Scanners… I had a nice microtek scanner that for the last year has refused to work and I decided to replace it. I have a project coming up that would require scanning some larger format pages so I was really pleased to find a $165 A3 scanner (usually the larger format are much more expensive.) This is the Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB 1200 Pro. So…. being a linux user I look to see if it’s supported by sane and naively…. finding a mustek usb scanner with 1200 in the name assume that it’s supported that way. (It’s not – mustek’s model numbering is quite cryptic and enigmatic. I have found multiple (different) scanexpress something 1200 scanners that are usb based. All with varying levels of support.

On inspection though mustek has a linux driver on their website…

Of course, this is promising. Until I install it – and it fails to find the scanner. I installed their linux driver (it’s actually a specially bundled libsane ) on two systems and neither would recognize the scanner. So…. I went down the rabbit hole of virtualization (digging out the windows XP license. This time around I used Virtualbox with usb support and am able to use the scanner via the virtual machine.

That’s where much more frustration came in with the windows driver for this scanner. I can’t seem to make multiple image scanning work with the default scanning panel. (I had to work around with irfanviews batch scanning mode.) I feel like their software is just a shade above lousy (really the perfect poster child for having an open development so someone could write a better interface for this GOOD piece of hardware. It drives me nuts to see good hardware cramped by poor software.

Back to the sane side of things (Sane is the linux scanner driver project.) There are several people that have expressed a desire for a workable driver for this model (mainly due to it being one of the rare cheap large format scanners…) Many are willing to put up/pledge money to get it working. (I would be willing to go up to $50 at this point towards a working linux/sane driver for this one.

Oh and when I took out the old scanner I decided to give it one more “last chance” to try and get it to work and…. it did – so now I have two scanners, and A4/letter size that is perfectly supported under linux and a large format A3 (about 11×17) that is not supported under linux… So in the coming weeks I really need to make sure I invest some time on this project to make the purchase worthwhile.

Just updated some information on the Virtualization page adding some information about virtualbox which I have spent some time with lately.

I’ve also had a big vpn/dd-wrt project going which I’ve teased out a bit of information on my dd-wrt and openvpn pages. I haven’t given our “recipe” for it yet, but it’s a vpn that can bridge between any two networks (regardless of network address collision issues…. well there is a small subset of cases where we could still find network address collision, but it’s much more robust than anything else I’ve done in that area.

I’ve also added a bit to my Online Virtual Servers page. I’ve been trying out gigenetcloud as an alternative to slicehost/vps.net – not for any particular reason, just to have options. Their billing is a slightly different model which may be of interest to many. By the way, I am still a HUGE fan of VPS.net. I can’t recommend them ENOUGH as a cloud VPS provider. It seems as though they are always rolling out great new features and they have great pricing and data centers in so many locations to boot. Their setup is soooooo resilient and their support is superb.

I think I’ll have to hold off on any of the other stray thoughts that I’ve had the last few weeks to post here as it’s looking like another busy stretch… here’s wishing everyone a good start to summer and a good 4th of July coming up!

I spent a bit of time lately drooling/browsing through the many different android based tablets/pads there are. Why not the ipad? I don’t know – I just don’t particularly like the idea of being tied to Apple…. having to acitvate with itunes – being restricted to the apple app store. I like that android is more open (in many different ways.) So… I saw a lot of cheap entries from China. None of which really impressed me much. It looks as though the real ipad killers are on their way later in the year 2010. One is the viliv x10 tablet with a 1366×768 screen, 3d graphics. SD card, usb, capacitive touch screen. (Some of the cheaper competitors are resistive touch screen which is not seen as sensitive. The cheaper alternatives also seem a bit underpowered processor wise. (Or may lack gps or the accelerometer – both of which really seem (to me) essential parts of a tablet system for all of the neat “killer app” possibilities.

Another option coming up is the Notion Ink device – the Adam Tablet. It’s rumored to be coming in the third quarter of 2010. It is supposed to include the nvidia tegra 2 processor (which should support 1080p video output.)

The Adam will have the Pixel Qi Transflective liquid crystal display – which gives some really interesting possibilities:

* A full color LCD transmissive mode and a low-power, sunlight-readable, reflective e-paper mode
* A transflective mode, that will make the LCD display visible in sunlight and automatic brightness control

(Given that I would like to work outside more….. that sounds fantastic.)

Finally there is the Malata SMB a1011 android tablet. It also features the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and will probably be produced under different names from various companies. So… right now there are a bunch of cheaper/underpowered tablets running android currently available as an ipad alternative but by the end of the year there should be some VERY good, capable competitors on the table. Bottom line – I think this Christmas is going to be the tablet pc/pad year when it comes to gift giving. While the Apple ipad is up in the $499 range, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these excellent alternatives down as low as $200 – $250.

