Hey Kiddies, Commodore 64 here to bring another tidbit of good advice from all of us to all of you. Along with this tasty piece of techie goodness is a brief admin-ography of the history of AskTheAdmin.com. We’ve come a long way folks, and we think we’ve finally found the true nexus point of our platform needs.

HostGator!

If you’ve been following us throughout the years, you’ve probably experienced the growing pains we’ve had moving from platform to platform, host to host. Our humble beginnings on Blogger dealing with all the limitations and WYSIWYG inconsistencies, then our HUGE fiasco getting our posts, media, and comments migrated, exported, and sometimes even re-written from scratch and re-imported one by tedious one.

Following the imports to our now defunct web host, Bansal-Inc, we were plagued with outages, server errors, php errors, unexpected reboots, files disappearing (wtf?) and older versions re-appearing (seriously now, WTFluck). It was like something out of The Twilight Zone with the title of  “Ghost in the Machine.” It was utter chaos.

On top of all the server-side issues, I’d like to spend a minute to mention how far WordPress has come as a platform as well as an all around user experience from front to back.

Back then, around version 2.5 or 2.6, the WYSIWYG was HORRIBLE. Having already spent many years in the field of front-end web development, the amount of “code rewriting” and “automatic formatting” that went on was horrible. Mixed into that was the advent of Windows Livewriter, which in my opinion, was too good of an editing tool to be justifiably paired with a crappy, built-in, wordpress wysiwyg from back then.

Essentially what would end up happening is that in a writers role, it wasn’t half bad. You said your peace, did a little formatting and published. But from an editor’s perspective – re-opening a post and simply switching from HTML view to Visual view would change the code drastically: replacing massive amounts of tags and flucking up all bullet points and various other elements. Aside from editing issues, plugins we were utilizing were crashing the site here and there. I remember there being a lot of fear associated with running a well-trafficked site in our situation, as it was.

Reaching out to tech support, especially when it’s overseas, was painful at best. Response times, even when they were responding, took days sometimes. We ended having to fish through our emails and find the email address of the company owner. It was only then we could get something done.

Just when we thought our problems were over… the company got sold to a web hosting service then called Inspirit Networks. We had a decent run with Inspirit. At first they were eager to please. But as time went on (we’re talking months, not years) the servers and support’s response times were getting worse and more unresponsive with each passing week. Ultimately we suffered major outages for days at a time which also seemed to strangely roll back our files to older versions. This was the last straw.

After major shopping around and considerations we decided on HostGator. The reviews were all good, and after testing their US based voice support lines, as well as chat lines we were thoroughly impressed.

Enter HostGator…

So far I’ve been personally using them for about a year now with no issues, and so far %100 uptime. Utilizing a free service called aremysitesup.com, I’ve been able to see that we have had NO DOWNTIME. The cpanel has all the options I’ve ever needed or wanted in a LAMP hosting account. We are currently running 8 different well trafficked blogs on one hosting account and see no slowdown and no issues. Truthfully, I’ve never been accustomed to being this fear-free and comfortable with my web server.

These days we can spend our time concentrating on publishing quality content rather than keeping our sites running and healthy.

This is commodore64 signing off.

Let us know what your web hosting experiences were in the comments below…

Or subscribe to our RSS FEED here

Check out http://www.digg.com and then click view source from your browser and you will see this:

Continue scrolling and you will see a URL for some sort of scary video game. Unbelievable! Where will they advertise next in your urinal water? Thanks Commodore!

_TheDiggingThisAdmiN_

So maybe you downloaded a trial application and you have not finished evaluating it? Maybe you have been using that trial application and now it has expired and you need to export your data. No matter if you are being good or evil NirSoft’s application will do the trick for ya! Check it out:

A few years ago I wrote about a little freeware utility that allowed you to remove the date protection that is found on most trial software. Well, I found another one!

You see, there are so many free trial versions of software out there. The software is really great too, however not good enough to spend a gob of money on them. Maybe you are an open source revolutionary and you don’t believe in paying for software. Maybe you are just a cheap ass bastard like me. We all have our reasons for shady software use.

Now, I am not saying I do it… and of course this article is for educational purposes only, but there are ways to extend the trial date, or at least fool the trial program into thinking it is still running in the trial period.

Enter RunAsDate from NirSoft! Here is a description from their page:

RunAsDate is a small utility that allows you to run a program in the date and time that you  specify. This utility doesn’t change the current system date and time of your computer, but it only injects the date/time that you specify into the desired application.
You can run multiple applications simultaneously, each application works with different date and time, while the real date/time of your system continues to run normally.

How it works from their page:

RunAsDate intercepts the kernel API calls that returns the current date and time (GetSystemTime, GetLocalTime, GetSystemTimeAsFileTime), and replaces the current date/time with the date/time that you specify.

Know of another utility that can extend the date for trial ware? Is it free? Post your links in the comments to your favorite trial ware extending tools!

By El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power

We just saw this from WindowsLifeStyle.com and had to share it with the group:

We are pleased to release The Complete Windows 7 Shortcuts eBook. Windows 7 includes a lot of new keyboard shortcuts that are unknown to a new user. This eBook comprises of more than 200 keyboard shortcuts containing almost all the keyboard shortcuts that are available in Windows 7 and its default programs like Paint, WordPad, MS Office, Calculator, Help, Media Player, Media Center, Windows Journal, Internet Explorer, etc.

Download the full ebook here in PDF or XPS format. 

Awesome work and content Nitin!

