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• WRT54GL Tomato Router in Client wireless mode to an iPhone Personal Hotspot

  - by Gordo

  I am trying to connect a router with Tomato firmware to an iPhone 4. The goal is to connect to the Personal Hotspot in Client Wireless mode. This should allow wired and wireless users to connect to the router rather then the iPhone. In theory this should be possible but I am having difficulty. Router Linksys WRT54GL Tomato 1.28.1816 firmware iPhone iPhone 4 iOS 5.1 (9B176) Carrier Rogers Wireless Personal Hotspot works with other devices, wifi/bluetooth/usb iPhone Personal Hotspot settings Mode: B/G Security: WPA or WPA2 Personal Encryption: AES Router IP: 172.20.10.1 Subnet: 172.20.10.0 Min IP: 172.20.10.2 Max IP: 172.20.10.14 maximum number of wireless tethered hosts is 5 I have followed the directions here: http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3810281 Ensured that the router subnet does not 'collide' with the iPhone subnet. Here is the configuration of the Tomato 'Basic - Network - Wireless' section: http://i.stack.imgur.com/pbmTB.png I have tried several variations of this configuration, but nothing seems to work. NOTE: I have successfully connected to my own wifi network in Wireless Client mode, so I am confident that there are no bad cables or other hardware issues. I would prefer to use Tomato, but DD-WRT maybe my only other option. Thanks!

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• How can I get Pinch to Zoom back in Desktop mode?

  - by Ben Brocka

  Windows 7 had an old implimentation of Pinch to Zoom where bringing your fingers apart/together would act similar to ctrl + +/-, the standard zoom. It's not as nice as granular zoom (like iOS/Android use) but it worked. Most notably it doesn't work in Chrome (did before) but I haven't noticed it working in any other apps. In windows 8 desktop mode, pinch to zoom doesn't seem to work at all. It doesn't even work in One Note 2010, which, if I recall correctly, had granular zoom in Windows 7. I have an (older) 2 touch point multi-touch monitor, and I can see the visual feedback that the two touch points and coming closer/farther apart, but it doesn't zoom. Note I'm using the touchscreen, not a touchpad or the Arch mouse or other peripherals. Can I enable this somehow or is it gone from Desktop mode? It works fine in Metro apps. Additionally I get weird visual feedback when placing my second finger on the screen; a shrinking transparent square appears somewhere between the two fingers, visually similar to the Right Click visual queue when long-pressing. It's not a right click though, I can't tell what, if anything, it's doing.

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• Wake a Mac display from sleep via SSH

  - by MaxGabriel

  I'm using Jenkins as a CI server, where I'm SSHing into an iMac running OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4) to run some UIAutomation integrations tests on an iOS app. The iMac actually sits 10 ft from me (but across a table) so I'm able to see the screen. However, the tests don't wake up the display, so I often can't see them. Is there a way to wake up the display from the terminal once Jenkins has SSHed in? So far I have tried using Applescript to press an arrow key, and using the Wake Assist application. I also tried setting the wake schedule to be the current date. Finally, I tried using the caffeinate command: caffeinate -t 300 &. The computer's "Wake for Wi-Fi access" checkbox is enabled. So far my best workaround is to just set the iMac to stay awake for atleast 3 hours. However, it'd be nice to keep normal sleep behavior, as I hypothesize that the screen waking from sleep would alert me visually that the integration tests are running. It's also significantly cooler :)

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• Possible Solution for Setting up a Linux VPN Server to Encrypt WLAN Traffic of Macs and iPhones on

  - by GorillaPatch

  I would like to set up a VPN server on debian linux to encrypt wireless traffic coming from my Mac or iOS device. I would like to use a certificate-based solution. Setting up a PKI infrastructure and managing certificates is OK for me. 1. Which server to pick? By looking through the internet and here on stackoverflow I found the following possible solutions: strongSwan IPSec and racoon Which solution is feasible for a linode running debian squeeze? 2. How to configure the network? If I understood correctly a VPN has a virtual network interface as an endpoint on the server side. Naively I would think that I need a DHCP server running on the server to assign a dynamic private IP (like of the class C network 192.168.xxx.xxx) to the connecting clients. Next I think I would need to set up masquerading to NAT the incoming VPN traffic to the real interface directly connected to the internet. Is this the right way to go? Do you have any configuration examples? I often saw VPN configurations used to connect to your home network, but that is not what I am looking for. I have a server up in the internet and want to use it as a proxy to encrypt traffic in insecure network environments like public WLANs.

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• Configuring iPad Mail app & Gmail app with different accounts? [migrated]

  - by Steve Crane

  I prefer to use the Gmail app over the standard Mail app on my iPad for reading my personal Gmail (I delete a lot of mails, newsletters, etc., after reading and this is one tap in Gmail and several in Mail). I have them set up so my personal Gmail uses the Gmail app and my work email is set up to use the standard Mail app. This all works fine except for one problem. If I'm in Gmail or Mail and send an email it sends from the relevant email address as expected. My problem is that when I share something via email from Safari or another app it sends from the email address configured in Settings for Mail (the work one) and I would prefer to do such sharing from my personal email address. Does anyone know if there is a way to achieve this? I could switch the addresses to use the other app but as I never delete work email and delete personal mail at least 50% of the time, the behaviour of the apps is perfect the way I have them set up; if only I could solve that one little problem of controlling where shared items are sent from. I am using an iPad 2 with iOS 5.1 should that be relevant.

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• Mobile app for sysadmins with monitoring and fixing tools(SSH, ping, traceroute) [closed]

  - by Roman

  I present a start-up company which is working on a new mobile tool for system administrators. Our team has released first several versions of Server Auditor which is now just a SSH terminal with special UI approach for touch devices and got quite good feedbacks, e.g. iOS and Android. Now we are thinking about adding extra features to make Server Auditor a tool number one for all system administrators and would like to know your opinion. Main question would you use a tool like Server Auditor with extra features described below: Fast problem fixing - preloaded recipes/snippets, e.g. clean logs, restart a process, reboot etc. Secure user data synchronisation(IP/DNS name, connection options, keys, snippets) across all your devices iPhone and Android. Built-in tools like ping, traceroute, whois System status integration - you can observe information about the system in a friendly way, e.g CPU load, hard drive and RAM usage etc. Monitoring tool integration. Your servers are watched by our Nagios-like system in the cloud and you get notified by push-notifications/SMS. Similar products are Server Density, CopperEgg. If we start to implement features from 1 to 5 when you will be ready to start use it or even potentially pay for it? Can you see any issues that would prevent you from using this kind of system? Thank you a lot for your time, we kindly appreciate it. Looking forward to hear your opinion

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• How often should network traffic/collisions cause SNMP Sets to fail?

