quuxpad

ITcookbook

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:45:27 -0800

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

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:23:00 -0800

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 to, you know … write! He’s no slouch in the writing department, and he’ll be bringing his own unique skills and viewpoints to the table.

We’re both pretty excited about this project. In it, we’re going to be building and growing a complete IT infrastructure, with full documentation of how we accomplish every little step along the way. In text, screenshots … and video. Our goal is to serve up plenty of ready-to-use complete step-by-step recipes handy to any IT practitioner out there, at any experience level. We’ll be showing successes and failures. We will be hammering hard on things like documentation, and tools, and communication with the boss, and how to make good decisions about the foundations and growth of your IT infrastructure.

I will be bringing lots of my old content from here and other places into the ITcookbook project. I’ll be updating a lot of that old stuff to fit with the changes that have happened over the years. Jeff will be bringing his *nix experience to the table, because the IT infrastructure we build will not be Windows-only.

We invite you to come take a look!

Don't be afraid of DNS Scavenging. Just be patient.

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:16:55 -0700

Don't be afraid of DNS Scavenging. Just be patient.

Fabulous Adventures...

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:22:15 -0700

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!

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:23:00 -0700

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 proceeding for the next 5 minutes or so (the rest of the podcast is also fascinating). Jeff and Joel: it rhymes with “ducks”!

Because they also discussed this blog, I guess I’ll have to come out of hibernation and post more here.

All About Windows Shutdown

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:59:00 -0700

All About Windows Shutdown:

Mysterious shutdown delays? This (welcome!) paper explains the process.

New twist in rackmount networking

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 01:00:00 -0700

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 cabling people do it).

I’d love to see this stuff up close. It looks to me like it can only mount on the outside of an open 4-post rack, but there may be a way to fit it inside enclosures (which have metal sides and doors front and back); it is hard to tell from the information and pictures shown.

Depending on your racks, need for KVM, and use of cable management arms, this would make for a sweet looking and easy-to-manage setup, I think.

Also: RackSolutions.com has a very nice writeup on various rackmount details - hole placement and shape, various cable arms and shelving options, open vs closed racks, portable and wallmount racks, and so on. If you’re new to racking, I heartily recommend at least skimming this document, which is no-nonsense and completely free of sales pressure. A very welcome presentation of the minutia of infrastructure racks.

Screen resolutions

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 07:08:41 -0700

Screen resolutions:

This graphic makes sense out of all those screen resolution acronyms (VGA, XGA, WXGA, etc)

My minor fame

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 05:32:47 -0700

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 Wikipedia page about WMI. Neato. Now I am a teeny-tiny little footnote in the world’s encyclopedia!

Also, I have been enjoying answering the questions people send me. If you have a Windows scripting question, feel free to send it, via the ‘quux’ links at the bottom of the wiki pages.

ERRORLEVEL is not %ERRORLEVEL%

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:28:50 -0700

ERRORLEVEL is not %ERRORLEVEL%:

Raymond Chen straightens that out for us!

Google's Chrome: observations

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:38:00 -0700

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 out, and more recently, IE8 beta 2, which I started using on the day it released.

Things I like about Chrome:

Chrome does sometimes hang, but usually for less than a minute, and it always recovers. By comparison, IE7/8 hung on me about every other day, and quite often never did fully recover.
Chrome usually closes nearly instantly. IE can sometimes take several minutes to close.
Chrome new tabs open instantly. I have seen IE take 15 seconds or more to open a new tab.
Pages seem to load faster in most cases. Not all cases though! I still find myself waiting on a page-load - usually because the banner advertisement has not yet loaded.
I’ve really come to enjoy Chrome’s single address bar. I type searches into it directly, and it is very fast to suggest sites and autocomplete words I am typing - often successfully.

The speed and stability of Chrome have kept me using it as my main browser for the past 30 days. I do have some gripes, listed below, but I have found that speed and stability are more important (to me) than I previously thought they were! Even with the long list of gripes I am about to list, I still prefer Chrome, and use it as my primary browser. I only open IE for the occasional task (like writing this post) that Chrome doesn’t yet handle as well as I like.

Things I am unhappy about (in Chrome):

Scrolling is sometimes broken. if I click in the whitespace of the scrollbar, intending to scroll down one screen, it often keeps scrolling down until I move the cursor out of that scrollbar. This can be really annoying!
Video clips often do not work correctly. They often do not play at all, or play only a few seconds and then stop. I have seen this happen in several video applets - YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
Chrome does not always create a new process for each tab. Sometimes two or more tabs share the same process, as shown here:

Chrome’s task Manager, showing two tabs in one process.
I really miss the ‘quick tabs’ view from IE7/8. Very often I have a lot of tabs open, and I loved using the thumbnail view in IE7/8 to see them all, and close the ones I no longer need. Chrome does have a list view of all open tabs (press Shift + Esc to open Chrome’s task manager, a small snippet of which is shown above), but it is not as handy as IE7/8’s quick tabs. It is clear that Chrome has the code to do this, because you get a similar thumbnail view when you open a new tab - but the thumbnails are of ‘most visited’ sites, not currently open sites.

