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• WNDR3700 Router + Cisco SG200-08 + LACP + Dual Uplink

  - by kobaltz

  Background I have a storage server that has several virtual machine images stored on them. I would store them locally, but I have limited space on my desktop (using SSD storage). I would like to increase the bandwidth between the desktop and the storage server by using two NICs on each computer. My original configuration allowed about 55MBps between the desktop and storage server. This storage server also has several TBs of documents, pictures, movies, vms, and ISO/programs. The storage server has 8 1.5TB hard drives in a RAID 10 configuration with a hardware RAID controller. The benchmarks on the RAID 10 are about 300MBps. Configuration In short, I am trying to bridge my switch and router. The switch is a small 8 port Cisco smart switch that supports 802.3ad LACP. I have two computers plugged into the switch, each with 2 Intel Gigabit NICs. The first computer is a Windows 7 machine that has the Intel ANS software installed. I have LACP configured with the computer and now show 3 NICs (2 Physical + 1 TEAM Virtual @ 2Gbps). It looks like this computer is configured correctly. I trunked the two ports that this computer is plugged into with the switch's web interface. The second computer is a homebrew storage box running debian. I also have the bonding enabled on this machine and the switch configured with LACP. Without having the WNDR3700 router in the picture yet, I am able to communicate between the Windows 7 machine and the debian box since they both have static IP addresses. With LACP enabled on both machines I am getting about 106-108MBps speeds. Issue I plug in a network cable from the switch into the router and enable DHCP on the desktop. I saw no need to have a static address on the desktop. My transfer rates are still from 106MBps-108MBps. While this is still a boost, I am trying to figure out how to get about 140-180MBps. I am thinking that I need to increase the bandwidth from the router to the switch. My switch allows 4 groups for port trunking. I plugged in a second network cable from the router to the switch. My question is, what is the proper way to fix this issue. Should I port trunk the two ports that are going from the switch to the router? Keep in mind that the router is a WNDR3700 and is unsure whether or not it supports LACP. I do have OpenWRT installed on the router, but it still wasn't clear in any documentation that I found if it supported 802.3ad LACP standards. I am also wondering if there needs to be anything changed within the Cisco settings. [Edit] - Corrected some numbers, wasn't really paying attention. It looks like the speeds though at least two NICs are bonded with LACP is still reaching the max bandwidth of one port. Is there a way to configure the switch so that I can increase this bandwidth? Also, on the storage server, I had a couple of extra NICs laying around and threw them on there as well. Another EDIT and More Findings I happened to look at the traffic of each individual NIC and think that I see the problem. I tested with a simple transfer for a 4GB file. I noticed that only one of the NICs was taking the load of the traffic. I then copied the file back to the Storage Server and noticed that the other NIC was sending out the traffic. I have 802.3ad LACP enabled on the two NICs and I see that it gets enabled dynamically on the switch's interface. Should I be using Static Link Aggregation?

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• Apache returns 403 Forbidden for alternative port vhost

  - by Wesley

  I'm having an issue getting vhosts to work on Apache 2.2, Debian 6. I have two VirtualHosts, one on port 80 and one on port 8888. The port 80 one has been created automatically by DirectAdmin, the 8888 is a custom one. It's configuration is as follows. <VirtualHost *:8888 > DocumentRoot /home/user/public_html/development ServerName www.myserver.nl ServerAlias myserver.nl <Directory "/home/user/public_html/development"> Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews AllowOverride All Order Allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> </VirtualHost> Of course I also have a NameVirtualHost *:8888 The port 80 DocumentRoot is /home/user/public_html/production, which is perfectly accessible and works like a charm. The port 8888 docroot of /home/user/public_html/development is 403 forbidden though. I have compared the permissions for both folders. They seem fine to me. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 17 16:14 development drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Aug 18 04:29 production Also, the index.php file which is supposed to display when accessing through port 8888, located in /development/: -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 41 Aug 17 16:14 index.html I have looked at my error_log and found many of the following entries, only being added to the log file when accessing through port 8888. [Sat Aug 18 04:35:09 2012] [error] [client 27.32.156.232] Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /home/user/public_html /home/user/public_html is a symbolic link that refers to /home/user/domains/mydomain/public_html. The symbolic link has the following permissions: lrwxrwxrwx 1 admin admin 29 Aug 17 15:56 public_html -> ./domains/mydomain/public_html I'm at a loss. It seems that everything is readable or executable. I've set the Directory to FollowSymLinks in the httpd.conf file, but that doesn't seem to make a difference. If I change that directory tag to <Directory "/home/admin/public_html"> (so it has FollowSymLinks on that as well) it still does not work. Any help is greatly appreciated. If I need to post more information, let me know. I'm pretty much a beginner at this stuff. .. .. UPDATE: I ended up changing the configuration to directly go to the actual path of the files, avoiding the public_html symlink altogether. That worked. Thanks for the suggestions folks. DocumentRoot /home/user/domains/mydomain/public_html/development instead of DocumentRoot /home/user/public_html/development

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• Windows 7 disk errors after a few hours of runtime

  - by GFK

  I'm having trouble understanding what is going on with my work PC. Whenever I boot it, it runs fine for a while, then starts to randomly show disk errors. The displayed error often contains the message "not enough storage is available to process this command", although depending on the application that fails it can be different. This has happened for weeks now and is getting worse. This is what troubles me: It never seems to impact critical parts of the system (no BSOD, no freeze). Only some applications seem impacted, refusing to function correctly after a while: Outlook 2010 cannot download RSS feeds anymore, Firefox 6 or IE9 cannot download anything bigger than 3MB without failing, Windows Update fails, all msi installers fail, Visual Studio 2010 starts failing in weird manners... It only happens after a while using it (typically 3 hours, but it seems that installing a program or compiling several times makes it shorter) Rebooting solves it (temporarily). The system: The OS is Windows 7 Pro Spanish SP1, 32 bits The system is an HP Compaq 6000 Pro with 4 GB memory (only 3.4GB usable since the system is 32bit), one 500GB hard drive. Installed applications include: Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, VMWare Workstation 7, Microsoft Security Essentials, Office 2010. Shutting down all related services and processes doesn't seem to change anything. The diagnostics I've run so far: Hard drive : 465GB, 165GB free Process Explorer : physical and virtual memory seem ok (pagefile is 5.3GB, physical memory usage 70%, system commit 39%) Windows Memory diagnostic tool: OK CHKDSK returned: 488282111 KB total disk space. 281668248 KB in 265779 files. 150188 KB in 62949 indexes. 0 KB in bad sectors. 571755 KB in use by the system. The log file has occupied 65536 kilobytes. 205891920 KB available on disk. For non-spanish speakers, that means all ok. SMART diagnostic tools (DiskCheckup) report all values normal. temperatures are in the normal range (HWinfo). The event viewer doesn't seem to contain any significant message. ran CCleaner 3, without any noticeable effect. I was thinking about some file number limit (between Visual Studio projects and other applications, there are around 300.000 files on the hard drive), but I couldn't find any. It's possible there is something related with the use of the temporary folders (it's the only explanation I have for why applications fail but Windows doesn't), but I cannot confirm that. Only thing I cannot find out is if chkdsk reporting 65MB for the log is normal. It seems since Vista it always reports this. Any other cleaning/diagnostic tool you might know of? Edit: I ran several other tools since I first published the question: Seagate SeaTools (the HD manufacturer's analysis tool): complete test run OK. Intel Rapid 10.1 (the HD controller manufacturer's troubleshooting tool): the HD's ok. Microsoft Desktop Heap Monitor: Desktop Heap Information Monitor Tool (Version 8.1.2925.0) Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Session ID: 1 Total Desktop: ( 46464 KB - 11 desktops) WinStation\Desktop Heap Size(KB) Used Rate(%) WinSta0\Winlogon (s1) 128 3.6 WinSta0\Disconnect (s1) 64 3.8 WinSta0\Default (s1) 20480 3.0 msswindowstation\mssrestricteddesk (s0) 1024 0.2 __X78B95_89_IW__A8D9S1_42_ID (s0) 1024 0.2 Service-0x0-3e5$\Default (s0) 1024 0.6 Service-0x0-3e4$\Default (s0) 1024 0.3 Service-0x0-3e7$\Default (s0) 1024 2.1 WinSta0\Winlogon (s0) 128 1.9 WinSta0\Disconnect (s0) 64 3.8 WinSta0\Default (s0) 20480 0.0 All ok, desktop heap usage < 5% Edit 2: I tried totally resetting my account by creating a new one, logging under this new one and delete the first one (local rights and files), then logging back with this deleted account (it is a domain account). No luck. Also, I found out often the error is "not enough storage is available to process this command". Searching on the internet, I found an old troubleshooting tip (setting a registry key to raise the IRP stack limit, whatever it is) which did not change anything.

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• How to allow unprivileged apache/PHP to do a root task (CentOS)

  - by Chris

  I am setting up a sort of personal dropbox for our customers on a CentOS 6.3 machine. The server will be accessible thru SFTP and a proprietary http service base on PHP. This machine will be in our DMZ so it has to be secure. Because of this I have apache running as an unprivileged user, hardened the security on apache, the OS, PHP, applied a lot of filtering in iptables and applied some restrictive TCP Wrappers. Now you might have suspected this one was coming, SELinux is also set to enforcing. I'm setting up PAM to use MySQL so my users in the web application can login. These users will all be in a group that can use SSH only for SFTP and users will be chrooted to their own 'home' folder. To allow this SELinux wants the folders to have the user_home_t tag. Also the parent directory needs to be writable by root only. If these restrictions are not met SELinux will kill the SSH pipe immediately. The files that need to be accessible thru both http and SFTP so I have made a SELinux module to allow Apache to search/attr/read/write etc. to directories with the user_home_dir_t tag. As sftp users are stored in MySQL I want to setup their home dirs upon user creation. This is a problem since Apache has no write access to the /home dir, it's only writable by root since it's required to keep SELinux and OpenSSH happy. Basically I need to let Apache do only a few tasks as root and only within /home. So I need to somehow elevate the privileges temporarily or let root do these tasks for apache instead. What I need to have apache do with root privileges is the following. mkdir /home/userdir/ mkdir /home/userdir/userdir chmod -R 0755 /home/userdir umask 011 /home/userdir/userdir chcon -R -t user_home_t /home/userdir chown -R user:sftp_admin /home/userdir/userdir chmod 2770 /home/userdir/userdir This would create a home for the user, now I have an idea that might work, cron. That would mean the server needs to check for users that have no home every minute, then when creating users the interface would freeze for an average of 30 seconds before the account creation can be confirmed which I do not prefer. Does anybody know if something can be done with sudoers? Or any other idea's are welcome... Thanks for your time!

