For the other 1 person besides me that actually views this site. We have a new editor/author, a good friend of mine. You may have noticed his stories “Firestorm”, we both are hoping to revamp up the content really soon, as you have seen.

I have also started developing a new look for the site, since we have been using the same theme for 2+ years now. This theme is going to be made entirely by me, and also encompass not only wordpress but the forum i plan on opening up as soon as i can get away from my current host.

Expect more robust content, about anything and everything computer related, from software to hardware in the near future. I will also be pushing out some software reviews, and write ups about software I use daily as a System Administrator which makes my life easier.

Well I guess I’ll add this part, even though it’s a bit off topic.

My name is SX here, but there’s many more names behind the true SX. I “Work” for a small website based on radio controlled hobbies. I know a bit about everything, a jack of all trades, but a master of only a few. I build systems for people I know, like the “NetBox” which I built for my brother a month or so ago. It’s a good machine.

However, there’s a much deeper side of me which I’m going to reveal in the next few paragraphs.

I’ve lived a hard life, rising from nothing in the middle of nowhere. I’ve never had true “broadband” internet. I’ve never had the “cool kids” stuff until I forced myself to have it. My biggest problem is the fact that I just don’t have the ability to get it through my head that there’s more to the world then a minimum pay rate and a dead end job. I’m currently a student in the CCNA Network Administration program with DeVry university, so I’m on the right track! Where will I go from there? Time will tell in the coming years, but for now I’m stuck in this decrepit hole where technology hasn’t even though of visiting. I’m stuck, nowhere to turn. Unemployed due to a layoff which has basically killed the place where I worked at. Jobs are… more than hard to find….

I guess the last month has daeded me into believe myself that I’m more or less a.. slacker? A drain on the economy? A waste? Is it my fault? Maybe, maybe not.. I don’t know what to believe anymore.. It’s horrifying to realize that I haven’t stopped working since I was 16 for more than two weeks… and now I’m at a month of dreadful laziness.. Help me… I’ve dug my own hole of personal misery and don’t know where to go anymore.

I guess this post is more or less a lax. A way to decide my own fate and release the tension on it. The subject is touchy. If you’ve read this, feel free to comment. I’m not depressed about it, just have a mindset that isn’t good for me unless I purge once in a while.. And I’ll tell you what, “sudo apt-get purge current-user-mindset” doesn’t work at all.. Keeps telling me it can’t find the package…

There’s one word that has become part of my daily Ubuntu life. That’s “Audacious”. While my main point is to waste my life away at the computer to find new things to play with and post about, I play music. My desktop literally plays it’s 2000+ music files all day, every day whenever it is running. If it’s in Vista, Media Player 64-bit is running through the list and playing files for my listening pleasure (however, that’s rare).. This only began after the AOL buyout of Winamp.com and the subsidiaries that made Winamp possible. After that buy, winamp began to be… intensive and heavy for system resources. Also, the lack of a 64 bit version made me gasp as the 64-bit players handle so much better against intense processor usage, like when taring (zipping) an iso file to MAX compression. 32-bit apps almost always skip and choke no matter how fast of a processor.

So, I was stuck with the standard Rythmebox of Ubuntu 9.04 and didn’t know what to do. I can’t say I hated it, but I couldn’t say I “liked” it at all. I searched and found a couple of different players, nothing that “induced” that love I had for messing with playlists and playing music all day. Nothing fulfilled my needs like bmp did back in the Gutsy Gibbon era(7.10). BMP was as close to winamp in an original sense as it got.

Enter Audacious. While it’s not “perfect” as a replica of Winamp from the version 2.5 era, it’s close. It’s almost identical to the original Winamp 2 series and even can use those OLD skins you had, plus new ones from today!

It handles really well and works with all of my codecs! I’m glad to have it at my side. It’s very lightweight and plays without problems on my desktop with two large ISO’s being extracted from tar.gz’s! Wonderful! Perfect, and it fits way to well. I will recommend this to anyone who remembers how well Winamp 2.51 performed on those old Windows 98 machines while playing games like Diablo 2 with not enough ram to even think about multi-tasking. It really brings back these memories and was easy to install with Ubuntu. If you have any issues with your music player like I did, search up for Audacious.