  - by A. Levy

  My team has a situation where an SNMP SET will fail once every two weeks or so. Since this set happens automatically, we don't necessarily notice it immediately when it fails, and this can result in an inconsistent configuration and associated wailing and gnashing of teeth. The plan is to fix this by having our software automatically retry the SET when it fails. The problem is, we aren't sure why the failure is happening. My (extremely limited) knowledge of SNMP isn't particularly helpful in diagnosing this problem, so I thought I'd ask StackOverflow for some advice. We think that every so often a spike in network traffic will cause the SET to fail. Since SNMP uses UDP for communication, I would think it would be relatively easy for a command to be drowned out if traffic was high for a short period of time. However, I have no idea how common this is. We have a small network with a single cisco router and there are less than a dozen SNMP controlled devices on that network. In addition to the SNMP traffic, there are some status web pages being loaded from the various devices. In case it makes a difference, I believe we are using the AdventNet SNMP API version 4.0.4 for Java. Does it sound reasonable that there will be some SET commands dropped occasionally, or should we be looking for other causes?

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• Getting Junk characters while trying to print the file contents using Java

  - by user1523797

  I am reading a file's contents and trying to print the contents using java. But it prints junk characters along with the file content. Code: import java.io.*; public class ReadFile { public String readFile(String filePath){ StringBuilder contents = new StringBuilder(); File file = new File(filePath); try{ String lines = null; FileReader fileReader1 = new FileReader(file); BufferedReader buffer = new BufferedReader(fileReader1); while((lines = buffer.readLine())!=null){ contents.append(lines); } buffer.close(); } catch(FileNotFoundException ex){ System.out.println("File not found."); }catch(IOException ex){ System.out.println("Exception ocurred."); } return contents.toString(); } public static void main(String[] args){ ReadFile rf = new ReadFile(); String lines = rf.readFile("C:\\Data\\FaultDn.txt"); System.out.println("Original file contents: " + lines); } } The file contents are: partner.cisco.com:org-root/mac-pool-QA_MAC_Pool_5-Sep-2012_12:00 The output is:  Can you please point me to what I am missing in this code?

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• Some DHCP clients end up with wrong DNS server

  - by Nic Waller

  The scenario: DC running Windows Server 2008 R2 providing DNS + DHCP Cisco 1811 Router as the gateway 30 Windows XP DHCP clients on the LAN The problem: Some workstations are spontaneously switching to an incorrect DNS server. Specifically, ipconfig /all shows that they start using the gateway as a DNS server. This happens about 5-10 times a day to various computers, sometimes more than once per day. The workaround: Repairing the connection on the XP client always fixes the problem, and the correct DNS server address is obtained. We lost our main DNS/DHCP machine a week ago, and had to bring this one online as a spare. We've been having this issue since then. DHCP leases on the old and new servers are configured for "wired" (8 day) duration. There are definitely no other DHCP servers active on the LAN. So far there is no discernible pattern about which clients will show this problem, or when. When I ran DCDIAG /test:DNS it came back clean. Manual inspection of the DNS zone shows that all the records are appearing as expected, with no traces of the previous machine in there. Update Feb 27: Added screenshots. Here is a screenshot of the DHCP scope options on the 2008 R2 server. And here is a screenshot of ipconfig /all running on a healthy host. I don't have any ailing hosts at the moment, but will grab a screencap next time it happens. Update Feb 28: More screenshots. Here's a screenshot of DHCP and DNS traffic from a healthy client when repairing the local area connection. There's definitely only one server responding, but it does seem strange that the negotiation takes place twice. I'll try to get a similar capture from a sick machine this coming week. Update Mar 01: Caught a bad ipconfig. Here's a screenshot of ipconfig /all from a client that had this issue. It says the lease was issued this morning, but it doesn't even have an entry for the secondary DNS I set up yesterday. Both DNS servers were discovered properly when repairing the connection. Update Mar 01: It even got the sysadmin! This issue finally affected my personal workstation this morning. Unfortunately I had just rebooted and wasn't running a packet dump at the time. I set up a secondary server yesterday, and was logging all DNS traffic to it. My machine had not contacted the secondary DNS in over half an hour, so that says to me that it's just spontaneously reverting to the gateway without even failing over to secondary DNS first. Today I swapped the order of the DNS servers in DHCP, so the secondary is primary and vice versa. I will update again once I know how that goes.

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• Multiple subnets on isc-dhcp-server using ddns with bind9

  - by legioxi

  On my network I have two subnets: 10.100.1.0/24 - Wired/wireless 10.100.7.0/24 - VPN Both subnets are served by isc-dhcp-server running on a Debian VM. This same VM runs bind9 for my DNS. ISC-DHCP-SERVER is configured to use DDNS and update BIND9 with hosts/IPs. Everything runs great until a device drops off the wired/wireless network and pops onto the VPN. When connecting on the VPN, a DHCP lease is handed out on the new subnet but DDNS does not update BIND9. Since the device has A/TXT/PTR records it appears ISC-DHCP-SERVER won't switch them to the new IP. The logs show: Connect to wireless: Nov 6 20:55:13 core-server named[2417]: client 127.0.0.1#57697: updating zone 'internal.mydomain.com/IN': adding an RR at 'demo-iphone.internal.mydomain.com' A Nov 6 20:55:13 core-server named[2417]: client 127.0.0.1#57697: updating zone 'internal.mydomain.com/IN': adding an RR at 'demo-iphone.internal.mydomain.com' TXT Nov 6 20:55:13 core-server dhcpd: DHCPACK on 10.100.1.160 to FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF (demo-iphone) via eth0 Nov 6 20:55:13 core-server dhcpd: Added new forward map from demo-iphone.internal.mydomain.com to 10.100.1.160 Nov 6 20:55:13 core-server dhcpd: Added reverse map from 160.49.21.172.in-addr.arpa. to demo-iphone.internal.mydomain.com Switch to VPN: Nov 6 20:56:34 core-server dhcpd: DHCPOFFER on 10.100.7.101 to BB:BB:BB:BB:BB:BB (demo-iphone) via 10.100.7.0 Nov 6 20:56:34 core-server named[2417]: client 127.0.0.1#57697: updating zone 'internal.mydomain.com/IN': update unsuccessful: demo-iphone.internal.mydomain.com: 'name not in use' prerequisite not satisfied (YXDOMAIN) Nov 6 20:56:34 core-server dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 10.100.7.101 (10.100.1.2) from BB:BB:BB:BB:BB:BB (demo-iphone) via 10.100.7.0 Nov 6 20:56:34 core-server dhcpd: DHCPACK on 10.100.7.101 to BB:BB:BB:BB:BB:BB (demo-iphone) via 10.100.7.0 Nov 6 20:56:34 core-server named[2417]: client 127.0.0.1#57697: updating zone 'internal.mydomain.com/IN': update unsuccessful: demo-iphone.internal.mydomain.com/TXT: 'RRset exists (value dependent)' prerequisite not satisfied (NXRRSET) Nov 6 20:56:34 core-server dhcpd: Forward map from demo-iphone.internal.mydomain.com to 10.100.7.101 FAILED: Has an address record but no DHCID, not mine. One thing to note is that the MAC of the device when connecting via VPN is the MAC of my Cisco ASA5512X and not the actual device. The ASA is relaying the DHCP request from the VPN client to the VM running ISC-DHCP-SERVER. Is there a way to get DDNS working in this scenario?

