So, if you were to click on http://www.google.com/ig/add?feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyCupOfTech (Go ahead! Do it! You know you want to!), you would be provided with the option to add the Daily Cup of Tech RSS feed to your Google homepage or Google Reader. To configure this for your own RSS feed simply use the following URL:

http://www.google.com/ig/add?feedurl=<Your RSS Feed URL>

and replace <Your RSS Feed URL> with (duh!) your RSS feed!

This is by no means a comprehensive troubleshooting chart but it is a very effective tool that will help you focus your attention when you are having difficulties accessing a website and you think that the problem may be with DNS either on your network or with your Internet service provider.

Ping DNS Server?

Check to see if the DNS server is even available through a ping. First, determine your DNS server by typing in the following in a command prompt:

ipconfig /all

and search for DNS servers to determine the IP address of your DNS server.

Next, ping the DNS server IP address. So, if your DNS server IP address is 192.168.0.1, you would enter:

ping 192.168.0.1

If you get a response back, your DNS server is accessible. If not, there are a few potential problems:

1. DNS server is down
2. Internet is down (when DNS is provided by Internet provider)
3. DHCP is giving out the wrong DNS name
4. DNS server is set statically and is wrong

Can You Ping?

If you can ping your DNS server, next check to see if you can ping a website on the Internet. I typically use google.com. Type the following command into a command prompt:

ping google.com

You should get a ping response. If you get something like:

Ping request could not find host google.com. Please check the name and try again.

this could indicate that you have a DNS issue but it warrants further investigation.

Can You Telnet?

If you can ping, check to see if you can Telnet to the website. Type into a command prompt:

telnet google.com 80

If your command prompt goes blank, port 80 is working fine. (Press CTRL+C and then ENTER twice to get out of the box.)

If you get something like:

Connecting To google.com...Could not open connection to the host, on port 80: Connect failed

there are a number of potential issues:

1. Port 80 is blocked
2. Your IP address is being blocked by the server
3. The website is down

You can also try to connect on other ports such as port 25 on an external mail server.

HOSTS File Entry?

Your HOSTS file is like a local copy of DNS. If there is an entry in the hosts file that points to a different IP address for a domain name, then it will never get to the the DNS to find the website.

You can open and check your HOSTS file by typing the following at a command prompt:

notepad %windir%\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS

This will present you with a next file much like this:

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

127.0.0.1 localhost

The last entry is the only entry that should be in a typical home computer. If you have any entries that coincide with the website that you are looking at, this could be your problem.

Clear Web Browser and DNS Cache

Both your web browser and your computer have a cache which stores information about DNS. If you are getting strange results from the tests, try clearing the web browser cache and the DNS cache.

The web browser cache can be found in the options window. To delete the DNS cache, simply type the following command prompt command:

ipconfig /flushdns

Conclusion

Hopefully this will help you to determine if you are running into DNS issues. Of course, DNS is only one small part of your entire network but this is a good start.

Update: I have had a great response so far and added a number of you to my connections. I have also created a LinkedIn group that you can join so that you can connect up with other DCoT readers. If I have already added you to my connections, you are automatically pre-approved for the group.

Here is how I fixed the problem.

1. I accessed the WP-Super-Cache admin page directly from its URL:
   <blog base URL>/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=wp-super-cache/wp-cache.php
2. I disabled the Super Cache Compression and then updated the settings.

This seems to have resolved the issue but I would really like to run compression as it is a nice feature. Anyone out there had any luck fixing the compression problem?

Simply type from a command prompt:

ipconfig /displaydns

to display the contents of the DNS cache.

You can then look through to see if there are any domains that should not be there.

In Linux, I have come up with a way to automate this process. For our example, let’s assume that we have a VM located at /var/VMs/Ubuntu.vmx. Let’s also assume that our backup starts at 2:00 AM and finished by 3:00 AM each morning. What I am doing is scheduling two cron jobs, one at 1:00 AM to shut down the virtual machine and one again at 4:00 AM to restart the virtual machine.

Here is what my crontab file looks like:

0 1 * * * vmware-cmd '/var/VMs/Ubuntu.vmx' stop>/dev/null 2>&1
0 4 * * * vmware-cmd ‘/var/VMs/Ubuntu.vmx’ start>/dev/null 2>&1

If you are wondering about the /dev/null 2>&1 part of the command, this disables the e-mail output that is automatically sent by crontab.