For the Ubuntu line of OS’s you can simply use an apt-get install audacious command in your terminal! Best part of all. You can run audacious at the command line too!

Well I took the 6 hour express way to the download of the KDE desktop environment for Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope x64. Downloading from the repositories took almost 6.5 hours at 5-10kb/s. While waiting I did a little research and found that it would probably be pretty neat for my liking.

Well the install went flawlessly. It took a while and my terminal was pretty tired of outputing the information. I setup gnome as my default DE for now. I made a new account just for the use of KDE.

So far, my findings. I’ll list what I’ve found impressive, then the bad news on the backend.

Plasma… There’s just no explaining this. The desktop is absolutely unreal. Widget based, small windows with almost a limitless supply of information.. RSS feeds, Clocks, system monitors, and more! Pretty easy to use, and best of all you can lock them down.

However, using plasma, there’s a bit of a difference between the normal desktop environment like GDM(Gnome) or WDM(Windows Vista). There is no desktop folder that shows the icons directly to the “desktop” persay off the bat. It is changable though, either way by default there is a widget that allows you to browse the entire file system from a window! Pretty good idea if you like a clean shop as I do. I feel unclean with more than 3 icons on my desktop, so this is a good thing for me.

Control.. Absolutely beautiful set of controls. This is a BIG thing for KDE. The ability to control the environment and the “special” effects is unmatched in KDE. It’s an easy world there!

Ease… Oh how easy it is. The menu at first is confusing going from Gnome to KDE in a whole. The desktop is changed and the menu is streamlined for finishing touches for someone who has a LOT of menu options. I’ll stick to the simplistic gnome menu, but KDE would be much more user friendly in the long run I believe. Specially with the search bar added into the menu for direct searching for applications.

Now, there’s the good side. An absolutely eye tingling experience awaits the Kubuntu user with the KDE environment. However, there’s still downsides with KDE.

Stability.. On my first boot of KDE, “krunner” crashed with a fatal error. It quickly recovered and I was set. If you work to fast for it, like double clicking icons that a single click will open, it’ll crash. It recovers fine with no side effects, yet having to look at the red X of doom and a “Fatal Error” message every time you want to quick click. I’m a power user and my mouse is like lightning, so this is bad for me. However, slowing myself down and stopping the speed of my mousing has kept it from crashing at all.

Plasma can be irritating if you aren’t completely literate with a computer. Locking the widgets down isn’t the hardest thing to do, but it even took me a few minutes to figure out. Customization on the widgets isn’t as good as I’d like, but they work well.

The worst problem I see with a Gnome user switching to KDE is the panels. Gnome panels are awesome for the fact that they can be mutated to almost anything you want to use them for. KDE’s panels lack customization ability if you ask me. And the process is much more painful to mutate them and even to move them around! The effects are nice, but if I can’t manage them the way I want, what’s the point in having more then one? I don’t want one on top and it takes me more than 50 mouse clicks to move it? That’s a definite downside to me.

The final verdict?

KDE is more advanced in MANY ways compared to Gnome. It’s more visually perfect and looks great. Stability is questionable however, especially with krunner failures. There may be an easy fix, but compared to two years ago, it’s still not stable enough for what I’d call daily use.

KDE definitely has an advantage, but an extra 100mb or so of ram overhead. Plus it uses a bit more on the processor to run at an “idle”. However, with the visuals and more “windows like” appearance, KDE could definitely be the choice of many in the future. For now, I’ll stick to Gnome as my default desktop environment as its purpose is well fit into my daily Ubuntu and I don’t think I’d change that for anything. KDE will from now on remain installed in my desktop distro’s for “play time” though. It’s definitely showing of a better feel and better environment, it just needs to be stable like Gnome before it will take a home as my “everyday” environment.

