Hacked Up in Kuwait

March 4th, 2012 by Grant No comments »


Additional proof that my former webhost sucked at life – a few weeks ago their server was pwned by Kuwaiti hackers. Great work guys!

In any case, I’ve moved to a much more reliable host. Although it saddens me to no longer support the small business owner, it’s obvious that they are not capable of reasonable security or customer service.

Cheers,

Grant

EDIT: Since a few people have asked, I’m not directly disclosing who my previous host was. It won’t do any good to bash them further and I seriously doubt they’re staying in business. And if you really wanna know, it’s not hard to figure out.

No comments »

Posted in Personal, Security

Sony SMP-N100 Media Player

December 5th, 2011 by Grant No comments »

Fun fact: Did you know that Sony makes a media player to access Netflix, Hulu Plus, local media, and a host of other online services? Well they do, it’s their competing box to Roku, and they just dropped the price on the older model to $50.

I purchased one because I use a PS3 as my primary media player, and I wanted a device for the bedroom TV. It uses the same XMB interface as the PS3, so it’s one less new interface for me and my girlfriend to learn.

When I was setting it up, even after connecting it to my wireless and wired network, it wasn’t connecting – with an error that said “Failed to reach network gateway”. Well, I knew that was BS, so after some troubleshooting, I realized that the SMP-N100 needs to be able to ping the router. For most people, that wouldn’t be a big deal, but if you have a Cisco ASA 5500-series, pings to interfaces are turned off by default. Here’s how you turn them on:

Start the ASDM-IDM Launcher
Go to Configuration > Device Management > Management Access
Click on ICMP
Add or change your internal interface (default is ‘inside’) and make sure you permit all traffic

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Grant

No comments »

Posted in Media, Streaming Hardware

Tags:

Great Managed DNS

June 14th, 2011 by Grant No comments »

Quick post.

I was in need of some solid DNS hosting. I used to use ZoneEdit, but they’ve become pretty lame as far as available services lately. I tried NameCheap, but was less than satisfied with the response time.

Enter Zerigo.
– EDIT: Please note, Zerigo has now been acquired by 8×8, Inc., but that’s not a bad thing.

Yes, an odd name, but cool service. They offer full-service VPS hosting, managed DNS, and a “Watchdog” server monitoring service. The interface is very clean and simple, and the DNS servers are fast. Also, pricing is reasonable as well for heavier users. I recommend you check it out.

P.S. – If you like it, please use my referral link here: http://www.zerigo.com/ref/5kp20d. Gracias.

No comments »

Posted in DNS, Internet

Going Green Is Easier Than You Think! (Part II)

January 31st, 2011 by Grant No comments »

The second part of a two-part series on Going Green has been posted to my company blog. Visit the e-Management website and check out some of the practical ideas I’ve put together.

http://www.e-mcinc.com/blog/?p=810

No comments »

Posted in Green Concepts, IT Governance

Leaving GoDaddy (Running Fast)

January 19th, 2011 by Grant No comments »

Since GoDaddy is notorious for having super slow MySQL performance, and over utilized shared hosting, I’ve decided to leave. I’m moving all my domains to a new host, HoldFire. They seem pretty awesome so far.

In the meantime, you may have intermittent access to the blog. But if you see this post, that means everything is good to go.

No comments »

Posted in Coding

Going Green Is Easier Than You Think! (Part I)

January 18th, 2011 by Grant No comments »

I wrote an article for my company about “Going Green” and some general ideas about what that means for consumers, small businesses and enterprises. Head on over the the e-Management website and read and comment.

http://www.e-mcinc.com/blog/?p=803

No comments »

Posted in Green Concepts, IT Governance

Redmine: Changing Versions to Milestones

November 10th, 2010 by Grant No comments »

At the office, we’ve started to get serious about organizing what we’re doing. I mean, it was getting to the point where every time I received a phone call, it began with “I know you’re really busy, but…” My boss was taking tasks away from me left and right – not in a bad way, but just so I could get the important things done. I’m pretty sure threats were made to several folks to not bother me.