The vmware-cmd utility has a number of other uses. For your reference, here is the complete usage and options:

Usage: vmware-cmd <options> <vm-cfg-path> <vm-action> <arguments>
vmware-cmd -s <options> <server-action> <arguments>

Options:
Connection Options:
-H <host> specifies an alternative host (if set, -U and -P must also be set)
-O <port> specifies an alternative port
-U <username> specifies a user
-P <password> specifies a password
General Options:
-h More detailed help.
-q Quiet. Minimal output
-v Verbose.

Server Operations:
vmware-cmd -l
vmware-cmd -s register <config_file_path>
vmware-cmd -s unregister <config_file_path>
vmware-cmd -s getresource <variable>
vmware-cmd -s setresource <variable> <value>

VM Operations:
vmware-cmd <cfg> getconnectedusers
vmware-cmd <cfg> getstate
vmware-cmd <cfg> start <powerop_mode>
vmware-cmd <cfg> stop <powerop_mode>
vmware-cmd <cfg> reset <powerop_mode>
vmware-cmd <cfg> suspend <powerop_mode>
vmware-cmd <cfg> setconfig <variable> <value>
vmware-cmd <cfg> getconfig <variable>
vmware-cmd <cfg> setguestinfo <variable> <value>
vmware-cmd <cfg> getguestinfo <variable>
vmware-cmd <cfg> getid
vmware-cmd <cfg> getpid
vmware-cmd <cfg> getproductinfo <prodinfo>
vmware-cmd <cfg> connectdevice <device_name>
vmware-cmd <cfg> disconnectdevice <device_name>
vmware-cmd <cfg> getconfigfile
vmware-cmd <cfg> getheartbeat
vmware-cmd <cfg> getuptime
vmware-cmd <cfg> getremoteconnections
vmware-cmd <cfg> gettoolslastactive
vmware-cmd <cfg> getresource <variable>
vmware-cmd <cfg> setresource <variable> <value>
vmware-cmd <cfg> setrunasuser <username> <password>
vmware-cmd <cfg> getrunasuser
vmware-cmd <cfg> getcapabilities
vmware-cmd <cfg> addredo <disk_device_name>
vmware-cmd <cfg> commit <disk_device_name> <level> <freeze> <wait>
vmware-cmd <cfg> answer

The is a quick trick in nano that lets you automatically backup the file you are editing. If you start the nano editor with the -B option, it will make a backup of the file before it changes it. So, for example, if you were to want to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file (which is a common thing to do), you would start it with the following command:

sudo nano -B /etc/apt/sources.list

This way, if you royally screw up the file, you can quickly recover from it.

Now, I could have copied and pasted the text files all into one file but this would have been time consuming, especially if I had several hundred files. So, here is what I did to make life really easy for me. I simply copied all of the files into one directory by themselves and then ran the following command:

for %F in (*.csv) do type %F>>AllData.csv

This copied the contents of each file into one file called AllData.csv. That’s all it took! Now, I can open this up in Excel and then analyze away!

Microsoft has released some technology that, when combined with heads up displays and GPS tracking could provide a very useful and informative way of seeing the world. When you combine the mapping capabilities of Virtual Earth with trueSpace, a 3D development environment, you can modify the way you see the virtual world.

Now, take this modified virtual world and add a heads up display in the form of glasses which interacts with very precise GPS systems, you have a very good start at something amazing!

Here is a demo that has been put together to show what a trueSpace building looks like in Virtual Earth:

The implications of something like this are astronomical! Some potential uses include:

• Tourist attractions to historical areas showing where building once existed
• Military real-time monitoring of a remote mission
• Real estate agents showing future expansion and growth of a neighborhood
• Architectural businesses performing a virtual walk-through of future building

I can’t imagine how long it took this guy to do this but I have to admit that I am impressed!

Just as a side note, the VPS that I have is running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) so if you are using a different OS, you make have to do things a bit differently.

Update The Server

For those of you from the Windows world, this may seem to be shockingly easy. First, you need to edit the file which tells the system where to get all of the updates. I like to enable all of the sources, including universe and source code. To do this, you need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Remove the # characters in front of all the sources. When I was done, my sources.list file looked like this:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main restricted universe
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main restricted universe

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates main restricted universe
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates main restricted universe

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main restricted universe
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main restricted universe

Now, update Ubuntu by entering these three commands one after another:

sudo aptitude –y update
sudo aptitude –y safe-upgrade
sudo aptitude –y full-upgrade

That’s all there is to it!

Configure iptables

In my opinion, this is the most important thing that you can do because it helps to restrict access to your VPS. The configuration that I am presenting here is just the basics that you should set out and you may want to tighten in down a bit afterward.

