Webs’ Random Ideas

Below are my documented steps of installing Snow Leopard:

1. Inserted disc with 10.5  up and running
2. Click the icon to install 10.6
3. Click through the menu options
4. Click Install
5. Enter User account info
6. Install process starts
7. Install reports about 1 hour before it will be finished
8. I came back and it was already finished with a setup assistant
9. I entered the info and had a warning about “Rosetta”. This app translates PowerMac apps to work on Intel CPUs so I think I should of installed from the get go. After a restart and seeing the message again I put the CD back in, opened it and clicked on “Optional Installs”. Then the “Option Installs.mpkg” which opened a wizard where I was able to select the other packages. This walked me through the rest.
10. Once finished I rebooted and everything seemed fine. Only odd thing was that I needed to re-enable the airport or wifi card.

All files and settings didn’t seem to go anywhere. Everything looks the exact same. As far as I can tell the upgrade didn’t even happen. In fact, if I didn’t tell and show my wife I was upgrading her system, she may have never known.

A gander at the list should tell any tech that the upgrade was crazy easy. Any tech who has done an upgrade knows the pains and this one presented none I could find. Also that list is pretty short and most of the items were on there to pad the list. I think it would of been a little pretentious of me to only have 3 items.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/iphone-encryption/

Apple claims that hundreds of thousands of iPhones are being used by corporations and government agencies. What it won’t tell you is that the supposedly enterprise-friendly encryption included with the iPhone 3GS is so weak it can be cracked in two minutes with a few pieces of readily available freeware.

Zdziarski said it’s just as easy to access a user’s private information on an iPhone 3GS as it was on the previous generation iPhone 3G or first generation iPhone, both of which didn’t feature encryption. If a thief got his hands on an iPhone, a little bit of free software is all that’s needed to tap into all of the user’s content. Live data can be extracted in as little as two minutes, and an entire raw disk image can be made in about 45 minutes, Zdziarski said.

It seems a little silly to me to call this a “security flaw” as if there was something inherently wrong with the device. The iPhone has to be stolen from the user for this “flaw” to come to fruition, which is a security flaw with any device.

The other thing that comes to mind is the discussion of what unencrypted data SHOULD be on a mobile device and what data shouldn’t. Why would you have sensitive or important info on a mobile device in the first place?

Imagine driving a car to work on a Friday. Let it sit for 8 hours, and then aftwerword getting in and driving to Chicago. Most people would imagine doing such a task in their typical hybrid or standard combustion engine car. What if you could do this in an electric car? What if it didn’t take special space-age technology? What if you could do this with an electric car being manufactured right now with battery technology currently being used right now?

How is that possible? Use current physics, science, and technology and the solution is there, just hiddne from plain sight. To many of us, myself certianly included (until about 30 minutes ago), think about electric cars in terms of the battery being a “tank” for electrons. And in doing so the solution is impossible to find. What if the battery was the fuel?

Think of a car that can be charged at charging stations but also has a battery module system that can be swapped out for pre-charged batteries. Consumers buy cars without batteries included. The pay for the cost of a car and get a module that comes pre-charged. Then they charge the battery wherever they need to at charging stations and go to swapping stations for longer trips and such.

Now you essentially have infinite range on your car and it no longer matters how good current technology is. And as the technology for batteries and charging gets better, your fuel cost will decrease over time thanks to Moore’s Law. Where gasoline is actually increasing over time.

Where does this come from? One heck of a TED talk… check below. Also here is Shai’s website on the idea.

Something I forced myself into, not really what I wanted to do. Below is the troubles I found and what I did to fix issues.

First the problem… Upgraded to a new mobo with Nvidia chipset. Not a big deal but the new ones have a new system for managing SATA ports. Rather than treating all SATA ports as independent ports and letting the user configure to his/her content, the new Nvidia system is to have the first 3 or 4 ports act as individual SATA ports and the last 2 as RAID ports. Now you can use the last two ports outside of RAID but only if you run ALL the SATA ports in AHCI mode. If you run ALL the ports in regular SATA mode then you can only use the first 3.

What’s the big deal? I have 4 hard drives that need to be independent of each other because three of them are used for a file server. So this new mobo I have kind of put me in a bad position. Luckily I created the file server in VM because I was worried about changing hardware and hard drives down the road and wanted a system that would be robust. Anyway, I figured a mobo with 5 SATA ports would give me what I need. So frustrated and broken after hours of pain I set my mobo to AHCI. Vista would not install. No matter what I did Vista did not like AHCI mode. It would allow me to do SATA mode, but I needed all 4 hard drives.