Scanners, Virtual Machines, more bash scripting, malware and openvpn are just a few of the things I’ve been hip deep in over the last few weeks. Things have been (and continue) fairly busy….. but I’m hoping to get a few things organized and posted here in the next few days to serve as a dumping of links of the different trains of thought that have been going on (and for future reference.)

I don’t think it will happen today as there are a few more irons in the fire still (although it might happen today yet)…. Update – it will probably be several posts scattered over a few days (and some may be updates to existing pages.)

Bad day for McAfee antivirus users….. It looks like the corporate users were bit the hardest. An update this morning basically detected svchost.exe as a virus and sent machines (Windows 7 not affected – but XP SP3 was…) into a perpetual reboot cycle. The fix requires manual intervention and some techs are reporting that the wait time for corporate users getting their machine back is several days.

If you’re sick and tired of McAfee and switching to something else you may want to visit the antivirus removal page to find the mcafee removal tool. (Not that I recommend you ditching McAfee over this, but I know how some people are.)

Here’s a link to the fix as McAfee has posted. Now of course…. many people use this as an opportunity to flame windows or McAfee and brag on their Mac or Linux box but what’s the real lesson that should be taken from this?

Diversity!

I know, from a technicians standpoint it’s really nice and convenient to have everybody running the same stack OS/antivirus/etc. Large licensing deals are cheaper per seat/etc. etc. This is why we really need options in computer operating systems, in antivirus and other security suites, in office suites, browsers, mail programs, etc.

I use linux primarily on all my home machines, which probably isn’t ideal. It’s the same release, which again, isn’t ideal. I tend to stagger the updates somewhat which helps somewhat to mitigate the risk of everything being taken down by a bad kernel update or something.

In reality having an entire business architecture with the same version and stack of operating system and antivirus is just waiting for a mass outage. Mistakes happen, even from antivirus vendors. I know a lot of people are upset with mcafee and frankly you would think this would be the type of thing that wouldn’t make it out of testing. That much said, it’s not hte first time an antivirus vendor has detected and removed legitimate (and crucial) files mistaking them for a virus. This kind of bug has bitten most all of the big antivirus names at one point or another although due to timing issues, users may have missed out.

Mac and Linux users typically don’t install antivirus these days (unless they’re using their systems to protect windows users.) But, there will be more malware for each as they gain marketshare. It won’t be quite like the mass outbreaks that Windows was faced with in the 90s. But malware for those systems will come. It’s just a matter of time (and market share.) When that day comes you’ll be glad to have a diversified network and not be too reliant on ONE OS.

Anyway – good luck getting back up and running!

I received a message from some at superantispyware in the last day or two that is a well timed and good heads up. Every year there is a surge in spyware, malware and rogue activity around April Fools Day (April 1st). It’s important to be aware and raise our skepticism a bit this time of year… I’m reprinting here…

Each year, the first week of April (coinciding with “April Fool’s Day”) brings an increase in spyware and malware infections. It’s become something of an annual tradition that causes havoc for computer users, lost productivity, and overall inconvenience. Not to mention potentially costing thousands of dollars in repairs.

We’re working hard to prepare for this onslaught and we’re up for the challenge. It makes sense, however, to remind computer users to be extra vigilant during this period of increased spyware activity:

Don’t open emails, files or attachments from people you don’t know.

Be extra cautious opening emails, files or attachments from people you do know.

Don’t be fooled by “scareware” tactics. Know what software you are using, and familiarize yourself with how it delivers warnings and alerts.

If you’re considering giving your social networking activities a break, now might be a good time. No one will miss you if you take a week off.

Stay away from websites that you haven’t visited before. Think before you click!

Run multiple layers of security software. There are many free and effective solutions that will co-exist well with each other. Remember, a single solution may not be enough, especially during this period of increased spyware activity.

We’re here and happy to help if you need anything. Our management team is happy to answer any questions you may have or address issues or concerns raised by your audience. If we can help, just let me know!

Stay safe online, and thanks again,

Mike

Mike Duncan

Director of Business Development

SUPERAntiSpyware

This post is going to be somewhat of a “link dump” for me of some pages that I’ve been perusing lately. After playing with RT (request tracker) – I added a few ticket items for the home network. Now, if you’ve been a longtime reader and sorted through ALL of these posts here you’ll know that I’ve made use of software raid on the home systems. Why? Linux software raid seems fairly reliable (so far – 2 years +). It doesn’t depend on a specific piece of hardware. In short IF the worst happens and the array fails I should be able to retrieve data from an individual drive more easily than if it were hardware raid. I’m using Raid Level 1 (cloning/mirroring) and ext3 is the filesystem on top. I’ve had some slight problems with one drive in both the Desktop and server arrays and both arrays had been degraded for some time. My goal was ultimately redundancy and to eliminate the disruption that hard drive failures have given over the last few years.