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• web services access not being reached thru the web browser [closed]

  - by Tony

  I am trying to reference my .asmx webservices in .NET but my server is not exposed to the internet. When I put on the following address I get the message mentioned below. What's the reason for not being able to see the directory? Am I missing something in my IIS configuraction? Am I missing anything in my permissions? Just as reference I have other folders with webservices and I have the same issue. When I login to the server I am doing it with my windows user and password (I am using windows authentication). It's necessary to mention that when I put the URL I am getting a popup screen to put in my userid and password but it seems that's not able to validate since keeps asking me a couple of times. Let me know if you need more information to address this issue . http://appsvr02/Inetpub/wwwroot/DevWebApi/ Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage What you can try: It appears you are connected to the Internet, but you might want to try to reconnect to the Internet. Retype the address. Go back to the previous page. Most likely causes: •You are not connected to the Internet. •The website is encountering problems. •There might be a typing error in the address. More information This problem can be caused by a variety of issues, including: •Internet connectivity has been lost. •The website is temporarily unavailable. •The Domain Name Server (DNS) is not reachable. •The Domain Name Server (DNS) does not have a listing for the website's domain. •If this is an HTTPS (secure) address, click tools, click Internet Options, click Advanced, and check to be sure the SSL and TLS protocols are enabled under the security section. For offline users You can still view subscribed feeds and some recently viewed webpages. To view subscribed feeds 1.Click the Favorites Center button , click Feeds, and then click the feed you want to view. To view recently visited webpages (might not work on all pages) 1.Click Tools , and then click Work Offline. 2.Click the Favorites Center button , click History, and then click the page you want to view.

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• Hard drive after PCB swap strange stuff

  - by ramyy

  I’ve done a PCB swap to my HDD. The HDD model is: WD6400AAKS-00A7B2. The original PCB PN matches the new one (first three letter groups), though the cache mismatches (16MB original, 8MB new). The Hardware store that made the swap told me it was hard to do the swap, they have done firmware adaptation. I can see that this firmware version does not match the original, (01.03B01 original, 05.04E05 new). Still I can see that the serial number and model of the drive is correct, the hard drive appeared normal in the BIOS, all the partitions show and everything appears normal. I have encountered three things though, I have left the drive non operated for 2-3 weeks after the swap to avoid corrupting the data or anything else the new PCB might cause, until I buy a new drive and backup the data. I got a drive, and when I powered the old drive manually (I have a laptop, I use a normal desktop power supply and a USB/SATA connector), I heard the motor start and I could hear ticking as if the motor’s somehow struggling to start, and then the motor sound starts again then the ticking, and so on.. I tried powering again it happened again. The third time it started normally and I could see everything normally. I took the chance and copied all the data over to the new drive. When I was done, I powered off the drive (after more than 25 hours of continuous operation), tried to power it up again and it did so normally, and so are the times I powered it up later; but I got very suspicious now. What could be the problem here? And what happened new, it used to power normally after the swap directly? The second thing that happened is that I found size differences with some files; some include movies, songs, (.iso) files for games, and programs. I could find the size is the same, but size on disk is a little more on the new drive for these files. . I’ve tried some of those files (with size differences) they worked fine. They are not too much but still make you suspicious of the integrity of the data copied; one cannot try if all files are working for about (580 GB) worth of data. I tried copying these files on the same partition they exist of the old drive; they are the same in size as when copied to the new drive (allocation unit size not the issue). I took an image of a partition (sector by sector including empty ones) and when I explore it, these file sizes are equal to the original (old drive); I copy them anywhere else their size on disk, increases, i.e becomes equal to the ones I copy from the old drive itself anywhere. Why the size difference and can one trust the integrity of the data?? The third thing is that when I connect my new external USB HDD, the partitions of the old HDD unmount and then mount again. Connected are: (USB mouse + Old HDD) then external HDD. Why that happens?? Considering the following: I compared the SMART reports from after the swap directly and after the copying, no error readings or reallocated sectors where reported. Here they are: http://www.image-share.com/ijpg-1939-219.html I later ran both WD data life guard tests and they came out passed. I’m worried for this drive since I must be sure the data is fine and safe on the new one, and I will consider it backup for the new one, since you can’t trust anything anymore. I hope you can forgive me for the length of the post, but couldn’t ignore any of the details, this hard drive contains very important data to me and I have to deal with the situation with great care.

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• Can't install .NET framework 4.0 on Windows XP professional version 2002 SP3 (OS bug?)

  - by that guy

  .NET framework 4.0 install fails on Windows XP professional version 2002 SP3: I tried to run setup using "run as..." to make sure the admin rights are used ("protect my computer..." tick was deselected of course). I tried everything: installing using online/offline setup, windows update. install goes a little and then "rolls back" and says: Installation did not succeed .NET Framework 4 has not been installed because: Fatal error during installation. for more information about this problem, see the log file. the full log: http://pastebay.net/1433771 Any ideas? EDIT1: I have found this in the log: "BlockIf: You must install the 32-bit Windows Imaging Component (WIC) before you run Setup. Please visit the Microsoft Download Center to install WIC, and then rerun Setup...." So I found it, and launched "wic_x86_enu.exe" - but it said: WIC Setup error Newer version of update is already on the system. I have already installed: .NET framewrok 2.0 SP2 .NET framewrok 3.0 SP2 .NET framewrok 3.5 SP1 but I need 4.0 . EDIT2: another attempt and it's log. (this time better copy of log file): http://pastebin.com/gmGfbM9a (copy to notepad and save as .htm and open with internet browser). I have tried all the solutions I could find - and nothing helped. I have found something weird: when I formatted the hard drive and installed windows xp again - the .NET framework 4.0 installed ok, but when I plugged my 100Mbit internet cable - the operating system kind off "locked itself" and the bug returned - I could no longer install .NET framework 4.0 again. There was no reason for that to happen, for example I have windows server 2003 in local network, but I don't have active directory enabled on it or anything like that - the server just has some folders shared and thats all (all server's "features" are default). I had the second pc with the same problem - with XP on it too. This seems like the bug of Operating System to me. I couldn't find what was causing the problem. After many days I gave up: backuped everything, formatted HDD and installed Windows 7 professional 64bit. .NET framework 4.0 installed with no problem on it.

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• My USB bootable thumb drive, no longer boots on a single particular computer on which it previously worked

  - by LiamMeron

  I created a bootable drive, booting CrunchBang, about 2 months ago. About a month ago, I booted into it on another laptop. After shutting down, I have been unable to get it to boot on my own laptop, despite having worked previously. I can still boot into it on my desktop, and can also boot into it on all other computers that I have tried. If I plug it in when I am running Ubuntu, the Home and / folders mount, the only error being that for some reason my PC likes to try and mount the swap partition too, which naturally, gives an error. The BIOS settings are all still setup to boot from USB. When I boot, all I get is a black screen with the white cursor, it will stay there for as long as I leave it. If it is worth anything, I have GRUB loader installed on the drive. The partitions look a little odd, but I am rather unfamiliar with how they are dealt with. The first partition, /, is sdb1 and has the bootable flag. The second partition is an extended system, and is sdb2. The third partition, according to GParted, seems to be nested under the second. This is the swap partition, and it is sdb5 The fourth partition is my home partition and is sdb6 and is also nested under the extended system. The first and fourth partitions are ext4. I don't know if that helps, but the more info, the better accuracy, generally. Thanks. EDIT: I tried reinstalling GRUB on the drive, but that didn't work. However, when I reinstalled GRUB on my laptop, I did it with my USB thumbdrive in. This caused the GRUB updater to find the /boot folder and add the proper details into my laptop's GRUB loader. I could log into CrunchBang from my laptop's GRUB but I was still unable to boot directly to the drive. It looked like my BIOS is unable to find the bootloader. I am unable to install GRUB to a partition I just created, a /boot partition at the start of the drive, GRUB just doesn't allow it. I think I'm going to have to reinstall #! on my drive, which won't be a great loss as I haven't put much time into it.

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• cakephp & nginx config/rewrite rules

  - by seanl

  Hi somebody please help me out, I've asked this at stackoverflow as well but not got much of a response and was debating whether it was programming or server related. I’m trying to setup a cakephp environment on a Centos server running Nginx with Fact CGI. I already have a wordpress site running on the server and a phpmyadmin site so I have PHP configured correctly. My problem is that I cannot get the rewrite rules setup correct in my vhost so that cake renders pages correctly i.e. with styling and so on. I’ve googled as much as possible and the main consensus from the sites like the one listed below is that I need to have the following rewrite rule in place location / { root /var/www/sites/somedomain.com/current; index index.php index.html; # If the file exists as a static file serve it # directly without running all # the other rewrite tests on it if (-f $request_filename) { break; } if (!-f $request_filename) { rewrite ^/(.+)$ /index.php?url=$1 last; break; } } http://blog.getintheloop.eu/2008/4/17/nginx-engine-x-rewrite-rules-for-cakephp problem is these rewrite assume you run cake directly out of the webroot which is not what I want to do. I have a standard setup for each site i.e. one folder per site containing the following folders log, backup, private and public. Public being where nginx is looking for its files to serve but I have cake installed in private with a symlink in public linking back to /private/cake/ this is my vhost server { listen 80; server_name app.domain.com; access_log /home/public_html/app.domain.com/log/access.log; error_log /home/public_html/app.domain.com/log/error.log; #configure Cake app to run in a sub-directory #Cake install is not in root, but elsewhere and configured #in APP/webroot/index.php** location /home/public_html/app.domain.com/private/cake { index index.php; if (!-e $request_filename) { rewrite ^/(.+)$ /home/public_html/app.domain.com/private/cake/$1 last; break; } } location /home/public_html/app.domain.com/private/cake/ { index index.php; if (!-e $request_filename) { rewrite ^/(.+)$ /home/public_html/app.domain.com/public/index.php?url=$1 last; break; } } # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000 location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /home/public_html/app.domain.com/private/cake$fastcgi_script_name; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; } } Now like I said I can see the main index.php of cake and have connected it to my DB but this page is without styling so before I proceed any further I would like to configure it correctly. What am I doing wrong………. Thanks seanl

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• How to move partition with Users to a new SATA controller?

