

For email correspondence, please reference the above Notice ID in the subject line.

mail to: mailto:mtvn_p2p@copyright-compliance.com?subject=RE%3A%20Notice%20ID%3A%20337%2D4189906%20Notice%20of%20Unauthorized%20Use%20of%20Intellectual%20Property

Nothing in this letter shall serve as a waiver of any rights or remedies of the Rights Owners with respect to the alleged infringement, all of which are expressly reserved. This notice is without prejudice to the positions that (1) 17 U.S.C. 512 does not apply and (2) you have an affirmative obligation to prevent or limit infringement of the Rights Ownerâ€™s exclusive rights without regard to receiving a specific takedown notice.

In complying with this notice, Cox Communications Inc. should not destroy or spoliate any evidence which may be relevant in a lawsuit relating to the infringement alleged herein, including the infringing files and all associated electronic documents and data relating to their presence on Cox Communications Inc.'s IP addresses, which shall be preserved while disabling public access, irrespective of any document retention or corporate policy to the contrary.

Should you need to contact me, I may be reached at the below address.

Regards,

Mark Ishikawa

Chief Executive Officer

BayTSP.com Inc. PO Box 1314 - Los Gatos, CA 95031

Phone: 408-341-2305 Fax: 408-341-2399

mtvn_p2p@copyright-compliance.com <mailto:mtvn_p2p@copyright-compliance.com>

*pgp public key is available on the key server at http://pgp.mit.edu

Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers.

This infringement notice contains an XML tag that can be used to automate the processing of this data. If you would like more information on how to use this tag please contact BayTSP.

Evidentiary Information:

Notice ID: 337-4189906

Initial Infringement Timestamp: 17 Aug 2010 02:45:53 GMT

Recent Infringement Timestamp: 17 Aug 2010 02:45:53 GMT

Infringers IP Address: 72.220.113.76

Protocol: BitTorrent

Infringed Work: Comedy Central- The Daily Show

Infringing File Name: The.Daily.Show.2010.06.16.Louis.C.K.HDTV.XviD-FQM.[VTV].avi

Infringing File Size: 183730744

Bay ID: 2fabba6762b392f5db2db72b4846d0af8faa7a3c|183730744

Port ID: 8500

Infringer's DNS Name: ip72-220-113-76.sd.sd.cox.net

Infringer's User Name:

- ---Start ACNS XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<Case>

</Case>

<Entity>BayTSP</Entity>

<Contact>mtvn_p2p@copyright-compliance.com, </Contact>

<Address>P.O. Box 1314, Los Gatos, California 95031 </Address>

<Email>mtvn_p2p@copyright-compliance.com</Email>

</Complainant>

<Service_Provider>

<Entity>Cox Communications Inc.</Entity>

<Email>abuse@cox.net</Email>

</Service_Provider>

<IP_Address>72.220.113.76</IP_Address>

<DNS_Name>ip72-220-113-76.sd.sd.cox.net</DNS_Name>

<Type>BitTorrent</Type>

<Number_Files>1</Number_Files>

<Deja_Vu>No</Deja_Vu>

</Source>

<Item>

<Title>Comedy Central- The Daily Show</Title>

<FileName>The.Daily.Show.2010.06.16.Louis.C.K.HDTV.XviD-FQM.[VTV].avi</FileName>

<URL>http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce</URL>

</Item>

</Content>

</Infringement>

- ---End ACNS XML

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

Version: 8.0

iEYEARECAAYFAkxqDLEACgkQnCw3gUzOHfL86ACfa3QXNmeOX4uzQWX7M23vVrIT

eMQAoIGOOtyKsJLT5QEYcECQDRYHl/ef

=POGT

-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

By: FreedomChicken

VMWare Clustering, EVC Mode’s and You

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

First off, I want to say I am not a VMWare expert. Nor do I even have my VCP (Yet, I’m going to school next month) but I have been screwing with vSphere long enough to learn some things and figure things out. A few months ago our resident VCP had to go on an extended leave of absence, so I was thrown rather abruptly into the VMWare admin role among many others I have.

One of the latest things I have been trying to do lately is getting three stand-alone ESXi servers into a cluster in vSphere. As long as you are properly licensed, and all servers have shared storage you can do it. Oh yeah, and if you have miss-matched processors, you have to enable EVC mode on the cluster. Here is the gotcha.

According to VMPros:

Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) simplifies VMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations. EVC automatically configures server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers. After EVC is enabled for a cluster in the VirtualCenter inventory, all hosts in that cluster are configured to present identical CPU features and ensure CPU compatibility for VMotion. The features presented by each host are determined by selecting a predefined EVC baseline. VirtualCenter does not permit the addition of hosts that cannot be automatically configured to be compatible with the EVC baseline.

So what’s the problem? Well, what I was trying to do when creating this cluster was minimize downtime. Actually, I was trying to not have any if possible. So what I initially did was create a cluster, then I dragged and dropped in the three servers I wanted in that cluster. Since the VM’s were still running I couldn’t have EVC enabled. Why? Because the VM’s that were running were using features not supported by the EVC mode I wanted to set. Ok, no problem, so I disabled EVC, and was able to put all three servers in the cluster.