So, I’m guessing here, but you’re probably a newer user of Linux? Well even some of the most die hard users of linux know little of this special program called Conky. Conky, in a whole is simply just an application that shows the status of certain things on your machine. However, Conky can be configured to almost a limitless potential. Over the past four weeks I’ve been tinkering with conky more then a small child plays with their rattle. Why? Simply put, it’s addicting.

Conky – “Conky is a system monitor for X originally based on torsmo. Since its inception, Conky has changed significantly from its predecessor, while maintaining simplicity and configurability. Conky can display just about anything, either on your root desktop or in its own window. Not only does Conky have many built-in objects, it can also display just about any piece of information by using scripts and other external programs. ” (Taken from: http://conky.sourceforge.net/docs.html, July 1, 2009)

Conky is a multipurpose tool. Just for an idea of how advanced you can make it, here’s what all system information I can VERY quickly see on my desktop.

System:
Kernel
System Updates
Processor Speed
Processor Temp
Video Card Speeds (ram/gpu)
GPU Temp
Processor usage
Uptime
Average System load
CPU load in a moving graph!

Memory:
My used amounts of ram in MB of the available GB
Used Swap Space

Storage:
Both of the HDD’s that support hddtemp temperatures and those temperatures of them.
I have the ability to see up to 3 plugged in external drives with used and total size and a bar to show it along with my root, /home and my other internal drives sizes and usage.

Network:
I can see exactly how fast I’m sending/receiving data through the network, along with a pair of graphs to show it visually.
The total downloaded and uploaded for the current uptime. More can be done with vnstat!

I also have a full display of weather including todays current conditions and windspeeds along with a graphical 4 day conditions with precipitation perfects and high and low temps! Not to mention the current stats for the following..

Chance of rain
UV Index
Humidity
Dew Point
Barometer
Sunrise/Sunset times
And the current Moon Phase.

All of this from the VERY lightweight and simple “conky” application. If you’re using linux and haven’t tried this, it’s definitely worth looking into! You won’t be disappointed by it’s abilities!

Side Note: Some distro’s come with conky either installed or in their repositories. However, the current version is now available and it is 1.7.1.1 as of July 1, 2009.

When I first started working for this company, the network was in shambles. The current IT Manager at the time was attempting to rebuild most servers to newer hardware or move them to our new VMWare environment. And in the process bring a lot of technology that we let third parties manage to an in house solution. One of the technologies he planned on bringing in house was DNS.

At the time we used both Network Solutions and/or godaddy DNS service, depending on which company we acquired the name from. We as an IT department were throwing around different ideas for which software we were going to use for external DNS. The manager wanted to go with Name Server Daemon (NSD) running on OpenBSD servers. NSD is an authoritative only, high performance, simple and open source name server. For me being a frequent FreeBSD user I was all for this idea, since the BSD line are well known in the server world for little issues, and long uptimes. From my personal experience I recommended BIND as I had no experience with NSD, but as everyone knows bind is very prominent in the DNS market. Our reasons for going to our own manage DNS servers were control over all our zones from one spot instead of two, and reverse DNS, since we currently handled reverse DNS through our T1 provider who just forward the information to AT&T’s staff.

Our current requirements for the DNS servers were that:

A few days after our talk over which software to use, our manager moved on to another job, due to conflicts with the owner at our company. I was tasked with taking over his remaining tasks along with mine, and also taking over managing the Cisco network equipment. Once everything settled down I was finally able to get back to exploring bringing our external DNS in house.

My first attempt was do a combination of FreeBSD and bind, this failed miserably because of lack of updates in our VM Environments, I could barely get FreeBSD to install in the environment, and when it did get installed, it ran really slow. (I did investigate the cause at a later date and fixed it). My second attempt failed because of a broken Bind package in Ubuntu 8.04 at the time. I spent a few days searching for resolutions too all the issues I was having, even going as far as copying config files and zone files off a server I maintained for a friends business. That did not work ether.