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• Issue with Netgear GS108T Managed Switch and Jumbo Frames

  - by Richie086

  I recently purchased a Netgear GS108T managed switch and I am trying to configure jumbo packets between my NAS (Thecus N4100Pro), PC and managed switch. I should mention the fact that I was able to use jumbo frames between my PC and NAS before I purchased the switch without issue. My Desktop has a wired gigabit NIC (Intel 82579V Gigabit) and has the ability to configure jumbo frames (see pic) that are either 9014 bytes or 4088 bytes. I choose 9014 bytes for the jumbo frame size My NAS supports jumbo frames as well, and is configured to use 9014 as the frame size. When I go into my Netgear managed switch and set the frame size to 9014 on the ports I am using for my PC and NAS. See image As soon as I hit apply in the web interface, I loose my connection to the SMB shares on my NAS and I can no longer connect to the web admin interface for my NAS. The really strange thing is I can ping my NAS via the ping command, but when I try to connect to the web interface on port 80 or port 443 the page never loads. I did a scan from my PC to my NAS using nmap and I can see the following ports open PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 80/tcp open http 111/tcp open rpcbind 139/tcp open netbios-ssn 443/tcp open https 445/tcp open microsoft-ds 631/tcp open ipp 2000/tcp open cisco-sccp 2049/tcp open nfs 3260/tcp open iscsi 49152/tcp open unknown MAC Address: 00:14:FD:15:00:44 (Thecus Technology) Read data files from: C:\Program Files (x86)\Nmap Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 211.97 seconds Raw packets sent: 1 (28B) | Rcvd: 1 (28B) Anyone have any idea what is going on here? Why is nmap able to detect the ports are open and listening for http, https and file sharing but I cant connect when all devices have jumbo packets enabled? Stranger still - I did a packet capture using wireshark while the nmap scan was running and filtered so I only saw converstations between my PC and my NAS. Here are the packet details from my scan Only 4 packets over 5k bytes? What is going on here? Do I not need to configure jumbo frame sizes on the switch? I have an internet connection from my pc to the switch to my router - I just cannot connect to my NAS. I just checked on my iPhone and I am able to open my NAS web admin interface without issue on my iPhone! WTF!!!!!! Let me know if you need more details..

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• How to grow to be global sysadmin of an organization?

  - by user64729

  Bit of a non-technical question but I have seen questions of the career development type on here before so hopefully it is fine. I work for a fast growing but still small organization (~65 employees). I have been their external sysadmin for a while now, looking after hosted Linux servers and infrastructure. In the past 12 months I have been transforming into the internal sysadmin for our office too. I'm currently studying Cisco CCNA to cover the demands of being an internal sysadmin and looking after the office LAN, routers, switches and VPNs. Now they want me to look after the global sysadmin function of the organization as a whole. The organization has 3 offices in total, 2 in the UK and 1 in the US. I work in one of the UK offices. The other offices are primarily Windows desktops with AD domain shops. My office is primarily a Linux shop with a file-server and NFS/NIS (no AD domain for the Windows desktops yet but it's in the works). Each other office has a sysadmin which in theory I am supposed to supervise but in reality each is independent. I have a very competent junior sysadmin working with me who shares the day-to-day tasks and does some of the longer term projects with my supervision. My boss has asked me how to grow from being the external sysadmin to the global sysadmin. I am to ponder this and then report back to him on how to achieve this. My current thoughts are: Management training or professional development - eg. reading books such as "Influencer" and "7 Habits". Also I feel I should take steps to improving communication skills since a senior person is expected to talk and speak out more often. Learn more about Windows and Active Directory - I'm an LPI-certified guy and have a lot of experience in Linux (Ubuntu or desktop, Debian/Ubuntu as server). Since the other offices are mainly Windows-domains it makes sense to skill-up in that area so I can understand what the other admins are talking about. Talk to previous colleagues who have are are in this role already - to try and get the benefit of their experience. Produce an "IT Roadmap" or similar that maps out where we want the organization to be and when, plotted out over the next couple of years with regards to internal and external infrastructure. I have produced a "Security roadmap" already which does cover some of these things. I guess this can summed up as "thinking more strategically"? I'd appreciate comments from anyone who has been through a similar situation, thanks.