IE quicktabs Chrome new tab
Chrome doesn’t always render edit controls well. For instance, here on Tumblr, when I edit or create a post, I see the following:

Chrome (above) gives only a few buttons

IE (above) showing all of the edit control buttons on Tumblr
Chrome loses my cookies whenever I restart it. This can be very annoying on sites like Techmeme or PopUrls, where preferences are saved in cookies, and those preferences define the way the sites act for me. I have to reset my preferences to sites like this every time I restart Chrome!
When you shutdown Chrome, it saves all open tabs, and brings them back next time Chrome is opened. So far so good, right? But what I want is the ability to save tab-sets as favorites; Chrome has no way to do this.
Even after a month, I want the page reload icon at the right side of the address bar; not on the left where Chrome places it. I still find myself mousing to the upper right, then correcting for upper left.
Chrome’s file download strategy is weird, counterintuitive, and sometimes broken. Many downloads open a new, blank page, where the download will appear as an icon in a footer at the bottom of the page. I must then click on this download to open it (such downloads are often PDFs). I must also click a little ‘x’ at the right side of the footer to close that footer. If I close the the blank tab-with-footer before using that ‘x’ to remove the footer, this footer then remains in some or all of my other tabs, and cannot be removed. Some unspecified amount of time later, the footer disappears on its own.

There you have it: a short list of really important Chrome advantages, and a much longer list of Chrome drawbacks. Yet still I prefer Chrome for most of my daily web browsing. I hope the Google folks are aware of these drawbacks, and working on them!

RAM and Disk Costs of Vista

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:23:00 -0700

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 well on my 1.7gHz processor, but I rounded up to 2gHz just for the heck of it.)
You do not need Aero, and therefore do not need to upgrade your video card.
You will replace your existing RAM with 2GB of new RAM.
You will replace your hard drive, but only charge the first 40GB of the new drive to the Vista upgrade. This is a generous estimate: the C:\Windows directory my Vista Ultimate system, running for months now, is using a total of 15.1 GB (including all subdirectories).
You’re not buying so-called “high-end” parts, like RAM with chrome heat spreaders and so on; you shop on specifications and best-deal prices.

All prices from http://www.pricewatch.com and are current as of the minute I write this article.

Desktop memory (DDR2, all ‘2GB kit’ prices):
41.00 - ddr2-1066 pc2-8500 2gb kit
61.98 - ddr2-1000 pc2-8000 2gb kit
26.73 - ddr2-800 pc2-6400 2gb kit
25.92 - ddr2-667 pc2-5300 2gb kit
25.69 - ddr2-533 pc2-4200 2gb kit
36.99 - ddr2-400 pc2-3200 2gb kit

Notebook memory (DDR2, single 2GB stick):
32.99 - so-dimm ddr2 pc2-6400 2gb
29.45 - so-dimm ddr2 pc2-5300 2gb
29.48 - so-dimm ddr2 pc2-4200 2gb
69.00 - so-dimm ddr2 pc2-3200 2gb

Disk (500GB, 3 flavors, plus a 250GB ATA drive):
53.99 - sata 500gb 3.5” ($0.11/gig)
65.95 - ultra ata 500gb 3.5” ($0.13/gig)
160.16 - notebook 500gb SATA 2.5” ($0.32/gig)
99.99 - notebook 250gb ATA 2.5” ($0.40/gig) (I was unable to find a 500GB ATA drive; had to go to Newegg to find this 250GB drive)

So, the worst case here is a notebook system using ATA hard drive and PC2/3200 RAM. You’d spend $99.99 for a 250GB hard drive and $69 for the RAM upgrade, for a total of $170. But if we assume you really only needed 40 GB for the Vista install, that’s $16 in disk costs ($0.40/gig * 40 gigs). So the upgrade cost required by Vista is $85. All the other RAM/disk costs, using this same method (full cost of RAM + cost of first 40 gigs of disk) are $48.99 or lower.

For a desktop system using 3.5” internal drives, the worst case would be a SATA 500gb drive ($160.16) and PC2/800 RAM ($61.98). That’s a total cost of $222.14, but the 40GB needed for Vista costs $12.80. So the upgrade cost required by Vista is $74.78. All the other desktop RAM/disk costs are $53.80 or lower (again via the ‘full cost of RAM + first 40 gigs of disk’ method).

