Mike Says Meh|The blog of Mike Kauspedas | Hosting by www.gearhost.com

This is one of the coolest things I have seen online. This site builds an installer that will combine multiple other application installers into one. It downloads and installs everything for you, no clicking next. I accidentally stumbled this but what a find. I just reloaded my PC with Windows 7 Pro ($30 student edition). Most of these apps I had installed but I made an installer with the following.

• VLC
• Winamp
• Hulu Desktop
• Paint.NET
• Picasa
• Gimp
• OpenOffice
• Microsoft Security Essentials
• Flash FF and IE
• Silverlight
• asp.net
• uTorrent
• Steam
• Google Earth
• IMGBurn
• Ccleaner
• Defragler

Ninite.com also has apps for x64 (64-bit) which I happen to be running now.

Ninite installer screen

Ninite installer screen

Grab your installer here. http://ninite.com/

I switched over to Qwest DSL a few months ago because Comcast kept dropping my connection. I’d been so satisfied with Qwest’s reliability that I kept them when I moved as well. Especially since I was moving to a highrise building. I figured the line would be saturated. But since DirectTV has the worst customer service ever and I still have Comcast cable I decided to give high speed another shot. I called them up and asked for a deal to match qwest. $80 a month with Science channel HD + high speed. I got it, Digital Preferred + High Speed for $80 a month. I got the modem and new channels the same day. Hooked everything up and ran some speedtests.

Comcast with Linksys WRT54G v8 Router - Speed of the beast!

My first test wasn’t very impressive but it was running through my router. A Linksys WRT54G v8. I thought the router might be the issue so I tried it without the router.

Speed test without router, PC direct through modem

Wow, much better. I only get 5mbs tops on Qwest. So I knew the router was a problem. I gave it the latest firmware update and reset it to factory defaults.

Speed test after upgrading firmware and resetting to factory defaults

Yay, because I really need a router and didn’t want to have to buy one. How does this compare with Qwest?

Qwest speed test

Honestly, DSL is slower than cable but there are some pros. You get your own dedicated line so no other user can affect your connection. The customer service with Qwest is amazing. I’ve used billing and technical support and they are great, even the people over in India. With that said I won’t be switching back. the deal I am getting with Comcast is too good and the speed is fantastic. Unless Comcast royally screws up again and my connection starts dropping I’ll stick with them long term.

All of my tests were using hard wired connections and to the same location each time. The Qwest modem/router combo I have is the Motorola Netopia 3347. Modem with Comcast is the Scientific Atlanta DPC2100. Router I use with Comcast high speed is a Linksys WRT54G v8. I have Comcast with power boost and Qwest 7mbs packages.

“Nameserver [ns1.domain-name.com] doesn’t exist at the registry”

When you are configuring a domain name with custom name servers they need to be registered. It’s free and has to be done with the registrar of the domain name. To discover your registrar use this web site www.who.is and type in your domain name then look at the registrar entry. If you are a reseller with Tucows or your hosting provider is ask them to do the following.

1. Login to their reseller control panel and locate the option to “Add Nameserver to All Foreign Registries”.
2. Type in the custom name server address and click on add nameserver.

You will need to wait a few hours for the addition to propagate before you can change the name servers on your domain name. I usually just wait a day.

For some reason in Windows 7 and with the ATI driver you get this crappy image scaling even at native res on the LCD. It makes things look a little off and not as crisp. I found the fix.

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=115903&enterthread=y

What that pompous prick meant to say was.

1. Open ATI CCC (catalyst Control Center).

2. Go to Desktops and Displays and on the bottom click on the triangle in the LCD then click on configure. You’ll notice image scaling is greyed out.

3. Leave the window open and right click on your desktop then click on screen resolution. Change the resolution to one below your LCD native (my native is 1680×1050 so I chose 1440×900) click on apply after choosing. Click on keep changes prompt, then click on the ATI CCC window.

4. At this point you should be able to adjust the scaling. Click the check box to enable image scaling and then click the bubble for Use Centered Timings. Click apply, go back to resolution and set back to native.

Voila, crispiness.

My PC:
Phenom X3 720
Radeon 4870 1GB
4GB OCZ 1066
I can play Simcity and Eve at the same time, yay!

Re-did security at GearHost with some better sandbox configurations and stronger security. Of course this broke weird stuff like the cf tag for PDFs. I think its just cfpdf. Here’s the error.

Security: The requested template has been denied access to applications\GearHost.pdf.
The following is the internal exception message: access denied (java.io.FilePermission applications\GearHost.pdf read)

I did a lot of searching and tried this: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/000/f2fbaac6.html

Plus found this: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/358/8eb3581a.html

Eventually I figured out I had to add C:\ColdFusion8\runtime\bin\- with read only access to sandbox security. It doesn’t resolve every issue but fixed this one.

I bought a little Sansa Clip to replace my iphone as an mp3 player. Not that I still don’t use the iphone but sometimes its just too big. Like on bike rides, working out, jogging, and that sort of stuff. So I found a well reviewed tiny ipod shuffle killing mp3 player. Get this, it has a screen and buttons! I don’t understand why Apple would get rid of those. Sometimes trying to be revolutionary is just taking a step back, or idiotic.