_TheShortcuttingAdmiN_

Chinese Hackers

Hello Kiddies,

Do you remember the good old days when hacking was done for fun? Back in those days anybody that knew Linux or Unix was considered a Hacker. One would think that since then, antivirus companies would have actually become effective. But what one company can compete with a whole country? To make matters worse, who can compete with multiple countries full of young hot heads venturing forth for the almighty dollar? That’s a powerful force to be reckoned with.

Since a hacker doesn’t technically require a whole lot of bandwidth to do what he/she does, internet access of any kind

Here at Ask The Admin we are committed to being sure every one of our readers is in the know. And while we cant really offer much in the way of a sure-fire killer app that can protect you from anything, we can offer you these few points of advice.

1. Keep your antivirus software up to date
2. Use a well known anti virus software, and do some research before purchasing
3. Be well versed with all the functions of your antivirus software, so no surprises come your way
4. Though it does slow you down, schedule full system scans as frequently as daily
5. Leave your computer turned off if you can
6. Lastly, try to use an OS other than Wind Blows (as we like to call Windows around here). If your a hacker its only more logical and profitable to target the statistically dominant OS, which is Microsoft’s unfortunately.

That’s all for today kiddies…

Has you or anyone you know been directly affected by this? Even if your just afraid and need a little encouragement, drop us a comment below.

This is Commodore64 signing off. Over and out.

Be sure to subscribe to our RSS FEED to stay on top of this and other topics that affect all of us.

Apple's New I-pad Disappoints

With the release of Apple’s shiny new I-Pad many enthusiasts were left wondering “What’s it for?”

This inherent identity crisis on the part of Apple’s new toy might or might not break it, since the price point resembles that of the original I-Phone. We all know how that turned out…

It doesn’t quite measure up to other tablets in any major arena : processing power, hardware, upgradability, versatility, and the list goes on.

I can imagine the disappointment to be largely due to Apple’s strong history of unveiling devices that re-pave the way for particular gadgets we’ve all used and loved – the cellphone and the MP3 player.

The question here is “What is being innovated?”.

I’m not sure even Mr. Jobs completely understands the specific direction for this device

Asus will debut their new EEE Tablet PCImage courtesy: www.techticker.com

Enter Asus. Another example of a company that has positioned itself to be known for innovation, minification, and basically answering the call of the wild market. I’m sure this device will be everything the I-Pad is not, and because of the price point set forth by Apple, I’m positive this little gadget, once polished, will be just as affordable.

I for one, will definitely be in line to pick up one of these tablets.

Let us know which device you think will accomplish what the Apple didn’t. And to be fair, let us know what the I-PPad does actually accomplish, or what need you think this pretty gadget fills – In The comments!

Thanks for tuning in kiddies,
This is Commodore 64 signing out-
Commodore64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on)

HEY- Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS Feed HERE

  This is a Windows 7 only feature don’t be jealous…

Do you want to lock down what applications the kids can run on your shinny new Windows 7 computer? Well they have a little known feature built into the latest and greatest version of Windows. It takes a little know how to get it going but that is what we are here for – right?

First set up the machine in question with the applications you want on it. Install the versions you want to run. Then we will need to open up the Group Policy editor or Local Security Policy Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in.

1. Click Start, type secpol.msc in the Search programs and files box, and then press ENTER.
2. In the console tree, double-click Application Control Policies, and then double-click AppLocker.
3. Right-click Executable Rules, and then click Create Default Rules.
4. AppLocker rules are automatically created .

To get into AppLocker and more advanced setups check out this page from Microsoft entitled AppLocker step by step scenarios http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee791835%28WS.10%29.aspx.

_TheLockedDownAdmiN_

Sure it has been a while since our last giveaway – and they all can’t be $1000+ computers right? Yes you should be kicking your self for not entering that! But I digress…
Today we are giving away a nifty commercial application that normally costs $60. It is called Audials One and it allows you to capture ANY audio that you can hear on your computer. You can rip songs from Blu Ray or DVD’s. It is billed as a professional media converter, organizer & player.

You can grab a track right from a audio stream.  Audials One will save the track to a MP3 that you can then listen to offline, burn it to a cd or throw it on your iPod. The application also has a built in search feature to scour the Internet for specific audio bytes and to top it all off it doesn’t care one bit about DRM or any other SILLY copy protection scheme.

You can actually play a DRM’ed track on your machine and magically strip it off when you are saving it as a MP3 – you can learn more via their tutorials here.

As I said before we have 5 copies to give away so step right up and enter our contest all you need to do is leave a comment on this post as to why we should give it to you. Be funny, be witty and this might just be yours. The publisher also told me if we see a lot of comments and tweets we can up the number to 10 or maybe even 20. Let’s see how much you guys need this..

A comment will get you one entry, tweeting about the contest will get you 2 entries (tag it #AskTheAdmin) and blogging about the contest will get you 3 votes.

The contest will go for one week from today! So get your entries in, starting NOW!

_TheJudgingYouAdmiN_

You ever have a conversation with someone, or perhaps stood in front of a group of people and in the middle of whatever you are talking about, someone gets up and walks out. It hurts a little, and is rather rude. Well, unfollowing people is sort of like that.

Granted, sometimes it is warranted. I mean, I have posted about tools to do mass unfollows to keeps your Twitter stream nice and fresh, but you don’t want people unfollowing you right? I mean, you are not a spam bot, so people should stick around to hear what you have to say right? Double standard much? That is besides the point.