Enter PowerDNS:

In my search for information on my bind issue, and VMware issues, I came across PowerDNS.
From there website:
“The PowerDNS Nameserver is a modern, advanced and high performance authoritative-only nameserver. It is written from scratch and conforms to all relevant DNS standards documents. Furthermore, PowerDNS interfaces with almost any database.”
My first thought was, to shun the overhead of a database backend on a DNS server, until I thought about database replication. Being that I am a geek, and like trying new things, I decided to give it try. Besides what did I have to lose? I was having issues with the current setup already.

Following a tutorial online, I had our initial DNS Server up and running, within a couple of hours (going back and forth handling other company issues). I was using MySQL as the backend as I am most familiar with. Testing with an extra domain that the company owned, I started testing out the initial features of PowerDNS. PowerDNS by nature is an Authorative only name server, but they do have an add-on package to do recursive lookups. I was, and am still getting lookup times from dig on the server at 2 msec. PowerDNS also as a third party web based admin console you can download, called powerAdmin. This allows for quick editing of your DNS records from a web based view, without having to view zone files. Another feature that I found useful is that adding a record or entire zone, does not require the restart of the service.

Database Replication:

Using MySQL built in replication routine, I was able to get the two other servers up and running in a few hours. I configured NS1 to be a parent node, then NS2 and NS3 to be a child node. Any change I made on NS1 was then replicated to the others almost instantly. I did not have to deal with accessing each machine remotely, and making a change in the zone file.

The usefulness of using MySQL to replicate really stood out to me, because it makes it easy to make a mass change. For instance, in the event that we have to move to our disaster recovery office, issuing one well thought out SQL query can change all IP addresses to reflect the external IP addresses of our other office. Overall I am very happy with this setup.

Stay tuned:

For some screenshots, installation instructions, and some personal changes to poweradmin that i perfer.

So, for the last twenty four hours or so I’ve been fighting with Windows Vista x64 and getting next to nowhere.. Here’s what started the problem..

Vista loaded up with an error that stated Windows Defender couldn’t be started : 0×800106ba…

After quite a few seemingly endless hours with google and searching for a fix, nothing came up for the 0×800106ba error that I had. Some say to simply reset the services mode from Automatic start to Manual and then back. This simply refreshes the starting prompt on the service, nothing for me. Some places have said, “Uninstall and Reinstall!!” They need to get “brains” because you can’t remove Defender from Vista’s backend. You have to disable it and that’s all you can do. Some say to load up the mysterious “msconfig” and uncheck windows defender in the startup list. Some even get extravagant and say to hide all of the MS sources on the previous tab to make you think that you’re doing something important. All that you’re doing by unchecking Windows Defender is totally disabling it from the Vista startup process.

Well my problem obviously flows deeper. After some hard searching on my system, come to find out something much worse is at play. My entire environmental path variable is SHOT. Now there’s no ability to fix this within vista without some skill and a good google. Under my problem, even the system properties applet for control panel fails. So obviously it’s not registering with “c:\windows\system32″ at all.

Anyways, come to find there’s no easy way to fix the problem. So, here’s my options.

Format – Reinstall… Go figure
Let it ride.. Prolly going to…
Wait for Win7 (Most definitely)

So if this happens to any of you, remember, 4 hours of searching does help. I just don’t feel like messing with windows for that long.

I think I’ve downloaded enough distro’s to give a complete opinion for you guys and gals who may or may not be ready for the switch to linux.

Picking a distro can be difficult… While some are easy, a lot of distro’s are different and have a very different learning curve. If you aren’t sure about a distro, let us know and we’ll toss some information your way about them.

Now for three distro’s I think are.. beyond the scope of reality now in ease of use compared to the rest. I’ll list them here so you can get a good idea of what I’m talking about.

From easiest to .. easier? LoL

MintOS.. While I may get shunted for this at some places.. I’ve got to admit this was the EASIEST Linux distro I’ve ever used. It’s one of the few that actually have kept a place longer then a week in my Virtual Box setup. Let me go into a little detail here.