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• RHEL 6.x on Rackspace Cloud and Dedicated hardware experiencing Redis Timeouts

  - by zhallett

  I just recently set up a mixture of RHEL 6.1 Rackspace cloud hosts and RHEL 6.2 dedicated hosts using Rackconnect. I am experiencing intermittent Redis timeouts from within our Rails 3.2.8 app with Redis 2.4.16 running on the RHEL 6.2 dedicated hosts. There is no network latency or packet loss. Also there are no errors on any interfaces on our cloud or dedicated servers or on the managed firewall from Rackspace. When Redis timesout, there is nothing logged within redis even though it is set up to do debug logging. The only error we receive is from Airbrake saying there was a Redis timeout. Network topology: RHEL 6.1 cloud hosts <--> Alert logic IDS <--> Cisco ASA 5510 <--> RHEL 6.2 dedicated hosts (web nodes) (two way NAT) (db hosts running redis) Ping from db host to web host: 64 bytes from 10.181.230.180: icmp_seq=998 ttl=64 time=0.520 ms 64 bytes from 10.181.230.180: icmp_seq=999 ttl=64 time=0.579 ms 64 bytes from 10.181.230.180: icmp_seq=1000 ttl=64 time=0.482 ms --- web1.xxxxxx.com ping statistics --- 1000 packets transmitted, 1000 received, 0% packet loss, time 999007ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.359/0.535/5.684/0.200 ms Ping from web host to db host: 64 bytes from 192.168.100.26: icmp_seq=998 ttl=64 time=0.544 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.100.26: icmp_seq=999 ttl=64 time=0.452 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.100.26: icmp_seq=1000 ttl=64 time=0.529 ms --- data1.xxxxxx.com ping statistics --- 1000 packets transmitted, 1000 received, 0% packet loss, time 999017ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.358/0.499/6.120/0.201 ms Redis config: daemonize yes pidfile /var/run/redis/6379/redis_6379.pid port 6379 timeout 0 loglevel debug logfile /var/lib/redis/log syslog-enabled yes syslog-ident redis-6379 syslog-facility local0 databases 16 save 900 1 save 300 10 save 60 10000 rdbcompression yes dbfilename dump-6379.rdb dir /var/lib/redis maxclients 10000 maxmemory-policy volatile-lru maxmemory-samples 3 appendfilename appendonly-6379.aof appendfsync everysec no-appendfsync-on-rewrite no auto-aof-rewrite-percentage 100 auto-aof-rewrite-min-size 64mb slowlog-log-slower-than 10000 slowlog-max-len 1024 vm-enabled no vm-swap-file /tmp/redis.swap vm-max-memory 0 vm-page-size 32 vm-pages 134217728 vm-max-threads 4 hash-max-zipmap-entries 512 hash-max-zipmap-value 64 list-max-ziplist-entries 512 list-max-ziplist-value 64 set-max-intset-entries 512 zset-max-ziplist-entries 128 zset-max-ziplist-value 64 activerehashing yes Redis-cli info: redis-cli info redis_version:2.4.16 redis_git_sha1:00000000 redis_git_dirty:0 arch_bits:64 multiplexing_api:epoll gcc_version:4.4.6 process_id:4174 uptime_in_seconds:79346 uptime_in_days:0 lru_clock:1064644 used_cpu_sys:13.08 used_cpu_user:19.81 used_cpu_sys_children:1.56 used_cpu_user_children:7.69 connected_clients:167 connected_slaves:0 client_longest_output_list:0 client_biggest_input_buf:0 blocked_clients:6 used_memory:15060312 used_memory_human:14.36M used_memory_rss:22061056 used_memory_peak:15265928 used_memory_peak_human:14.56M mem_fragmentation_ratio:1.46 mem_allocator:jemalloc-3.0.0 loading:0 aof_enabled:0 changes_since_last_save:166 bgsave_in_progress:0 last_save_time:1352823542 bgrewriteaof_in_progress:0 total_connections_received:286 total_commands_processed:507254 expired_keys:0 evicted_keys:0 keyspace_hits:1509 keyspace_misses:65167 pubsub_channels:0 pubsub_patterns:0 latest_fork_usec:690 vm_enabled:0 role:master db0:keys=6,expires=0 edit 1: add redis-cli info output

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• RFC 1918 address on open internet?

  - by longneck

  In trying to diagnose a failover problem with my Cisco ASA 5520 firewalls, I ran a traceroute to www.btfl.com and, much to my surprise, some of the hops came back as RFC 1918 addresses. Just to be clear, this host is not behind my firewall and there is no VPN involved. I have to connect across the open internet to get there. How/why is this possible? asa# traceroute www.btfl.com Tracing the route to 157.56.176.94 1 <redacted> 2 <redacted> 3 <redacted> 4 <redacted> 5 nap-edge-04.inet.qwest.net (67.14.29.170) 0 msec 10 msec 10 msec 6 65.122.166.30 0 msec 0 msec 10 msec 7 207.46.34.23 10 msec 0 msec 10 msec 8 * * * 9 207.46.37.235 30 msec 30 msec 50 msec 10 10.22.112.221 30 msec 10.22.112.219 30 msec 10.22.112.223 30 msec 11 10.175.9.193 30 msec 30 msec 10.175.9.67 30 msec 12 100.94.68.79 40 msec 100.94.70.79 30 msec 100.94.71.73 30 msec 13 100.94.80.39 30 msec 100.94.80.205 40 msec 100.94.80.137 40 msec 14 10.215.80.2 30 msec 10.215.68.16 30 msec 10.175.244.2 30 msec 15 * * * 16 * * * 17 * * * and it does the same thing from my FiOS connection at home: C:\>tracert www.btfl.com Tracing route to www.btfl.com [157.56.176.94] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms myrouter.home [192.168.1.1] 2 8 ms 7 ms 8 ms <redacted> 3 10 ms 13 ms 11 ms <redacted> 4 12 ms 10 ms 10 ms ae2-0.TPA01-BB-RTR2.verizon-gni.net [130.81.199.82] 5 16 ms 16 ms 15 ms 0.ae4.XL2.MIA19.ALTER.NET [152.63.8.117] 6 14 ms 16 ms 16 ms 0.xe-11-0-0.GW1.MIA19.ALTER.NET [152.63.85.94] 7 19 ms 16 ms 16 ms microsoft-gw.customer.alter.net [63.65.188.170] 8 27 ms 33 ms * ge-5-3-0-0.ash-64cb-1a.ntwk.msn.net [207.46.46.177] 9 * * * Request timed out. 10 44 ms 43 ms 43 ms 207.46.37.235 11 42 ms 41 ms 40 ms 10.22.112.225 12 42 ms 43 ms 43 ms 10.175.9.1 13 42 ms 41 ms 42 ms 100.94.68.79 14 40 ms 40 ms 41 ms 100.94.80.193 15 * * * Request timed out.