Well, here are two tools that will snitch when someone unfollows you so you know who the jerks are:

• Goodbyebuddy: Goodbyebuddy will DM you when someone unfollows you. So far they claim to have busted over 2759413 unfollowers. To use this service, all you have to do is follow @GoodByeBuddy.
• Twitterless.com: Twitterless tells you who stops following you and graphs your follower history over time, making this info available in a variety of useful views. Once again, all you have to do is follow them to get started. @tless.

Know of any other Twitter tools to give you the goods on those walking out on you? Let us know in the comments!

[Via  Bauer-Power.net]

So Johnny command line needs to be cool and open his computer management console or maybe just his services how can he do it?

Here you go little Johnny Command Line:

• Computer Management – compmgmt.msc
• Component Services – comexp.msc
• Disk Managment – diskmgmt.msc
• Device Manager – devmgmt.msc
• Disk Defrag – dfrg.msc
• Event Viewer – eventvwr.msc
• Group Policies – gpedit.msc
• Local Security Settings – secpol.msc
• Local Users and Groups – lusrmgr.msc
• Performance Monitor – perfmon.msc
• Resultant Set of Policies – rsop.msc
• Shared Folders – fsmgmt.msc
• Services – services.msc

And for the n00bs hit Start—Run—type anyone of these commands (include the .msc extension) and viola… Console Magic

_TheConsoleLovinAdmiN_

Free Easy CD DVD Burner 3.9 rocks hardcore. If you need a free light weight easy to use CD or DVD burner look no further.

Grab the installer from http://www.koyotesoft.com/en/products.html. Install it and you are good to go. No rebooting just lots and lots of burning goodness – for free! Thanks KoyoteSoft you guys are awesome.

_TheFreeLovingAdmiN_

Yesterday I had a nasty run in with a fake antivirus application yesterday. I was trying to remove it and un-do the troubles it had caused the user. But I was unable to delete the executables associated with it due to there being in use. So I tried to bring up the task manager and got an error message that this was not allowed… WTF?

But wait it got worse… As I was trying to open a alternative task manager I got a blue screen of death…

Huh? I was able to Alt-Tab out of the error seeming it was just a running program with an image…. Sons of bitches! I needed to stop these processes so I can start recovering… So I dropped to a command prompt and ran this command:

taskkill /IM av1010.exe

This will cause the program to terminate gracefully, asking for confirmation if there are unsaved changes. To forcefully kill the same process, add the /F option to the command line. Be careful with the /F option  it will kill all processes with the name you specified without asking for any confirmation.

You can also kill a single instance of a process this is helpful if there are multiple instances of the same name application running. All we need to do is  specify its process id aka PID.

If your rouge process has a PID of 321, use the following command to kill it:

taskkill /PID 321

Using filters (/FI), a variety of different patterns can be used to specify the processes to kill. For example, the following filter syntax will forcefully kill all processes owned by the user AtA:

taskkill /F /FI "USERNAME eq AtA"

The following table shows the available filters and their use.

Filter Name Valid Operators Valid Value(s)
----------- --------------- --------------
STATUS eq ne RUNNING | NOT RESPONDING
IMAGENAME eq ne Image name
PID eq ne gt lt ge le PID value
SESSION eq ne gt lt ge le Session number.
CPUTIME eq ne gt lt ge le CPU time in the format
of hh:mm:ss.
MEMUSAGE eq ne gt lt ge le Memory usage in KB
USERNAME eq ne User name in [domain\]user
format
MODULES eq ne DLL name
SERVICES eq ne Service name
WINDOWTITLE eq ne Window title

eq: equals ne: not equal
gt: greater than lt: less than
gt: greater than or equal le: less than or equal

I was able to kill the processes and delete them. I removed references to them in msconfig and then rebooted. I was able to run Malware Bytes and clean out the rest of the garbage.

_TheSpyWareKillinAdmiN_

Enable ‘GodMode’ in Windows 7 – The funniest videos are a click away

So it turns out there are a list of folder “Codes” that you can add to the end of a folder name to create all sorts of special folders. Check out the list of codes here:

{00C6D95F-329C-409a-81D7-C46C66EA7F33}
{0142e4d0-fb7a-11dc-ba4a-000ffe7ab428}
{025A5937-A6BE-4686-A844-36FE4BEC8B6D}
{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}
{1206F5F1-0569-412C-8FEC-3204630DFB70}
{15eae92e-f17a-4431-9f28-805e482dafd4}
{17cd9488-1228-4b2f-88ce-4298e93e0966}
{1D2680C9-0E2A-469d-B787-065558BC7D43}
{1FA9085F-25A2-489B-85D4-86326EEDCD87}
{208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-08002B30309D}
{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}
{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}
{241D7C96-F8BF-4F85-B01F-E2B043341A4B}
{4026492F-2F69-46B8-B9BF-5654FC07E423}
{62D8ED13-C9D0-4CE8-A914-47DD628FB1B0}
{78F3955E-3B90-4184-BD14-5397C15F1EFC}

And, as a reminder, to create the God mode folder itself, use this string:

{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

All you need to do is create a new folder with any name, then a period, then one of the text strings above. For example, the first one could be a folder named “AskTheAdmin.{00C6D95F-329C-409a-81D7-C46C66EA7F33}” (use everything inside quotes–but not the quotes themselves).

This should make customizing your Windows 7 machine a lot easier!

_TheGodModeAdmiN_

Do you ever need command line access to see how long a Windows Server has been up for? This morning I did. I needed to prove that a machine (Windows Server 2003) was up last night at 3 am when a critical process was going down. Someone flucked up and it sure wasn’t me! So…

Using one of my favorite command line commands NET I will show you quickly how to display your Windows up-time:

net statistics workstation

This will show you a similar screen to this:

The first line across the top shows when the machine was last rebooted along with some other geeky goodness. Do you have an easier/quicker/more obscure way of doing this?