  - by Al Kepp

  Our current situation: X79 chipset. Windows 7 installed on SATA SSD running on Marvell controller. C:\Users contains just Public and computer-name folders, all the other users are created in E:\Users. That partition is on two HDD's running on an Intel RAID controller. (The motherboard has got two SATA/RAID onboard controllers.) The goal is: Without reinstallation, I want to move SSD to a standard SATA controller. Then I want to get rid of RAID1, and move one HDD to the same internal Intel SATA controller and the current E:\Users move to that new place. I want it to stay as E:\users, but I need to reinstall the HDD to let it work in SATA mode without RAID. So I face several problems. I am sure all are solvable with free software utilities, but I don't know how exactly to do it. I can see the particular problems: I have got all users at E:\Users. When I turn off that E:\ disk, I won't be able to login to Windows. I need at least one admin account to be placed back at C:\users. The current C: runs on standard 120 GB SSD, but it is connected to a Marvell SATA/RAID controller. I am affraid the Windows won't let me put it to Intel SATA controller due to hardware/licence check, and I won't be able to use standard W7 recovery disk either, because there probably isn't marvel SATA/RAID driver on it. I haven't tried anything yet, because I am affraid I can end up with computer not working at all. (I want to move it to a standard ICH10 Intel SATA controller to let us have no problems in future with it. I think it is not very safe when we use any nonstandard hardware to boot the computer.) I need to somehow backup current E:\ disk and restore it to a new E:. I hope this will be the easy part (as long as the admin account will reside on C:). The E: RAID array is very large, but it is almost empty (less than 100 GB of data.) So I can make the partition smaller so it can easily fit to a single SATA HDD.

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• Can't recover hard drive

  - by BreezyChick89

  My drive got corrupt after a thunderstorm. It used to be 1 partition of 2.5tb but now it shows 2 partitions. It's weird because 300gig free space is about how much it had before corrupting, but it was part of the first partition. I tried $ sudo resize2fs -f /dev/sdb1 Resizing the filesystem on /dev/sdb1 to 536870911 (4k) blocks. resize2fs: Can't read an block bitmap while trying to resize /dev/sdb1 Please run 'e2fsck -fy /dev/sdb1' to fix the filesystem after the aborted resize operation. sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdb1 e2fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011) The filesystem size (according to the superblock) is 610471680 blocks The physical size of the device is 536870911 blocks Either the superblock or the partition table is likely to be corrupt! Abort? n .... Error reading block 537395215 (Invalid argument) while reading inode and block bitmaps. Ignore error<y>? yes Force rewrite<y>? yes Error writing block 537395215 (Invalid argument) while reading inode and block bitmaps. Ignore error<y>? yes ... A lot of these. I can't use e2fsck -y because the first question aborts if I say "y". If I put a weight on the 'y' key it fails because none of the errors were really fixed. I asked this question before and tried using gparted but gparted fails because the first thing it does is: e2fsck -f -y -v /dev/sdb1 giving the same error. The disk status says healthy. There are no bad blocks. This is very frustrating because I can see the data in testdisk and it looks like it's all there. I already bought another 2.5tb drive and made a clone using dd. The next step if I can't fix this is to wipe that drive and just move the data with testdisk, but it seems certain folders will copy infinitely until the drive is full because of symlinks or errors so it's also a difficult option. sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sdb: 2500.5 GB, 2500495958016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 304001 cylinders, total 4883781168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0005da5e Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2048 4294969342 2147483647+ 83 Linux sudo badblocks -b 4096 -n -o badfile /dev/sdb 610471680 536870911 badfile is empty I also tried changing the superblock with "fsck -b" but all of them are the same.

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• The best dvd ripper software in 2014 review

  - by user328170

  The top 3 DVD Ripping Tools in 2014 Nowadays everyone may have several smart mobile devices, such as iphone, ipad air, ipad mini ,Samsung Galaxy and Sony Xperia. If you want to take your movies with your mobile devices, or sometimes just want to backup those classic physical discs on your notebook or workstation with high quality resolutions, you need a fast and stable software to rip them and convert them to the format you like. Fortunately, there are plenty of great software products designed to make the process easy and transform DVD to the files that are playable on any mobile device you choose. We have done a full review on dozens of products. Here are five of the best, based on our review. We test the software from its ripping speed, friendly use guide , reliability and ripping capability. The top one is still Winx DVD Ripper platinum. We've test its 6.1 version 2 years ago for its ability to quickly and easily rip DVDs and Blu-ray discs to high quality MKV files with a single click. It gave us deep impression in the test. This time we test it’s lastest 7.3.5 version. Besides easy use and speed, we test its capability to decrypt all kinds of discs with different protect method, for example, Disney X-project DRM , Sony ArccOS, RCE and region code. The result shows that winx dvd ripper platinum still maintain its advantages in all the area. Winx dvd ripper platinum is a more focused on DVD ripping software with the basic duty to rip and convert DVD. The color of UI is a modern technical sense. All the main functions are shown obviously while others specials are hidden for advanced users, making it more clear and convenient to make option. There are two company weisoft limited and Digiarty who can provide the software. Weisoft limited focus on USA, UK and Australia market. Digiarty focus on others. ripping speed ????? friendly use guide ????? reliability ????? ripping capability ????? The second one DVDFab DVDFab is also very robust during ripping dics. It can also decrypt most of the dics in the market. The shortage it still friendly use and speed. We'd note that the app is frequently updated to cut through the copy protection on even the latest DVDs and Blu-ray discs . The app is shareware, meaning most features are free, including decrypting and ripping to your hard drive. Many of you note that you use another app for compression and authoring, but many of you say they hey, storage is cheap, and the rips from DVDFab are easy, one-click, and work. ripping speed ??? friendly use guide ???? reliability ????? ripping capability ????? The Third one is Handbrake Handbrake is our favorite video encoder for a reason: it's simple, easy to use, easy to install, and offers a lots of options to get the high quality file as a result. If you're scared by them, you don't even have to use them—the app will compensate for you and pick some settings it thinks you'll like based on your destination device. So many of you like Handbrake that many of you use it in conjunction with another app (like VLC, which makes ripping easy)—you'll let another app do the rip and crack the DRM on your discs, and then process the file through Handbrake for encoding. The app is fast, can make the most of multi-core processors to speed up the process, and is completely open source. ripping speed ??? friendly use guide ???? reliability ???? ripping capability ????

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• Map a Network Drive from XP to Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  We’ve received a lot of questions about mapping a drive from XP to Windows 7 to access data easily. Today we look at how to map a drive in Windows 7, and how to map to an XP drive from Windows 7. With the new Homegroup feature in Windows 7, it makes sharing data between computers a lot easier. But you might need to map a network drive so you can go directly into a folder to access its contents. Mapping a network drive may sound like “IT talk”, but the process is fairly easy. Map Network Drive in Windows 7 Note: All of the computers used in this article are part of the same workgroup on a home network. In this first example we’re mapping to another Windows 7 drive on the network. Open Computer and from the toolbar click on Map Network Drive. Alternately in Computer you can hit “Alt+T” to pull up the toolbar and click on Tools \ Map Network Drive. Now give it an available drive letter, type in the path or browse to the folder you want to map to. Check the box next to Reconnect at logon if you want it available after a reboot, and click Finish. If both machines aren’t part of the same Homegroup, you may be prompted to enter in a username and password. Make sure and check the box next to Remember my credentials if you don’t want to log in every time to access it. The drive will map and the contents of the folder will open up. When you look in Computer, you’ll see the drive under network location. This process works if you want to connect to a server drive as well. In this example we map to a Home Server drive. Map an XP Drive to Windows 7 There might be times when you need to map a drive on an XP machine on your network. There are extra steps you’ll need to take to make it work however. Here we take a look at the problem you’ll encounter when trying to map to an XP machine if things aren’t set up correctly. If you try to browse to your XP machine you’ll see a message that you don’t have permission. Or if you try to enter in the path directly, you’ll be prompted for a username and password, and the annoyance is, no matter what credentials you put in, you can’t connect. To solve the problem we need to set up the Windows 7 machine as a user on the XP machine and make them part of the Administrators group. Right-click My Computer and select Manage. Under Computer Management expand Local Users and Groups and click on the Users folder. Right-click an empty area and click New User. Add in the user credentials, uncheck User must change password at next logon, then check Password never expires then click Create. Now you see the new user you created in the list. After the user is added you might want to reboot before proceeding to the next step.   Next we need to make the user part of the Administrators group. So go back into Computer Management \ Local Users and Groups \ Groups then double click on Administrators. Click the Add button in Administrators Properties window. Enter in the new user you created and click OK. An easy way to do this is to enter the name of the user you created then click Check Names and the path will be entered in for you. Now you see the user as a member of the Administrators group. Back on the Windows 7 machine we’ll start the process of mapping a drive. Here we’re browsing to the XP Media Center Edition machine. Now we can enter in the user name and password we just created. If you only want to access specific shared folders on the XP machine you can browse to them. Or if you want to map to the entire drive, enter in the drive path where in this example it’s “\\XPMCE\C$” –Don’t forget the “$” sign after the local drive letter. Then login… Again the contents of the drive will open up for you to access. Here you can see we have two drives mapped. One to another Windows 7 machine on the network, and the other one to the XP computer.   If you ever want to disconnect a drive, just right-click on it and then Disconnect. There are several scenarios where you might want to map a drive in Windows 7 to access specific data. It takes a little bit of work but you can map to an XP drive from Windows 7 as well. This comes in handy where you have a network with different versions of Windows running on it. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Find Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XPMake Vista Index Your Network ConnectionsEasily Backup & Import Your Wireless Network Settings in Windows 7Quickly Open Network Connections List in Windows 7 or VistaHow To Find Drives Easily with Desk Drive TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher