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• A dusty server room

  - by pauska

  Here's the story.. The owners of the building we lease office space from decided to do a renovation of the exterior. This involved in some pretty heavy work at the level where our server room is, including exchanging windows wich are fit inside a concrete wall. My red alert went off when I heard that they were going to do the same thing with our server room (yes, our server room has a window. We're a small shop with 3 racks. The window is secured with steel bars.) I explicity told the contractor that they need to put up a temporarily wall between our racks and the original wall - and to make sure that the temporary wall is 100 % air and water-tight. They promised to do so. The temporary wall has a small door in it, so that workers can go in/out through the day (through our server room, wich was the only option....). On several occasions I could find the small door half-way shut while working evenings/nights. I locked the door, and thought that they would hopefully get the point soon and keep the door shut. I even gave a electrician a mouthful when I saw that he didn't close the door properly. By this point - I bet that most of you get a picture of what happened. Yes, they probably left the door open while drilling in the concrete. I present you our 4 weeks old EMC VNX: I'll even put in a little bonus, here is the APC UPS one rack further away from the temporary wall. See the nice little landing strip from my finger? What should I do? The only thing that comes to mind is to either call all our suppliers (EMC, HP, Dell, Cisco) and get them to send technicians to check out all the gear in the server room, or get some kind of certified 3rd-party consulant to check all of it. Would you run production systems on this gear? How long? Edit: I should also note that our aircondition isn't exactly enterprise-grade, given the nature of our small room. It's just a single inverter, wich have failed one time before I started working here (failed inverters usually leads to water dripping out).

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• pix 501, static route to d-link router (different subnet)

  - by ra170

  I have pix 501 cisco firewall with internal ip 192.168.10.1. I have connected d-link router (dir-655) to pix 501. The d-link router has internal ip 192.168.0.1 The picture would like something like that: |pix 501| has 192.168.10.1 ip |DIR-655| has 192.168.0.1 ip 1. |cable modem|----|pix 501|-------|DIR-655|-----PC 2. PC--------|pix 501|---------|DIR-655| | | |cable modem| When I'm on the wireless network (dir-655) with assigned ip of 192.168.0.x I can cross the subnet and connect to my firewall 192.168.10.1. (pic. 1) The problem is that if I'm on the 192.168.10.x network I can't connect to anything over at 192.168.0.x network. (pic.2) I've tried entering a static route like this: `route inside 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.1 1` I also tried assigning static ip to wan interface on DIR-655 to 192.168.10.30 and then tried this: route inside 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.30 1 But still, can't connect to 192.168.0.1 or anything on that subnet. Is there a way to setup a static route? Would adding a separate router between PIX 501 and DIR-655 help? I would think that static route like this should take care of it, but it doesn't. This is my route config and nat: (config)# sh route outside 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 (outside_IP) 1 DHCP static outside (outside_IP) 255.255.248.0 (outside_IP) 1 CONNECT static inside 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.1 1 OTHER static inside 192.168.10.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.1 1 CONNECT static or (route inside 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.30 1) (config)# sh nat nat (inside) 1 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 0 0 nat (inside) 1 192.168.10.0 255.255.255.0 0 0 nat (inside) 1 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 0 0 I ended up turning DIR-655 into an Access Point (turning off DHCP and pluging cable from PIX lan interface into one of the LAN interfaces on DIR-655, and leaving WAN port empty), that works as far as DIR-655 being on the same subnet now, and I can access every machine. However the question is, why can't I simply route between those two? would router between these two help? One of the reasons is, that the PIX 501 has only 10 licences, so now I'm using almost all of them. (I have few computers, iphones, ps3, print server, etc.) I would really appreciate some help! Thanks.

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• Port forwarding not working properly

  - by sudo work

  I'm trying to host a small web server from my home network; however, I have not been able to successfully port forward ports to the local server. My current network topology looks like this: Cable Modem/Router - Secondary Wireless Router - Many computers (including server) The modem/router I'm using is a Cisco (Scientific Atlantic) DPC2100, provided by my ISP. The wireless router that I'm using as the central hub to my home network is a Linksys E3000. The computer being used as a server is running Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition. The main issue is that I can't access the server remotely, using my WAN IP address. I have port forwarded my wireless router; however, I believe that I need to somehow set my modem to bridge mode. As far as I can tell though, this isn't possible. Here are the various IP address settings: DPC2100 WAN: 69.xxx.xxx.xxx Internal IP: 192.168.100.1 Internal Network: 192.168.7.0 E3000 IP Address: 192.168.7.2 Gateway: 192.168.7.1 Internal IP: 192.168.1.1 Internal Network: 192.168.1.0 Server IP Address: 192.168.1.123 Gateway: 192.168.1.1 Now I can do an nmap at various nodes, and here are the results (from the server): nmap localhost: 22,25,53,80,110,139,143,445,631,993,995,3306,5432,8080 open nmap 192.168.7.2: 22,25,80 (filtered),110,139,445 open (ports I have forwarded in the E3000)* nmap 69.xxx.xxx.xxx: 1720 open *For some reason, I can SSH into the server at 192.168.7.2, but not view the website. Here are also some other settings: /etc/hosts/ 127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.1.1 servername ::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback fe00::0 ip6-localnet ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix ff02::1 ip6-allnodes ff02::2 ip6-allrouters /etc/apache2/sites-available/default snippet <VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot /srv/www/ <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None </Directory> <Directory /var/www/> ... </Directory> ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin"> ... </Directory> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log LogLevel warn CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/" <Directory "/usr/share/doc/"> ... </Directory> </VirtualHost> Let me know if you need any other information; some stuff probably slipped my mind.

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• One user sometimes gets an unknown certificate error opening Outlook

  - by Chris

  Let me clarify a little. This isn't an unknown certificate error it's an unknown certificate error in so much as I can't figure out where the certificate comes from. This happens on a Win 7 Enterprise machine connecting to Exchange 2010 with Outlook 2010. The error he gets is that the root is not trusted because it's a self-signed cert. Take a look at this screenshot because even if I had generated this myself I wouldn't have put "SomeOrganizationalUnit" or "SomeCity" or "SomeState", etc. (Red block covers our domain name.) I'm a little concerned this is a symptom of a security breach. Exchange 2010 has three certificates installed but none of them are this certificate. They all have different expiration dates (one is expired) and different meta-data. edit: There are two scenarios that I see the certificate warning and one of them I can reliably repeat. When the user leaves his computer on over night Outlook pops the Security Warning window. I don't know what time this happens. Using Outlook Anywhere if I connect to Exchange externally via a cellular USB modem the Security Warning window will appear every time I close and reopen Outlook. Whether I say Yes or No does not make a difference on whether or not I can connect to Exchange and send/receive email. In other words, I can always connect to Exchange. I've checked my two Exchange servers and my Cisco router for a certificate that matches this one and I can't find it. edit 2: Here is a screenshot of the Security Alert window. (I've been calling it Security Warning... My mistake.) edit 3: I stopped seeing this error several weeks ago but I can't tie it to any single event (because I just sort of realized that warning had stopped showing up) but I think I found the source of the certificate. Last week I found out that the certificate on our website DomainA.com was invalid. I knew that our web admin had installed a valid certificate so when I look into the problem I found out I was being presented with the invalid certificate that this posting is in regards to. The Exchange server's domain is mail.DomainA.com so I can only guess that Outlook was passing this invalid certificate through as it did some kind of check on DomainA.com. This issue is still a mystery because the certificate warning stopped appearing several weeks ago whereas the invalid certificate issue on the website was only fixed last week. It ended up being a problem with the website control panel. The valid certificate was installed but not being served for some reason and instead the self-signed cert was being served.