_TheObscureAdmiN_

I know the feeling of your secure network being compromised by an end user… Passwords do fall into the wrong hands and then what do you do? Scenarios start running through my head and I make a mental list of all the passwords and system configs that need to be changed. These aren’t fun times in Admin land but they usually breed scripts and easier ways to do the necessary!

El Di Pablo tell us of his experiences… And is culminated by using a Great tool that AtA LOVES! Check it out…

I had a bit of a scare the other day. I get a call from a user in the field.

She is traveling with her laptop and she was calling from her hotel. she was complaining that she couldn’t log into her laptop using her normal log in credentials, and that the only way she could log in was using the local administrators account.

“Local Admin what?!?!”

I exclaimed then started hyperventilating. I asked her how she came across the local administrator password, and she told me that one of the techs at the company that is no longer with us gave it to her a long time ago.

I asked her to spell out the password for me, and low and behold it was the corporate standard.

I ran to my bosses office and reported the compromise, and recommended changing the local passwords. He agreed and called a meeting with me, our head desktop technician and one of the senior systems administrators to come up with a plan of attack. I told them that I can easily change these passwords using a script and pspasswd.exe that comes with Sysinternals PSTools.

I told them that I can export a list of all of the workstations on the network from Active directory, and put them in a text file. pspasswd will read directly from the list in the text file and change the password of the specified account on each computer in the list. I showed each of the guys in the meeting how it works, and they agreed that my script would be the best way to go with this.

Here is an example of the syntax used in my script. Keep in mind that this script must be ran from within the directory containing the pspasswd.exe program or else you have to modify the script to change into it’s directory. Of course, if you know batch scripting well, you can add all sorts of stuff to the script, but the basic run command looks like this:

>set /p filename=”Please enter name of computer list (ie: computers): “

>pspasswd @%filename%.txt -u administrator@domain.com -p password

administrator newpassword >> %filename%-results.txt

You’ll notice that I added an output to a text file so I could create a log of which workstations the password was changed on, and which ones it wasn’t. That is a good idea so you can keep whittling away at it until the change has been completed on all workstations. Also, you’ll notice that I added the -u and -p switches. You don’t need that if you are already running the script from an account that has permissions to change local passwords.

There are many other little changes you can do as well. I used the set command because I had different lists for different offices. You could just put the computer names in one list and not use the set command.

Let me know if you have used this or a similar product, and perhaps some other scripting ideas for this.

This article was written by El Di Pablo a guest contributor on AskTheAdmin.com. You can keep up with his high tech antics at his blog http://www.Bauer-Power.net!

This is one of those articles where you HAVE to read the comments. You guys have some great insights and ideas! Keep on Commenting, that is what makes this site great. Go ahead pat your self on the back!

Keeping up with the upgrading process over here at http://www.askTheAdmin.com I just finished upgrading to 2.9.1. I backed up my database and did the automatic upgrade via my WP-Admin console as you can see here:

2.9.1 comes out about three weeks after the official release of Wordpress 2.9

Bugs that came to bite Bloggers and Webmasters in the ass are now fixed including problems with scheduled posts and pages on some web hosts.

Scheduled posts would not be published at the time configured by the user but appear as missed in the list of posts forcing the webmaster to reschedule and hope for the best or to publish it manually.

There are 23 others fixes that are listed in this ‘minor’ upgrade. Five of the bugs listed have been rated high while the majority received a normal rating. Several updates fix installation and upgrade issues that webmasters might have experienced.

You can use the automatic upgrade feature or download Wordpress 2.9.1 from the official Wordpress website.

_TheUpgradingAdmiN_

See that picture? When it happens to you, it may not look quite that bad (or be quite that obvious), but data loss sucks. And it does happen. I’ve been working with computers for 10+ years, and I’ve had it happen a couple times myself. Did I mention how much it sucks?

I’m not going to spend a couple pages telling you why you should backup, I’m just going to be straight about it, unless you really couldn’t care less if that happened to your computer, you are flat out stupid if you are not backing up your data on a regular basis.

Instead of telling you why to backup, I’m going to tell you how to ensure that you are not going to get your data back, even if you think you are backing it up.

Method 1: I’ll just back the data up to CD/DVD.

Well sure, this will work for a bit, but:

1. Ever try to save 20GB to CD? Or 250GB to DVD? Ugh.
2. How long do you think that optical desk is going to be readable?

Going this route, you can quickly end up trapped behind a small mountain of plastic. Or lets say you manage to somehow keep the optical disks to a manageable quantity, will the marker you labeled it with make the disk unreadable in a year, or is the dye layer unstable, rendering your disk unreadable in six months, or will the glue on the label you made for the disk make it worthless in a year or two? These are just a couple of examples of why optical media should not be considered an archive grade solution.

Method 2: ok then, I’ll just copy the data to a USB hard drive.

Sure it’s better than nothing, but single HDD solutions are not going to keep your data safe. Hard drives fail. In fact it will happen to every single hard disk you will ever come across. The only question is; when? It’s not a matter of if, or of MTBF (mean time between failure), it is more a matter of “you never know, it could fail in ten years, or in ten seconds”.

Don’t get me wrong, if this is the only way you can back the data up, then it is your only choice, and it’s better than nothing. Just be aware, as soon as you copy the data to that USB HDD, the “Clock of Death” is ticking.