Here is my second gotcha, all servers were in the cluster, but only two of them had the same processors (Intel Xeon E5420) the third little black sheep had an Intel Xeon E5345. I could vMotion machines around between the two E5420’s, but if I tried to vMotion to the E5345 I would get the following error:

Host CPU is incompatible with the virtual machine’s requirements at CPUID level 0x1 register ‘ecx’. Host bits: 0000:0100:0000:1000:0010:0010:0000:0001
Required: x000:0x0x:00x0:0xx0:xx10:xx1x:xxxx:xx01
Mismatch detected for these features:
*SSE4.1; refer to KB article 1993 for a possible solution.

Now, in a pinch, you can shutdown the host you want to vMotion, edit the properties, click on the Options tab > CPUID Mask > Advanced and copy the required information from your error, for example:

x000:0x0x:00x0:0xx0:xx10:xx1x:xxxx:xx01

And place it in the Level 1 ecx line as shown here:

Once that is done, you can power the VM back up and do your vMotion. Do you want to do that for all VM’s? I didn’t think so. I didn’t either.

So what to do? Well, first you have to find out which mode of EVC your CPU’s will support. It turns out that both E5420’s and E5345’s support the Intel Xeon Core 2 setting. Great, but since all are in the cluster already, and EVC was disabled, I can’t enable that EVC mode, at least not while VM's are running (There goes my zero downtime plan!). Here is what I had to do.

Power off all VM’s off the E5345 ESX server
Power off all the VM’s on the two E5420’s
Set the cluster in Intel Xeon Core 2 mode
Power back on all the VM's
Done

Now all machines can vMotion around like nobody’s business! Now I just have to make sure that any new VMWare heads I want to put in the cluster later support the Intel Xeon Core 2 EVC setting.

If you are a VCP, and know if a better way of doing this, please let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: vsphere,4,EVC,vmotion,error

VMWare ESXi Hack to Allow SSH

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

VMWare ESXi is running on a proprietary version of Linux. This is a fact. Another fact is that in order to do Linux type stuff in VMWare you need access to the console. Now, I know what you are thinking, there is no console in VMWare ESXi. Well my firend, that is simply not true. How the hell do you think VMWare tech support will get in to fix it when you blow it up? If you guessed console, then give yourself a pat on the back.

There is a secret access into the ESXi console, that is only officially supported if tech support needs to whip out some VM kung fu. Doesn’t mean you and I can’t access it, it just isn’t supported. To access the consol, at the Administration Window press ALT + F1. You will get a black screen, type the word unsupported and press enter. You will not be able to see yourself type. After you hit enter, you will be prompted for the root password. Enter your root password and bammo! You will now have a prompt!

Well that is cool and all, but we as IT guys want remote console access right? How do you go that in Linux? SSH right? I know what you are thinking, SSH is disabled in ESXi too. Well, now that we have console access, we have a lot of possibilities. One of those is to enable SSH. To do that just follow these steps.

Change directory into /etc

#cd /etc
Open inetd.conf in vi (I know vi sucks, deal with it!)

#vi inetd.conf
arrow down until you see #ssh stream tcp…
With the curser on the # type x to delete the #
Type :wq! to exit vi and save your changes
Now we need to find the process running inetd. To do that run the following command

#ps -a grep | inetd
Find the process number, lets pretend it is 1234. Run the following command to kill the inetd process

#kill 1234
Now we need to start inetd again

#inetd
Bam! SSH into your ESXi box!

Love ESXi? Why not buy an ESXi shirt from the Bauer-Power Gear store?

Know of any other cool hacks to get additional functionality out of ESXi? Hit us up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: vmware,esxi,ssh,how to

What Makes a Good I.T. Technician?

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Normally I write about cool free software I find, interesting tech news I hear about, cool electronics, and just about anything geeky. Every once in a while I will write a sort of editorial piece talking about poor custer service, crappy products, or whatever else I can come up with. Today, I got to thinking about what I consider to be a good I.T. Technician. Now this goes from Help Desk, all the way up to CIO/CTO level. If the person has any experience twisting a screw driver, or reviewing event logs, this applies.

Now I haven't been in I.T. as long as some of you. I still consider myself to be rather green. I've only been working with computers and software for about 6 years, but during that time I've worked with all kinds of I.T. guys. In my mind, there are four basic types of technicians. Let me go down the list.

Technical Bullshitter - This is the guy that knows just enough technical jargon and terminology to seem like they know what they are doing, but really don't know their ass from their elbow. These guys easily make it through an interview with H.R. and non-technical upper management. The best way to weed these guys out before hiring them is by running them through a panel interview with their peers.