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• IT merger - self-sufficient site with domain controller VS thin clients outpost with access to termi

  - by imagodei

  SITUATION: A larger company acquires a smaller one. IT infrastructure has to be merged. There are no immediate plans to change the current size or role of the smaller company - the offices and production remain. It has a Win 2003 SBS domain server, Win 2000 file server, linux server for SVN and internal Wikipedia, 2 or 3 production machines, LTO backup solution. The servers are approx. 5 years old. Cisco network equippment (switches, wireless, ASA). Mail solution is a hosted Exchange. There are approx. 35 desktops and laptops in the company. IT infrastructure unification: There are 2 IT merging proposals. 1.) Replacing old servers, installing Win Server 2008 domain controller, and setting up either subdomain or domain trust to a larger company. File server and other servers remain local and synchronization should be set up to a centralized location in larger company. Similary with the backup - it remains local and if needed it should be replicated to a centralized location. Licensing is managed by smaller company. 2.) All servers are moved to a centralized location in larger company. As many desktop machines as possible are replaced by thin clients. The actual machines are virtualized and hosted by Terminal server at the same central location. Citrix solutions will be used. Only router and site-2-site VPN connection remain at the smaller company. Backup internet line to insure near 100% availability is needed. Licensing is mainly managed by larger company. Only specialized software for PCs that will not be virtualized is managed by smaller company. I'd like to ask you to discuss both solutions a bit. In your opinion, which is better from the operational point of view? Which is more reliable, cheaper in the long run? Easier to manage from the system administrator's point of view? Easier on the budget and easier to maintain from IT department's point of view? Does anybody have any experience with the second option and how does it perform in production environment? Pros and cons of both? Your input will be of great significance to me. Thank you very much!

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• What router hardware or software should be used when multiple public IPs are routed into the same LAN?

  - by lcbrevard

  I am looking for recommendations to replace a set of consumer grade (Linksys, Netgear, Belkin) routers with something that can handle more traffic while routing more than one static public IP into the same LAN address space. We have a block of static public IPs, 5 usable, with Comcast Business. Currently four of them are in use for: General office access Web server Mail and DNS servers Download and backup web server for separate business All systems (a mixture of physical and virtual) are in the same LAN address space (10.x.y.0/24) to enable easy access between them inside the office. There are 30 or more systems in use depending on which virtual machines are currently active. We have a mixture of Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Currently a separate consumer grade router is used for each of the four static addresses, with its WAN address set to the specific static address and a different gateway address for each: uses 10.x.y.1 - various ports are forwarded to various LAN IPs on systems with gateway 10.x.y.1 uses 10.x.y.254 - port 80 is forwarded to a server with gateway 10.x.y.254 uses 10.x.y.253 - ports for mail and dns are forwarded to a server with gateway 10.x.y.253 uses 10.x.y.252 - ports as needed are forwarded to server with gateway 10.x.y.252 Only router 1. is allowed to serve DHCP and address reservation based on the MAC is used for most of the internal "server" IP addresses so they are at fixed values. [Some are set static due to limitations in the address reservation capabilities of router 1.] And, yes, this really does work! But... I am looking for: better DHCP with more capable address reservation higher capacity so I don't have to periodically power cycle the routers One obvious improvement would be to have a real DHCP server and not use a consumer grade router for that purpose. I am torn between buying a "professional" router such as Cisco or Juniper or Sonic Wall verus learning to configure some spare hardware to perform this function. The price goes up extremely rapidly with capabilities for commercial routers! Worse, some routers require licensing based on the number of clients - a disaster in our environment with so many virtual machines. Sorry for such a long posting but I am getting tired of having to power cycle routers and deal with shifting IP addresses afterwards!

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• Wifi network stopped being visible (and usable) (Linksys wag320n)

  - by s427

  Basically, my wifi network simply stopped working for no apparent reason. It doesn't appear in the list of the available networks anymore. I can see all my neighbors' networks, but not mine. It's as if it doesn't exist anymore. The internet connection (non-wifi), which goes through the same modem/router, is fine though. I already had a similar problem about one year ago (see here: Wifi network SSID not visible ), just after buying this very modem. I finally got it to work after performing two factory resets and getting rid of the Cisco "Magic" software; but this time it's not working. I use a linksys router-modem (WAG320N) which is directly connected (via network cable) to my desktop computer (Windows 7). I have (mainly) two devices that use the wifi network: my phone (Samsung Galaxy Nexus) and an Asus tablet (TF201, aka Transformer Prime). I also resurrected an old laptop computer (Dell, running Windows XP) to test that, and it doesn't see anything either (apart from the 20 other wifi networks, of course ^^). This wifi network was working just fine and has been for about a year. I haven't touched the modem settings so I have no idea what's causing the problem. I tried: making my phone "forget" about my network, hoping it would see it again after that: no luck. re-entering the network informations (SSID/password) manually on my phone: still no luck (says it's not in range) exporting the modem configuration, resetting the modem (factory reset, via modem admin), restarting it, importing the configuration: nope. factory reset, turning it off for 15 minutes, restarting, re-factory reset, and entering the configuration manually: still nothing. Has anybody experienced something similar before? Have you any suggestion to fix that? Thanks in advance. PS: to clear things up, here are the settings of my modem regarding wifi: Basic wireless settings: Configuration: manual Radio Band: 2.4GHz Wireless Network Mode: B/G/N-Mixed SSID: s427 Channel Bandwidth: Wide - 40 MHz Channel Wide Channel: 9 - 2.452GHz Standard Channel: 11 - 2.462GHz SSID Broadcast: Enable Advanced Wireless Settings AP Isolation: Disable Authentication Type: Auto Basic Rate: Default Transmission Rate: Auto N Transmission Rate: Auto CTS Protection Mode: Disable Beacon Interval: 100 DTIM Interval: 1 Fragmentation Threshold: 2346 RTS Threshold: 2346