MintOS is an “off chute” of Ubuntu if you will. It’s so much like Ubuntu that it actually uses the Ubuntu repositories (places that hold updates and thousands of applications and modifications for the OS). It also has a few of the MintOS repos on it as well that hold some applications that aren’t normally in Ubuntu. There is a LOT more customization options already installed and it’s pretty much a shinier version of Ubuntu in a whole. While personally, this isn’t my thing, it’s what a LOT of people want. It’s easy to use and works very well (see the Ubuntu portion). The install was even easier then Ubuntu and the process took 10 minutes on my Virtual Box. MintOS should have all the same hardware requirments and abilities as Ubuntu does.

Ubuntu.. The premium if you will. Solid and ready, Ubuntu is already being sold with Dell computers, which says a LOT for the computer world. Dell has one of the most stringent policies for thier computers and if they are installing Ubuntu onto thier machines, you can rest assured that it’s a good OS. Ubuntu is a free OS, like almost every Linux distro, but it’s updated constantly. Usually more then Windows Vista is now. There are rolling updates and new versions released every six months. Quite impressive for a free OS. Also, Ubuntu remains one of the easiest and user friendly Distro’s around. Ubuntu also has a rolling HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) that is updated constantly. Even a lot of the hardware not in this list works but the hardware in thier list has been tried and proven to work. Ubuntu is the #1 choice for new users, and this is where MintOS has copied the tried and true and reformed it for the “graphic loving” crowd.

Mandriva… This one is hard to explain, but once you dig in, it’s wonderful! Not quite as capable as Ubuntu with hardware and applications, however still one of the most impressive distro’s out there. The manuals are easy to the eyes and to the new users that haven’t been there before. Also, the install was QUICK and PAINLESS! I was suprised at how easy it was to get to a running operating system. Mandriva definitely has something to prove and they are definitely on the right track. I will be downloading the newest version for myself and having a good chunk of hard drive space dedicated to it. If I wasn’t so happy with Ubuntu, I’d probably switch to mandriva totally.

The thing one must remember with Linux is that it’s free (for the most part). People like me and you who don’t have a multi-billion dollar research staff code this stuff. The community is the champion here so thank the guys that help design these operating systems. If it wasn’t for the guys from Ubuntu doing such a great job I wouldn’t have an operating system on my laptop at all.

One last thing to remember, which is basically the same with windows unless you like hanging on hold for hours at a time. Google is the BEST tech support you can find for any operating system. If you’re running into a problem, chances are that someone else has already been there and posted about it. Ubuntu and Mandriva both have very nice support forums, and the MintOS can pretty much be troubleshooted with the Ubuntu forums since it’s basically the same OS.

If you have any questions about Linux, we’d be more then happy to try and help you out. Just leave a comment!

SX

The “hizzy”.. branded the best of the best and the cream of the crop to these words our desire is always unmatched. To hold what is coveted by all else, but owned by you. Where’s the cream?

In my life I’ve watched computers run from IBM Dos to Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition.. The ATI Rage Fury Pro Rage Fury Version 8.010203 Pro AGP X models and nVidia Geforce Titanium 48585839323r000 model. I know this doesn’t make much for sense to someone who hasn’t been down the long road I have, but there’s a point here.

Where’s the cream? What’s the cream then? The best of the best, the most elite of the elite? Is it that quad core system cooled by water and running at 4.5Ghz? Is it that 16GB of ram you just can’t stop drooling over? That 24×256GB Samsung SSD setup in raid that just makes you drool?

No, it’s not that.. it’s what you hold to you. I don’t have it all, nor do I want it. So what if some idiot can own a quad core extreme system that had costed over $5000 to build. I go with what I like, and that’s where the real “cream” is. My laptop, it’s the hizzy. It’s over a year old and I like it because it’s perfect for me. The $3000 Alienware may be nice, but it isn’t what I really want.. It’s not my “cream” persay.

It’s time we all stop looking at each other and having jealousy over that which is an item of personal ownership. We need to focus on what is important in life and how we can better ourselves and others for the benefit of everyone. This is just a post of free will, which others take for granted every day. Stop sobbing and start helping. Sharing the knowledge is better then knowing everything in the world.

SX