So I ran in AHCI and installed Linux (funny thing, Linux could care less what mode my SATA ports ran in as it took all three, Vista only took SATA mode). Once installed I ran updates and rebooted and installed VMWare Server. Follow this badass guide for doing this too. Once this is done you can run VMWare, I also recommend creating a test VM to play around and make sure VMWare works for you in Linux.

The next thing I had to do was add my hard drive with my 11 VMs to VMWare. In VMWare you need a place to store the VMs. I do this with a separate physical disk. Not a bid deal, but it wasn’t mounted in Linux so I didn’t know what to add to VMWare. So I installed pysdm. Copy the code below into a terminal window:

sudo apt-get install pysdm

Once installed run pysdm with the following:

sudo pysdm

Then you can mount and configure your mounted drives as necessary. The other issue for me was that my drives are NTFS drives so I had to make sure things were setup correctly. So I clicked the sideways triangle thing next to the drive I wanted to mount and clicked the listing under it (this is the partition Linux recognized). Then click assistance and below is a screen capture of my settings:

After hitting okay on the screen above, you should be back to the main screen. At this point I had to make sure “rw” showed up under options toward the beginning of the line. For some reason “ro” was showing. This means the hard drive is being mounted as read only, not good. So if necessary change this right on the options line.

Once you have mounted the drives and applied the settings copy the location from pysdm. Now we need to try navigating to these mounted drives. Open “Computer” by going to “Places” (at the top of the taskbar up top on Ubuntu’s taskbar) and then click “Computer”. By default Computer will not show you the actual location, but just folder names on its taskbar. Click the icon that looks like a notepad with a pen on the left of the window under the first two taskbars. This should show you the full location of the folder you are viewing. Paste in the location you copied from pysdm.

If you can view the files success! I made it this far, but getting my FreeNAS system back up in running without losing any files is still a big step…

Copy your file server (FreeNAS in my case) folder in your drive or folder that holds your VMs. Copying your VM folder is a last resort fail safe. I just copied the folder and then pasted it in the same location which creates a folder with all the same files, but a different folder name. If you screw up you can just copy the files from the backup to start out from scratch again. I had to use it a bunch of times.

Open your folder with the VM you are fixing. Find the VMX file and open it in gedit. This file is the config file for VMWare. It holds everything about the VM in it. I followed this guide to figure out what I needed to change. Lets open the file and take a look:

gedit FreeNAS64.vmx

Notice that right off the bat the top of the file has a line showing it is configured for Windows. Make sure you see the following at the top (for me it was the second line):

.encoding = “UTF-8″

Then you will need to delete any locked files according to this guide. Look for files with “.lck” at the end. Delete them.

Once done add the VM from the webapp for VMWare and power it on. When I did I jumped up and down for like 5 minutes. Seriously I have like a couple hundred gigs of files and lost none of it!! Everything came back up

Just follow a similar process to get your other VMs up and running.

As I mentioned a little bit ago I had a network upgrade. Took place Tuesday night. What we were doing should not have been a big deal. In fact I had done this before on a smaller scale. My coworker Rob and I were upgrading a network with some newer equipment and moving routing down to the Distribution layer. Maybe I should attempt to explain some of this…

Typically in a network design you have 3 layers for host traffic, Access, Distribution, and Core. The Access layer is the host or client layer. Devices at this layer are typically switches (in older networks you might see hubs) and access points and give hosts a layer two connection to the network. Layer two connections in a network use the MAC address of devices to send traffic along.

The Distribution layer interconnects access layers together. It can be used for physical separation of access layers or to route traffic between access layers to each other and the Core layer. Typically devices here are switches and have a layer two connection up to the Core layer. But more and more networks are now creating layer 3 connections at the distribution layer because of the advantages it offers. This is what we were doing with our upgrade.

The Core layer is used to route traffic around the higher levels of the network and typically to the outbound pipes to the Internet. Devices at this layer are typically routers, but Layer 3 switches usually work great to the point where you need special services like VPN tunnels and outbound connections. All traffic at the Core is typically layer 3 when it leaves. This means traffic is traversing devices via IP addresses.