One Trick Pony - This person may be very good at what they do. They may know the Cisco IOS like the back of their hand. Perhaps they are a master at EMC SANs. Maybe they are really, really good at Windows only. Maybe they are really good at a select group of products, and that is all they know. These people are best kept in one I.T. department for 20 or 30 years, because the moment they go elsewhere, they begin to breakdown when the new environment isn't what they are used to. To them, their way is the ONLY good way because that is how they have always done things.

Overly Cautious - I will never argue with anyone who wants to take a few extra minutes to make sure the change they are making is the right one, or won't break anything. I also always recommend taking a backup of whatever it is you are working on prior to making a change in case something goes wrong. That is all reasonable. What I think is a little over the top is the person who will NOT act in fear that they will break something. They will let users be down for days without trying anything because they don't want to be the person that screws it up more. Maybe you have worked with people like that. Maybe you have had to jump in to save they day because they were too chicken shit to do anything.

Jack of All Trades - This guy can literally make anything work. If they normally work on Windows, and you hand them a Mac to fix it may take them a while, but they will figure it out. This person wants to learn a little bit of Linux, Windows, Unix, and anything else they can get their hands on so they have a full arsenal of weapons they can bring to the fight. This person can make things happen with little to no budget, or with unlimited resources because they aren't afraid to work with open source, or non-standard technologies. They use whatever they can to make things work. This person can think quickly on their feet and adapt to just about any situation.

In my opinion the best I.T. people fall in the last category. When I am sitting on panel interviews weeding out the technical bullshitters, I am actually looking for the Jack of All Trades. If I am working in a Microsoft shop, I may throw out some Linux questions to see how the person reacts. If they can dodge my bullets and come out okay, I will usually give them my nod of approval.

Every day at work I strive to be the Jack of All Trades. I try to learn as much as I can about all types of technology. The reason being is that if you don't close your mind you will see that there are millions of alternatives to help you get your job done. I also am not affraid to try things to see if I can fix things. Being cautious is great, but being straight up scared to act is no way to be in I.T..

No matter what category you may fall in, really good I.T. comes from the ability to research. There are I.T. guys that are quick to hand problems off to other people, or other departments without first trying to qualify the problem, and do a little Google searching to see if they can fix it themselves. If you run into a problem you have never seen before, and your first reaction is to open up Google and start searching, then you are probably a pretty good at I.T.. If you see a problem, and immediately take it to someone else on your team, or in your department because you are "out of ideas" then you need to discover Google.

What kind of I.T. Tech are you? Maybe you can think of some other catergories I missed. Perhaps your co-workers fall into one of these categories. Some of you may even disagree. Let me know what you think makes a good I.T. Technician in the comments!

Technorati Tags: opinion, editorial, it, technology

GUI For Cron

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Back in my college days, when I was taking Security classes, I remember one of my instructors asking the class if we used scheduled tasks in Windows, or it’s Linux equivalent Cron. Many of the students, not really knowing what the hell they were talking about, and thinking they were spewing out the “correct” answer said they didn’t, because it was an “unnecessary security risk”. To that I say bull crap! I don’t think I could do half the stuff I do without some form of automation. Many times the trigger for said automation comes in the form of a scheduled task or Cron job. Am I right?

So like I mention above, Cron is the scheduled task program for Linux. If you want something to run at a certain time of day, Cron is your man (or app). For instance, I have a Linux server that backs up Cisco configs daily using a tool called Rancid. Well, what do you think makes Rancid run every day? Magic leprechauns? Nope, my man Cron does!

The thing about configuring Cron to run at a certain type of day can be a little daunting to the non-Linux type person, or non-terminal like person. Let’s face it, Windows admins like their GUI’s right? I mean, with the terminal, where the f^(k do you use the mouse? Well, to configure Cron normally you have to edit the crontab file with your favorite text editor like Nano or VI. Also the format isn’t that straight forward. I mean look at it:

Once you do one or two, it’s not that big of a deal, but what if there was an easier way? Well, there is if you have installed Gnome desktop, KDE, or some other windows manager. The tool is called Gnome-Schedule. Installing it is pretty easy. You can grab it from the software store in Ubuntu, or run apt-get from the terminal like thus:

sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule

Once installed, it is really intuitive to create your own scheduled Cron jobs without having to figure out exactly how to format your Crontab. Who doesn’t like easy right?

[Via TechThrob]

Technorati Tags: how to,schedule,taks,linux,cron,gui,gnome,scheduler

How To Move SharePoint Databases To Another Drive or Partition

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

You may have noticed the lack of new content recently around here. If you have read any of my recent posts you may have gotten the idea that I have been pretty busy at work. if you guessed that, you are right! It was like that around here when i first started working where I work, but things settled down and I was able to write more regularly again. I’m sure that will happen soon. It’s the blogger circle of life really.

So I was thinking of stuff to write recently and I was suffering from some writer’s block. That is when I thought about writing about something I had to do recently at work. So here is the back story. We had a Microsoft office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 farm running with a SQL 2005 back end. The data drive on the SQL server was running out of disk space. When i say running out of disk space, I mean I would log in and there would be 0MB left!