When push comes to shove I’m cheap and hadn’t looked at replacing the drives yet. (Potentially a problem especially since I was down to 1 drive for 2 out of 3 arrays.) So, I was running a risk for several months. The main reasons I’ve procrastinated is 1) I’m cheap and 2) I’m busy. The other reason though is the two arrays were made of 400gb sata drives which are now hard to find. 500 gb is the new standard size. Now, I don’t want to waste space so… it’s been a bit of a mental puzzle thinking about replacing one, growing the partition size and then replacing the other to pass along to the second system.

So….. long story short. I was able to re-add the drives to their respective arrays after researching the best way to grow a mirrored array onto larger devices. Why? When the arrays degraded they did so for pending sector reads. I’ve tested the drives via smart and they seem okay. So, I tried re-adding and so far all seems good.

Anyway, here’s the link dump:

Good reminder – http://www.freddenny.com/UNIX/linuxRAID.html – making raid volumes bootable when moved.

Resizing a raid 1 system partition – http://mkfblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/resizing-raid1-system-partition.html

Looks like gparted supports software raid now – http://gparted.sourceforge.net/news.php

Just some notes for a reminder.

RAID is not a substitute for backups. If you accidentally delete a file, it’s still GONE. If you have corruption on one drive (or via the bus) your data is still GONE. Schedule backups of important data.

In sum – replacing drives in a software raid array is quite simple – especially if they’re the same size. Moving to larger drives and not wasting space is a bit more complicated and is a bridge I’ll have to cross at some point.

As a side note, I discovered that I had two more drives of equal size (2 160GB drives) in one system that I had originally intended to mirror those as well, but they needed data cleanup. I spent some time cleaning up the data on one then deleted it’s partitions – created a new partition of the linux auto raid type and create a new raid device with that drive and a missing drive. After that, I created the ext3 filesystem and moved the files over from the other drive. Then I blew away the partition on the 2nd drive and re-partitioned that to be a linux auto raid partition. Then I added it to the array and all synced well.

So, now – all of my 24/7 uptime drives are mirrored and I’ve got some research notes for how to move things around to larger drives when the time comes. I still should add a to-do item to check and see how many more sata drives I could squeeze into my desktop or server – it might be nice to have a hot spare.

If you didn’t know, this has been a tumultuous week for clients of Westhost, my internet service provider. Their Primary data center is located in Utah and they share that space with a sister brand VPS.net. The datacenter is a Tier IV center managed by Consonus. Saturday afternoon there was a yearly fire equipment/alarm/suppression system test. The third party technician failed to follow procedures and one actuator remained on the output system for the gas that is designed to suppress fires in the building. When the system was re-armed there was a sudden release of the gaseous fire suppressant. At that same moment hundreds of hard drives died. Now, Inergen is what was used and the gases themselves shouldn’t be a problem. In this case, and judging from what I’ve read, the problem was with the sudden and intense change in air pressure caused by the release. That point is somewhat moot though, the end result is hundreds of dead and damaged hard drives.

Now, I have an account with VPS.net as well as westhost and have a VPS in the Utah datacenter with vps.net as well as several (12 or so) vps’s with westhost. They use Sphera as their Virtual machine platform, while vps.net is a xen based platform. One of the advantages that VPS.net had is their architecture is cloud based and another advantage from what I can see is that they have a smaller hardware footprint at the DC than Westhost. VPS first reported some sort of potential power issue at the DC early on, before finally getting the details that power was not the issue, fire suppressant was. Fortunately for them they were able to get enough drives replaced to be operational by Saturday night/Sunday morning and then back to 100% not long afterwards.

Westhost has not been nearly so fortnate. The first reports out of Westhost were that Sphera was acting up. A statement that was raked over the coals by many in hindsight as a lie. In all fairness, if you look at your network status monitor and see EVERYTHING going don – wouldn’t you wonder if your platform itself wasn’t the issue(?) I would. Information was slow coming out of Westhost, I think in part due to the size and scale of the damage. I have been lucky and only have seen sporadic downtimes, maybe a day at the most on Saturday. Some systems have not been so lucky and are still offline.

