Adventures in Technobabble

Cisco PIX VPN Setup for Windows 7 & Vista x64

Alright, sorry it took so long to put the rest of my Vista x64 setup on here. Here's part 2 - configuring Cisco PIX VPNs for Windows Vista & Windows 7 64-bit machines. To start, Cisco is dropping support for PIX devices and ASA is definitely a more robust device ...

Know No Stranger Presents

Sorry I have been posting a little off-topic lately, but there has been a lot going on lately. My wife graduated from Herron School of Art & Design, we opened a print shop/gallery in downtown Indy, and now she has been featured in a new e-zine called Know No Stranger ...

Wordpress mySQL troubles

This was an issue caused by my own carelessness. I have a script to just do a tar backup of my entire system to an external drive every night. The script is this: #!/bin/bash OF=/mnt/backup/backup$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S).tar mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup rm /mnt/backup/log.txt touch /mnt/backup/log.txt tar cvfW $OF / --exclude /mnt/backup --exclude /mnt/backup2 --exclude /proc --exclude /sys --exclude ...

Wake Press Opening Friday, May 7

We are pleased to announce that Wake Press will be opening this Friday in Fountain Square, Indianapolis. We will be opening with a collaborative show by the Senior printmaking students from Herron School of Art & Design. Wake will be offering commercial printing as well as a gallery space for emerging ...

Visual Studio Team Suite 2005 on Vista 64 bit

This post may simply be a product of my own ignorance, but hopefully it can help someone else out there in a similar situation. So recently I was tasked with setting up a Vista Business 64-bit laptop for a developer in our office. The needed applications are as follows: SQL 2005 - ...

DNS Records Disappearing

This post is a little confusing, but it may help someone out there. In a recent security audit, we were told to disable several services on our servers, one of which was DHCP. Before disabling it on each server, I verified they were manually configured. We have some that are ...

Find Tables Missing Indexes and Create Clustered Indexes for Them

**Update at bottom** OK, so we had a SQL 2005 database that we migrated from another company. The application that uses it as a backend was having some terrible performance issues. We had limited information on the previous configuration, so we bumped the Application up to a newer server since it ...

How To Seize FSMO Roles and Clean Up Failed Domain Controllers In Active Directory

Alright, so I think at some point, every SysAdmin will have a domain controller fail. Every SysAdmin should also know that unless you run dcpromo.exe to demote a domain controller before removing it from AD, you can have some issues. From FSMO to DFRS, it's just not a good situation. ...

Error Logging in VB and C#

Alright, so lately I have been working on a couple of ASP.NET(C#) projects. One thing I have seen is nothing is as useful as having a good error logger. Now, since I am still in the learning phases of .NET programming, I have been looking to a coworker, Joe Young, ...

Moving

Just to let everyone know, I am moving my blog off to my own server. The new address will be blog.christophermichaelwebb.com. I had resisted for quite a while as wordpress has some powerful clout on the search engines, but I feel it's for the best as I like ...