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• Book Review Charlene Li's New Book: Open Leadership

  - by david.talamelli

  A few weeks ago, I was surprised when I looked in our mail box. I had received an Advance Copy of Charlene Li's new book titled "Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead". Charlene sent a tweet a while back asking anyone interested in receiving the book to submit their details. I sent off my details and didn't think I would hear anything back, so it was a pleasant surprise. With that I almost feel bad that it has taken me 3 weeks to read her book. It took this long mainly because it has been hard to fit in some quality reading time for myself with work, the kids, volunteering, etc..... I am happy to report I have finished her book and wanted to run through my initial thoughts with you. I first came across Charlene Li after reading her book "Groundswell" a few years ago, her latest book "Open Leadership" is a follow on from Groundswell and to me it seems like a natural progression from the question "Ok the business landscape is changing, what do we do now?" For me these two books have a different writing style to them. Groundswell from memory spoke about broad social media concepts and adoption and alerted us to some of the changes taking place in the SM landscape. Open Leadership seems to be focussed on taking those broad concepts and finding ways to implement them into your environment. That is breaking broad concepts down into individual action items that can be measured and analysed. As the business world changes Leaders must change their approach and let go of control to more control. One of the things I love reading about is seeing real life examples of how people and organisations are making these things happen. In this book Charlene has collected some great collateral and case studies from companies such as Cisco, Best Buy, The Red Cross and The State Bank of India (as a side-note, I wish now that I submitted my input for the Leaders I work with here at Oracle - there are some great examples here of people who empower their staff). As society becomes more adept at using social media it is inevitable that Leaders must become open with their employees, clients and partners. From the book some of the key points I took away are (I actually took away a lot more from this book, this is just an overview) : 1) Organisations should encourage risk taking. Without being a "hacker", how can we improve ourselves, our processes, our business, etc... The old saying you only fail by not trying applies here. If Leaders create a culture where people are afraid to stick their neck out - how will you innovate? 2) Leaders need to lead by example - if you want to promote an open and transparent business, a Leader needs to exemplify the traits they would like to see out of their employees. 3) The definition of a Leader is changing, open leadership is about being a catalyst to change that uses networks to spread a vision as opposed to traditional leadership that is viewed as a role. 4) There is a cultural and business shift taking place. Information is more wide-spread and is being disseminated faster than any other time in the past. Leaders who are open and transparent will thrive in this new business environment. 5) Leadership is not defined by a title - it is defined by a person's actions. Also anyone can be a Leader or has Leadership potential in them- it is a matter of drawing that out of people. I found this book useful and I also found myself looking at my own actions and the actions of others around me (including my management) to see how open and transparent I am in my work. For me I am glad I read this book as it validated my own thoughts of the changes we are seeing take place. This book has certainly given me some new ideas and helped me push my own boundaries of what I can do. The book has a number of action plans at the end of some of the chapters such as "Conducting you Openness Audit" that I think have helped me take thoughts and ideas and turn them into concrete action items. I have included a link to the introduction of the book here if anyone wants to have a read of it. If anyone else has read this book, it would be great to hear your thoughts/comments/review. Leave your comments below. This article was originally posted on David Talamelli's Blog - David's Journal on Tap

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• What if &ldquo;Microsoft&rdquo; were in our shoes? About Windows Phone

  - by Vijaya Malla

  This is what I think about Microsoft Windows Phone. If Microsoft were in our shoes looking at various phones available their configurations, memory, front facing cameras etc. Microsoft disappointed the USA customer base again by not getting Nokia Lumia 800. The Past: If we talk few years ago, few business people were on their Blackberry’s and few Gadget lovers were on crappy Windows OS devices. The world was all going right till Apple came with a revolutionary device iPhone, which completely changed our perception towards phone and how great a smartphone can be. It’s not just phone but the whole technology industry. The romantic appealing of the phone and smooth touch and feel of it made everyone to get one of those bad boys. The sales went up for not just Apple for AT&T too. Even though everyone complained about the signal strength of AT&T, everyone wanted to be on it because they have iPhones. All world wanted iPhone back then except Microsoft with few comments on how it is not going to be in market. But it did great and rocked the industry. A few years later with iPhone and Android taking over the smartphone market Microsoft realized that it should be in the game too. Worked on the design of it, and gave us the best Mobile OS ever. Everyone thinks that iOS is a great OS for phones but if you have touched a Windows Phone and use it for real then you will realize the strengths of it. so last year we welcomed Windows Phone 7 The Present : Windows Phone 7 has the fastest growing market. The phones are cheap, you can buy from any carrier out there. The phone became smarter and smarter with the recent update “Mango (7.5)” and with the collaboration with Nokia, Microsoft created a new eco-system for smartphones with the best smartphone hardware and best smartphone software. Everyone in the world was excited about the collaboration. As we fly over cloud 9 imagining about Nokia made Windows Phones we all heard a good news from Nokia “Nokia World”. Nokia showed the world what a best hardware making company can do with Windows Phone 7.5 OS. Nokia Lumia 800 and 710 took the spotlight. Everyone here in USA and all over the world wanted to own a Nokia Lumia 800 because of the design, software, proprietary apps from Nokia (maps, ESPN, drive and music). If USA market had Nokia Lumia 800, then it would have been the best step Microsoft and Nokia had ever made in their history of smartphone market. With all the numbers going to Android and IPhone, its not clear on why Microsoft/Nokia did not release Lumia 800 here in USA. Its unclear if Microsoft had learnt the lesson or not. if it had learnt the lesson I guess Microsoft needs to get the Nokia Lumia 800 to the USA. The Future: This is where we hope we get the best form Microsoft. I was an iPhone user, I used 2G, 3G, 3GS, 4 and then moved to Windows Phone and never felt so happy with my iPhones’. From the day when Nokia announced the partnership with Microsoft and said that they going to come up with a new Nokia windows phone, I was dreaming for my Nokia Phone. but looks like it is not going to happen any time soon. My thoughts about the Market :  Nokia has the biggest market base in the world. Even though people moved to Android or iPhone over the years in other parts of the world like India and China, people still love to use Nokia. Everyone who uses a Windows Phone now will wait for that day when Nokia Lumia comes to the USA but what either or both of the companies should do for a better market share is to make a very aggressive move with the hardware and bet on the devices. I am pretty sure that it will work. everyone here in the USA will like to have a dual core windows phone with front facing camera and all other crazy things that android/apple phones offer. I think we just have to wait for that day and hope that day comes soon. Love Microsoft and Nokia Thank you for reading.