Among the issues have been multiple drives in the RAID arrays on individual machines have been hit. In some cases that would require restoring from backups. Well, the servers that host the backups were hit too. (Backups in the same building – a traditional IT no-no, but realistically in many hosting situations that is par for the course.) In the case of one group of servers they have now brought in data recovery experts to recover drives to restore from.

In all fairness, I think they’ve had a monumental repair job and have been handling it quite well. I would have appreciated more information up front, but being a self employed tech I know that talking doesn’t solve problems with hardware and can understand why it took so long to start getting the facts of the story as to what happened and passing them along.

The whole event though has had me thinking seriously about webhosting and the way we treat our data in the cloud. We assume that if our webhost does backups then we shouldn’t worry about making backups. But what if a comet hits their datacenter?

For many people a week of outage may not phase you. Maybe you just have a hobby site, or “it’s just a brochure” or “most of our leads come from local referrals anyway”. But, for many they may make hundreds or thousands a day from their site (or 10s of thousands). What then? First off. If your sites are making that much for you, does it make sense to be using cheap hosting? I think it’s a serious question to ask. I’m not saying that cheap is unreliable mind you, but with cheaper hosting you have fewer frills (backups not stored offsite for instance, single datacenter perhaps). There are services out there that are more expensive but can better assure uptime. There are services where you could have your site mirrored across several data centers and load balanced to whichever ones are the current most responsive.

I guess one of the things that I’ve considered is….. if your site is THAT important to you here’s what you should do.

1) look at and consider load balanced hosting with multiple datacenters.

2) Have a registrar for your domain name that is different from your hosting company. Why? The registrar is where you can set dns server information. If your hosting company is down you won’t be able to manage switching dns to another location.

3) Have a copy of your dns settings available offsite so that you can reconstruct the DNS if necessary elsewhere. This is especially useful for hosted google docs/gmail setups.

4) Have an offsite backup of all your essential configuration files (mail accounts and passwords for instance or mail aliases.) Virtual server settings for apache perhaps.

5) Have an offsite backup for any databases you use. You can script these to be automatically made and sent to an offsite location fairly easily, or pay someone to do so.

6) Have an offsite backup for any install files, html files or other tools that you make use of on your site.

Most sites are going to find this kind of contingency planning fairly easy. It’s only hard WHEN YOUR HOST IS DOWN and you don’t have an offsite copy. Some would say, well the hosting company should do this for me. The only thought I have to that statement is you should then not have a problem with your site being down. Take responsibility for the planning and you won’t regret it.

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that everyone should abandon your hosting the minute there is an outage. In fact, I see many moves like this as a temporary “bug out” until things settle down with your main provider. Actually as a VAR myself I’m thinking this is a service that I should be offering my hosting clients so that they don’t have to deal with the mess of moving firsthand.

So…. what do I mean by offsite? Well, you could of course, load all of the backups onto a server or desktop in your office or business. That’s a possibility, but you could also make use of various online storage possibilities like jungledisk or direct to Amazons S3 storage. You may want to just take advantage of a spare slicehost, vps.net or linode server as your backup server. My main preference would be to at least host it in a different datacenter from your primary vps or other hosting and potentially set it up with a different company. At the very least you should also research your backup plan hosting options from other providers in case yours is decimated by such an outage.

In respect to Westhost, I’m impressed with their work at this point, they’ve been one of the most responsive companies I’ve ever dealt with and they will get through this. Yes, some customers may go elsewhere and likely already have. That happens. With proper planning though a temporary site can be up quickly and easily elsewhere while the dust settles and then if you like you can transition back to your previous hosting, or keep it as a spare in case your NEW location has a meltdown.

It would probably pay well to make your contingency planning for all of your sites today!

This afternoon I received an email that said the following…

Welcome to Midwave Products LLC!

Congratulations Avery,

This e-mail is to confirm your recent/successful WaveEGreetings.com
order! Log in online and get instant access to hundreds of E-Greeting
Cards!

Billing Telephone Number: **********

As part of your service with the WaveEGreetings.com program, you will
receive:
Unlimited access to ecards for every occasion!
Send greetings to your friends and family.
Create unique and personalized greetings.

Your WaveEGreetings.com account can be accessed by going to
www.waveEgreetings.com/login.asp and entering in your username and
password below;
username: ****************
password: *************

For your convenience you will be billed a monthly fee of $14.95 on your
local phone bill for the phone number you provided which is **********.
Although, there is no affiliation with your local phone company, these
charges will appear on your local telephone bill on the Transaction
Clearing bill page as being billed on behalf of Midwave Products, LLC.
There is no long term contract and the service can be cancelled at any
time.

If you have questions or concerns and need to contact customer service
just simply reply to this e-mail and we will be happy to assist you.