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• Week in Geek: FBI Back Door in OpenBSD Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to migrate bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo, fix annoying arrows, play old-school DOS games, schedule smart computer shutdowns, use breaks in Microsoft Word to better format documents, check the condition of hard-disks using Linux disk utilities, & what the Linux fstab is and how it works. Photo by Jameson42. Random Geek Links Another week with extra news link goodness to help keep you up to date. Photo by justmakeit. Report of FBI back door roils OpenBSD community Allegations that the FBI surreptitiously placed a back door into the OpenBSD operating system have alarmed the computer security community, prompting calls for an audit of the source code and claims that the charges must be a hoax. Fortinet: Job outlook improving for cybercrooks In an ironic twist in the job market, more positions will open up for developers who can write customized malware packers, people who can break CAPTCHA codes, and distributors who can spread malicious code, according to Fortinet. Enisa: Malware for smartphones is a ’serious risk’ Businesses and consumers are at risk of data breaches through smartphone use, according to the European Network and Information Security Agency. The trick with the f: Google and Microsoft web sites distribute malware Last week, Google’s DoubleClick advertising platform and Microsoft’s rad.msn.com online ad network briefly distributed malware to other web sites in the form of advertising banners. New scam tactic: Fake disk defraggers It would appear that scammers are trying out new programs to see which might best confuse potential victims and evade detection by legitimate antivirus software. Microsoft closes IE and Stuxnet holes As previously announced, Microsoft has released 17 security updates to close 40 security holes. All four Windows holes so far disclosed in connection with Stuxnet have now been closed. Microsoft Offers H.264 Support to Firefox on Windows via Add-On The new HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in add-on from Microsoft offers users that are running Firefox on Windows 7 H.264 support for HTML5 video playback. Google proclaims Chrome business-ready Google has announced that Chrome is ready for corporate use. Microsoft Tells Exchange Customers to Think Twice Before Opting for Google Message Continuity This week, Microsoft is telling companies still running Exchange 2010’s precursors that they should carefully consider the implications of embracing Google Message Continuity. Who Google has in mind for its Chrome OS users Steven Vaughan-Nichols explains why he feels that Chrome OS will be ideal for either office-workers or people who need a computer, but do not know the first thing about how to use one safely. Oracle takes office suite to the cloud Oracle has introduced Cloud Office 1.0, a cloud-based version of its office suite, which is aimed at web and mobile users. Mozilla pays premiums for reports of vulnerabilities The Mozilla Foundation has followed Google’s example by expanding its rewards program for reports of vulnerabilities in its Web applications. Who bought those 882 Novell patents? Not just Microsoft The mysterious CPTN Holdings — the organization that bought the 882 Novell patents as part of the terms of the Attachmate acquisition of Novell – has been unmasked (Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle). Appeals court: Feds need warrants for e-mail Police must obtain search warrants before perusing Internet users’ e-mail records, a federal appeals court ruled today in a landmark decision that struck down part of a 1986 law allowing warrantless access. Geek Video of the Week What happens when someone plays a wicked prank by shoveling crazy snow paths that lead to dead ends or turn back on themselves? Watch to find out! Photo by CollegeHumor. Janitor Snow Shoveling Prank Random TinyHacker Links The Oatmeal on Cat vs Internet What lengths will our poor neglected kitty hero have to go to in order to get some attention? Guide On Using JoliCloud With Windows JoliCloud is a nifty operating system that’s made for people who need a light-weight OS that’s mostly cloud based. Check this guide on using it with Windows. Use Cameyo to Easily Create Portable Programs Here’s a nifty tool to make portable apps out of programs in Windows. Check out the guide to do it. Better Family Tech Support A nice new site by Google to help members of family understand how computers work. Track Your Stolen Mobile Phone With F-Secure A useful anti-theft tool for your mobile phone. Super User Questions Another week with great answers to popular questions from Super User. What Chrome password manager fits my requirements? What’s the best way to be able to reimage windows computers? Could you suggest feature-rich disk-based personal backup program for linux (and I’ve seen a few)? What is IPv6 and why should I care? Is there any way to find out what programs are trying to connect to Internet on windows? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Here are our hottest articles full of geeky goodness from this past week at HTG. 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Kills Viruses Dead. Download It Now. Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? Ask the Readers: Would You Be Willing to Give Windows Up and Use a Different O.S.? The Twelve Days of Geekmas One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy reading through our latest batch of retro-geek goodness from one year ago. Macrium Reflect is a Free and Easy To Use Backup Utility How To Turn a Physical Computer Into A Virtual Machine with Disk2vhd How To Restore Windows 7 from a System Image How To Manage Hard Drive Space Used by Windows 7 Backup and Restore How To Manage Hibernate Mode in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week, so see you back here again after the holidays! Got a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by mitjamavsar. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Deathwing the Destroyer – WoW Cataclysm Dragon Wallpaper Drag2Up Lets You Drag and Drop Files to the Web With Ease The Spam Police Parts 1 and 2 – Goodbye Spammers [Videos] Snow Angels Theme for Windows 7 Exploring the Jungle Ruins Wallpaper Protect Your Privacy When Browsing with Chrome and Iron Browser

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• LINQ to SQL and missing Many to Many EntityRefs

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ran into an odd behavior today with a many to many mapping of one of my tables in LINQ to SQL. Many to many mappings aren’t transparent in LINQ to SQL and it maps the link table the same way the SQL schema has it when creating one. In other words LINQ to SQL isn’t smart about many to many mappings and just treats it like the 3 underlying tables that make up the many to many relationship. Iain Galloway has a nice blog entry about Many to Many relationships in LINQ to SQL. I can live with that – it’s not really difficult to deal with this arrangement once mapped, especially when reading data back. Writing is a little more difficult as you do have to insert into two entities for new records, but nothing that can’t be handled in a small business object method with a few lines of code. When I created a database I’ve been using to experiment around with various different OR/Ms recently I found that for some reason LINQ to SQL was completely failing to map even to the linking table. As it turns out there’s a good reason why it fails, can you spot it below? (read on :-}) Here is the original database layout: There’s an items table, a category table and a link table that holds only the foreign keys to the Items and Category tables for a typical M->M relationship. When these three tables are imported into the model the *look* correct – I do get the relationships added (after modifying the entity names to strip the prefix): The relationship looks perfectly fine, both in the designer as well as in the XML document: <Table Name="dbo.wws_Item_Categories" Member="ItemCategories"> <Type Name="ItemCategory"> <Column Name="ItemId" Type="System.Guid" DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL" CanBeNull="false" /> <Column Name="CategoryId" Type="System.Guid" DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL" CanBeNull="false" /> <Association Name="ItemCategory_Category" Member="Categories" ThisKey="CategoryId" OtherKey="Id" Type="Category" /> <Association Name="Item_ItemCategory" Member="Item" ThisKey="ItemId" OtherKey="Id" Type="Item" IsForeignKey="true" /> </Type> </Table> <Table Name="dbo.wws_Categories" Member="Categories"> <Type Name="Category"> <Column Name="Id" Type="System.Guid" DbType="UniqueIdentifier NOT NULL" IsPrimaryKey="true" IsDbGenerated="true" CanBeNull="false" /> <Column Name="ParentId" Type="System.Guid" DbType="UniqueIdentifier" CanBeNull="true" /> <Column Name="CategoryName" Type="System.String" DbType="NVarChar(150)" CanBeNull="true" /> <Column Name="CategoryDescription" Type="System.String" DbType="NVarChar(MAX)" CanBeNull="true" /> <Column Name="tstamp" AccessModifier="Internal" Type="System.Data.Linq.Binary" DbType="rowversion" CanBeNull="true" IsVersion="true" /> <Association Name="ItemCategory_Category" Member="ItemCategory" ThisKey="Id" OtherKey="CategoryId" Type="ItemCategory" IsForeignKey="true" /> </Type> </Table> However when looking at the code generated these navigation properties (also on Item) are completely missing: [global::System.Data.Linq.Mapping.TableAttribute(Name="dbo.wws_Item_Categories")] [global::System.Runtime.Serialization.DataContractAttribute()] public partial class ItemCategory : Westwind.BusinessFramework.EntityBase { private System.Guid _ItemId; private System.Guid _CategoryId; public ItemCategory() { } [global::System.Data.Linq.Mapping.ColumnAttribute(Storage="_ItemId", DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL")] [global::System.Runtime.Serialization.DataMemberAttribute(Order=1)] public System.Guid ItemId { get { return this._ItemId; } set { if ((this._ItemId != value)) { this._ItemId = value; } } } [global::System.Data.Linq.Mapping.ColumnAttribute(Storage="_CategoryId", DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL")] [global::System.Runtime.Serialization.DataMemberAttribute(Order=2)] public System.Guid CategoryId { get { return this._CategoryId; } set { if ((this._CategoryId != value)) { this._CategoryId = value; } } } } Notice that the Item and Category association properties which should be EntityRef properties are completely missing. They’re there in the model, but the generated code – not so much. So what’s the problem here? The problem – it appears – is that LINQ to SQL requires primary keys on all entities it tracks. In order to support tracking – even of the link table entity – the link table requires a primary key. Real obvious ain’t it, especially since the designer happily lets you import the table and even shows the relationship and implicitly the related properties. Adding an Id field as a Pk to the database and then importing results in this model layout: which properly generates the Item and Category properties into the link entity. It’s ironic that LINQ to SQL *requires* the PK in the middle – the Entity Framework requires that a link table have *only* the two foreign key fields in a table in order to recognize a many to many relation. EF actually handles the M->M relation directly without the intermediate link entity unlike LINQ to SQL. [updated from comments – 12/24/2009] Another approach is to set up both ItemId and CategoryId in the database which shows up in LINQ to SQL like this: This also work in creating the Category and Item fields in the ItemCategory entity. Ultimately this is probably the best approach as it also guarantees uniqueness of the keys and so helps in database integrity. It took me a while to figure out WTF was going on here – lulled by the designer to think that the properties should be when they were not. It’s actually a well documented feature of L2S that each entity in the model requires a Pk but of course that’s easy to miss when the model viewer shows it to you and even the underlying XML model shows the Associations properly. This is one of the issue with L2S of course – you have to play by its rules and once you hit one of those rules there’s no way around them – you’re stuck with what it requires which in this case meant changing the database.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ADO.NET  LINQ  

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• Ajax Control Toolkit and Superexpert