One day, I sat down with him at lunch, and we decided we really needed a way to just figure out “what sh** we had to do”. A project management system was needed, both to solve the problem of tasking the department equally and so we could track what jobs were in progress.

After several involved Google searches, I came across Redmine, a very flexible, web-based project management system developed on Ruby on Rails. I was skeptical at first, but truthfully Redmine is one of the most active and functional project management apps I’ve used. Primarily aimed at software development, Redmine has many third-party plugins available to extend the capabilities for any organization, and can be used to control nearly any type of project.

One of the major modifications we were interested in making was changing the “versions” feature to “milestones”. Our primary use of Redmine is managing standard projects, not software development, but the concept is the same. I found that I was not the only one interested in this feature, a request had been submitted nearly 2 years ago. The basic consensus was that it could be changed, but then it would not suit the needs of software developers. As a flexible framework, it was noted that you could edit the *.yml configuration files with little difficulty, but no further explanation was provided.

Well, here’s that explanation on how to change “versions” to “milestones” in Redmine:

  1. Navigate to your Redmine install directory, and open config\locales\en.yml (or whichever localization you need to modify). These files contain labels for each language supported by Redmine.
  2. Run a simple find and replace for the word version. Be very careful not to modify the actual variables, just the assigned value.
  3. Save the file, and restart the Redmine application.

That’s all there is to it!

You might see the capability to change some of these values in the Redmine GUI in the distant future, but at the current time it’s a slight technical challenge. In any case, I’ve found this is a very quick and simple fix. I hope this is a help to anyone (like I was) who’s starting out with Ruby on Rails for the first time and is a little apprehensive.

Cheers,

Grant

No comments »

Posted in Coding, Project Management, Ruby on Rails

Tags:

Windows SteadyState for Standalone Servers

April 26th, 2009 by Grant No comments »

Recently, I had the need to build a standalone system to run a point-of-sale system. I’m running this on a low-voltage Atom processor, so I wanted a light-weight operating system, but still needed Windows. I chose to use Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition.

Everything setup and ran fine, but I wanted to lock down the user account that was used for running the POS. I could use the native Local Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc), but the interface isn’t that great, and the policies affect all users unless you do some registry tweaks. After some googling, I came across Windows SteadyState.

Windows SteadyState, successor to the Shared Computer Toolkit, is designed to make life easier for people who set up and maintain shared computers. Unfortunately, it’s only available (and designed for) Windows XP and Windows Vista. When you try to run the setup on Windows 2003, you get an error saying that it’s not designed for this operating system. Well, I wasn’t going to let that stop me!

Windows XP and Windows 2003 are very similar. There really isn’t any reason why it couldn’t work on a server operating system, it’s just not very likely you would ever need to. In case you’re like me, here’s what I did:

1) Get a copy of Microsoft Orca. Orca is a database table editor for creating and editing Windows Installer packages and merge modules. This tool is only available in the Windows SDK Components for Windows Installer Developers. It is provided as an Orca.msi file. After installing the Windows SDK Components for Windows Installer Developers, double click Orca.msi to install the Orca.exe file.

2) Download SteadyState, and open the installer file in Orca.

3) I searched through the many entries, and came across this line in the LaunchCondition table:

(MsiNTProductType = 1) AND ((VersionNT = 501 AND ServicePackLevel >= 2) OR (VersionNT >= 502 AND VersionNT <= 600))

[ProductName] requires Windows XP SP2 or higher, or Windows Vista.

This entry is just a checker to see what operating system you’re running. It won’t affect any of the install files, so it’s safe to delete. Right-click on the line, and select “Drop Row”.

4) Save the MSI, and run the installer. It works!

I ran this modified installer on my Server 2003 box, and everything setup and configured perfectly. I haven’t come across any issues so far, but as always, take these instructions at your own risk.