I would shrink the databases, and files, truncate logs, and all the usual tricks. That would only free up a few hundred MB of data. Not really anything to write home about. What made matters worse was this SQL server was physical, and all the drive bays were filled. I couldn’t add any more drives. Something had to be done.

I decided to install a new NIC, and connect the server to our iSCSI SAN and provision a LUN for use on the SQL server. The problem was though that I now had to move one or more databases from the drive that was full over to the SAN storage. Here is how I did it!

NOTE: I recommend you take a full backup of your environment before doing this. It is pretty easy to jack this up if you are not careful. I accept no responsibility if you “screw the pooch” on this.

The first thing you will have to do is identify the databases you want to move. I recommend looking at the biggest ones first, as they are what is probably filling up your drive the fastest. That’s what I did anyway. I also tried to pick one that wasn’t used as much.

Now you need to go over to your SharePoint server and run the following command to detach your database from SharePoint. I realize that the command looks like the database is getting deleted, but it isn’t.

stsadm -o deletecontentdb -url http://<your-site's-url> -databasename <Database name>

Repeat this process for each database you are moving. If you can’t find stsadm.exe it is usually located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN. I recommend copying it to c:\windows\system32.

Once the database(s) is/are detached from SharePoint, on your SQL server go to each database you want to move to the new drive, then right click, click on Tasks> Take Offline.

Once the database is offline, right click the database again and select Tasks> Detach.

No browse to your SQL data directory and locate the .mdf and .ldf database files. If you didn’t know, the .mdf file is the actual database flat file, and the .ldf is the log for the database. Now move them to your new drive or partition. I recommend creating a new folder called SQL with all the same SQL data folders. Once moved go into SQL, right click on Databases and select Attach. Click the Add button and browse to the .mdf file(s) you just moved. You will have to do this one at a time for each .mdf file. Also, depending on what OS you are running, you might have to turn off UAC. Click OK, and you are just about done.

Now all that is left is to re-attach the database to SharePoint. To do that, go back to your SharePoint server and run the following command:

stsadm -o addcontentdb -url http://<your-site's-url> -databasename <Database name>

Once attached, browse to your site’s URL to make sure nothing is broken. Chances are that if you followed this post, you will be good to go!

Have you ever had to do something like this? Are you running into a similar issue? How did you solve it? Did you do something differently? Let us know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: how to,move,SQL,databases,to,new,drive,partition,sharepoint,2005,2008,2007

Tech Chop! Ep1 – What is Hardware Virtualization?

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 07:05:00 +0000

As you may or may not know, I decided to create a separate site for my video podcasts. That way I can sort of brand the videos separately, and I can feel free to reach back and re-use content that I have written about here at Bauer-Power. Why not right? Besides, when you hear the name “Bauer-Power” if you have never heard of my blog, you wouldn’t immediately think of it as something that revolves around computers and technology right? Hence the name Tech Chop was born!

In this episode, I decided to answer an email I received from a viewer of the old Bauer-Power videos. His name was Terrance, and he wanted to learn more about virtualization, and what exactly it is. I mean, it’s a cool buzz-word right? Right up there with “cloud computing". It’s funny but virtualization, and cloud-computer actually go hand-in-hand as most cloud computing companies, offer their cloud services by using virtualization!

So here it is, episode 1 of Tech Chop!

Did I miss a favorite virtualization product of yours? Care to share some other benefits of virtualization that I neglected to mention? What virtualization software do you use in your environment? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: esx,esxi,hyper-v,hypervisor,is,kvm,openvz,parallels,virtualbox,virtualization,vmware,what,xen

D-Link DIR-655 Wireless-N Router with SharePort

noreply@blogger.com (Thom) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:00:00 +0000

by Thom Hiatt, Guest Writer

Years ago my father-in-law had his house wired for internet access in each room of the house. Then came wireless routers, and he installed a G-band unit. Three years have passed and the family is tired of having some "dead spots" around the house. Plus, they wanted the benefit of sharing the printer, without having to purchase a wireless printer. Being a nice son-in-law, I offered to pick up a Wireless N router with a USB port so that they could share the family printer.

My FIL was looking for a great price, and wanted to see what Fry's had to offer. So we made our visit and I must say that the management at Fry's sure is doing something better than in years past. I've avoided that dreaded F-word of a store for years simply due to their sales tactics, rude behavior, and ridiculous return policies. But things have changed a bit and they seem to be nicer over there.

While looking at 'N' routers, we told the salesman that we needed to be able to share the printer. He pointed us to the only option in the house, the D-Link DIR-655 Wireless-N Router with SharePort. $90 plus tax.

After installing it at my FIL's house, we set up access on four laptop computers. Then it was time to plug in the printer. That's where the nightmare begins.

The router comes with SharePort software on CD, necessary for each laptop that needs access to the printer... which means that netbooks can't readily use it because they don't have CD-ROM drives.

After installing SharePort on both full-sized laptops, we started to run test prints. This is where it gets downright ridiculous.

On Laptop 'A' we type a note in Notepad and then click print. Going through the dialog boxes, we print, no problem.

