June 2010
2 posts
April 2010
1 post
November 2009
2 posts
ITcookbook →
I’ve got a new project going, and it’s called ITcookbook.
I’ve got a collaborator this time (Jeff Palmer, an accomplished BSD admin), who will kick me in the pants and incite me to, you know ……
ITcookbook
Over the past few years, since my adminfoo.net site died horribly and was later resurrected as a Blogger site, my post activity has been … sporadic at best. That’s changing, starting now.
I’ve got a new project going, and it’s called ITcookbook.
I’ve got a collaborator this time (Jeff Palmer, an accomplished BSD admin), who will kick me in the pants and incite me...
June 2009
3 posts
Don't be afraid of DNS Scavenging. Just be... →
Fabulous Adventures... →
Eric Lippert thinks of memory as a disk store with a fast ram cache. It’s not as dumb as you think.
Thanks, Jeff & Joel!
On the Stackoverflow podcast, which I actually do follow sporadically (because it’s awesome!), Joel Spolsky found one of my answers at the serverfault.com website (again, awesome site), and singled it out for praise.
Jeff Atwood and Joel then proceed to discuss. You can tune into StackOverflow Podcast #59 and hear my little moment of unpronounceable fame starting around 58:50 and...
October 2008
7 posts
4 tags
All About Windows Shutdown →
Mysterious shutdown delays? This (welcome!) paper explains the process.
4 tags
New twist in rackmount networking
Here is a nifty thing I found at RackSolutions.com - a vertical rackmount patch panel! Optionally you can put a vertical powerstrip right next to it.
The 44U, 88-port assembly, without the vertical powerstrip, goes for $199. And listen up: it is not prewired. In fact it does not even come with the keystone jacks pictured here. You buy those separately, patch and label them yourself (or have your...
2 tags
Screen resolutions →
This graphic makes sense out of all those screen resolution acronyms (VGA, XGA, WXGA, etc)
5 tags
My minor fame
Over on my anemic little Zoho wiki, I have this page of WMIC Snippets. In case you did not know, WMIC is a very handy commandline/scripting tool for querying all sorts of things about a Windows computer. But I will let that page tell its own story about WMIC.
Lately I have been getting a number of comments and email complimenting me on the page, and I found out why: someone linked it from this...
4 tags
ERRORLEVEL is not %ERRORLEVEL% →
Raymond Chen straightens that out for us!
6 tags
Google's Chrome: observations
I have been using Google’s new Chrome web browser since its release, which was a month ago today. So it’s time to put together a few thoughts!
Let me start off by saying, I am not a Firefox person. I haven’t put much thought into the reasons for this; it’s just a personal preference of mine. So this article will compare Chrome to IE7, which I have been using since it came...
4 tags
RAM and Disk Costs of Vista
I hear a fair number of complaints about the ‘bloat’ in Vista, so I decided to do a little bit of pricing research. I conclude that in most cases, the extra RAM and disk needed to run Vista will be $50 or less. The assumptions I used were:
You are upgrading a system with at least a 2gHz processor, and therefore do not need to upgrade the CPU or motherboard. (Vista is actually running...
September 2008
10 posts
3 tags
Moving to a new PC →
Ed Bott lays out a simple process for getting it done right.
3 tags
Networking cheatsheets →
Some very nice reference sheets for OSPF, BGP, subnetting, ports, etc.
1 tag
Extreme Disk Failure!
I found this and many other pictures of the same failed hard drive in the Ars Technica forums, and I just had to share it with the 3 loyal readers of this blog.
Notice how the inner part of the platter (near the hub) has actually worn completely through - the platter is no longer attached to the hub! Wow. Go have a look at the rest of the pictures, which are horridly fascinating.
1 tag
Short power cords for shipshape racks.
If you’ve racked any servers lately, you’re probably irked at the coils of power cord slack you ended up with. There’s no good place to put them! CablesToGo have an answer: short power cords. They have them in 1’, 2’, 3’ and, well, a bunch more sizes. They’ll cost $5 and up, but are worth it.
Go ahead, submit the purchase order. Worst thing that can...
CentOS Network Install Mirrors
So today I needed to do a fresh install of CentOS 5.2. Went to the trouble of torrenting the DVD, then discovering my DVD burner has the (terminal?) flu.
Plan B: a network install. Tony Bhimani has documented this pretty well, with one problem: in screen 8, he recommends using http://mirrors.kernel.org as the netinstall source. But today it is down. So a bit more googling brings me to a few other...
2 tags
The Great Zero-Fill Challenge →
Do you need tools like DBAN? These guys say no.
3 tags
Windows Performance Tools
Remember Bootvis? That’s it, on the right. Microsoft made it to help OEMs setup XP systems that would boot faster. But more than a few techies got hold of it and used it for similar purposes. It provided a very handy view of which processes took the most time during the boot process, allowing a savvy user to tweak things. MS stopped providing Bootvis on their public website, saying that it...
3 tags
Kill-a-watt
NewEgg is currently selling this handy little device for 18 bucks, plus $7 in shipping. And it’s a great price, but wait, there’s more! Now you can get it for the low, low price of $14 (plus shipping), if you use the promo code EMCAKACAF at the checkout stand. For $21 you can have your very own Kill-a-Watt.
I use my K-A-W when I am setting up a new server. I plug the server into the...
2 tags
3 tags
Microsoft DHCP Team Blog →
They’re looking for feature suggestions.
August 2008
9 posts
3 tags
IE8 beta 2
Short and sweet: I have found no showstoppers, and several things to really like, in IE8 beta2 (running on my Vista system). If your web browser isn’t mission critical, go ahead and give IE8b2 a try. It won’t bite.