  - by Stephen Walther

  Microsoft has asked my company, Superexpert Consulting, to take ownership of the development and maintenance of the Ajax Control Toolkit moving forward. In this blog entry, I discuss our strategy for improving the Ajax Control Toolkit. Why the Ajax Control Toolkit? The Ajax Control Toolkit is one of the most popular projects on CodePlex. In fact, some have argued that it is among the most successful open-source projects of all time. It consistently receives over 3,500 downloads a day (not weekends -- workdays). A mind-boggling number of developers use the Ajax Control Toolkit in their ASP.NET Web Forms applications. Why does the Ajax Control Toolkit continue to be such a popular project? The Ajax Control Toolkit fills a strong need in the ASP.NET Web Forms world. The Toolkit enables Web Forms developers to build richly interactive JavaScript applications without writing any JavaScript. For example, by taking advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit, a Web Forms developer can add modal dialogs, popup calendars, and client tabs to a web application simply by dragging web controls onto a page. The Ajax Control Toolkit is not for everyone. If you are comfortable writing JavaScript then I recommend that you investigate using jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit. However, if you are a Web Forms developer and you don’t want to get your hands dirty writing JavaScript, then the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great solution. The Ajax Control Toolkit is Vast The Ajax Control Toolkit consists of 40 controls. That’s a lot of controls (For the sake of comparison, jQuery UI consists of only 8 controls – those slackers J). Furthermore, developers expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on browsers both old and new. For example, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 9 and every version of Internet Explorer in between. People also expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. And, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with different operating systems. Yikes, that is a lot of combinations. The biggest challenge which my company faces in supporting the Ajax Control Toolkit is ensuring that the Ajax Control Toolkit works across all of these different browsers and operating systems. Testing, Testing, Testing Because we wanted to ensure that we could easily test the Ajax Control Toolkit with different browsers, the very first thing that we did was to set up a dedicated testing server. The dedicated server -- named Schizo -- hosts 4 virtual machines so that we can run Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Internet Explorer 9 at the same time (We also use the virtual machines to host the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari). The five developers on our team (plus me) can each publish to a separate FTP website on the testing server. That way, we can quickly test how changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit affect different browsers. QUnit Tests for the Ajax Control Toolkit Introducing regressions – introducing new bugs when trying to fix existing bugs – is the concern which prevents me from sleeping well at night. There are so many people using the Ajax Control Toolkit in so many unique scenarios, that it is difficult to make improvements to the Ajax Control Toolkit without introducing regressions. In order to avoid regressions, we decided early on that it was extremely important to build good test coverage for the 40 controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. We’ve been focusing a lot of energy on building automated JavaScript unit tests which we can use to help us discover regressions. We decided to write the unit tests with the QUnit test framework. We picked QUnit because it is quickly becoming the standard unit testing framework in the JavaScript world. For example, it is the unit testing framework used by the jQuery team, the jQuery UI team, and many jQuery UI plugin developers. We had to make several enhancements to the QUnit framework in order to test the Ajax Control Toolkit. For example, QUnit does not support tests which include postbacks. We modified the QUnit framework so that it works with IFrames so we could perform postbacks in our automated tests. At this point, we have written hundreds of QUnit tests. For example, we have written 135 QUnit tests for the Accordion control. The QUnit tests are included with the Ajax Control Toolkit source code in a project named AjaxControlToolkit.Tests. You can run all of the QUnit tests contained in the project by opening the Default.aspx page. Automating the QUnit Tests across Multiple Browsers Automated tests are useless if no one ever runs them. In order for the QUnit tests to be useful, we needed an easy way to run the tests automatically against a matrix of browsers. We wanted to run the unit tests against Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari automatically. Expecting a developer to run QUnit tests against every browser after every check-in is just too much to expect. It takes 20 seconds to run the Accordion QUnit tests. We are testing against 8 browsers. That would require the developer to open 8 browsers and wait for the results after each change in code. Too much work. Therefore, we built a JavaScript Test Server. Our JavaScript Test Server project was inspired by John Resig’s TestSwarm project. The JavaScript Test Server runs our QUnit tests in a swarm of browsers (running on different operating systems) automatically. Here’s how the JavaScript Test Server works: 1. We created an ASP.NET page named RunTest.aspx that constantly polls the JavaScript Test Server for a new set of QUnit tests to run. After the RunTest.aspx page runs the QUnit tests, the RunTest.aspx records the test results back to the JavaScript Test Server. 2. We opened the RunTest.aspx page on instances of Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, Google, and Safari. Now that we have the JavaScript Test Server setup, we can run all of our QUnit tests against all of the browsers which we need to support with a single click of a button. A New Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit Each Month The Ajax Control Toolkit Issue Tracker contains over one thousand five hundred open issues and feature requests. So we have plenty of work on our plates J At CodePlex, anyone can vote for an issue to be fixed. Originally, we planned to fix issues in order of their votes. However, we quickly discovered that this approach was inefficient. Constantly switching back and forth between different controls was too time-consuming. It takes time to re-familiarize yourself with a control. Instead, we decided to focus on two or three controls each month and really focus on fixing the issues with those controls. This way, we can fix sets of related issues and avoid the randomization caused by context switching. Our team works in monthly sprints. We plan to do another release of the Ajax Control Toolkit each and every month. So far, we have competed one release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which was released on April 1, 2011. We plan to release a new version in early May. Conclusion Fortunately, I work with a team of smart developers. We currently have 5 developers working on the Ajax Control Toolkit (not full-time, they are also building two very cool ASP.NET MVC applications). All the developers who work on our team are required to have strong JavaScript, jQuery, and ASP.NET MVC skills. In the interest of being as transparent as possible about our work on the Ajax Control Toolkit, I plan to blog frequently about our team’s ongoing work. In my next blog entry, I plan to write about the two Ajax Control Toolkit controls which are the focus of our work for next release.

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• Ask How-To Geek: Dropbox in the Start Menu, Understanding Symlinks, and Ripping TV Series DVDs

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  This week we take a look at how to incorporate Dropbox into your Windows Start Menu, understanding and using symbolic links, and how to rip your TV series DVDs right to unique and high-quality episode files. Once a week we dip into our reader mailbag and help readers solve their problems, sharing the useful solutions with you in the process. Read on to see our fixes for this week’s reader dilemmas. Add Drobox to Your Start Menu Dear How-To Geek, I use Dropbox all the time and would like to add it right onto my start menu along side the other major shortcuts like Documents, Pictures, etc. It seems like adding Dropbox into the menu should be part of the Dropbox installation package! Sincerely, Dropboxing in Des Moines Dear Dropboxing, We agree, it would be a nice installation option. As it stands you’re going to have to do a little simple hacking to get Dropbox nestled neatly into your start menu. The hack isn’t super elegant but when you’re done you’ll have the link you want and it’ll look like it was there all along. Check out this step-by-step guide here in order to take an existing Library shortcut and rework it to be a Dropbox link. Understanding and Using Symbolic Links Dear How-To Geek, I was talking to a coworker the other day about an issue I’d been having with a media center application I’m running. He suggested using symbolic links to better organize my media and make it easier for the application to access my collection. I had no idea what he was talking about and never got a chance to bug him about it later. Can you clear up this whole symbolic links business for me? I’ve been using computers for years and I’ve never even heard of it! Sincerely, Symbolic Who? Dear Symbolic, Symbolic links aren’t commonly used by many Windows users which is why you likely haven’t run into the concept. Symbolic links are essentially supercharged shortcuts—the newly introduced Windows library system is really just a type of symbolic link system. You can use symbolic links to do all sorts of neat stuff like link folders to your Dropbox folder, organize media, and more. The concept of symbolic links is pretty simple but the execution can be really tricky. We’d suggest reading over our guide to creating symbolic links in Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubunutu to get a clearer idea what you’re getting into. Rip Your TV DVDs into Handy Episode Files Dear How-To Geek, My wife got me an iPod for Christmas and I still haven’t got around to filling it up. I have tons of entire TV show seasons on DVD and would like to get them on the iPod but I have absolutely no idea where to start. How do I get the shows off the discs? I thought it would be as easy to import the TV shows into iTunes as it is to import tracks off a CD but I was totally wrong. I tried downloading some applications to rip them but those didn’t work at all. Very frustrating! Surely there is an easy and/or automated way to do this, right? Sincerely, Free My DVDs Dear DVDs, Oh man is this a frustration we can relate to. It’s inordinately difficult to get movies and TV shows off physical media and into digital (and portable media player-friendly) formats. There are a multitude of ways to rip DVDs and quite a few applications out there (some good, some mediocre, and some outright malware). We’d recommend a two-part punch to solve your ripping woes. You’ll need a copy of DVDFab to strip away the protections on the discs and rip the disc and Handbrake to load the disc image and convert the files. It’s not quite as smooth as the CD-to-iTunes workflow but it’s still pretty easy. Check out all the steps and settings you’ll want to toggle here. Have a question you want to put before the How-To Geek staff? Shoot us an email at [email protected] and then keep an eye out for a solution in the Ask How-To Geek column. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines Google’s New Personal Blocklist Extension Kills Search Engine Spam KeyCounter Tracks Your Keystrokes and Mouse Clicks Add Custom LED Ambient Lighting to Your PC or Media Center The Trackor Monitors Amazon Prices; Integrates with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari Four Awesome TRON Legacy Themes for Chrome and Iron Anger is Illogical – Old School Style Instructional Video [Star Trek Mashup]

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• Security Trimmed Cross Site Collection Navigation

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). This article will serve as documentation of a fully functional codeplex project that I just created. This project will give you a WebPart that will give you security trimmed navigation across site collections. The first question is, why create such a project? In every single SharePoint project you will do, one question you will always be faced with is, what should the boundaries of sites be, and what should the boundaries of site collections be? There is no good or bad answer to this, because it really really depends on your needs. There are some factors in play here. Site Collections will allow you to scale, as a Site collection is the smallest entity you can put inside a content database Site collections will allow you to offer different levels of SLAs, because you put a site collection on a separate content database, and put that database on a separate server. Site collections are a security boundary – and they can be moved around at will without affecting other site collections. Site collections are also a branding boundary. They are also a feature deployment boundary, so you can have two site collections on the same web application with completely different nature of services. But site collections break navigation, i.e. a site collection at “/”, and a site collection at “/sites/mySiteCollection”, are completely independent of each other. If you have access to both, the navigation of / won’t show you a link to /sites/mySiteCollection. Some people refer to this as a huge issue in SharePoint. Luckily, some workarounds exist. A long time ago, I had blogged about “Implementing Consistent Navigation across Site Collections”. That approach was a no-code solution, it worked – it gave you a consistent navigation across site collections. But, it didn’t work in a security trimmed fashion! i.e., if I don’t have access to Site Collection ‘X’, it would still show me a link to ‘X’. Well this project gets around that issue. Simply deploy this project, and it’ll give you a WebPart. You can use that WebPart as either a webpart or as a server control dropped via SharePoint designer, and it will give you Security Trimmed Cross Site Collection Navigation. The code has been written for SP2010, but it will work in SP2007 with the help of http://spwcfsupport.codeplex.com . What do I need to do to make it work? I’m glad you asked! Simple! Deploy the .wsp (which you can download here). This will give you a site collection feature called “Winsmarts Cross Site Collection Navigation” as shown below. Go ahead and activate it, and this will give you a WebPart called “Winsmarts Navigation Web Part” as shown below: Just drop this WebPart on your page, and it will show you all site collections that the currently logged in user has access to. Really it’s that easy! This is shown as below - In the above example, I have two site collections that I created at /sites/SiteCollection1 and /sites/SiteCollection2. The navigation shows the titles. You see some extraneous crap as well, you might want to clean that – I’ll talk about that in a minute. What? You’re running into problems? If the problem you’re running into is that you are prompted to login three times, and then it shows a blank webpart that says “Loading your applications ..” and then craps out!, then most probably you’re using a different authentication scheme. Behind the scenes I use a custom WCF service to perform this job. OOTB, I’ve set it to work with NTLM, but if you need to make it work alternate authentications such as forms based auth, or client side certs, you will need to edit the %14%\ISAPI\Winsmarts.CrossSCNav\web.config file, specifically, this section - 1: <bindings> 2: <webHttpBinding> 3: <binding name="customWebHttpBinding"> 4: <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly"> 5: <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm"/> 6: </security> 7: </binding> 8: </webHttpBinding> 9: </bindings> For Kerberos, change the “clientCredentialType” to “Windows” For Forms auth, remove that transport line For client certs – well that’s a bit more involved, but it’s just web.config changes – hit a good book on WCF or hire me for a billion trillion $. But fair warning, I might be too busy to help immediately. If you’re running into a different problem, please leave a comment below, but the code is pretty rock solid, so .. hmm .. check what you’re doing! BTW, I don’t  make any guarantee/warranty on this – if this code makes you sterile, unpopular, bad hairstyle, anything else, that is your problem! But, there are some known issues - I wrote this as a concept – you can easily extend it to be more flexible. Example, hierarchical nav, or, horizontal nav, jazzy effects with jquery or silverlight– all those are possible very very easily. This webpart is not smart enough to co-exist with another instance of itself on the same page. I can easily extend it to do so, which I will do in my spare(!?) time! Okay good! But that’s not all! As you can see, just dropping the WebPart may show you many extraneous site collections, or maybe you want to restrict which site collections are shown, or exclude a certain site collection to be shown from the navigation. To support that, I created a property on the WebPart called “UrlMatchPattern”, which is a regex expression you specify to trim the results :). So, just edit the WebPart, and specify a string property of “http://sp2010/sites/” as shown below. Note that you can put in whatever regex expression you want! So go crazy, I don’t care! And this gives you a cleaner look.   w00t! Enjoy! Comment on the article ....

