Tech

...so my old webhost for kquery.com is pulling the plug at the end of the year on all of their hosting services. It makes me wonder if I should keep kquery.com going by hosting it myself.

Kquery is still a great server browser - people are using it (i have no idea how) for Call of Duty 4 - someone must have hacked together their own master server menu file for it! The stats page on kquery.com still shows over 1000 downloads of the software every week, and between 1000-2000 game connections registered per day.

It makes me wonder if I should start developing Kquery again, but I can see it taking up a large amount of my time ...

Belkin's new "N1 Vision" pre-n wireless router looks pretty sweet.


Currently £104 from eBuyer.

We've been putting the finishing touches to our new remote data backup solution (we've decided on synching files over an openSSL link), and boy have we run into a lot of headaches!

Backing up open files... VSS + Robocopy

Robocopy is very good, though it can't deal with locked files very well. So we thought we'd try using Hobocopy, but this also has a few problems. Without any other way of doing VolumeShadowCopies, we thought we'd have to go back to using NTbackup, but there was a solution to be found... Using this as a guide (you will also need to download this SDK), we now have volume shadows exposed as a drive letter, which we can then Robocopy from!
Tip: use the GeneratedVarsTempScript.cmd so that you can call VSHADOW.EXE -ds=%SHADOW_ID_1% from your own batch file, and remove the -nw switch from the vshadow argument list so you get the MSDE writers (exchange/mssql)

Scripting openVPN:

Scripting all of this via a batch file is a little complex - we also can't use "net start openvpnservice" to start/stop openVPN because we already have openvpn running on the machine! We also can't just run the openvpn.exe file because it doesn't return control back to the batch file. We ended up renaming the openvpn.exe file to "backup_openvpn.exe", and started it with "start backup_openvpn.exe path/to/our_config_file.ovpn", and at the end of our backup script doing:
- replace [tab] and [space] with the appropriate keypresses!

Freeware Ghost Replacement

In other news, ruairi has found FreeGhost, which looks to be a promising project for us windows sysadmins.

This article on arsTechnica says that while the PS3 is just 12 percent of F@H clients, it achieved 78 percent of the new petaflop record - just goes to show how well the Cell processor is suited to the task (it's just a shame that no games have yet harnessed the real power of the PS3...)

Toms Hardware has a lengthy (19 page) review of Windows Server 2008. Looks like Vista, tastes like Windows Server!

Slashdot have put up part 2 of their "behind the scenes" look at what powers /. - part 1 covers the hardware, and now part 2 covers some of the software and configuration.

Today mozilla launched Prism "...an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop."

I just tried using it with our CRM and I don't think it works well with windows Vista... If you want to try it out you can download it from here. It's more than just a desktop shortcut to a website!

From The Register:

Fasthosts, "the UK's number 1 web host", has fired off emergency emails telling customers to change all their passwords after police were called in to investigate a major data breach.
"As a precautionary measure, Fasthosts has asked its customers to update their passwords. This includes their control panel, email, FTP, and database passwords, all of which can be changed via the customer control panel. Fasthosts has now implemented customer password encryption to further protect customer data."
We've asked Fasthosts why the passwords were not encrypted in the first place. It said: "Historically, Internet companies have rarely encrypted passwords to aid customer service."

I found a cool little table which shows the degredation that installing different types of AntiVirus and Firewall software - check it out:

Software	% Boot Delay	% Prime Delay	% FileIO Delay
Norton Internet Security 2006	46	20	2369
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8	7	20	2246
Norton Internet Security 2007	45	8	1515
Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006	2	0	1288
ZoneAlarm ISS	16	0	992
Norton Antivirus 2002	11	8	658
Windows Live OneCare	11	8	512
Webroot Spy Sweeper	6	8	369
Nod32 v2.5	7	8	177
avast! 4.7 Home	4	8	115
Windows Defender	5	8	54
Panda Antivirus 2007	20	4	15
AVG 7.1 Free	15	0	19

As you can see, norton's internet security suites have a huge impact on system performance. Our recommended antivirus software (AVG, Avast! and Panda) do quite well.

From Ars Technica, this article outlines BT's hopes that it's users would share their internet connection, using a new router which allows secure public access. BT's Gavin Patterson holds out hopes that the FON scheme can someday "cover every street in Britain." "We are giving our millions of Total Broadband customers a choice and an opportunity," he added in a statement. "If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband at hundreds of thousands of FON and BT Openzone hotspots today, without paying a penny." Sounds like a good idea to me!

Just been playing about with openVPN, and have got a multi-site network successfully working. What amazes me is the speed, we did some windows domain joining and client app transfers and they went through with no hitch, and shared folder browsing is faster than via terminal services! We love you openVPN!

At the Popular Science Blog, this entry shows a portable projector (think size of a mobile phone) in action. I want one!

I've got to say, these 3Ware Escalade raid cards are brilliant - the drivers and web-based UI are well programmed plus the performance is great - I really like it when things "Just Work"!

I've had enough of this card already... I bought it to replace our cheaper silicon image cards, only to find out that they are also re-branded silicon image cards! We have several Fujitsu Primergy servers, and one card installed fine into one of the servers, but it doesn't seem to want to work in this other identical server. If drives are attached to the card, it hangs windows2k3 startup (and safe mode doesn't work either). Disconnect the drives, and the card is fine... This is the third make of SATA RAID card that I've tried. We had some good looking Promise cards but they had bios conflicts with the Primergy's onboard SCSI Anyway, i've wasted enough time on this - we've now got some 3ware Escalade cards on order, lets hope they fare a little better.

The british government has responded to an online petition about the BBC's iPlayer on-demand TV service being windows only. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been any change bought about by the petition - the BBC had already stated that they were working on supporting other operating systems and would review this process every 6 months, which is essentially what the PM's response says.

A PCMag article by John Dvorak about the recent failure of the Windows Genuine Advantage authentication servers brings up some interesting points. With everyone becoming more reliant on online programs (i.e. Software as a Service), we're more at risk to comms faults and server outages. Why can't we go back to having applications on our desktop?!

You can image the advertising push. "Now control your own data!" "Faster processing power now." "Cheaper!" "Everything at your fingertips." "No need to worry about network outages." "Faster, cheaper, more reliable."