Conclusion: in most cases, the costs of extra disk and RAM for Vista will be less than $50, if you are buying new parts and shopping smart.

Moving to a new PC

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:43:34 -0700

Moving to a new PC:

Ed Bott lays out a simple process for getting it done right.

Networking cheatsheets

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:57:43 -0700

Networking cheatsheets:

Some very nice reference sheets for OSPF, BGP, subnetting, ports, etc.

Extreme Disk Failure!

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:43:00 -0700

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.

Short power cords for shipshape racks.

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:14:00 -0700

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 happen is, boss says no!

CentOS Network Install Mirrors

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:17:15 -0700

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 sites recommending their favorite mirror … in places like Belgium. But I’m in the US, and the thought of all those packets flying halfway around the world does not thrill me. Where, oh where, is the list of mirrors I can install from? It doesn’t seem easy to find by searching the CentOS site, nor via Google … so I figure I’ll document it here. Maybe the next person googling it will find this just a tad quicker?

The CentOS Public Network Install mirror list is here: http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=13

and some interesting status views are here: http://mirror-status.centos.org/

I’m glad I found the list; I first tried installing from U Idaho, but that failed because of a bad or missing Gnome image. My next try, from U Oregon, worked out well.

The Great Zero-Fill Challenge

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:55:47 -0700

The Great Zero-Fill Challenge:

Do you need tools like DBAN? These guys say no.

Windows Performance Tools

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:15:00 -0700

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 was of no use to the average end user

I had thought there was no Vista/W2008 equivalent to Bootvis, but it turns out I was wrong. Microsoft makes the Windows Performance Tools (WPT) available for download. WPT includes the On/Off Transition Performance Analyzer so you can track performance data during startup, shutdown, standby/resume, or hibernate/resume. I haven’t had a chance to play with the On/Off perf tool yet, but WPT itself is nice.

Unlike Perfmon, WPT is not live performance information. First you run the xperf tool for awhile, capturing data. When you have completed your data capture, you run the graphical analysis tool.

Above, WPT is showing CPU usage by process, disk reads and writes by priority, and finally disk utilization by process. The first pane is not new - perfmon provides this data. The middle pane is an interesting breakdown of disk reads and writes by priority. And the third pane is really interesting: disk utilization graphed per process and by priority (Perfmon will do overall system I/O per process, but that includes file, network, and other device I/O). The presentation is nice - you can hover the cursor over any line to see which process was using that much of the resource at any one time.

Now here’s a fun bit:

The process lifetimes in the top pane are something you won’t get in Perfmon, and they are quite handy because they sync to the other graphs. The bottom pane here is showing hard faults (agan, available via Perfmon). But the nice bit here is, you can show any two panes next to one another, so you can see the effect of starting a process on, say, CPU or disk utilization. You can also overlay any one pane on top of another. That’s handy.

WPT has a few other tricks up its sleeve, which I’ll let you discover for yourself. Honestly, there’s not a lot of new data here; it’s mainly a different view of the Perfmon counters we already know and love. The ability to track this data during a startup/shutdown is a new and appreciated capability though. And I am excited to finally be able to see disk utilization on a per-process basis.

I have some ideas on performance visualization that I hope to write about in the coming days. Meanwhile, I thank Michael Fortin, who mentioned WPT in a fascinating post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. I’m really impressed with the quality of information Steve Sinofsky (who heads up the Windows 7 project) is personally exposing in this blog, and I hope to see more of it!

Kill-a-watt

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:29:00 -0700

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 K-A-W and write down the starting amperage (computers draw the most current at startup, when they power fans at full speed, spin up drives, etc). Then I wait till I hear the fans drop down to their normal, lower speed operation, and measure again - this will be typical of the system’s normal draw. I keep all that data in a spreadsheet, usually sorted by which breaker and/or PDU each server is plugged into. It then becomes easy to see when I am nearing an overload condition.

A problem I have seen in several server rooms is, things work fine until a power outage occurs. Once power is restored, it can be difficult to power the room up again, as all those high starting loads trip the breakers. Similarly, servers draw more power the hotter they get, so if you have any HVAC problems, you can start seeing breakers trip out.

With a $21 outlay and a few more minutes during your server commissioning procedure, you can completely avoid these kinds of issues. There are many other fun and useful things you can do with the K-A-W, like precalculating the power cost per year of a server, or figuring out how overloaded your UPS is. The K-A-W has a readout mode which shows that pesky ‘VA’ number that UPS makers are so enamored of.

It’s a convenient little truth-teller.