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• Twitter traffic might not be what it seems

  - by Piet

  Are you using bit.ly stats to measure interest in the links you post on twitter? I’ve been hearing for a while about people claiming to get the majority of their traffic originating from twitter these days. Now, I’ve been playing with the twitter ruby gem recently, doing various experiments which I’ll not go into detail here because they could be regarded as spamming… if I’d conduct them on a large scale, that is. It’s scary to see people actually engaging with @replies crafted with some regular expressions and eliza-like trickery on status updates found using the twitter api. I’m wondering how Twitter is going to contain the coming spam-flood. When posting links I used bit.ly as url shortener, since this one seems to be the de-facto standard on twitter. A nice thing about bit.ly is that it shows some basic stats about the redirects it performs for your shortened links. To my surprise, most links posted almost immediately resulted in several visitors. Now, seeing that I was posting the links together with some information concerning what the link is about, I concluded that the people who were actually clicking the links should be very targeted visitors. This felt a bit like free adwords, and I suddenly started to understand why everyone was raving about getting traffic from twitter. How wrong I was! (and I think several 1000 online marketers with me) On the destination site I used a traffic logging solution that works by including a little javascript snippet in your pages. It seemed that somehow all visitors disappeared after the bit.ly redirect and before getting to the site, because I was hardly seeing any visitors there. So I started investigating what was happening: by looking at the logfiles of the destination site, and by making my own ’shortened’ urls by doing redirects using a very short domain name I own. This way, I could check the apache access_log before the redirects. Most user agents turned out to be bots without a doubt. Here’s an excerpt of user-agents awk’ed from apache’s access_log for a time period of about one hour, right after posting some links: AideRSS 2.0 (postrank.com) Java/1.6.0_13 Java/1.6.0_14 libwww-perl/5.816 MLBot (www.metadatalabs.com/mlbot) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows -NT 5.0 - real-url.org) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Twitturls; +http://twitturls.com) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Viralheat Bot/1.0; +http://www.viralheat.com/) Mozilla/5.0 (Danger hiptop 4.6; U; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050920 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092313 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.5 OpenCalaisSemanticProxy PycURL/7.18.2 PycURL/7.19.3 Python-urllib/1.17 Twingly Recon twitmatic Twitturly / v0.6 Wget/1.10.2 (Red Hat modified) Wget/1.11.1 (Red Hat modified) Of the few user-agents that seem ‘real’ at first, half are originating from an ip-address used by Amazon EC2. And I doubt people are setting op proxies on there. Oh yeah, Googlebot (the real deal, from a legit google owned address) is sucking up posted links like fresh oysters. I guess google is trying to make sure in advance to never be beaten by twitter in the ‘realtime search’ department. Actually, I think it’d be almost stupid NOT to post any new pages/posts/websites on Twitter, it must be one of the fastest ways to get a Googlebot visit. Same experiment with a real, established twitter account Now, because I was posting the url’s either as ’status’ messages or directed @people, on a test-account with hardly any (human) followers, I checked again using the twitter accounts from a commercial site I’m involved with. These accounts all have between 500 and 1000 targeted (I think) followers. I checked the destination access_logs and also added ‘my’ redirect after the bit.ly redirect: same results, although seemingly a bit higher real visitor/bot ratio. Btw: one of these account was ‘punished’ with a 1 week lock recently because the same (1 one!) status update was sent that was sent right before using another account. They got an email explaining the lock because the account didn’t act according to their TOS. I can’t find anything in their TOS about it, can you? I don’t think Twitter is on the right track punishing a legit account, knowing the trickery I had been doing with it’s api went totally unpunished. I might be wrong though, I often am. On the other hand: this commercial site reported targeted traffic and actual signups from visitors coming from Twitter. The ones that are really real visitors are also very targeted. I’m just not sure if the amount of work involved could hold up against an adwords campaign. Reposting the same link over and over again helps On thing I noticed: It helps to keep on reposting the same links with regular intervals. I guess most people only look at their first page when checking out recent posts of the ones they’re following, or don’t look too far back when performing a search. Now, this probably isn’t according to the twitter TOS. Actually, it might be spamming but no-one is obligated to follow anyone else of course. This way, I was getting more real visitors and less bots. To my surprise (when my programmer’s hat is on) there were still repeated visits from the same bots coming from the same ip-addresses. Did they expect to find something else when visiting for a 2nd or 3rd time? (actually,this gave me an idea: you can’t change a link once it’s posted, but you can change where it redirects to) Most bots were smart enough not to follow the same link again though. Are you successful in getting real visitors from Twitter? Are you only relying on bit.ly to provide traffic stats?

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• Test Drive Windows 7 Online with Virtual Labs

  - by Matthew Guay

  Did you miss out on the Windows 7 public beta and want to try it out before you actually make the leap and upgrade? Maybe you want to learn how to deploy new features in a business environment. Here’s how you can test drive Windows 7 directly from your browser. Whether you manage 10,000 desktops or simply manage your own laptop, it’s usually best to test out a new OS before installing it.  If you’re upgrading from Windows XP you may find many things unfamiliar.  Microsoft has setup a special Windows 7 Test Drive website with resources to help IT professionals test and deploy Windows 7 in their workplaces.  This is a great resource to try out Windows 7 from the comfort of your browser, and look at some of the new features without even installing it. Please note that the online version is not nearly as responsive as a full standard install of Windows 7.  It also does not run the full Aero interface or desktop effects, and may refresh slowly depending on your Internet connection.  So don’t judge Windows 7’s performance based on this virtual lab, but use it as a way to learn more about Windows 7 without installing it. Getting Started To test drive Windows 7, visit Microsoft’s Windows 7 Test Drive website (link below).  You will need to run the Windows 7 Test Drive in Internet Explorer, as it requires Active X support.  We received this error when attempting to run the Test Drive in Firefox: Now, click the “Take a Test Drive” link on the bottom left of the page. This site includes several test drives to demonstrate different features of Windows 7 and its related ecosystem of products including Windows Server 2008 R2, some of which, including the XP Mode test drive, are not yet ready.  For this test, we selected the MED-V Test drive, as this includes Office 2007 and 2010 so you can test them in Windows 7 as well.  Simply select the test drive you want, and click “Try it now!”   If you haven’t run a Windows test drive before, you will be asked to install an ActiveX control.  Click the link to install. Click the yellow bar at the top of the page in Internet Explorer, and select to Install the add-on.  You may have to approve a UAC prompt to finish the install. Once this is finished, click the link on the bottom of the page to return to your test drive.  The test drive page should automatically refresh; if it doesn’t, click refresh to reload it. Now the test drive will load the components.   Once its fully loaded, click the link to launch Windows 7 in a new window. You may see a prompt warning that the server may have been impersonated.  Simply click Yes to proceed. The test lab will give you some getting started directions; click Close Window when you’re ready to try out Windows 7. Here’s the default desktop in the Windows 7 test drive.  You can use it just like a normal Windows computer, but do note that it may function slowly depending on your internet connection.   This test drive includes both Office 2007 and Office 2010 Tech Preview, so you can try out both in Windows 7 as well. You can try out the new Windows 7 applications such as the reworked Paint with the Ribbon interface from Office. Or you can even test the newest version of Media Center, though it will warn you that it may not function good with the down-scaled graphics in the test drive.   Most importantly, you can try out the new features in Windows 7, such as Jumplists and even Aero Snap.  Once again, these features will not function the quickest, but it does let you test them out. While working with the Virtual Lab, there are different tasks it walks you through. You can also download a copy of the lab manual in PDF format to help you navigate through the various objectives. The test drive system is running Microsoft Forefront Security, the enterprise security solution from which Microsoft Security Essentials has adapted components from. Conclusion These virtual labs are great for tech students, or those of you who want to get a first-hand trial of the new features. Also, if you’re not sure on how to deploy something and want to practice in a virtual environment, these labs are quite valuable.While these labs are geared toward IT professionals, it’s a good way for anyone to try out Windows 7 features from the comfort of your current computer. Test Drive Windows 7 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Mount Multiple ISO Images Using Virtual CloneDriveHow To Delete a VHD in Windows 7Keyboard Shortcuts for VMware WorkstationMount an ISO image in Windows 7 or VistaHow To Turn a Physical Computer Into A Virtual Machine with Disk2vhd TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 If it were only this easy SyncToy syncs Files and Folders across Computers on a Network (or partitions on the same drive) Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver

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• Convert Video and Remove Commercials in Windows 7 Media Center with MCEBuddy 1.1

