Switch Systems Blog - Tech

PHP6 new features

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:36:39 +0100

PHP6 has some interesting new features (some of which will be back-ported to PHP5.3), including

Namespaces

namespace NathanAGood;
class XMLWriter 
{
    // Implementation here...
}

$writer = new NathanAGood::XMLWriter();

Removal of magic_quotes, register_globals, register_long_arrays, safe_mode

Vista SP1 problem - .xls is Not a Valid Win32 Application?!

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:09:02 +0100

It seems that quite a few people are having issues with opening Excel 2007, Access 2007 after an installation of Vista SP1. I only just experienced this, and a log off / log on will fix this temporarily, but microsoft is aware of the issue and is working on a fix.

£10 device could speed up your adsl?

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:16:03 +0000

PCPro says BT is reportedly testing an 'interstatial plate' which plugs into your BT master socket to help reduce noise (and thus increase your ADSL sync speed!).
We already remove all unneeded phones and use a decent master socket face plate on our BT ADSL lines, so it'll be interesting to see the results!
Updated with some pics:

3d engine....in EXCEL?!

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:19:43 +0000

By using a series of formulae, and a worksheet resized so that each cell represents a pixel, you can get a rudimentary 3d engine out of it:

And by using the Office Graphics Abstraction Layer, we can get shading!

Read more at Gamasutra

Truecrypt 5 major update released

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:17:28 +0000

A major update to TrueCrypt (the free open source on-the-fly encryption software) has been released with the following juicy updates:

Ability to encrypt a windows system partition/drive with pre-boot authentication (anyone who wants to gain access and use the system, read and write files, etc., needs to enter the correct password each time before the system starts).
Pipelined operations increasing read/write speed by up to 100% (Windows)
Mac OS X version

I'm gonna give the system drive encryption a go and see what the performance/battery life impact is like!

Steal This WiFi

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:55:58 +0000

Security "guru" Bruce Schneier writes on Wired about how he runs a completely open wireless network. He thinks this is a good idea. Others disagree.

I for one, think he misses the most fundamental flaws in running an open network - the fact that strangers have access to your local network. From there, they can easily scan/exploit your local computers, brute-force your router login credentials, or poisen the ARP cache on your machines to perform man-in-the-middle attacks (to capture passwords, SSL sessions, voip phonecalls, http sessions) and so on.

Similar to the way Jeremy Clarkson didn't think anyone could do anything malicious when he posted his bank account numer and sort code in his newpaper column (he was proved wrong when monies were taken out of his account via a fraudulent direct debit), journalists quite often miss the point completely.

D-Link Routers get an overdue facelift

nospam@example.com (Ruairi Fullam) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:10:41 +0000

Some of you may have had D-Link routers in the past, known for their clunky silver / grey boxes, the aquamarine logo and awful looking administration interfaces. Luckily, they've had a visit from the taste brigade and managed to update all the shortcomings in their market approach. The boxes are now cheaper, smaller, and much better presented. I bought a DIR-100 Ethernet Broadband Router to see what it was about and I'm quite impressed! The new firmware has had its control panel redesigned in an attractive black and green theme, more facilities including Game Mode and QoS (Quality of Service) prioritising. It's much much better and snappier than its existing incarnations. Shipping versions currently have the 1.00 firmware - a 1.01 firmware has been released which addresses issues with Application Rules amongst other minor things. The box itself is a small black and silver number, well presented considering the cost (under £20 from ebuyer). For cable modems, this may potentially be the router to shift me from my favourite, the Netgear 624.

Kquery.com

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:39:36 +0000

...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 wireless router

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 12:55:24 +0000

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

Currently £104 from eBuyer.

VSS, Robocopy and More..

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:14:40 +0000

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:

FOR /F "tokens=2 delims=[tab][space]" %%A IN ('TASKLIST /V ^| FIND /I "backup_openvpn.exe"') DO taskkill /PID %%A /T

- 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.

Sony's PS3 new Folding@Home champion

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:13:20 +0000

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...)

Win Server 2008, Slashdot behind the scenes

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:53:00 +0100

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.

Mozilla launches Prism - a desktop wrapper for web based applications?

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:07:00 +0100

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!

Fasthosts accounts comprimised

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:14:15 +0100

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."

AV software, firewalls, how does it affect PC performance?

nospam@example.com (Kris Sum) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 22:42:23 +0100

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.