So when I say we are moving routing to the Distribution layer, it means devices at this layer will route traffic up to the Core devices. There are many advantages to doing this. One of the big ones is segmenting VLANs. VLANs (virtual LANs) is a networking tool that allows us to split up traffic on switches. What you can do is create a network for any traffic going through a switch that you want. Then apply this network or VLAN to any switchport you want. Traffic within a VLAN stays in that VLAN thus giving us our segmentation.

So in a scenario where we have multiple sites in a geographic region we can create layer 3 Distribution layers at the edge of each site to do routing between them and the core. This means that the VLAN traffic at each site stays local. So VLAN 50 traffic that might exist at site 1 will stay local to that site. When the traffic from VLAN 50 leaves and goes out the layer 3 Distribution device, it is routed. So at this point the VLAN this traffic came from is irrelevant.

What we get from this is that traffic at site 1 will remain at site 1 unless it needs to go out to another network or VLAN that doesn’t reside at site 1. Whereas if we had a layer 2 device at the distribution layer and maybe 10 VLANs at site 1, clients in 2 different VLANs would have to have their traffic leave site 1 for them to communicate with each other up to the Core layer where the gateway of each VLAN would exist. Even if they sat right next to each other. This is why having a layer 3 device at the Distribution layer can be a good thing because the gateway for VLANs exists closer to the point of origin for traffic.

So back to the story…

I took down our main campus. I was connected directly to our cores at the World Wide Headquarters and connected to the wireless infrastructure. I applied my scripts and as soon as I did my wireless dropped. I thought, “Hmmm that’s strange.” I called Rob who was at our Tech Center site doing some work in our closet there. I asked him if he had finished hooking up the Distribution switches. He said he had but we had no connectivity from me to him.

Once we started looking into it I got a call from Ops (operations). There is only one thing I think of when my work cell phone rings, “SHIT!!” Reason being, the only folks that call it are the ones from Ops, so when it rings I have the Pavlovian response of, “It must be Ops!” Sure enough it was Ops and our Enterprise wide security team was down. This is a problem.

After looking into we found I had two lines of code that took things down. Normally those two lines would not have been a big deal. This time it was a big deal because it was blocking the VLANs that were used to pass routing information between the cores and our major routers. Oops! This meant those two lines took down our ENTIRE World Wide Headquarters campus and security for the entire Enterprise.

Well lessons learned and after an slap on the wrist the next day I have learned my lesson and know what I did wrong. What a night!

So for those of you unaware, 802.11N is the latest and greatest wireless revision soon to be out of draft state. If you don’t know what N is, you likely have an “A”, “B”, or “G” wireless router at home or some mixture of those three. Well the IEEE organization that writes and specifies Technology standards has written specs for each of those letters under the section of 802.11. Thus 802.11N refers to the “N” wireless standard.

My partner and I at work are doing some Wireless N testing to see what performance we get and also to determine what if any applications exist for it’s use (we already have a wireless infrastructure so what is there to gain by moving to N). We have heard rumors and listened to all kinds of webcasts about what Wireless N can do. We thought it was time to put the money where the mouth is so to speak. We have 3 client laptops at work that can do Wireless N. We have 4 Cisco Wireless N Access Points (AP) deployed and connected to a Wireless Controller over Gig connections.

We go to do the testing and the laptops freak out! They will not connect to any of our test APs. Well they do but as soon as they connect the systems freeze and lock up. Naturally we troubleshoot all the obvious issues like rebooting, reinstalling the drivers, looking for system log errors, uninstalling the NIC and re-installing, but nothing worked.

Then just randomly we took a few of the laptops and one of the N APs to a different building about ready to give up. The APs in this building will connect to a different wireless controller. And oddly enough when the laptops are connecting to an N AP that is associated with any other controller besides the one used for our N testing, they work just fine.

Assuming the controller was the problem we checked out the settings and sure enough there was one little difference… To attempt to force a wireless connection using “N” we set the controller to force the client to connect at 54mbps or higher. For whatever reason the laptop freaked out with this one little setting. Which doesn’t make much sense. So we set the controller so that it will allow connections at lower speeds and sure enough the laptops work just fine.