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Today look at MCEBuddy for Windows 7 Media Center. This handy app automatically takes your recorded TV files and converts them to MP4, AVI, WMV, or MPEG format. It even has the option to cut out those annoying commercials during the conversion process. Installation and Configuration Download and extract MCE Buddy. (Download link below) Run the setup.exe file and take all the default settings.   Open MCEBuddy Configuration by going to Start > All Programs > MCEBuddy > MCEBuddy Configuration.   Video Paths The MCEBuddy application is comprised of a single window. The first step you’ll want to take is to define your Source and Destination paths. The “Source” will most likely be your Recorded TV directory. The Destination should NOT be the same as the Source folder. Note: The Recorded TV directory in Windows 7 Media Center will only display and play WTV & DVR-MS files. To watch the converted MP4, AVI, WMV, or MPEG files in Windows Media Center you’ll need to add them to your Video Library or Movie Library. Video Conversion Next, choose your preferred format for conversion from the “Convert to” drop down list. The default is MP4 with the H.264 codec. You’ll find a wide variety of formats. The first set of conversion options in the drop down list will resize the video to 720 pixels wide. The next two sections maintain the original size, and the final section is for a variety of portable devices.   Next, you’ll see a group of check boxes below the “Convert to” drop down list. The Commercial Skipping option will cut the commercials while converting the file. Sort By Series will create a sub-folder in your Destination folder for each TV show. Delete Original will delete the WTV file after conversion is complete. (This option is not recommended unless you are sure your files are converting properly and you no longer need the WTV file.) Start Minimized is ideal if you want to run MCEBuddy on Windows startup. Note: MCEBuddy installs and uses Comskip for commercial cutting by default. However, if you have ShowAnalyzer installed, it will use that application instead. Advanced Options To choose a specific time of day to perform the conversions, click the checkbox under the “Advanced Options,” and select the starting and ending times for conversion. For example, convert between 2 hours and 5 hours would be between 2 am and 5am. If you want MCEBuddy to constantly look for and immediately convert new recordings, leave the box unchecked.   The “Video age” option lets you choose a specific number of days to wait before performing the conversion. This can be useful if you want to watch the recordings first and delete those you don’t wish to convert. You can also choose the “Sub Directories” if you’d like MCEBuddy to convert files that are in a sub-folder in your “Source” directory. Second Conversion As you might expect, this option allows MCEBuddy to perform a second conversion of your file. This can be useful if you want to use your first conversion to create a higher quality MP4 or AVI file for playback on a larger screen, and a second one for a portable device such as Zune or iPhone. The same options from the first conversion are also available for the second. You’ll want to choose a separate Destination folder for the second conversion.   Start and Monitor Progress To start converting your video files, simply press the “Start” button at the bottom. You’ll be able to follow the progress in the “Current Activity” section. When all the video files have finished converting, or there are no current files to convert, MCEBuddy will display a “Started – Idle” status. Click “Stop” if you don’t want MCEBuddy to continue scanning for new files.   Conclusion MCEBuddy 1.1 will convert all WTV files in it’s source folder. If you want to pick and choose which recordings to convert, you may want to define a source folder different than the Recorded TV folder and then just copy or move the files you wish to convert into the new source folder. The conversion process does take a good bit of time. If you choose the commercial skipping and second conversion options it can take several hours to fully convert one TV recording. Overall, MCEBuddy makes a nice Media Center addition for those that want to save some space with smaller size files, convert Recorded TV files for their portable device, or automatically remove commercials. If you’re looking for a different method to skip commercials check out our post on how to skip commercials in Windows 7 Media Center. Download MCEBuddy 1.1 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)How To Skip Commercials in Windows 7 Media CenterHow To Convert Video Files to MP3 with VLCStartup Customizations for Media Center in Windows 7Add Folders to the Movie Library in Windows 7 Media Center TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher Automate Tasks in Linux with Crontab Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam

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• Convert Excel File 'xls' to CSV, CAUTION: Bumps Ahead

  - by faizanahmad

  The task was to provide users with an interface where they can upload the 'csv' files, these files were to be processed and loaded to Database by a Console application. The code in Console application could not handle the 'xls' files so we thought, OK, lets convert 'xls' to 'csv' in the code, Seemed like fun. The idea was to convert it right after uploading within 'csv' file. As Microsoft does not recommend using the  Excel objects in ASP.NET, we decided to use the Jet engine to open xls. (Ace driver is used for xlsx) The code was pretty straight, can be found on following links: http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/yuanwang200409/102242008174401pm/1.aspx http://www.devasp.net/net/articles/display/141.html FIRST BUMP 'OleDbException (0x80004005): Unspecified error' ( Impersonation ): The ablove code ran fine in my test web site and test console application, but it gave an 'OleDbException (0x80004005): Unspecified error' in main web site, turns out imperonation was set to True and as soon as I changed it to False, it did work. on My XP box, web site was running under user                   'ASPNET'  with imperosnation set to FALSE                   'IUSR_*' i.e IIS guest user with impersonation set to TRUE The weired part was that both users had same rights on the folders I was saving files to and on Excel app in DCOM Config.  We decided to give it a try on Windows Server 2003 with web site set to windows authentication ( impersonation = true ) and yes it did work. SECOND BUMP 'External table not in correct format': I got this error with some files and it appeared that the file from client has some metadata issues  ( when I opened the file in Excel and try to save it ,excel  would give me this error saying File can not be saved in current format ) and the error was caused by that. Some people were able to reslove the error by using "Extended Properties=HTML Import;" in connection string. But it did not work for me. We decided to detour from here and use Excel object :( as we had no control on client setting the meta deta of Excel files. Before third bump there were a ouple of small thingies like 'Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {00024500-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} failed due to the following error: 80070005' Fix can be found at http://blog.crowe.co.nz/archive/2006/03/02/589.aspx THIRD BUMP ( Could not get rid of the EXCEL process  ):  I has all the code in place to 'Quiet' the excel, but, it just did not work. work around was done to Kill the process as we knew no other application on server was using EXCEL.  The normal steps to quite the excel application worked just fine in console application though.   FOURTH BUMP: Code worked with one file 1 on my machine and with the other file 2 code will break. and the same code will work perfectly fine with file 2 on some other machine . We moved it to QA  ( Windows Server 2003 )and worked with every file just perfect. But , then there was another problem: one user can upload it and second cant, permissions on folder and DCOM Conifg checked. Another Detour: Uplooad the xls as it is and convert in Console application.   Lesson Learnt:  If its 'xlsx' use 'ACE Driver' or read xml within excel as recommneded by MS. If xls and you know its always going to be properly formatted  'jet Engine'  Code: Imports Microsoft.Office.Interop Private Function ConvertFile(ByVal SourceFolder As String, ByVal FileName As String, ByVal FileExtension As String)As Boolean     Dim appExcel As New Excel.Application     Dim workBooks As Excel.Workbooks = appExcel.Workbooks     Dim objWorkbook As Excel.Workbook      Try                   objWorkbook = workBooks.Open(CompleteFilePath )                            objWorkbook.SaveAs(Filename:=CObj(SourceFolder & FileName & ".csv"), FileFormat:=Excel.XlFileFormat.xlCSV)       Catch ex As Exception         GenerateAlert(ex.Message().Replace("'", "") & " Error Converting File to CSV.")         LogError(ex )         Return False      Finally                      If Not(objWorkbook is Nothing) then               objWorkbook.Close(SaveChanges:=CObj(False))           End If           ReleaseObj(objWorkbook)                                      ReleaseObj(workBooks)           appExcel.Quit()           ReleaseObj(appExcel)                                 Dim proc As System.Diagnostics.Process           For Each proc In System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcessesByName("EXCEL")               proc.Kill()           Next         DeleteSourceFile(SourceFolder & FileName & FileExtension)     End Try  Return True  End Function   Private Sub ReleaseObj(ByVal o As Object)     Try      System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject(o)   Catch ex As Exception           LogError(ex )   Finally      o = Nothing    End Try End Sub     Protected Sub DeleteSourceFile(Byval CompleteFilePath As string)         Try             Dim MyFile As FileInfo = New FileInfo(CompleteFilePath)             If  MyFile.Exists Then                 File.Delete(CompleteFilePath)             Else              Throw New FileNotFoundException()             End If         Catch ex As Exception             GenerateAlert( " Source File could not be deleted.")              LogError(ex)         End Try     End Sub  The code to kill the process ( Avoid it if you can ): Dim proc As System.Diagnostics.Process For Each proc In System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcessesByName("EXCEL")     proc.Kill() Next

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• Diagnose PC Hardware Problems with an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  So your PC randomly shuts down or gives you the blue screen of death, but you can’t figure out what’s wrong. The problem could be bad memory or hardware related, and thankfully the Ubuntu Live CD has some tools to help you figure it out. Test your RAM with memtest86+ RAM problems are difficult to diagnose—they can range from annoying program crashes, or crippling reboot loops. Even if you’re not having problems, when you install new RAM it’s a good idea to thoroughly test it. The Ubuntu Live CD includes a tool called Memtest86+ that will do just that—test your computer’s RAM! Unlike many of the Live CD tools that we’ve looked at so far, Memtest86+ has to be run outside of a graphical Ubuntu session. Fortunately, it only takes a few keystrokes. Note: If you used UNetbootin to create an Ubuntu flash drive, then memtest86+ will not be available. We recommend using the Universal USB Installer from Pendrivelinux instead (persistence is possible with Universal USB Installer, but not mandatory). Boot up your computer with a Ubuntu Live CD or USB drive. You will be greeted with this screen: Use the down arrow key to select the Test memory option and hit Enter. Memtest86+ will immediately start testing your RAM. If you suspect that a certain part of memory is the problem, you can select certain portions of memory by pressing “c” and changing that option. You can also select specific tests to run. However, the default settings of Memtest86+ will exhaustively test your memory, so we recommend leaving the settings alone. Memtest86+ will run a variety of tests that can take some time to complete, so start it running before you go to bed to give it adequate time. Test your CPU with cpuburn Random shutdowns – especially when doing computationally intensive tasks – can be a sign of a faulty CPU, power supply, or cooling system. A utility called cpuburn can help you determine if one of these pieces of hardware is the problem. Note: cpuburn is designed to stress test your computer – it will run it fast and cause the CPU to heat up, which may exacerbate small problems that otherwise would be minor. It is a powerful diagnostic tool, but should be used with caution. Boot up your computer with a Ubuntu Live CD or USB drive, and choose to run Ubuntu from the CD or USB drive. When the desktop environment loads up, open the Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on the System menu in the top-left of the screen, then selecting Administration, and then Synaptic Package Manager. Cpuburn is in the universe repository. To enable the universe repository, click on Settings in the menu at the top, and then Repositories. Add a checkmark in the box labeled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click close. In the main Synaptic window, click the Reload button. After the package list has reloaded and the search index has been rebuilt, enter “cpuburn” in the Quick search text box. Click the checkbox in the left column, and select Mark for Installation. Click the Apply button near the top of the window. As cpuburn installs, it will caution you about the possible dangers of its use. Assuming you wish to take the risk (and if your computer is randomly restarting constantly, it’s probably worth it), open a terminal window by clicking on the Applications menu in the top-left of the screen and then selection Applications > Terminal. Cpuburn includes a number of tools to test different types of CPUs. If your CPU is more than six years old, see the full list; for modern AMD CPUs, use the terminal command burnK7 and for modern Intel processors, use the terminal command burnP6 Our processor is an Intel, so we ran burnP6. Once it started up, it immediately pushed the CPU up to 99.7% total usage, according to the Linux utility “top”. If your computer is having a CPU, power supply, or cooling problem, then your computer is likely to shutdown within ten or fifteen minutes. Because of the strain this program puts on your computer, we don’t recommend leaving it running overnight – if there’s a problem, it should crop up relatively quickly. Cpuburn’s tools, including burnP6, have no interface; once they start running, they will start driving your CPU until you stop them. To stop a program like burnP6, press Ctrl+C in the terminal window that is running the program. Conclusion The Ubuntu Live CD provides two great testing tools to diagnose a tricky computer problem, or to stress test a new computer. While they are advanced tools that should be used with caution, they’re extremely useful and easy enough that anyone can use them. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDCreate a Persistent Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash DriveAdding extra Repositories on UbuntuHow to Share folders with your Ubuntu Virtual Machine (guest)Building a New Computer – Part 3: Setting it Up TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause

