Stephens’ Blog

I did it, I finally did it. I managed to pluck up enough self control to deactivate my facebook account and what is better is that a week later I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would.

Was it hard ?

In all honesty I should have done it weeks ago when I first thought about it but I waited. I don’t quite know what I was waiting for. Was I in search for the next great game, A friend request I from someone I have thought to already request or just because I didn’t want to let go..?

What am I doing instead?

Spending time with my wife and two children, starting and finishing jobs around the house reducing the amount of time I spend in front of a PC. Although some time has now been added to play on wii fit and bonding on the xbox360 with the eldest.

Am I going back?

I really hope not. Although there are some times where I end up at the front page they have only been for a spilt second usually because it was my most visited page my browser was trying to be helpful. I feel if I go back I have failed at something and this is one thing I don’t want to fail at. If that day came where I am sucked back into the website called facebook would be a very sad day.

Well I have been using Windows 7 of the last couple of days so I though I would write a review of on how I am finding it.

First of the version of Window 7 I am using is “Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit”.

My machine has a 2.79 GHz Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU with  4GB of RAM and a PNY Geforce 8400 graphics card with 256MB Memory 64-bit. This machine scores a 3.5 and that is due to the Graphics component.

One of the good things is the ability to view which machines you are recently connectrd to via Remote Desktop. Another good feature I have found is the preview with Internet Explore version 8 where you can see all tabs.

I shall write about some more of the features I have found usual later on.

I have had a google android mobile phone for a while I have missed not being able to use my mobile as a modem when out and about.

That has all change now that I have found proxoid for my HTC Magic. http://code.google.com/p/proxoid/wiki/installationLinux. It took me 30 minutes to download everything and setup things up as per the instructions. Everything seemed to go swimming well until it came time to active the forward the my device but my device wasn’t showing in the command “adb devices” so a quick reboot of my laptop and still nothing so I started searching the Internet for any sort of ideas on how to resolve this I couldn’t find anything to help so I rebooted the phone just to see if that would help and bingo. After a very slow but satisfying test I am now happy that when I am on call I am able to go out and not have to be too close to home.

My next article will be added online later this week.

Well I know I haven’t written much about the type of computing I have been doing recently,  well that is about to change.

As I work on a support desk having to do technical support and new service provisioning. I spend a lot of time working on helping our users troubleshoot issues they may have.

Recently I have been building a virtual exchange 2007 server server a virtual machine with Icewarps merak mail server. once I have the whole thing configured and built I shall do a write up on provisioning the setup.

Today I have been setting up a MS FTP 7.5 server which allows connections of SSL. The main instructions for the service were obtained from iis.net but I then encountered some problems being able to connect to the service from the Internet.

As my office has a direct VPN connect to the servers it was difficult to test the connection. what we found for the Internet was the passive connection could not be established after the initial FTP connection.

We found after reading Configuring FTP Firewall settings also from iis.net and applying the firewall rule

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="FTP for IIS7" service=ftpsvc action=allow protocol=TCP dir=in

and adding the passive connection ports to the Windows Firewall the issue seems to be resolved.

One thing I must add is that if you are using the ftp server for yourself and just want to encrypt the traffic a self signed certificate is OK but if you are opening up the server the clients, suppliers, partners or any one else I would suggest a certificate from a recognised certificate body like Thawte or Verisign and other certificate authorities are also available.

Well it has been a while is I have updated this much to my own dissatisfaction. I have been up to a few things in recent months and will try and write about everything now but I may well miss somethings.

So what have I been doing?

Ice Skating -

I have still been going fairly regularly and I am not improving at the rate I was but still a nice rate, my personal fitness could do with a lot of work but it isn’t anything to be worried about.

Computing -

1. I have been trying to setup shrewsoft VPN client to allow me to my office systems without using my desktop, this means that when I am on call I can be out and about without having to worry about staying too close to home.
2. I have also been playing the sirens game at hack3r website I am currently on level6 trying to gain access to level7 and I hope to have that done at some point tonight.

Photography -

1. Having played with my samsung trying to get the best pictures I could I decided to upgrade to the sony A200k entry level digital SLR. ( I shall write some more on the camera by the end of the week).
2. I have a photo I have taken with it up at “My Gallery” and there will be some more photos added shortly.

Well it has a long time since I have updated this with what I am actually doing, so here goes.

On Sunday I did the usual think of going ice skating and I most say that over the past couple of month I have been improve a lot, I still can’t ice hockey stop but that will come with time.