What this means to me is that N is still in it’s infancy and driver support is too. More about the testing results later…

So I have been in a major writing drought for over 6 months now and I have finally decided to start writing again. What I want to do is start putting my networking knowledge down on “paper”. I will be sitting for the last half of the CCNA in a couple months and while studying I thought I could write about networking topics that could help others out too.

But as we all know blogging is narcisistic so of course there is something in it for me. I want to make sure I know the subject material too. And as folks ask questions and tell me where I screwed up I will be better able to hone my skills. As well as likely help someone else in the process.

Don’t know how much I will get written down, but hopefully there will be a wide range and long list of topics. Starting with the one following this post.

There are about a million ways you can record TV on your PC.  I wanted to take a moment to show how I did it.  PC based DVR solutions have come a long way in the past few years.  I’ve read a lot of really nice things about DVR functionality within Windows Media player, as well as Myth TV. Thanks to a suggestion by Webs about 3 years ago I have become a mac enthusiast so I choose the less popular mac centric Eye TV route.

The Tuner

I picked up the eye TV 250 plus.  It has a hardware encoder for analog TV to take some of the load off the CPU.  It also decodes clear QAM which allows you to watch the network channels broadcasted in HD.  I hooked this up to the cable that comes into the apartment instead of trying to plug this thing into a cable box.  Hooking this thing up to a cable box so I could get all the channels would be nice, but right now it would require a separate IR blaster and an additional rented cable box.  All of which is a little too messy and expensive for my tastes.

The picture is pretty good for the analogue channels and flawless for the HD channels.  The built in TV guide works pretty well.  I can create smart guides to catch all of my reoccurring shows, and all the basic things you would expect from a DVR setup.  The best feature of this particular tuner/software package is how it integrates with the rest of my setup.

Apple TV

Yeah I know I am the only person besides Steve Jobs to own one of these things, but I would at least like to pretend I have a good reason for it.  The Apple TV works really great for playing my recorded TV shows.  I can stream my iTunes library with this device (so not to be limited by syncing with a 40GB hard drive).  This becomes really handy when my girlfriend who lives with me can share her iTunes library with her recorded shows at the same time(she has her own Eye TV tuner as well).  Now on to the next piece how to get your TV shows into iTunes.

Turbo.264

When Eye TV records TV shows it does so in a Mpeg2 format.  Apple TV like the iPod requires video to be in an H.264 format.  The conversion process between the two can be very time consuming and taxing on the CPU.  That is where the Turbo.264 comes in.  It looks like a usb flash drive, but what it does is take the bulk of the work of encoding away from the CPU.  It will basically free your mac up to do other things or allow you to use a really old mac, which leads to the next segment…..

Ye Geezerly Mac

(more…)

Since this deals with my current line of work…

Wolfpidgeons.

Ubiquitous Digital Networking
Interconnectivity has never been more important. Digital networks serve up more and more of our entertainment, information, and communication than ever. Indeed, our ability to easily connect with each other is the foundation of our daily lives.

Qualcomm, with its newly developed convergence program, seeks to create the first truly ubiquitous digital network so that everyone, everywhere, can find themselves connected.

Convergent Innovation
In order to provide the most expansive coverage possible, the convergence program has implanted tiny base stations into thousands of pigeons. “These birds thrive in diverse habitats, from dense cities to unpopulated regions,” says Peter Rauber, director of engineering. “They carry with them a dynamic network as they flock and migrate.” But the birds needed certain improvements to ensure goals were met and safeguarded. According to Rauber, this is where true convergence enters the equation.

I got it working!! For users with VMware server my steps for using OVA files are as follows:

1. Download/install/run VMware vCenter Converter (I also recommend to just install the standalone)
2. Click on the icon to “Convert Machine” or go File, New,”Convert Machine”
3. In the wizard that pops up, select “Virtual Appliance” and browse to the “.OVA” file. Hit next and next again.
4. Choose “VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine” from the first drop down.
5. For the second drop down choose your VMware product, in my case it was “VMware Server 2.x”
6. Browse to your location where you keep your VMs and hit next.
7. Edit or change any options you like, I left mine at defaults.
8. Then next your way through till it runs. You should be taken back to the main screen and the status will show as “Completed” when it’s done.

Once done you can add the VM using the server management interface just like you would any other appliance. The OVA file appears to be nothing more than a package for VMs similar to how ZIP files are used.

I was able to figure this out thanks to a commentator on VMware forums named Tim F. Thanks Tim!