Laptop 'B' now wants to print. What? You mean you want to simply be able to click the print icon and watch your beautiful masterpiece come out of the printer? No, you're not going to get off that easily, pal.

Before printing, Laptop 'B' must open the SharePort program, see that Laptop 'A' is currently connected, then right-click on the Laptop 'A' listing, then request PERMISSION to use the DAMN PRINTER, then wait for Laptop 'A' to GRANT PERMISSION. Once this has all happened, only then can I click the print icon on my document and print away, assuming it works.

In fact, it's so unusually difficult that SharePort has it's own web page with 4 tabs full of instructions. At the very bottom of tab 2, it says, "[when you are connected] This means that no other PC on your network can access it. If you have more than one PC connected to your network and want to print from that computer, you must ask for access."

WTF? So in my house, I have to ask my wife for permission to connect to the printer? Or in my office I have to ask my intern for permission?

Dear D-Link, this is just stupid. Why do you and other companies continue to make tasks so incredibly difficult? Is it that much more complex to put a print server in the router, perhaps like the Apple Airport Extreme?

What's most frustrating is that the D-Link packaging clearly promotes that you can share your printer, but fails to tell you that it will be a pain in the ass to do so. It's also frustrating that the Fry's salesman didn't know enough to warn us.

So the $90 D-Link is going back to the store, for a refund. And now my father in law will need to decide if he wants to 1) buy an Aiport Extreme for $180, or 2) buy a cheaper wireless router and upgrade to a wireless all-in-one printer for a total cost of around $150-200.

Bottom line: I really wish employees of brands would actually use their own products. If they did so, D-Link employees would realize how much SharePort sucks, and they would provide a better solution.

I offer a new slogan for SharePort:

"Share a printer or mass storage device! Sure, it's kind of a pain, and embarrassingly old-school technology, but it's the best we were willing to do!"

How To Set an IP Address in Windows From Command Line

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

This is not something you should have to do often, but it certainly is a nice thing to know. Especially if you have to do this on a large group of computers. Being able to do this from command line in a script is nice.

The reason I had to do it was I migrated a DEV server from one VMWare cluster at my company’s home office over to a new DEV cluster at our offsite data center. I was moving it to a new subnet, so I had to change the static IP address of the virtual server. For some reason, when I powered it on and logged in, I was unable to access Network and Sharing Center. It would open up, but nothing would display. It was almost like it hung up on something. I mentioned it to the person who owned the machine, but they shrugged it off like that was just how it was.

Since it is a personal DEV machine, and not a production server I decided not to spend a lot of time troubleshooting it. I did still have to give this thing a new IP address though. Lucky for me, the command line was working fine!

In order to change the IP address and DNS information from command line on a Windows server, you need to use the netsh command. To change the IP address, subnet mask and default gateway run the following:

netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area Connection" static 10.4.0.30 255.255.255.0 10.4.0.1

Of course, you will have to change the interface name, and IP information for your environment. The next thing you may want to change is the DNS server information. To change the Primary DNS server run the following:

netsh interface ip set dnsserver "Local Area Connection" static 10.4.0.100 primary

Once again, change this to match your environment. Now to add additional DNS servers run the following:

netsh interface ip add dnsserver "Local Area Connection" static 10.4.0.101

Notice in the above example, I have replaced set with add. Smart right? Once you have those set, you can now check your configuration by running ipconfig /all.

Have any other command line tips you want to share? Hit us up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: how to,change,ip address,subnet mask,default gateway,dns,primary,secondary,cmd,command,line,prompt,windows

Free and Easy Open Source Monitoring

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

We are currently evaluating different network monitoring tools right now at my day time gig. We are currently using a mix of HP System Insight manager, SCCM, and Cacti. Our goal is to consolidate into one, easy to use tool. We have looked at three so far, and are slowly narrowing it down to one.

The one I am going to tell you about isn’t one we are going to use, not because it doesn’t work well, but because it runs on Linux, and my new boss is a Windows guy. He wants us to move away from Open Source solutions because often times they require a bit more time to make them work, while many products made for Windows are designed to work out of the box.

The tool I will tell you about, actually works pretty well out of the box as well. All you do is install it in Linux, and the rest you follow the wizards through a web interface! This makes it easy for those who are not so Linux Savvy.

The tool is called Zenoss Core. It was recommended to me by a former colleague, and what I use4d on it was pretty cool. As soon as we stood it up, it asked a series of questions in a wizard like format, and after about 10 minutes or so, we were “off to the races” with monitoring.

From their page:

[Zenoss Core is] One of the most popular projects on Sourceforge.com, Zenoss Core is an award-winning open source IT monitoring product that offers visibility over the entire IT stack, from network devices to applications. Features include automatic discovery, inventory via CMDB, availability monitoring, easy-to-read performance graphs, sophisticated alerting, an easy-to-use web portal, and much, much more.