Backup

The first thing that you need to do is backup your present iptables rules:

iptables-save > /etc/iptables.up.rules

Create Filter

Next, you are going to want to create your filter. This is a set of rules that tells the firewall what you want to do with data packets that hit your network card.

First, allow all loopback (lo0) traffic and drop all traffic to 127.0.0.0/8 that doesn’t use lo0. This will allow you network services that run on your VPS to talk to other network services on your VPS:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i ! lo -d 127.0.0.0/8 -j REJECT

Next, accepts all established inbound connections. This means that anything that is already connected to your firewall will remain connected, even if there is a change to the rules. This is very handy to prevent you from locking yourself out of your virtual server if you accidentally disable the wrong port:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

You want your VPS to be able to talk to anything on the Internet so you need to be enable that access:

sudo iptables -A OUTPUT -j ACCEPT

Since we are building a web server, we need to allows HTTP (port 80) and HTTPS (port 443) connections from anywhere on the Internet:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT

Linux servers are managed primarily via SSH. So, we need to make sure that we have an SSH port open. I decided to use a non-standard port (port 999) rather than the standard port 22:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW --dport 999 -j ACCEPT

The next line will allow you (and others) to ping your server. There is some debate as to whether or not you should allow pings but, in the end, it is really up to you:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type 8 -j ACCEPT

We will be needing to know if there is anyone out there trying to tamper with our server. So, we are going to log iptables denied calls:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -m limit --limit 5/min -j LOG --log-prefix "iptables denied: " --log-level 7

Since we have configured all of the ports that we want access to, we will reject all other inbound traffic that is not explicitly allowed by a policy:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -j DROP
sudo iptables -A FORWARD -j DROP

Save Rules

Now that we have created out filter/rules, we need to save it:

sudo iptables-save > /etc/iptables.up.rules

When you are finished, your /etc/iptables.up.rules file should look something like this:

# Generated by iptables-save v1.3.8 on Fri Jul 18 02:03:12 2008
*filter
:INPUT ACCEPT [15:1712]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [15:9376]
-A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -d 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 -i ! lo -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable
-A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 999 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type 8 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m limit --limit 5/min -j LOG --log-prefix "iptables denied: " --log-level 7
-A INPUT -j DROP
-A FORWARD -j DROP
-A OUTPUT -j ACCEPT
COMMIT
# Completed on Fri Jul 18 02:03:12 2008

Configure Network to Load Rules Automatically

We need to make sure that these rules reload automatically whenever we reboot the server. Do this by editting the network interface to load the rules automatically:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Add pre-up iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.up.rules after iface lo inet loopback and then save the file.

Conclusion

With this short tutorial, we have upgraded and secured out VPS. In part 2, we are going to look at installing and configuring SSH so that we can remotely connect and manage the VPS plus we are going to add some security to our SSH sessions by changing the SSH port to 999 and setting up and using public and private keys with PuTTY in Windows.

Using BackTrack Live CD which can be found ::here::

For those of you who forgot your spiffy new Vista Logon password. Here’s a quick and dirty way to make a new user account. BTW, this has been around since XP but still useful.

Boot into Backtrack and open a shell prompt:

cd /mnt (change directory to mounted drives)
ls (get the list of mounted drives)
cd sda1 (sda1 is the main hard drive)
cd Windows/ (change to the windows directory)
cd System32/ (change to the system directory)
mv Utilman.exe Utilman.old (backup original file)
cp cmd.exe Utilman.exe (copy cmd.exe as utilman.exe)
reboot

once rebooted, at vista logon screen, Press Windows key + U
To invoke Utility Manager ( A.K.A. CMD.exe)
Cmd.exe will spawn with ‘System’ privileges.
c:\>net user S00perAdmin mypassword /add
c:\>net localgroup administrators S00perAdmin /add
Reboot and log in with your newly added Admin account

Well, the USB pinout varies, depending upon which type of USB plug and receptical you have.

Series A USB Pinout

This is usually what you see most USB devices such as mice and keyboards using. These are four pin devices, two pins for power (1,4) and two pins for data (2,3). The power pins transfer 5V DC.

Series B USB Pinout

These are more popular on USB hard drives, CD/DVD drives and scanners. Just like Series A, these are four pin devices, two pins for power (1,4) and two pins for data (2,3). The power pins transfer 5V DC.

Mini-USB Series A USB Pinout

The Mini-USB series went to a five pin design, even though one pin is either not used or is redundant. You will usually see these on cameras or other such devices. Pins 1 and 5 are for power and pins 2 and 3 provide data access. Pin 4 is connected to pin 5 for redundancy.