You can cancel the service by calling 866-982-3699or by emailing us at
support@waveEgreetings.com and include your home telephone number or
simply reply to this email stating “cancel”. Or write us at PO Box 17598
Suite# 77145, Baltimore, Maryland 21297-1598.

Thank you and Congratulations on joining WaveEGreetings.com

Sincerely,
WaveEGreetings.com Customer Support
—————————————-

AT&T ENDUSERS:You have the right to dispute the Midwave Products LLC
charges billed on your local telephone bill. You are not legally
responsible for Midwave Products LLC charges incurred by minors or
vulnerable adults without your consent. Your local telephone service
will not be disconnected because you fail to pay a charge by Midwave
Products LLC except that nonpayment of certain regulated
telecommunication charges may result in disconnection of service in
Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina and
Tennessee. Enhanced Telecommunications Service Providers may employ
other agencies to collect delinquent charge, even if your local phone
company has previously adjusted them from your telephone bill.

My first thought was that this was a phishing email and I checked out the links in the message and the site of waveEgreetings.com because….

To be honest I’m not that hot on FREE ecards really – much less a $14.95 per month subscription (!$!$!$???) It all seemed legit and so I sent a message to the support@ email mentioned in the message I got to cancel immediately and make sure that no charges ever appeared for this on my phone bill.

And…

—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–

(reason: 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected support@waveEgreetings.com)

—– Transcript of session follows —–
… while talking to smtp.secureserver.net.:
>>> RCPT To:
<<< 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected support@waveEgreetings.com
550 5.1.1 … User unknown

So…. I tried replying to the message as instructed as our second option to cancel….

—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–

(reason: 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected membership@waveEgreetings.com)

—– Transcript of session follows —–
… while talking to smtp.secureserver.net.:
>>> RCPT To:
<<< 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected membership@waveEgreetings.com
550 5.1.1 … User unknown

By now I was fairly primed for a phone call and called the number listed in the email. I looked on their website to try to verify that this really is the number of Midwave Products LLC – but their site does not have contact information and I was NOT about to login to an account I didn’t want in the first place to see if they posted a phone number inside the gates. –CORRECTION– I do see that they do have their phone # on their main webpage – it’s in the VERY small print after the box to check for agreeing to the terms and conditions….etc.

So, I called and about 5 minutes after my call I was told that I was the next caller in line and my call would be handled by the next available representative. There was a pause in the music and then a click and a fast busy. I was hung up on!

So, I called back and was connected fairly quickly to a representative who asked for a confirmation of phone number and address. It was canceled in short order.

First off, I really DON’T LIKE to see services “conveniently bill to your telephone bill.” I have seen lots of companies do this and they most all have been scams. One company I know had a sudden charge on their bill for webhosting from God only knows where. I DID THEIR webhosting. Our best guess was that somebody called up and asked some questions and they suddenly had a $100 a month charge added to their phone bill. They canceled in short order and the phone representative I spoke with said that they had a lot of complaints from that particular group. I remember going through similar problems with long distance slammers at one point as well. I seem to recall even one more “service” that we found a charge for on our bill that was not something we authorized.

I suspect that many businesses and individuals either don’t look closely at their phone bills and just pay it or…. are big enough that the person paying the bill is not the one authorizing charges on it and they don’t ask any questions.

I thank the representative at waveegreetings.com for the quick and easy cancellation. However, I will be watching carefully to make sure that there are no charges for this.

So…. this leaves me with a few questions.

1) WHO would pay $15 each month to be able to send electronic greeting cards !!!!!

2) Are there people that get a commission for signing up new leads for wavegreetings.com (my bet is the answer is yes…)

3) Have you ever had a strange charge on your phone bill?

4) Has anyone else had a similar experience with WaveEgreetings.com?

A recent malware removal session gave a very frustrating error in trying to boot into safe mode. I was unable to boot into safe mode, safe mode with networking or even safe mode with the command prompt. The Stop Error was a Stop 0×0000007B Error. The instructions on the screen talk about running chkdsk on the drive (which I did.) There were a few things found and corrected, but the problem was still there. On investigation I went into the registry editor (regedit) and found that the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot registry key had been emasculated. There were two subkeys for minimal and network profiles…. So… I found a way to rebuild them.

Didier Stevens has spent a lot of time on this and has developed a registry patch file. There are patches for Xp sp2 and sp3 as well as 2003 server and Windows 2000 SP4 in his download zip.

There is an https and an http download link for safeboot. The registry patches worked and allowed safe mode to work. I did further scans on the system and ultimately all is clean.