If you’re boss is one of those who doesn’t like Open Source because of a lack of support, there is an enterprise version of Zenoss available too. The enterprise version gives you all the features of Core, plus the following:

Deep VMware Monitoring
Enhanced Windows Monitoring
Synthetic Transactions (Web, Email, Database)
Predictive Thresholds
Fine-Grained Access Control
Global Dashboard
Distributed Configuration Manager
High Availability Package
Enterprise ZenPacks
Production-level, expert support via phone and email
Premium service levels
Automated patch management
Licensing & IP Assurance

If you must know, the tools we are leaning towards are Orion by SolarWinds because both my new boss, and my coworker are familiar with it, and opManager by ManageEngine because it is similar, but cheaper. It’s funny, but if you look at both of these products side by side, they almost look identical! It’s almost as if opManager copied the source code from Orion when they built it! I suppose it will come down to price on which one we choose there.

If you’re IT department is looking for a new monitoring solution, and you have no qualms about using Linux and Open Source, then I recommend checking out Zenoss Core.

I’m curious to know what you use for monitoring in your environment. Is it free/open source? Is it easy to setup and configure? Do you hate it? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: free,easy,to,use,open source,linux,network,application,monitoring,zenoss,core

Free Alternative To Veeam Reporter

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Sorry I haven’t been blogging as frequently as I normally do. I have been slammed all of a sudden with a boat load of projects at work. Namely because we have to do a much needed network cleanup, but also to understand how the infrastructure is currently setup. There has been a lot of turnover in the department, and as mentioned in a previous article, with all that turnover comes layers of inconsistent network design.

One of my duties right now is to create a data map of our entire network using Visio. On small networks, that is a simple task, but on vast networks with hundreds of nodes, it becomes a larger task. I mentioned previously that I found a tool that generates topology diagrams for Active Directory automatically. I wanted something that does the same thing, but for virtualized infrastructure.

I looked at Veeam Reporter, but that isn’t free. I’m not sure how much it costs, in fact I am still waiting on a quote from our software vendor, but the fact remains, it isn’t free. While waiting for the quote though, I found something that is free, and does everything I need and more!

The tool is called vEcoShell! Here are some of it’s features from their website:

Gather – Access data from multiple standalone ESX Servers or vCenter instances to consolidate information from every layer of the virtualization stack including the operating systems, applications and infrastructure services.

Filter – Easily identify inconsistencies and provide “health checks” on any virtual infrastructure and multi-platform environment with powerful time-saving filters that can be tuned, saved and leverage across the organization.

Remediate – Reduce errors and streamline repetitive administrative tasks by efficiently modifying multiple objects across the infrastructure in a single operation.

Report – Rapidly generate and customize reports for all types of IT- and business-related processes – save and print to a variety of formats such as XML, CSV, HTML and Microsoft Visio.

Integrate - Leverage Windows PowerShell technology across the virtual environment to provide unparalleled integration capabilities with hypervisors, operating systems and application workloads, including support for Vizioncore vControl and Vizioncore vRanger Pro.

This tool provides a GUI front end to VMWare CLI, and PowerGUI that give you many tools that you don’t have in your standard virtualization environment. It also has tools to work with other virtualization technologies like Microsoft Hyper-V!

Besides the Visio diagram automation I was looking for, it also gives you tools to not just report, but also manage your infrastructure better. For instance, It can provide a report on snapshots, their age, and allows you to remove old snap shots all from one place!

So far, this is the best free VMWare management and reporting tool I have ever seen! I highly recommend it to ANY administrator who has to manage virtual servers.

What are some of your favorite VMWare/Virtualization tools? Are they free? If not, how much do they cost? Let us know in the comments!

Note: I received word from Veeam that a free edition of Veeam Reporter is in the works. Here is a link to the details: (Veeam Reporter FREE)

Technorati Tags: free,alternative,veeam,reporter,automatic,automated,visio,diagramming,vmware,hyper-v,management,snap-shot cleanup

FREE Powered By Ubuntu Stickers! Get Them While They're HOT!

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Many many moons ago I sent away for some free "Powered By Ubuntu" stickers from some laptop company in Colorado that make laptops with Ubuntu installed on them. They don't do Windows!

It took a while, but I got my stickers, and I was a happy camper. I promptly removed my Windows sticker from my laptop, cleaned off the old adhesive with some rubbing alcohol, and replaced it with my shiny new Ubuntu sticker. I proudly showed the world around me that I didn't answer to multi-million dollar, self absorbed, monopolistic software companies like Microshaft. No, I did things on my own terms using free, as in FREE BEER, software available to anyone savvy enough to download it and install it!

I decided I would extend that same offer to you my readers, and anyone else that comes along that enjoys the freedom that Ubuntu Linux has to offer!

I will print out, and mail you a sheet of six "Powered By Ubuntu" self adhesive stickers free of charge! I am a big proponent of Ubuntu, and I want to spread the Ubuntu love to as many people out there as possible!

The sticker comes from the Free Software Stickers book that I blogged about quite a while ago. Sure, you can download the book yourself, print out the stickers and tape them to your laptop all ghetto style and whatnot. I on the other hand will print them out for you on nice, self adhesive sticker paper for a more professional look that says, "Hey, I'm not a douche bag!"