Mini-USB Series B USB Pinout

Just like Mini-USB Series A, Series B used five pins, two for power (1,5) and two for data (2,3). Pin 4 is not connected and serves no purpose.

Summary Tables

Standard USB Pinout & Cable Color Code

Mini-USB Type-A Pinout & Cable Color Code

Mini-USB Type-B Pinout & Cable Color Code

So, I would like to ask for everyone’s help with this. If you see something broken or things don’t look quite right, please leave a description of the problem in the comments (either on this post or the post that you see the problem on) so that I will know and I can add it to my to do list.

Here are a couple of things that I am aware of:

1. E-mail does not work. I simply have not gotten around to setting up a mail server.
2. My favorites icon does not always work.

I’m also working in a new theme and upgrading to the latest version of WordPress.

Thanks for the help in advance.

Now, before you believe that I’ve finally gone off the deep end, please hear me out. Slicehost does not host my website, I do. What Slicehost does is provide me with a virtual private server (VPS) on which I can build whatever I want. I decided to build a web server but I could have just as easily built a mail server or a network monitor.

Getting into a VPS solution is not for the faint of heart. I needed to learn a lot in order to get things up and running. Here is a list of some of the technologies that I needed to familiarize myself with in order to make things work well:

1. iptables
2. ssh
3. nginx
4. PHP
5. linux permissions
6. Wordpress
7. MySQL

I have a lot of notes and things that I have learned which I will be sharing here about this upgrade in the near future.

Unfortunately, they can no longer provide me with web hosting and I am now on the hunt for a new host. This biggest issue that I am running into is the fast that shared hosting does not seem to be enough for my site. I use a lot of processor and I get a lot of traffic.

So, this is what I am now working on:

1. A new web host so that I can move Daily Cup of Tech
2. Ways that I can optimize my website to reduce CPU
3. Upgrading to the latest version of WordPress
4. Designing a new theme so that the website comes up quicker

Any suggestions/comments/ideas on any of these would be greatly appreciated!

Once again, thanks to AlwaysWebHosting for all the past support!

Personally, I have loved Firefox for a long time now and it would take quite a bit for me to go to another browser.

Buy more servers? Nope!

Increase bandwidth? Nope!

Use a program that has been essentially outlawed in North American universities? Yep!

The university decided, on the advice of their IT consultant, that they would use bittorrent to deploy the patches.

This really got me thinking about how I would go about creating my own U.Holl server (as I like to call it). These are some of the thoughts that I have come up with.

The Server

Just to add a really strong sense of irony, I would probably build the U.Holl server on Linux, most likely Ubuntu with a typical LAMP installation. Then, for ease of management, I would install a tracker such as phpMyBittorrent or something similar.

In the tracker software, I would create several different categories based on the target systems that I would use. For example, there would be Windows XP, Windows Vista, Office 2007, etc. categories. Each category would have its own RSS feed.

The Clients

Each workstation or server that was to receive updates using bittorrent would have a copy of uTorrent running in the background. This would be critical. You would also need to tweak uTorrent so that it automatically ran an installation script r program each time it finished downloading a new patch. This script would also schedule a reboot at 3:00 AM (or whatever time you wanted) since it seems almost every hotfix from Microsoft needs to reboot the system.

A potential install script might look like this:

The trick to automatically downloading files is to subscribe each uTorrent client to the proper RSS feeds given out by the server. This way, each system only gets the patches it needs.

Potential

I think that this type of a delivery system has great potential. You could even use it across slow bandwidth links or to deploy other software, not just patches.

This is a project that I am hoping to spend some time on over the next while but I am looking for your input/suggestions now so that I can hopefully avoid some pitfalls later. Any input would be greatly appreciated!

So, imagine my surprise when I had this in my inbox this morning:

Dale,

I recently took over Costa Coffee Eastleigh and have found your USB Memory stick, I’m not sure how long it has been here but if you would like to pop in and collect it I will put it to one side.

Thanks

Matthew
Store Manager

Costa Coffee
27-29 Market Street
Eastleigh
SO50 5RG

To be honest, I was a little shocked! But, at the same time, this totally made my day! Just goes to prove that there are some honest people out there and that a little ingenuity can go a long way!

If any of you are in the area of Matthew’s store, go in, congratulate him on his honesty and integrity, and buy the biggest, most expensive coffee on the menu! Way to go, Matthew!

Is there an option in Windows to save Documents and Settings to a different partition during install?

In Ubuntu Linux, I can have a separate /home partition. This lets me reinstall without losing *any* files or settings from a user point of view. (Also, it’s nice having all my wireless passwords work from install to install).