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• Software development stack 2012

  A couple of months ago, I posted on Google+ about my evaluation period for a new software development stack in general. "Analysing existing 'jungle' of multiple applications and tools in various languages for clarification and future design decisions. Great fun and lots of headaches... #DevelopersLife" Surprisingly, there was response... ;-) - And this series of articles is initiated by this post. Thanks Olaf. The past few years... Well, after all my first choice of software development in the past was Microsoft Visual FoxPro 6.0 - 9.0 in combination with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - 2008 and Crystal Reports 9.x - XI. Honestly, it is my main working environment due to exisiting maintenance and support plans with my customers, but also for new project requests. And... hands on, it is still my first choice for data manipulation and migration options. But the earth is spinning, and as a software craftsman one has to be flexible with the choice of tools. In parallel to my knowledge and expertise in the above mentioned tools, I already started very early to get my hands dirty with the Microsoft .NET Framework. If I remember correctly, I started back in 2002/2003 with the first version ever. But this was more out of curiousity. During the years this kind of development got more serious and demanding, and I focused myself on interop and integrational libraries and applications. Mainly, to expose exisitng features of the .NET Framework to Visual FoxPro - I even had a session about that at the German Developer's Conference in Frankfurt. Observation of recent developments With the recent hype on Javascript and HTML5, especially for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development, I had several 'Deja vu' events... Back in early 2006 (roughly) I had a conversation on the future of Web and Desktop development with my former colleagues Golo Roden and Thomas Wilting about the underestimation of Javascript and its root as a prototype-based, dynamic, full-featured programming language. During this talk with them I took the Mozilla applications, namely Firefox and Thunderbird, as a reference which are mainly based on XML, CSS, Javascript and images - besides the core rendering engine. And that it is very simple to write your own extensions for the Gecko rendering engine. Looking at the Windows Vista Sidebar widgets, just underlines this kind of usage. So, yes the 'Modern UI' of Windows 8 based on HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript didn't come as any surprise to me. Just allow me to ask why did it take so long for Microsoft to come up with this step? A new set of tools Ok, coming from web development in HTML 4, CSS and Javascript prior to Visual FoxPro, I am partly going back to that combination of technologies. What is the other part of the software development stack here at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd? Frankly, it is easy and straight forward to describe: Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP 2 - still going strong! Visual Studio 2012 (C# on latest .NET Framework) MonoDevelop Telerik DevCraft Suite WPF ASP.NET MVC Windows 8 Kendo UI OpenAccess ORM Reporting JustCode CODE Framework by EPS Software MonoTouch and Mono for Android Subversion and additional tools for the daily routine: Notepad++, JustCode, SQL Compare, DiffMerge, VMware, etc. Following the principles of Clean Code Developer and the Agile Manifesto Actually, nothing special about this combination but rather a solid fundament to work with and create line of business applications for customers.Honestly, I am really interested in your choice of 'weapons' for software development, and hopefully there might be some nice conversations in the comment section. Over the next coming days/weeks I'm going to describe a little bit more in detail about the reasons for my decision. Articles will be added bit by bit here as reference, too. Please bear with me... Regards, JoKi

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• Google TV Gets Bad Reception. Can Media Center Pull in the Signal?

  - by andrewbrust

  The news hit Monday morning that Google has decided to delay the release of its Google TV platform, and has asked its OEMs to delay any products that embed the software.  Coming just about two weeks prior to the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Google’s timing is about the worst imaginable.  CES is where the platform should have had its coming out party, especially given all the anticipation that has built up since its initial announcement came 7 months ago. At last year’s CES, it seemed every consumer electronics company had fashioned its own software stack for Internet-based video programming and applications/widgets on its TVs, optical disc players and set top boxes.  In one case, I even saw two platforms on a single TV set (one provided by Yahoo and the other one native to the TV set). The whole point of Google TV was to solve this problem and offer a standard, embeddable platform.  But that won’t be happening, at least not for a while.  Google seems unable to get it together, and more proprietary approaches, like Apple TV, don’t seem to be setting the world of TV-Internet convergence on fire, either. It seems to me, that when it comes to building a “TV operating system,” Windows Media Center is still the best of a bad bunch.  But it won’t stay so for much longer without some changes.  Will Redmond pick up the ball that Google has fumbled?  I’m skeptical, but hopeful.  Regardless, here are some steps that could help Microsoft make the most of Google’s faux pas: Introduce a new Media Center version that uses XBox 360, rather than Windows 7 (or 8), as the platform.  TV platforms should be appliance-like, not PC-like.  Combine that notion with the runaway sales numbers for Xbox 360 Kinect, and the mass appeal it has delivered for Xbox, and the switch form Windows makes even more sense. As I have pointed out before, Microsoft’s Xbox implementation of its Mediaroom platform (announced and demoed at last year’s CES) gets Redmond 80% of the way toward this goal.  Nothing stops Microsoft from going the other 20%, other than its own apathy, which I hope has dissipated. Reverse the decision to remove Drive Extender technology from Windows Home Server (WHS), and create deep integration between WHS and Media Center.  I have suggested this previously as well, but the recent announcement that Drive Extender would be dropped from WHS 2.0 creates the need for me to a) join the chorus of people urging Microsoft to reconsider and b) reiterate the importance of Media Center-WHS integration in the context of a Google compete scenario. Enable Windows Phone 7 (WP7) as a Media Center client.  This would tighten the integration loop already established between WP7, Xbox and Zune.  But it would also counter Echostar/DISH Network/Sling Media, strike a blow against Google/Android (and even Apple/iOS) and could be the final strike against TiVO. Bring the WP7 user interface to Media Center and Kinect-enable it.  This would further the integration discussed above and would be appropriate recognition of WP7’s Metro UI having been built on the heritage of the original Media Center itself.  And being able to run your DVR even if you can’t find the remote (or can’t see its buttons in the dark) could be a nifty gimmick. Microsoft can do this but its consumer-oriented organization, responsible for Xbox, Zune and WP7, has to take the reins here, or none of this will likely work.  There’s a significant chance that won’t happen, but I won’t let that stop me from hoping that it does and insisting that it must.  Honestly, this fight is Microsoft’s to lose.

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