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• Multitask Like a Pro with AquaSnap

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you tired of shuffling back and forth between windows?  Here’s a handy app that can help you keep all of your windows organized and accessible. AquaSnap is a great free utility that helps you use multiple windows at the same time easily and efficiently.  One of Windows 7’s greatest new features is Aero Snap, which lets you easily view windows side by side by simply dragging windows to side of your screen.  After using Windows 7 for the past year, Aero Snap is one of the features we really miss when using older versions of Windows. With AquaSnap, you now have all of the features of Aero Snap and more in Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and of course Windows 7.  Not only does it give you Aero Snap features, but AquaSnap also gives you more control over your windows to make you more productive. Getting Started AquaSnap is a a free download for Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7.  Download the small installer (link below) and install it with the default settings. AquaSnap automatically runs as soon as it is installed, and you will notice a new icon in your system tray. Now you can go ahead and put it to use.  Drag a window to any edge or corner of your desktop, and you will see an icon showing what part of the screen the window will cover. Dragging it to the side of the screen expanded the window to fill the right half of the screen, just like the default Aero Snap in Windows 7.  You can drag the window away to restore it to its former size. AquaSnap works on any corner of the screen too, so you can have 4 windows side-by-side.  We already have 3 windows snapped to the corners, and notice that we’re dragging a fourth window to the bottom right corner. You can also snap windows to the bottom and top of the screen.  Here we have Word snapped to the bottom half of the screen, and we’re dragging Chrome to the top. You can even snap internal windows in Multiple Document Interface (MDI) programs such as Excel.  Here we are snapping a workbook in Excel to the left to view 2 workbooks side-by-side.   Additionally, AquaSnap lets you keep any window always on top.  Simply shake any window, and it will turn semi-transparent and stay on top of all other windows.  Notice the transparent calculator here on top of Excel. All of AquaSnap’s features work great in Windows 2000, XP, and Vista too.  Here we are snapping IE6 to the left of the screen in XP. Here are 3 windows snapped to the sides in XP.  You can mix the snap modes, and have, for instance, two windows on the right side and one window on the left.  This is a great way to maximize productivity if you need more space in one of the windows. Even AquaShake works to keep a window transparent and on top in XP. Settings AquaSnap has a detailed settings dialog where you can tweak it to work exactly like you want.  Simply right-click on its icon in the taskbar, and select Settings. From the first screen, you can choose if you want AquaSnap to start with Windows, and if you want it to show an icon in the system tray.  If you turn off the system tray icon, you can access the AquaSnap settings from Start > All Programs > AquaSnap > Configuration (or simply search for Configuration in Vista or Windows 7). The second tab in settings lets you choose what you want each snapping region to do.  You can also choose two other presets, including AeroSnap (which works just like the default Aero Snap in Windows 7) and AquaSnap simple (which only snaps at the edges of the screen, not the corners). The third tab lets you increase or decrease the opacity of pinned windows when using AquaShake, and also lets you increase or decrease the shaking sensitivity.  Additionally, if you prefer the standard AeroShake functionality, which minimizes all other open windows when you shake a window, you can choose that too. The fourth tab lets you activate an optional feature, AquaGlass.  If you activate this, it will make windows turn transparent when you drag them across the screen.   Finally, the last tab lets you change the color and opacity of the preview rectangle, or simply turn it off. Or, if you want to temporarily turn AquaSnap off, simply right-click on its icon and select Off.  In Windows 7, turning off AquaSnap will restore your standard Windows Aero Snap functionality, and in other version of Windows it will stop letting you snap windows at all.  You can then repeat the steps and select On when you want to use AquaSnap again. Conclusion AquaSnap is a handy tool to make you more productive at your computer.  With a wide variety of useful features, there’s something here for everyone.  Download AquaSnap Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Get Virtual Desktops on Windows XP TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Out of band Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 Cool Looking Screensavers for Windows SyncToy syncs Files and Folders across Computers on a Network (or partitions on the same drive) If it were only this easy Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook

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• Monitor your Hard Drive’s Health with Acronis Drive Monitor

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you worried that your computer’s hard drive could die without any warning?  Here’s how you can keep tabs on it and get the first warning signs of potential problems before you actually lose your critical data. Hard drive failures are one of the most common ways people lose important data from their computers.  As more of our memories and important documents are stored digitally, a hard drive failure can mean the loss of years of work.  Acronis Drive Monitor helps you avert these disasters by warning you at the first signs your hard drive may be having trouble.  It monitors many indicators, including heat, read/write errors, total lifespan, and more. It then notifies you via a taskbar popup or email that problems have been detected.  This early warning lets you know ahead of time that you may need to purchase a new hard drive and migrate your data before it’s too late. Getting Started Head over to the Acronis site to download Drive Monitor (link below).  You’ll need to enter your name and email, and then you can download this free tool. Also, note that the download page may ask if you want to include a trial of their for-pay backup program.  If you wish to simply install the Drive Monitor utility, click Continue without adding. Run the installer when the download is finished.  Follow the prompts and install as normal. Once it’s installed, you can quickly get an overview of your hard drives’ health.  Note that it shows 3 categories: Disk problems, Acronis backup, and Critical Events.  On our computer, we had Seagate DiskWizard, an image backup utility based on Acronis Backup, installed, and Acronis detected it. Drive Monitor stays running in your tray even when the application window is closed.  It will keep monitoring your hard drives, and will alert you if there’s a problem. Find Detailed Information About Your Hard Drives Acronis’ simple interface lets you quickly see an overview of how the drives on your computer are performing.  If you’d like more information, click the link under the description.  Here we see that one of our drives have overheated, so click Show disks to get more information. Now you can select each of your drives and see more information about them.  From the Disk overview tab that opens by default, we see that our drive is being monitored, has been running for a total of 368 days, and that it’s health is good.  However, it is running at 113F, which is over the recommended max of 107F.   The S.M.A.R.T. parameters tab gives us more detailed information about our drive.  Most users wouldn’t know what an accepted value would be, so it also shows the status.  If the value is within the accepted parameters, it will report OK; otherwise, it will show that has a problem in this area. One very interesting piece of information we can see is the total number of Power-On Hours, Start/Stop Count, and Power Cycle Count.  These could be useful indicators to check if you’re considering purchasing a second hand computer.  Simply load this program, and you’ll get a better view of how long it’s been in use. Finally, the Events tab shows each time the program gave a warning.  We can see that our drive, which had been acting flaky already, is routinely overheating even when our other hard drive was running in normal temperature ranges. Monitor Acronis Backups And Critical Errors In addition to monitoring critical stats of your hard drives, Acronis Drive Monitor also keeps up with the status of your backup software and critical events reported by Windows.  You can access these from the front page, or via the links on the left hand sidebar.  If you have any edition of any Acronis Backup product installed, it will show that it was detected.  Note that it can only monitor the backup status of the newest versions of Acronis Backup and True Image. If no Acronis backup software was installed, it will show a warning that the drive may be unprotected and will give you a link to download Acronis backup software.   If you have another backup utility installed that you wish to monitor yourself, click Configure backup monitoring, and then disable monitoring on the drives you’re monitoring yourself. Finally, you can view any detected Critical events from the Critical events tab on the left. Get Emailed When There’s a Problem One of Drive Monitor’s best features is the ability to send you an email whenever there’s a problem.  Since this program can run on any version of Windows, including the Server and Home Server editions, you can use this feature to stay on top of your hard drives’ health even when you’re not nearby.  To set this up, click Options in the top left corner. Select Alerts on the left, and then click the Change settings link to setup your email account. Enter the email address which you wish to receive alerts, and a name for the program.  Then, enter the outgoing mail server settings for your email.  If you have a Gmail account, enter the following information: Outgoing mail server (SMTP): smtp.gmail.com Port: 587 Username and Password: Your gmail address and password Check the Use encryption box, and then select TLS from the encryption options.   It will now send a test message to your email account, so check and make sure it sent ok. Now you can choose to have the program automatically email you when warnings and critical alerts appear, and also to have it send regular disk status reports.   Conclusion Whether you’ve got a brand new hard drive or one that’s seen better days, knowing the real health of your it is one of the best ways to be prepared before disaster strikes.  It’s no substitute for regular backups, but can help you avert problems.  Acronis Drive Monitor is a nice tool for this, and although we wish it wasn’t so centered around their backup offerings, we still found it a nice tool. Link Download Acronis Drive Monitor (registration required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Change Monitor Timeout From Command LineAnalyze and Manage Hard Drive Space with WinDirStatMonitor CPU, Memory, and Disk IO In Windows 7 with Taskbar MetersDefrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once In WindowsFind Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XP TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer

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