The answer, Will, is yes, there is a way to change the location of the Documents and Settings location in Windows. By default, a user’s configuration files are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>. This location is created the first time the user logs into the system and their default settings are taken from C:\Documents and Settings\Default User.

But, it can be really useful to redirect the location of this folder. For example, I have redirected user’s My Documents from the default C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents to \\server\users$\<username>. This way, users were storing their My Documents on the network and not locally so that if a workstation blew up, then all of their documents would be safe on the network.

To allow this example to work, simply perform the following:

1. Open Registry Editor (Regedit.exe) and navigate to: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders]
2. In the right-pane, look for the entry “Common Documents” and double-click it.
3. The value which present there by default is “%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Documents”.
4. Change the value to the redirected folder (e.g. “\server\users$\%USERNAME%”)

That should do it for you!

So, I decided to export the contents of my mySQL database the runs behind the scenes at DCoT to a text file and then download a word and frequency counter. Do you think I could find a word counter that would count all of the words in the file and then count how many times each word appears? No luck.

But, my bad fortune is your lucky day. I decided that since I couldn’t find anything like this, I’d make it myself. So. today I present you with the Daily Cup of Tech Word Counter!

The application is a self contained program that is fully portable to USB devices. You can download the program and the source code if you are interested. The program is written in AutoIt.

Here is a screenshot of my new baby:

Most of the program is self explanatory. You can sort the output alphabetically or by how frequent each word appears. You can also sort in ascending or descending order. You can count the words that you type or paste into the edit box or use a text file.

The delete options may be the only confusion portion. When you are counting words, you need to clean up the rough text a bit. Delete some punctuation, get rid on non-printable letters, or scrub out the non-standard English words. Each of these options selects a different one of these options. Control characters are things like carriage returns and line spacing. Punctuation is your standard punctuation that you will find in most documents. Extended characters are characters that you usually do not see regularly and are often used in some non-English languages.

The Use Spaces option will replace all deleted characters with spaces rather than deleting them. This can modify your outcomes so feel free to experiment.

When you are done counting your words, a complete list of all the words and how often they appeared will be presented in the edit box.

Feel free to play around with this and let me know if you find it to be useful.

I discovered that there is a way to reset your user interface and run interactively as the LOCAL SYSTEM account. This is important because the LOCAL SYSTEM account has a lot of privileges available to it. According to Microsoft:

The system account and the administrator account (Administrators group) have the same file privileges, but they have different functions. The system account is used by the operating system and by services that run under Windows. There are many services and processes within Windows that need the capability to log on internally (for example during a Windows installation). The system account was designed for that purpose; it is an internal account, does not show up in User Manager, cannot be added to any groups, and cannot have user rights assigned to it. On the other hand, the system account does show up on an NTFS volume in File Manager in the Permissions portion of the Security menu. By default, the system account is granted full control to all files on an NTFS volume. Here the system account has the same functional privileges as the administrator account.

A little while back, some enterprising individuals discovered a way to run the LOCAL SYSTEM account interactively. Here are the instructions according to one website:

1. Start > Run > cmd.exe > type: at 12:03 /interactive “cmd.exe” (replace 12:03 with a time 2 mins from now). > close command prompt
2. New command prompt will open, when it does > Hit CTRL+ALT+DEL > find explorer.exe and End Process.
3. At command prompt type: cd.. > type: explorer.exe

This all words fine except that it is a bit confusing for someone who does not understand how all this works. So, I thought I would make it easier for those who do not have my background. I created a little program in AutoIt that completely automated the process. Simply run the program, wait for a couple of minutes, and you’re running as the LOCAL SYSTEM account.

You can download this program and play with it all you want.

WARNING: I have tested this program to the best of my abilities but this does not mean it is perfect. I did not have any problems with it but that does not mean you will not. If something goes wrong, don’t blame me! You’ve been warned.

For those of you who are interested, here is the source code for this little program I wrote. Feel free to hack around and make it do different things:

#include <Date.au3>
If $CmdLine[0] = 0 Then
;No command line options
;First run
$RunTime = _DateTimeFormat(_DateAdd(’n', 1, _NowCalc()),5)
$Command = @ComSpec & ” /c AT ” & $RunTime & ” /interactive “”" & @ScriptFullPath & “”" 2″
Run($Command)
Else
;Second run
$Command = @ComSpec & ” /c taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F & ” & @WindowsDir & “/explorer.exe”
Run($Command)
EndIf

Update: Someone asked in the comments how you get back to your normal account. Simply log out and then log back in as yourself. You should be back to normal.