Much better would be to copy the data over to a machine with a RAID storage system (preferably RAID5).

Method 3: I bought actual Backup Software (or use a vetted Open Source solution), and run Incremental Backups (to tape!) every single day!

Ok, so you spent some money on a tape backup solution, spent hours reading the manual and configuring your backup. Congratulations, I bet you think your data is safe! Until you find out how Incremental Backups really work (this usually happens after a disaster, and the tapes is all you have left of your pr0n, illegal mp3’s downloaded movies warez mission critical data).

Let’s pretend for a minute that your backup tapes look something like this:

Full_backup_tape (tape 1 – doesn’t matter what you tell it to be, the first backup is always and without exception, a full backup)

Incremental_backup_1 (tape 2)

Incremental_backup_2 (tape 3)

Incremental_backup_3 (tape 4)

Incremental_backup_4 (tape 5)

Incremental_backup_5 (tape 6)

And then you have a catastrophic failure. So you’re sitting there at 2am merrily running the restore, and you hit a snag: tape 2 won’t read. Doesn’t matter why, the tape could be bad, maybe you left it out of the tape safe overnight, and the radio station next door managed to erase it with the magnetic waves they transmit (this actually happened), the data is gone. So is all data after it. See Incremental backups require that all tapes since the last full backup be present and working. So tapes 3-6 may as well be empty, because you are never getting the data off of them. Ever.

If you can’t run full backups every day, use Differential backups instead of Incrementals. Let’s say that in the scenario the user had been running differentials rather than incrementals. They could then restore to current using just the original full backup, and the last differential.

Method 4: Now I’m running differential backups to tape every single day!

But you fail to check the backup logs every day, and the backup job you though had been running for the last year actually failed 273 days ago, and has been requesting the “correct” tape since then. I’ve seen this one a lot (in fact, I think this would be the most popular reason for data loss if you have backup software running).

You’ve got to check your backup logs. It sucks, and it’s boring, but it’s one of those things you just have to do.

Method 5: Alright, I’m running differentials to tape, and have been checking my logs for the last 2 years every single day!

But you’ve never run a test restore. If you haven’t restored data from the tape successfully, there is no data on the tape. The tape was bad, the backup software failed (silently of course), the gremlins ate it.

Method 6: Ok, now I spend two hours reading the log and then randomly restoring files from my backups (before putting the tapes in the tape safe) every single day!

And then your server room catches fire. All machines, and the safe holding the backup tapes are destroyed. You never took any offsite, because you have a tape safe. It happens. It’s unfortunate.

Method 7: Enough, I give up on tape! Now I run a full backup to a RAID5 NAS every single day!

But you ordered your NAS with the drives form the manufacturer, and they used 4 HDD’s from the same batch, and two failed. This is the one that always gets them! The strength of RAID5 is that more than one drive has to fail before the RAID is unrecoverable. The weakness is that hard drives from the same batch tend to fail at the same time (or thereabouts).

To strengthen your RAID system, always make sure that you have drives from different batches, if not from different manufacturers (this is not always the best idea, but that is an argument for another time). For instance: to take care of my backup needs at home, I bought a Buffalo Terastation. Unfortunately, Buffalo sent me a Terastation with 4 drives from the same batch (you can usually tell if they all have the same date on them, sometimes there will be a batch code on the drive). I bought 3 more of the same model drive from 3 different manufacturers, and now have the most healthy RAID I can.

These are not the only ways to lose data, but they are by far the most common. How would I know? I was the Worldwide Manager of Technical Support for a backup software company for several years. And I always got to be the one to explain to the customers why their data is gone.

So what do I do?

There are as many answers to that question as there are IT shops with backup systems. Here is how I protect data at my office:

I backup all data every day (full backup) to a NAS configured in RAID5, with a hot spare. I check the health of the RAID every day (it takes about two minutes). Once a week I backup the entire RAID to LTO3 tape, and take the tapes offsite (currently I am taking them home, where they go into a DATA rated fire safe (there is a difference, do your homework), and then into my large safe where I keep all my other valuables. My ideal would be to have them delivered to a bank safety deposit box, but that costs money.

At home, I back up all my data to the aforementioned Terastation. Once per month, I copy all the data off to a USB HDD (actually two of them), and take one to work where it goes into the tape safe.

Is it perfect? No. Does it stand a much better chance of keeping that data alive through a catastrophic event? Absolutely. You don’t have to go to these lengths to protect your data, but you should be aware of the risks.

I often find myself in situations where I wished I could share out my internet with other users. I have tried programs that turn my Touch Pro into a hot spot but it not only kills my phone’s battery but it also slows it down to a crawl. I could tether my laptop to my phone and share that out but why should I when I found a nifty little device called a travel router. When I paired this up with a mobile internet card I had a match made in heave!

The Cradlepoint CTR350 Cellular Travel Router has found a new home in my laptop bag. Using this router with a Verizon Sierra Mobile Broadband Card (EVDO) I can have an instant network setup… Um anywhere I can rig up power.

Simply insert the card into the router. Log into the router and configure firewall, routing and even dynamic name resolution.

This means at your next outdoor event you can not only provide internet to your geeky pals but you could be running a web server that is resolving to a domain name.

I was not only impressed by it’s simplicity but also by how cheap it is. I found the mobile router online for under $150. Cradlepoint CTR-350 Mobile Router The Verizon card I already had but they are also practically free if you are willing to sign up for a 2 year contract. AT&T USBConnect Mercury Broadband USB Modem (AT&T) I have used this little guy to set up a  DVR in an office without internet. Share out internet in my truck/car to all the others on-board. The sky’s the limit!

