Archive for the ‘tech’ Category

Wallaby

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

Now that’s interesting:

“Wallaby” is the codename for an experimental technology that converts the artwork and animation contained in Adobe® Flash® Professional (FLA) files into HTML. This allows you to reuse and extend the reach of your content to devices that do not support the Flash runtimes. Once these files are converted to HTML

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/

StartSSL

Friday, February 18th, 2011

Hi all,

I needed to buy a SSL certificate for a website and someone recommended StartSSL to me. I usually buy my certificates from GoDaddy or DigiCert but since they are providing free class 1 certificates, I’ve decided to give it a try… when I tried to add one of my domains, it got approved right away, however, when I tried to add the real domain I wanted to use, I got an error message that said it was blacklisted… weird, heh? I contacted StartCom to see what’s the problem and they told me google has blacklisted it in the last 90 days. That’s semi-true, one of the website’s sub-domains is used as a free web-hosting and someone has uploaded a malicious file to it, however, it was a totally different machine and the uploading account has been suspsended as soon as we got the complaint from google. They weren’t willing to add the domain manually for me unless I pay 49.99$ for verification… I really needed a multiple domain (UCC) SSL certificate for 5 sub-domains and comparing to GoDaddy’s 89.99$/year, 49.99$ for two years didn’t sound too much… in addition to that, they provide unlimited sub-domains so I could add a few more sub-domains we use for the same fee.

I had bad experience with another SSL certificate provider (not godaddy or digicert, they’re fine) but I decided to give them a chance anyway. They asked me to scan two different identification IDs with pictures and my phone bill and they even called me to verify I am really me… after that, they manually verified the domain I wanted the certificate for and I could issue it. Everything was done within a few hours and I’m really happy.

The bottom line is that I recommend StartSSL too, just remember to be prepared with the needed “papers”.

 -Kobi.

My Knowledge Base

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

I just updated my Knowledge Base:
– Added search box to the main page.
– Fixed the searches to search the “Solution” field too.
– Added comments support for KBs (comments for registered users are approved automatically, comments from guests must be approved by a moderator).
– Added list of softwares (with KBs) to the KB categories.

-Kobi.

Exchange 2010 SP1

Friday, August 27th, 2010

Hi all,

I’ve waited for Exchange 2010 SP1 for a long time and I must say I like:

– The ability to create mailbox archives on a different server/database (the ability to host the archives online is interesting too).

– The ability to reset corrupted virtual directories (yes, I’m a lazy person).

– Scripting Agent (I know I could do some of it with a daily script running on new mailboxes but still).

– New-MailboxRepairRequest.

– Distribution group naming policies.

– More GUI options for managing DAGs.

– The ability to install the required Windows roles/features.

– The ability to set Public Folder permission from the Exchange Management Console (welcome back!).

– Import/export .pst files without outlook.

– Soft-deleted mailboxes.

– SMS Sync looks a nice feature, I hope other mobile clients will support it too.

– Calendar publishing looks like a nice feature too.

P.S. in case it wasn’t obvious – I didn’t intend to list all the changes, just the ones I like! for the full list, check out http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff459257.aspx

-Kobi.

Interesting way to debug slow logons

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Mark Russinovich (Sysinternals) wrote an interesting post of how to use PsExec and Process Monitor to debug slow logons:

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2010/01/13/3305263.aspx

-Kobi.

GParted (Gnome Partition Editor)

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Remember PowerQuest’s (now Symantec) Partition Magic? I needed a similar tool (but free) to resize a partition some time ago. I found and used GParted’s live CD: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

It was working like a charm…

-Kobi.

Windows XP SP3

Friday, May 9th, 2008

So I decided to install SP3 for Windows XP on my laptop, the installation took a little more than 30 minutes…

The only things I acutally liked were the Remote Desktop (6.1) and the native support for WPA2.

The installation without a product key feature is somehow nice too but I don’t really need it as I’m going to slipstreaming SP3 to my current XP installation which doesn’t require a serial anyway (VL included ;)).

-Kobi.

Windows 2008

Monday, March 31st, 2008

I added a Windows 2008 domain controller to my network today:
1) I don’t need hyper-v so I installed “Windows 2008 Enterprise without Hyper-V” which ran pretty quickly, I did the “Server Core Installation” ofcourse.
2) I had to change my computer name (duh!): netdom renamecomputer %computername% /newname:blahdc08
3) I set the ip: netsh interface ipv4 set address “local area connection” static 10.0.0.3 255.255.255.0 10.0.0.1
4) I set the dns: netsh interface ipv4 set dnsserver “local area connection” 10.0.0.2
5) I ran dcpromo: dcpromo /replicadomaindnsname:”blah.nonstop.co.il”
/replicaornewdomain:replica
/replicationsourcedc:”blahdc03.blah.nonstop.co.il”
/username:”kobi” /password:* /userdomain:”blah.nonstop.co.il”
/safemodeadminpassword:CHANGEME /installdns:yes
/rebootoncompletion:yes /confirmgc:yes /creatednsdelegation:yes

(I’m sure some people would prefer to write an unattend file but not me, I like to do things in my own way)

Everything is working just fine and I’m happy with it. I like the general concept of no GUI on servers, it’s not what I want yet but it’s getting there…

I also like the new “Protect object from accidental deletion” feature (I used to do it manually with denying “Delete subtree” until now).

-Kobi.

Nero via remote desktop connection

Friday, March 28th, 2008

I was connecting with remote desktop to my vista machine and wanted to burn a DVD and got this: “If you are running Nero burning software via Windows Remote Login, you might not be able to access your drives for burning. This is a security restriction from Windows“.

I went to: Start –> Run –> gpedit.msc –> Computer Configuration –> Administrative Templates –> System –> Removable Storage Access –> All Removable Storage: Allow direct access in remote sessions and fixed it by changing it to Enabled.

-Kobi.

oops!

Friday, October 5th, 2007

I did a big mistake a few hours ago:
I was doing a rm -fr /home/something instead of rm -fr /tmp/something, it took me a few seconds to realize what I’ve done but I’ve managed to umount -f /home quickly 🙂

All my machines have daily backups but I was working on a another machine for this project for a few days now and didn’t have any backups there.

The machine was running FreeBSD and the /home partition was UFS, I was dd’ing 2GB each time in the hope to find my deleted files but it was worth it.

I restored 95%+ of the data and restored the rest of it manually from my head 😉

I guess it’s time to setup svn for these projects 🙂

-Kobi.

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