Here is a blurry photo I snapped using my Blackberry of the one I have on my laptop:

So you want some right? I knew you did. All you have to do is mail me a self addressed stamped envelope to:

Bauer-Power Ubuntu Stickers
www.Bauer-Power.net
1419 Kingston Drive
Escondido, CA 92027

When I get your envelope, I will return it with your sheet of FREE "Powered By Ubuntu" stickers!

For you Kubuntu users, I haven't forgot about you either! Just change the address from Bauer-Power Ubuntu Stickers to Bauer-Power Kubuntu Stickers and I will send you stickers reflecting your choice in Linux desktop managers (KDE v.s. Gnome)!

Please tell all your friends!

Create Active Directory Topology Diagrams Automagically

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

I just got a new boss at work the day before yesterday, and like a lot of small companies there is a serious lack of documentation. We have had a lot of turnover in the IT department, and things are constantly changing. I have only been at my job for just under a year, and I am already on my third boss. With each new manager or director comes a new way of running a network, so you can imagine the hodge-podge of systems on the network. Like many of the new bosses coming in, I had my own ideas on how things should be run, but ultimately it is up to the person sitting in the manager seat right? Therefore not much has changed... Until now.

One of the first things my boss has asked me to do is to create a map of our network topology so he can get an idea of how things are setup in the various domains we manage. That got me thinking of ways to automate the process, and lucky for me I found a nice little tool that does the trick. The tool is called the Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer, or ADDT for short.

What this tool does is, using either Visio 2003, 2007 or 2010, it scours Active Directory and spits out a fairly detailed topology of your domain, sites, trusts, Exchange, etc. All in a pretty, easy to understand Visio diagram.

Here is an Overview from Microsoft:

With the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool, you can read your Active Directory structure through Microsoft ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO). The Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool automates Microft Office Visio to draw a diagram of the Active Directory Domain topology, your Active Directory Site topology, your OU structure or your current Exchange 200X Server Organization. With the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool, you can also draw partial Information from your Active Directory, like only one Domain or one site. The objects are linked together, and arranged in a reasonable layout that you can later interactively work with the objects in Microsoft Office Visio.

Pretty cool right? Know of any other free tools that can easily, and automatically create detailed network maps of your environment? Let us know your favorite tools in the comments!

Technorati Tags: automated, network, ad, active cirectory, topology, visio, plugin, tool, generator

Prank on The New Boss

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Last week my was my IT Manager’s last day, and upper management had already found a candidate to replace him with a Director. We are getting ready to do a data center move, so the new Director wanted to start right away to get in on the project.

All of us IT guys had a meeting on Tuesday to discuss projects, and the new Director. During the meeting my counterpart, James, said, “We have to do some sort of prank on the new Director!” So we all thought about it for a little bit, and finally decided we should build him an old junkie computer running Windows 98! The other guys were too afraid they would get in trouble with the new Director, so none of the help desk or desktop guys wanted to set up the Windows 98 box, so I decided I would do it. What was the worst thing that could happen?

I began looking on my MSDN for Windows 98, but no luck there so I had to seek the media elsewhere. I wasn’t able to find Windows 98, but I did find Windows 98 SE (Second Edition). I thought that was better because I do work for a Microsoft Gold Partner, so we have to stay cutting edge!

The oldest computer we had lying around the office wasn’t THAT old per se, but it was certainly nothing special. It was an older Dell Latitude D510. Windows 98 SE installed easily, with only a few drivers missing. No big deal, the laptop didn’t have to work, it was just a joke anyway.

Yesterday the Director started, and spent most of the day in orientation. When he finally went to his desk, one of the Help Desk guys took him in there. I missed the whole thing, but the Help Desk guy said that the director didn’t find it very funny. Not funny? WTF?

Well, I spoke with my Director’s boss later that day (He was in on the joke by the way) and he said that the Help Desk guy ruined the joke. When he led the Director to his desk he told him, “Here is your computer… Only kidding! Ha ha ha!” before even letting the director power it on…. Um, yeah! I wouldn’t find the joke funny either if someone ruined it!

Anyway, the joke is a good idea. I don’t want to see it go to waste, so please feel free to do this joke on a boss, or co-worker on their first day. Let me know how they react in the comments!

Technorati Tags: it,tech,computer,pranks,jokes

Episode 25 – The Final Episode

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Yes, I’m afraid you read that correctly. This will be the final video episode of Bauer-Power. Now, don’t get your panties in a bunch, because I will still be making videos, I just want to separate them from the blog.

My reasoning for this is I have several years of content on Bauer-Power that I feel would be good to use in the videos. I really don’t want to duplicate stuff I have already talked about on the blogs and the videos, and then re-post them on the blog. I feel that if I branch out with a different brand for the videos, I am more free to do whatever I want, and to reach back and use previous content.