Do any of you use mobile internet for something interesting? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

_TheMobileAdmiN_

I read this over at Guy Mcdowell’s website and had to publish it and let you guys see this! It was not written by Guy but hey you can read the post your self. If you enjoy it check out his site as well!

I didn’t write this. I got it from a site, who got it from a site that no longer exists. Although the tone is a bit whiny, it is essentially true.

1. If you ask me technical questions please don’t argue with me because you don’t like my answer. If you think you know more about the topic, why ask? And if I’m arguing with you…it’s because I am positive that I am correct, otherwise I’d just say “I don’t know” or give you some tips on where to look it up, I don’t have the time to just argue for the sake of it.
2. Starting a conversation by insulting yourself (i.e. “I’m such an idiot”) will not make me laugh, or feel sorry for you;  all it will do is remind me that yes, you are an idiot and that I am going to hate having to talk to you. Trust me;  you don’t want to start a call that way.
3. I am OK with you making mistakes, fixing them is my job. I am not OK with you lying to me about a mistake you made. It makes it much harder to resolve and thus makes my job more difficult. Be honest and we can get the problem resolved and continue on with our business.
4. There is no magic “Fix it” button. Everything takes some amount of work to fix, and not everything is worth fixing or even possible to fix. If I say that you just need to re-do a document that you accidentally deleted 2 months ago, please don’t get mad at me.  I’m not ignoring your problem, and it’s not that I don’t like you, I just can’t always fix everything.
5. Not everything you ask me to do is “urgent”. In fact, by marking things as “urgent” every time, you almost ensure that I treat none of it as a priority.
6. You are not the only one who needs help, and you usually don’t have the most urgent issue. Give me some time to get to your problem, it will get fixed.
7. Emailing me several times about the same issue in the same day is not only unnecessary, it’s highly annoying. Emails will stay until I delete them. I won’t delete them until I’m done with them. I will typically respond as soon as I have a useful update. If it is an urgent issue, let me know (see number 5).
8. Yes, I prefer email over telephone calls. It has nothing to do with being friendly, it’s about efficiency. It is much faster and easier for me to list out a set of questions that I need you to answer than it is for me to call and ask you them one by one. You can find the answers at your leisure and while I’m waiting I can work on other problems.

9. Yes, I seem blunt and rude. It’s not that I mean to, I just don’t have the time to sugar coat things for you. I assume we are both adults and can handle the reality of a problem. If you did something wrong, I will tell you. I don’t care that it was a mistake, because it really makes no difference to me. Don’t take it personal, I just don’t want it to happen again.
10. And finally, yes, I can read your email, I can see what web pages you look at while you are at work, yes, I can access every file on your work computer, and I can tell if you are chatting with people on an instant messenger or chat room (and can also read what you are typing). But no, I don’t do it. It’s unethical, I’m busy, and in all reality you aren’t all that interesting. So unless I am instructed to specifically monitor or investigate your actions, I don’t. There really are much more interesting things on the internet than you.

The point of that article is one that everyone wants to make, whether they are in IT, or are testers, consultants, or engineers. The point is we are all trying to do our jobs the best that we can and it’s easiest to do that if we all work together, stop pointing fingers and give other people the space that we would like to get as well. If we can do that more often than not, things will go well and work out.

_TheWatchingYouAdmiN_

You know the saying, “You can’t have too much RAM or too much storage.”

Well, there is at least one case where a lot of RAM can cause problems.

My current desktop had 1 Gig of RAM and I recently bought an additional 2 Gigs since the price was so low. (And of course I used The AdmiN’s link to give a little back to AtA)

Wow, 3 Gigs of RAM what could possibly be bad about that? Well one night, I went to put the system into hibernate and it beeped and a balloon popped up from the system tray that said “Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API.” After that, the system would only go into standby, not into hibernate. In fact the hibernate tab of the Power Options settings was completely gone.

It turns out this is a known issue and Microsoft has a patch for it. The KB article describes the exact problem I was having and states “This problem typically occurs when the computer uses 1 gigabyte (GB) or more of RAM.“

My favorite part of the article is

“This problem occurs because the Windows kernel power manager cannot obtain the memory resources that are required to prepare the computer to hibernate.“

So basically, you have so much memory that we cannot obtain enough memory! The system had no problem obtaining enough memory resources when there was only 1 Gig of RAM, but with 3 Gigs there isn’t enough.

I applied the patch offered in the article and haven’t had any problem putting the system into hibernate since.

Who knew, it IS possible to have too much RAM!

Ok, so it really doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.  Yeah, drat, your mouse has broken after you used it by accident on top of that peanut butter smudge on your desk.  Here’s an obscure yet real windows tool you can use to make your keyboard act as a mouse until you get that replacement.   To do this, you push at the same time, Alt+Left shift key + NumLock . You’ll get a pop-up window saying to

1) Use Mouse Keys, click OK

2) Cancel MouseKeys, click CANCEL

3) Deactivate, click settings….blah, blah blah.

When you get the popup you can click the settings button and customize the feature as well.

How many of you knew about this? We all knew about the OSK I wrote about here but not this one!

Kerry is a wanna-be geek who periodically writes on the the AskTheAdmin website.  Her favorite website is callcatalog.com which is a reverse phone lookup website that allows you to do a reverse phone number lookup.

This was brought back from the AtA archives for several readers! We normally stick to our computers and such but REVENGE is always a good topic! Lets put our love of gadgets to good use…

“Alright let me start out by saying there is this woman who works in my office, who is SUPER annoying. She annoys everyone around her. She has her own office but comes over to “Visit” with everyone spreading the urgency to kill her. Now I don’t want to resort to violence is there a Techie way I can annoy her?”