Anyway, I use my macbook to sync my iphone and it has the playlists I want. So I searched for a way to sync my sansa clip with the playlists in itunes, well actually just export them. But what I found was incredible. And free! All you have to do is follow the instructions in the guide below.

http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=clip&thread.id=3744

Thanks to the guy who wrote that and the script. Man, it couldn’t be easier.Here’s a picture of the little guy, and I mean little. It was only $40 too and 4GB.

Sansa Clip 4GB

Recently we got a customer who wanted an inexpensive high availability solution. To keep costs down we decided to utilize NLB within Windows Server 2008 and load balance two IIS web servers. The issue we ran into was getting multiple sites to balance. It actually turned out be a very simple issue. When a request is passed to IIS it looks at the header for the site and then passes that request to the site with the same binding. I had setup the bindings in IIS 7 for the sites to the local IP addresses on each server. When our sys admin setup NLB and tried the sites one each server through the NLB public facing IP we got a 404.

Our sys admin gave me a quick crash course in NLB so I could get a simple understanding of how it worked and was setup. After watching the setup I suddenly realized what was going on. It was a great eureka moment. I knew what I had to do to fix it but I was hoping for a work around because I wanted ot keep it simple for the customer. In the end all I had to do was assign the bindings with the public facing IP of the NLB cluster, not the IP’s on the local machines. After doing this the sites worked great.

The servers we are load balancing are virtual so we simply paused one and made sure the site still worked. It worked great. If one of the servers goes down the other will take over requests. This is very simple setup. If you want to get a little more complicated and really dig into high avialability I suggest looking into ARR. Here is a link, Microsoft Application Request Routing with NLB for high availability. Have fun with that one

1000 free mp3′s from Microsoft. Windows 7 free for a year and now 1000 mp3′s as well. Lets all be PC’s.

http://www.myspace.com/windows

I’m not saying any of this is good but its free. So just download them all and listen later, delete what you don’t like. These may not be in the list but here’s some tunes I’ve been listening to. Some new, some old.
Metric – Help I’m Alive
Animal Collective – My Girls
The Clash – Straight to Hell
Passion Pit – Little Secrets (The reeling is awesome as well)
Phoenix – Lisztomania (great band regardless of song)
Angie Reed – Hustle a Hustler
Bon Iver – Blood Bank
The Penelope[s] – Stuck in Lakaland
Cibo Matto – Stone
Client – Zerox (N Joi Radio Edit)
Empire of the Sun – We Are The People
Tegan and Sara – Back in your head (tiesto remix)
Bon Iver – Skinny Lover
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Zero
Paper Planes – M.I.A.
p.s. this site has tons of free music too http://www.rcrdlbl.com/

Nameserver [ns1.domain-name.com] doesn’t exist at the registry

When you are configuring a domain name with custom name servers the custom name servers need to be registered. It is free and needs to be done with the registrar of the domain name. To discover your registrar use this web site www.who.is and type in your domain name then look at the registrar entry. If you are a reseller with Tucows or your hosting provider is ask them to do the following.

1. Login to their reseller control panel and locate the option to “Add Nameserver to All Foreign Registries”.
2. Type in the custom name server address and click on add nameserver.
3. On the Manage Interface, https://manage.opensrs.net, in the Name Server section, click on the link at the bottom of the page. “If you want to create or modify a nameserver which is based on <Domain Name>, click here.”
4. To create a new nameserver, add the DNS prefix (ns1, dns2, etc.) and the IP address, then click Create Name Server. The new name server will appear in the list above.

You will need to wait a few hours for the addition to propagate before you can change the name servers on your domain name. I usually just wait a day.

For the past 2 weeks we have been dealing with an iframe hack on one of our shared servers. It is a nightmare. I’ve been on the phone with Symantec for a few hours, worked all night, etc. Basically what has been happening is someone has found a way to add the everyone group with full access to our partition with all of the customer’s web site files. This isn’t too hard to do but you have to get access to the server to do so. This is what we can’t figure out, how they get access. Once they’re in the server they simply run:

cacls.exe c:\ /c /e /t /g everyone:F

This adds the everyone group with full access to everything on that drive. After they get access they insert some scripts for hidden iframes that redircet to sites that deliver a trojan. The imapct is a few hundred web sites on the server all of a sudden redirect to malicious sites and spread virus, trojan, worm, malware, etc.

Symantec found some files and not other. Even when a known trojan was running in memory it did not catch it.

We still aren’t sure if the issue has been resovled. I thought I got everything yesterday but it was hacked again over night. Currently what I have been doing to check is:

Look for C:\user.exe (trojan)
Check system32 for modified files. Google recent ones.
Run cacls to remove everyone from customer’s web files.
Scan all accounts for script insert in the files below using an app called Actual Search and Replace.
index.*
default.*
main.*
home.*
config.*
web.*
Search services for anything weird.
Check auto-runs.
Check task manager and process explorer.

Here are some files I found in system32 which seemed weird.
00045cdd.sys
000444bd.sys
000554f1.sys

I was also finding random registry keys with session info. As in what was running while I was logged in. One even had my password in it. Which I changed, a few times.

sorgqe.key
vokidl.key
zzdlad.key

And the file user.exe kept pooping up on the C: drive and was running.

We’re still working on the issue but at this time the server is clean and running. Hopefully we fixed whatever was causing it.

Here is a good article on iframe hacks as well. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=901622