Over the Weekend I decided to upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10. I decide to do this at 22:00 on a Saturday night which is never the best idea I could have as I kept falling asleep and the whole process didn’t finish until 5:00 the following morning and then I had to go back through the ubuntu guide to make sure everything was working on my laptop correctly.

All of last week I was learning about Active Directory (AD) at the “Learning Tree” centre in London. I must admit that I did know some of the things that were being discussed the slightly more basic things such as adding machines to the domain, promoting a machine to be a domain controller and creating users, groups, Organisational Units (OUs), but I was unclear about how to actually plan an AD but this course I believe has helped put me in the mind set of what requirements to look at when planning.
Also on Sunday the 26th of October I was invited by Microsoft to watch an American Football game at Wembley Stadium in there corporate box. It was the San Diego Chargers Vs New Orleans Saints. The Saints went on to win the game but is was a close game which went down to the wire.

That is about all I have done over the past week and a bit and I shall update with a bit more technical information shortly.

For some stupid reason I didn’t change the permalinks on this site when I moved it from one server to another, this meant that when I did change it today most of the site wasn’t working. Arghhhhhhhhhhh

The only way so I did a search which lead me to this page at codex.wordpress.org. This page give out the basics of permalinks and a quick read of the page showed me that my virtual host coonfiguration for this domain in apache was missing some options.

This is what I was missing

<Directory /path-to-website/>
AllowOverride ALL
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

Once I had added that and done the necessary “httpd -k restart” to pick up the new changes in the config it all came together and started to work.

Today at work I had the need to change the regional settings for an IUSR as the data and time format were set to US not the UK. I had found a page which told me how to do this for the standard IUSR_<machine-name> but as the website with the issue wasn’t using the standard IUSR.
The website I found the information on was Fresh mango

Which is followed but it wasn’t all the information I needed so I experimented as best I could and found that if I type cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/X/root/anonymoususerpass
with X being the identifier for the website it would give me the password I wanted or at least I thought so. With the credentials now available I tried to log in and change the regional settings but the password wouldn’t let me in.
so what should I do now?

Well I decided to take a jump which isn’t always the best idea but this is what I have done.
within computer manager I located the IUSR I was after and reset the password for the user.
Opened up regional settings as that user by holding down the shift ket and clicking with the left mouse button on regional settings.
changed the regional settings and closed the window.
Within DOS I inputted the following command “cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/X/root/anonymoususerpass <password>
I then checked to make sure the password had been accepted by running this command again cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/X/root/anonymoususerpass “although it does print it back when the it has been accepted”.

Then I checked the website to ensure it was still working and it was phew but has the date change I well find out when I reboot the server in the next couple of days and let you know.

Well I know I said I would update this yesterday after I install the latest alsa release candidate but I become really busy trying to fix an wireless connection between a linksys wga54g and a netgear WGX102. I am yet to fully fix the issues regarding the connectivity issues but that should be fixed tonight. I have the microphones working but not without issues. The main issue I had was that I did not have the patch utility install so I grab that with apt-get and then all seemed well. I would like to say cheers to ed for his help in my time of need. The microphones are working but require a bit of tweaking once this is done I shall post my settings to share the information.

caio for now

On my wonderful HP Compaq 2133 laptop the issue still lies where the sound card is not recognised properly which mean on microphone and a nasty bug with the inputting of a set of headphones in to it’s jack would not result in the speakers muting. Now it wasn’t really an issue for me as such as I didn’t really use the headphone socket or have needed to use the microphones on it. Now thanks to the developers at the alsa-project and the people using ubuntu and contributing to the forum this issue seems to have now been fixed well at least until the next kernel update. To get this sound card working the way it should go the alsa project download page http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Download, download the alsa-driver-1.0.17rc3 and follow the instructions on this ubuntu support forum topic http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=749693&page=14. Now although I haven’t tested this to see it work I am very confident as I have done all of the other instructions and got the wireless card working the graphics working better than just using the standard system. I shall be trying the instruction out tonight and shall let you know how it goes.
Also since I last posted I manage to kill an ipod nano 3rd generation by performing a simple firmware update. The ipod was just showing the apple logo. Now this happened at 22:30 one night and whilst trying to fix it the time got later and later until around 00:30 I decided to give up for the night. I then proceeded to fix it the next day but following the instructions from this article I found the night before and didn’t read properly http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1399?viewlocale=en_US. Now if I had bothered to read this properly that night I would have had it fixed within 20 minutes instead of wasting at least 2 hours. I always forget to read all the instructions before attempting to repair anything.