We have something that sounds like it might be what you need. For $10 this will be hours and hours of fun loving entertainment / revenge And AskTheAdmin gets a whole $.89!  for every time someone uses this link.

Check out this information pieced together from their site:

The ThinkGeek Annoy-a-tron would be useless against an army of Snowbots, but it’s very effective at disturbing that guy in the sales department or your “friend” down the hall. With its thin design and embedded magnet for easy hiding, the Annoy-a-tron can be placed in a variety of locations. Select one of the three sound choices (2 kHz, 12 kHz, or alternating) and push the switch to the on position. Place it in a proper hiding spot and let the “fun” begin.

The Annoy-a-tron generates a short (but very annoying, hence the name) beep every few minutes. Your unsuspecting target will have a hard time ‘timing’ the location of the sound because the beeps will vary in intervals ranging from 2 to 8 minutes. The 2kHz sound is generically annoying enough, but if you really really want to aggravate somebody, select the 12 kHz sound. Trust us. The higher frequency and slight ‘electronic noise’ built into that soundbyte will make a full-grown Admin wonder where his packets are.

3 simple steps.
• Turn on.*
• Hide it.
• Muahahaha…

Assuming you have done your part in selecting a suitable hiding location for the Annoy-a-tron, it will do its part to drive your co-workers slowly mad with its short and seemingly random beeps. And when someone does locate the Annoy-a-tron, they’re really not going to know what it is – which is almost as much fun as watching them search for it. Muahaha.

The Annoy-a-tron takes one CR2032 battery (included) and measures approximately: 2.5″ x 1.25″ x .3″. It will run for 3 to 4 weeks on a single battery.

Some Recommendations:

• Don’t hide it inside of food (the chemicals in a burrito are known to be quite destructive to electrical components)
• You should probably avoid the area near your local BOFH (we understand that most likely you are the local BOFH, but still please take note)
• Yes, we realize you could buy a dozen and hide them all inside someone’s office (oh, did we say that out loud?)
• Please reserve the use of the Annoy-a-tron for deserving subjects only (we’ll leave it up to you to determine who qualifies)
• * Note: Please remember to remove the small plastic tab underneath battery.

Not convinced of the Annoy-a-tron’s evil powers?

Read this letter we received from a satisfied customer and be enlightened:

And for another way to Annoy the hell out of some one legally check this out…

_TheMuhahahahaAdmiN_

I love when other sites incorporate what we do here at AskTheAdmin.com and we also love sharing them with our readers. So here is Paul Bauer from Bauer-Power.net using our Make Outlook your biatch with rules and batch files for those of you that have not seen that post check it out here.  Without further ado here is the post:

My buddy Karl over at AskTheAdmin.com once wrote an article about running a script from Outlook when a particular email comes in. It got me to thinking if there was a way to remotely wipe a hard drive when an email comes in. I couldn’t find a program that could be scripted to remotely wipe a drivebut I once wrote about a program called HDD Wipe that can at least wipe a drive while Windows was running.

So all that was left was a way to automate HDD Wipe. Well, HDD Wipe is GUI only, so that got me thinking about another program I wrote about called Autoit that lets you automate GUI programs. I decided to write my own program that automates HDD Wipe to wipe out a hard drive remotely. Here is a teaser video of me wiping a drive using an email. I will get more into that in Episode 18, but in the meantime here is a teaser, and below is the link to my Autoit program RemoteWipe!

http://www.youtube.com/v/iiAn2FaqDZ4

Download RemoteWipe here: (RemoteWipe.exe)

To use it drop it in the HDDGURU FreeWipe Tool programs file directory, and run it via script, double click, PSExec or however you feel you need to run it!

Do you know of a better way to remotely wipe a drive in windows? If so, let me know. Preferably a scriptable program please.

[Via Bauer-Power]

As a lot of you know I have a baby and I have a full time job. So I do not get to spend as much time with her as I would like to. I have tried setting up Skype Video so that we can see each other.The Tablet that HP hooked me up with also has a built in camera and microphone. But alas little Kayla just want to mash the keyboard… Could it be because of baby Smash? Probably!

So the computer video phone was out of the question, I took a look at stand alone Skype phones like this one but they were too rich for my blood. Then I found something called the OJO Video Phone created by Motorola way back in 2005. They have shown these things on shows like 24 but I never knew what they were.

They used to cost $400 and $20 a month. Now you can find them on eBay for ~$150 and the service is $10 a month.

EDIT I FOUND IT NEW FOR CHEAPER HERE $130:

It is what it says it is – a stand alone video phone that works over broadband. Now i can see my baby whenever I want… She loves it!

Do you have a way to connect with your kids while you are at work? We would love to hear about it in the comments! And those links above are affiliate links so we will see some money if you guys decide to buy anything via our links.

_TheVideoingAdmiN_

LMFAO!

[Via My Personal XKCD Archive]

_TheAddictedAdmiN_

If you are using Opera Browser and want to back up all the browser data to another PC, then the free utility Opera Back up should be useful. OperaBackup is smart and easy to use application that lets you create and restore backups of all data as bookmarks, passwords, configuration, etc. of your Opera browser. Once installed, it can take a back up of all the user profile or a specific user profile.

The interface is pretty simple and it provides you with two options, Backup and Restore a back up. You can select the user profile from the list of available profiles.