IE8b1 did bite. It rendered many pages terribly; required a close-and-reopen cycle to switch to compatibility mode, and didn’t understand anchor tags. It stayed...
4 tags
Vista and multiple displays: annoyance
This is bugging me. Recently I added a spiffy new monitor to my desk. My primary work system is a ThinkPad T42, which lives in a docking station when it’s here on the desk. I position the laptop so that its screen is beneath the new screen, so I need Vista to understand the relative layout of the two screens.
I can do that:
… but what I find is that every time the screensaver is...
3 tags
About the users
If you’re anywhere in IT, I think you’ll profit by reading Joel Spolsky’s 9-chapter User Interface Design for Programmers. It’s available free on the web - in fact that link opens the whole thing as one big web page. If you’re not a slow reader, you should be able to get through the whole thing in under two hours. You’ll learn some surprising things about how...
2 tags
3 tags
Computer Description
SF-DC-01.
Many organizations name their computers (or at least the servers) like this. LOCATION-PURPOSE-NUMBER or similar. So the above would be a server in San Francisco, primarily tasked with being a domain controller, and having the number 01 just to differentiate it from any other domain controllers in SF. Personally, I am not a fan of name schemes like this, because they suffer a number of...
3 tags
Troubleshooting pool memory →
How to resolve SRV errors.
3 tags
PC Incubator →
Chooses top-rated components from Newegg to help you build a great PC. Try it!
Observing chkdsk
I recently had occasion to suspect there might be problems on my Vista laptop’s C: drive, so I scheduled a chkdsk (more technical explanation of chkdsk in this KB article). Since chkdsk cannot run on a mounted drive, and obviously one cannot unmount the system drive, the chkdsk was scheduled to run at next boot. But my suspicions were not really urgent, so I didn’t reboot right away.
...
3 tags
ReadyBoost Blues
About a week ago, I noted in the winsat article that I was trying to get ReadyBoost to work on my laptop, which runs Vista Ultimate. The promise of ReadyBoost is better performance, mainly when invoking applications. I’ve given up on it, but will record a few notes here for your amusement and my later reference.
Into my aging Thinkpad T42 (type 2378-FVU, now exactly 4 years old), I...
July 2008
27 posts
3 tags
Windows perf team blog →
Some deep explanations of How Things Work.
4 tags
Windows Memory Management
Unless you’ve studied it a bit, you probably have a few wrong impressions about how Windows memory management works, and that may be hurting your understanding of how to get good performance from the OS. So here are a few links that are worth reading. On this topic, there seems to be a lot of just plain wrong advice out there on the web. So here are a few links which avoid those common...
3 tags
Lazy Linux Admin: 10 tricks →
Exchange Admins, read this.
Running Exchange 2003? Exchange 2003 Disaster Recovery Operations Guide
Exchange 2007? Disaster Recovery and perhaps High Availability
Sometime in your Exchange admin career, you’ll be asked to recover lost data. This isn’t because Exchange itself is intrinsically a fragile platform. But if you do not set it up with recovery situations in mind, there’s a great likelihood that...
2 tags
EasyVMX →
Use this tool to easily create free VMware Player instances with your own OS build.
4 tags
Vista --> XP downgrade notes
If you have a legit copy of Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate, you can downgrade to XP Professional. Here’s the straight dope:
Can downgrade the Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate versions only. There are no downgrade rights from other Vista versions. This is true regardless of whether your Vista license is Retail, OEM, or via Select/Open/SA agreements with Microsoft or...
7 tags
Windows Scripting and CLI Reference Gold
I consider scripting to be an essential skill for a serious sysadmin. Anything you’ll have to do more than twenty times in a row is likely to lead to repetition fatigue: one or more times you’ll make some little mistake, do things a slightly different way. Scripting means spending a bit more time at the beginning, but guarantees that the results are always predictably the same....
4 tags
Poor Man's Tripwire for Windows
I’ve been thinking lately: one of the more frustrating experiences in sysadmin is when you find some configuration item changed on a server, and you wish you’d known about it when it happened.
Imagine, for instance, you log on to SERVER17 and by happenstance you check the members of the local Administrators group, finding 27 accounts listed there. But you remember setting the server...
3 tags
Writing better
A sysadmin often needs to write convincingly and well. Emails to the boss, the users, other sysadmins. Upgrade justifications. And so on.
This short essay, written for college students in the 50’s, is full of timeless good advice which can help your writing become more immediately useful to its intended audience.
FSMO roles command.
Quick and dirty. You want to know which domain controllers hold the FSMO roles in your Active Directory domain? Hate navigating through all the dialog boxes in the MMC tools and find NTDSUTIL navigation a pain?
On your DC, drop to a cmd session and run this - all as one line:
Ntdsutil Roles Connections “Connect to server %COMPUTERNAME%” Quit “Select Operation Target”...
7 tags
winsat perf-testing tool
I’ve been trying to get a CF card to work as ReadyBoost memory. Still no success on that project yet; I may have more to say about that in the future.
But along the way I have discovered a neat little command line tool called winsat. This is basically the commandline underpinnings of the Windows Experience Index tool, except that it returns real numbers, rather than something fuzzy like...
3 tags
Bandwidth reference →
Handy bandwidth charts.
2 tags
Ba-dum PAH! →
Just what it sounds like. An instant rimshot! Also, http://sadtrombone.com
3 tags
Update service uptimes
The folks at Pingdom have been monitoring availability of the update services for Ubuntu, Apple, and Windows. In a 3-month period (April 1-June 30 of 2008), here’s what they found:
To be fair, Ubuntu mirrors its repositories around the world. But to use one of those mirrors during an outage, you’d have to manually reconfigure apt.
5 tags
USB speeds clarified →
Nice description with graph. Compares USB to Firewire and LAN speeds.