Also, when I first started doing the videos, they were sort of an experiment. I had been watching a lot of Podcasts on the Internet and felt that I could do it too. It took a lot of trial and error, but I think i finally have the hang of it. We started out editing everything in Windows Movie Maker, and have since moved to better editing software, and better equipment. All of which make creating these videos easier!

Here is the final episode, complete with our original (EXTRA LONG) action opening sequence!

Come and watch videos at our new home at TechChop.com! Thanks for sticking with us for the last 25 episodes!

Technorati Tags: last,episode

Mvix Ultio Pro (MX-880HD) Review

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

I have a friend that mentioned that he had purchased a really cool device called the Mvix Ultio. It is an HD media server device that can play just about any type of media file out there in 1080p goodness. It also features something that most devices of its kind don't, a built in BitTorrent client!

I decided to contact Mvix USA to see if I could get a review model to test out myself. Lucky for me, they sent me a review unit at a substantial discount! Anyway, when I got the unit, it wasn't the unit my friend had, but their latest model, the Mvix Ultio Pro! T.his device, like it's predecessor, has a built-in BitTorrent client, can handle internal storage up to 2TB, as well as additional storage via USB, and SDHC. It will also play DVD's if you have an external USB DVD ROM.

With a built-in BitTorrent client, you probably already assume that it is network attached right? Good, glad we're on the same page. Yes, you can either attach it via ethernet cable, or via wifi. Since it is network attached, you can also share files over the network to and from the Ultio Pro using SMB shares. Also, if you have a UPnP server like PlayOn or Tversity, you can stream stuff like Hulu, Netflix and Pandora directly to your TV!

Ok, now you know all about the device, lets get down to my review. All the above are true. You could potentially use this device to free yourself from your TV cable company, satellite company etc. Would you really want to though? That is the real question with this device. You see, for a computer guy, this device is fine, but I think the average user might not like this device as an alternative to cable. The reason being it that the device's navigation is done in file folder format. Trying to find something to watch, even using UPnP is like browsing through files on your PC. Also, when you hi-light a show, or a file, there is no metadata, or show information. People like seeing that stuff when they are browsing for things to watch, that is why cable companies do that. Here are some pictures of what I'm talking about from my TV:

The top picture is the file structure of the internal hard drive, the bottom picture is from Hulu. To me, it isn't so bad. Especially with Hulu using PlayOn, because you at least get the episode titles. You also get a little bit of a preview on the upper right. The problem though is that when using UPnP there is a little bit of a lag when navigating between shows, and you have to wait almost one full minute before you get the preview to work.

Navigating the local hard drive isn't as bad, as it is relatively fast. The problem there is the BitTorrent client. There are a couple of things I don't like about it. One, you can only download one item at a time. If you wanted to use a Torrent RSS feed from say EZRSS, you will still have to use the BitTorrent client on your PC. Also, it dumps all downloads to the root on one file folder. If you want to keep your shows organized, once again, you will have to use the Torrent client on your PC. I had my PC Torrent client set to download directly to the Ultio Pro over SMB, the problem with that is that SMB to the Ultio is ridiculously slow and periodically disconnects. To compensate I have to download to my local hard drive, then using a Robocopy script, I move the files over to the Ultio Pro. Not exactly user friendly for the average Joe.

As mentioned above, the device supports UPnP. That is good, because if you want to watch legal shows from the Internet, that is how you have to do it. The problem? The only UPnP server that I know of that does this well is PlayOn which costs $39.99 for the license plus an annual subscription of $19.99 after that. Sure, it's cheaper than cable, but I think if Mvix wants to truly make a cable TV killer, they need to have this functionality built in. They do have some things built in like Youtube, but for some reason it looks like crap... Too much compression I guess.

Finally, lets get to the hardware. I mentioned above that the device supports up to a 2TB SATA hard drive. Now you can buy this bundled with the device for a little extra. For instance, the device retails for around $160. If you want a 1TB drive, you can add an additional $90. For 2TB you pay an additional $179! I recommend that you buy this without the drive, and get your drive some place else. I picked up a 1TB SATA drive from Geeks.com for only $64.99! Installation is pretty easy too, all you have to do is unscrew the top, mount the bracket, and plug it in.

All said and done, on a scale of 1 to 5, I give this device a 3.5. It does display video really well, and it plays everything. I do like that I can watch anything I can find online, and the device is fairly easy to use. My problem with it is that it really isn't "pretty". That is fine for me, but if I am going to convince my wife to let me cancel cable, this device has to be easy for her to use, and at least "look" like something you get with Cable or Satellite TV. Because it isn't, this device is sitting in my entertainment center like a novelty instead of a money saving solution.

If you are looking for something relatively cheap to replace cable, this device is a good option. If you already have a Playstation 3, or and Xbox360, don't waste your money, because you can get the same UPnP functionality by just buying PlayOn by itself to use with those devices. If you want something all encompassing, I think upcoming Google TV might be a better option.

Let me know what you think. Do you have an Mvix Ultio, or Ultio Pro? Do you like it? Do you have something better? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: mvix, ultio pro, mx-880HD, playon, review