F you are selecting the define user profile option, then you need to manually profile the path to the opera folder, preferences and also the email and RSS folders. Opera Backup is a pretty useful utility to back up and restore Opera profiles which includes bookmarks, configuration etc.

Download Opera Backup

[Via LifeRocks 2.0]

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I have learned my lesson some time back and now keep my wordpress updated as quickly as a day after release. We have a mirror site for testing first and I can announce safely that the automatic upgrade works nicely and without a hitch. There are a bunch of new features, security improvements and overall speed enhancements.

Batch Plug-in Update in Word Press

When Word Press introduced one click upgrade for pluggins, it was like Christmas in July. But this time maybe on the actual Christmas or perhaps slightly earlier with the release of Word Press 2.9, we will now be able to upgrade multiple pluggins with one click from our WordPress Admin Panel.Optimize/Repair Database Functionality

WordPress has added a new feature to the core which allows you to repair and optimize your database. In order to activate this function, you will need to add this line in your wp-config.php

define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);

Once you have added it, you will now be able to run the script which is located at this URL:

http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php

WordPress Recycle Bin / Trash

Regardless of whether you are a PC user, or a Mac user, we have all had moments when we accidently deleted something really important. But good thing about the operating systems is that they have something where our trash is stored at. In PC its called a recycled bin, and in Mac it is called the Trash, regardless of what it is called, the fact that we can restore it is what matters. WordPress has now added a similar functionality for the posts, pages, and the comments. Instead of permanently deleting these, you can now trash it and then later on empty the trash once you are completely done with what you were doing. By default WordPress will empty the trash every 30 days, but you can change the time limit by simply entering the following code in your wp-config.php:

define( ‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 10 );

Image Editor

The image editor is something that a lot of users were waiting for and it is included in this release. This editor will let you make simple changes such as cropping, rotating, scaling, etc.

Ability to add Post Thumbnails

You have probably seen many sites displaying posts on the homepage with a post thumbnail. Or many sites having the post thumbnail next to each post in their index. Before version 2.9, it was done through custom fields. In this release, you can simply add the thumbnail when writing the post and displaying it in the template is even easier.

In order for you to have this functionality available in the admin panel, you must have a theme that supports this function. It is really simple to add support for this feature and we will have a full tutorial on this coming up soon. You will need to visit your theme’s functions.php and add the following code:

add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );

Once you choose the thumbnail, you can display it on the template using the following code:

We will be posting a full guide for this function very soon because it is a very useful feature.

Extend User Contact Info

WordPress user profile page is quite old and many new networks have gain popularity such as twitter and facebook. Prior to version 2.9, it was really hard to add a custom field in the contact area, but thanks to Joost De Valk for his contribution, now this feature is available.

Simply open your functions.php and add the following function:

function my_new_contactmethods( $contactmethods ) {
// Add Twitter
$contactmethods['twitter'] = ‘Twitter’;
//add Facebook
$contactmethods['facebook'] = ‘Facebook’;

return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter(‘user_contactmethods’,'my_new_contactmethods’,10,1);
?>

This will add extra fields in your user profile pages.

You can display these on author profile page by using the normal $curauth variable or the_author_meta variable. We will also be writing about these in the near future to explain full details how this function works.

New Excerpt Filter

Up till WordPress 2.8.6, when the user add the_excerpt code in the loop, it would display content with a 55 word limit and once the word limit was reached, it would add [...]. With this new ability, You can now specify a function and control both excerpt word count, and the more text. All you have to do is open your theme’s function.php file and add the following code:

// Changing excerpt length
function new_excerpt_length($length) {
return 60;
}
add_filter(‘excerpt_length’, ‘new_excerpt_length’);

// Changing excerpt more
function new_excerpt_more($more) {
return ‘…’;
}
add_filter(‘excerpt_more’, ‘new_excerpt_more’);

All thanks goes to Ramiy for suggesting this feature.

oEmbed making Embedding Easier

Thanks to ViperBond007 that this feature was added to the core of WordPress 2.9. It is a specification that allows media providers like Flickr, YouTube and others to provide data for consumer applications like WordPress about media.

There are many many more features that are being included in this version. To see a full list check out this page.

Don’t hesitate and do your part for the community. Download the Release Candidate from this Link and start testing out all the features, so this version can be released even faster.

 [Via WP-Beginner]

Our buddy over at Bauer-Power was able to install Windows 7 directly from his USB drive. Check out his method below:

I was having some performance issues on my Dell Mini 9 recently and decided to start doing some optimization. One of the things I was going to do was change the Page file settings from system managed, like they are by default, to a static size.

Well, I had filled up my drive, and didn’t have enough room to do that, so I decided to re-build my Dell Mini. Why not? It’s the weekend, and I didn’t have anything important save on it anyway. So like normal, I pull out my external DVD drive that I purchased with my netbook, and began trying to re-install. That is when I started having problems.

This actually happens every time I try to install anything via CD or DVD on the Dell Mini. The external drive that came with it is hit or miss. I looked online, and it appears to be a common issue with the Dell Mini. Let me tell you it is frustrating as hell!

The good news is that I can boot off of a USB stick no problem. In fact, that is how I install my Bauer-Puntu partition on the Dell Mini. What about the Windows half though? Well it turns out it is fairly easy to make a bootable USB Windows 7 install stick!

All you need is a Windows 7 install DVD, and a 4GB USB Flash drive. Don’t have one? You can get a Bauer-Power one here: Bauer-Power 4GB USB

Better yet, you get one for only $10.99 $5.65 from Amazon here: 4GB USB

Once you have your materials, just do the followi