Happy modding!

No comments »

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Server

Connecting TS Web Access with Terminal Server

January 4th, 2009 by Grant 1 comment »

With Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has released a new feature called TS Gateway. Basically, this finally brings a native Microsoft approach to tunnel all remote traffic (typically on port 3389) on encrypted port 443 (or another port of your choosing). I had the need to set this up at the office, so I chose to configure it in the following setup:

Alot of people suggested putting both servers inside my domain network, which in the past, I have heavily avoided in favor of using a DMZ. In any case, my options would be opening numerous TCP/IP and Active Directory connection ports, or opening 443 only to the TS Web Access server, which was my chosen solution.

Now, for the unique problem: TS Web Access communicates using WMI (under the guise of RPC) to the Terminal Server to find the list of published applications. However, in my case, even after specifying the server name and reviewing the install procedures at least 100 times, the connection wasn’t working. This is the front-end error:

TS Web Access was not able to access the specified terminal server. Verify that the computer account of the TS Web Access server is added to the TS Web Access Computers security group on the terminal server.

And if that isn’t erroneous enough, here’s the error I received when using a packet sniffer:

Status: nca_s_fault_access_denied (0×00000005)

I won’t go into the numerous solution attempts I tried. I resorted to calling Microsoft Support, and unfortunately had no luck. I spoke on the phone for about 2 hours with a technician, and they were unable to resolve my problem.  Crossing my fingers, I posted my problem on the Microsoft TechNet Terminal Server forum. Suprisingly, I got a response from a Microsoft engineer within a few hours. To solve this problem, I had to go into the COM Security settings in the DCOM control panel. My problem stemmed from a SID that wasn’t enumerating properly, possibly due a problem with the install (though I rebuilt the server from scratch multiple times). Here are the details:

Start up the WMI mmc snapin and then click on Root->CIMV2->TerminalServices and click the Security group.  Make sure that the TS Web Access Computers group is there and has Execute Methods, Remote Enable and Enable Account listed.  Then open up the Component Services mmc snapin.   Click on Computers->My Computer and Right Click to bring up the Properties.  Take a look at the COM Security tab, click both Edit Limits.  The TS Web Access Computers group should be listed with all permissions.

As soon as I made the changes described above, the connection worked without a hitch. Hopefully if anyone else comes across this problem, this will help out, because there was absolutely no documentation for this issue. Here is the original link to the forum post.

Cheers,

Grant

1 comment »

Posted in Microsoft, Terminal Services

Tags:

Using SNMPGetNext in PHP

November 25th, 2008 by Grant No comments »

Recently I was working to try to create a basic web page to generate a report of the print counts from all of our office copiers. Conveniently, they are all the same brand (Ricoh) and easily accessible over the network. Being that SNMP is popularly used in most network printers and copiers, this seemed like the easiest method.

After browsing php.net for the SNMPGet functionality (http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.snmpget.php) I found that it was useful, but not well documented. After generating some basic code, I found that I was getting ‘OID Not Found’ errors. Here’s the code I was using:

$model_conn = snmpget(’0.0.0.0′, ‘public’, ’1.3.6.1.4.1.367.3.2.1.1.1.1′, 1000000000);

The existing examples on php.net show people using written OIDs, such as ‘system.SysContact.0′. Most SNMP Walk utilities only display the numerical value. After much tribulation, this is the code we ended up using successfully:

$model_conn = snmpgetnext(’0.0.0.0′, ‘public’, ‘.1.3.6.1.4.1.367.3.2.1.1.1.1′, 1000000000);

One difference is the single ‘.’ in the beginning of the numerical OID. I’ve noticed this on a few other SNMP applications, but again, poorly documented. I also switched to using the SNMPGetNext, but it’s always been trial and error for me to see which works (most of my applciations use SNMPGetNext by default). Hope this helps anyone else trying to use SNMP with PHP.

No comments »

Posted in Coding, PHP

Tags: