Allow me to rant for a moment, if you will. I’m not forcing you to read it or anything…

Why is it that newspapers, when they design their websites, seem to forget that they are making the site available to a worldwide audience? I see it all the time: read Google News, or a blog entry, or some other source with a link to a newspaper story. Click. The newspaper has the name of the paper, often with the city name, plastered in about fifty places, and that’s just “above the fold”! But do they bother to put the state or any other identifying information somewhere? Not usually on the same page, or the home page. If you hunt around, sometimes you’ll find a Contact page or something that might list even a full [gasp] mailing address! Is it too much to ask that you list the full city and state where the paper is located somewhere on every page of the site? Or even just the homepage?

The latest example, and the one that set off this rant, is this story here, in the Holland Sentinal. One of my new favorite humor blogs, The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, mentioned that the blog was covered in that article in the Holland Sentinel. I clicked through and the article says,

This sign is one of the many signs guilty of what Holland native Bethany Keeley calls “unnecessary” quotation marks.

So yes, it says blogger Bethany is a “Holland native.” So what. I’ve been to Holland twice, and it’s pretty long flight from here, and if that’s where she and the paper are from, there would be a lot more Dutch mixed in on her posts! (And as a side note, “Holland” is actually just a part of the Netherlands, but it is used informally to refer to all of the Netherlands by outsiders. You can read about it on Wikipedia, but having been there, I’ll vouch for the article’s accuracy on that point :-)  But Wikipedia also disambiguates Holland, and shows that there are at least seventeen states with cities having the name “Holland” in them just in the United States! Yeah, that makes it perfectly obvious where the “Holland Sentinel” newspaper is based. Well, it does once you visit their Contact page. Oh well.

Anyway. The article itself is good, and mentions that the blog was covered recently in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, which is pretty hefty exposure for a humor blog! I’m certainly enjoying it. The blog is great,  and so is the article about it, it’s the newspaper’s website I have an issue with! Identify yourself fully, you geographically-oriented entities with cyber-presences!

End rant. If you made it this far…sorry :-)

Windows Defender used to be my go-to anti-spyware software. After all, it was free, unobtrusive, simple, and seemed to catch a lot of junk. Then I worked on a user’s computer today that Defender said was clean. It wasn’t. There were at least six different forms of spyware on there, causing various popups, warnings that the computer was infected with spyware (duh! Of course the warnings by the spyware are less then scrupulous!), a weird desktop wallpaper warned of infection, and even putting a yellow bar at the top of the browser when visiting symantec.com warning of spyware infection with a link (not to Symantec) to “fix the problem.” Oh yeah, I’m going to click on that!

Anyway, normally I would try Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy next. I’ve had mixed results with both of these in the past; they’re generally very good products but I had heard several things a while ago (not even sure where) about Sunbelt Software’s CounterSpy software. They have both Enterprise and Home editions; both have trials but to test it out, I chose the Home edition for this one computer. I installed the download, ran a full scan, and it found five items that Windows Defender missed! Zap. Problem gone. I’m impressed. The Enterprise functionality they advertise, which supposedly has a nice administrative dashboard to monitor all this stuff centrally (if it works half as well as the Symantec console and is even one-fifth easier to use it should be sweet). Price looks to be around the same as our Symantec deployment (not that we can get rid of antivirus, it’s just comparable), which is more than the freebies but if we do try it on the whole network and it finds a lot, it’s probably worth it. I’m putting it on my to-do list.

This should be an interesting test considering that another major commercial antispyware vendor I’ve heard of, Webroot, seems to have Jason Powell steamed due to their poor communication! I’ve never used Webroot, but if Sunbelt can do the communication thing and get the job done, I’ll at least consider it.

Anyone else use CounterSpy and have comments to share?

It’s been a long week. This past weekend my dad went to the hospital with chest pains and found out he had a heart attack last week (well, possibly last week, they can’t pinpoint the exact time and it could have been earlier than that) and also found out that he has diabetes, along with high blood pressure and high blood sugar. He’s been in the hospital since Sunday. They did a heart catheterization a couple of days ago and discovered that he has three blocked arteries, one 99% blocked and the others less (I forget the exact numbers but something like 60% and 40%). So tomorrow (Friday) morning he is going to have heart bypass surgery. Your prayers are much appreciated.

Wednesdays and Thursdays my mom generally watches my son while I work because my wife works part time. However, with my dad in the hospital that didn’t work out this week, so I stayed home with him yesterday. He was tired and clingy (wouldn’t let me put him down all day) and when my wife got home we discovered that he had a fever. He didn’t sleep well last night (but he’s sooooo tired!) and although he’s a bit better today, my wife and I both stayed home and have been alternating taking care of him and sleeping. And I’ve been contemplating the homework I have due tonight and tomorrow night that I haven’t started yet. We’ll see how that works out.

Long week.

UPDATE at 11:30 pm Thursday: Surgery is at 7:30 am EST tomorrow (Friday) morning, and will take 3-4 hours (and possibly some extra time for prep). It will be a double, triple, or quadruple bypass, but they won’t know until they start. He will be in the hospital for 4-6 days afterwards and will be at home for at least a month after that. As for my son, he is still running a fever but no other symptoms, so the pediatrician said wait it out or call back if there are more symptoms or it lasts longer than a week.

UPDATE at 10:40 am Friday: My son’s fever seems to have broken overnight and he was sleeping when I woke up! He kept us up a lot again last night though, and I just woke up about a half-hour ago and have been waiting to get ready to go until he and my wife woke up, since they were both sleeping (and they both just woke up). My dad’s surgery started on time at 7:30, with no updates yet. My mom is supposed to know more sometime around 11-noon, and he will be unconscious for two hours afterwards and in ICU for two days, with 5-7 days in hospital total and then a month where he can’t drive. He likely won’t know who is around him until dinnertime tonight, or possibly later.

UPDATE at 11:30 am on Friday: My dad’s out of surgery and it went well! It ended up being a double-bypass; although there were three blockages the surgeon said the third one was not a primary artery and wouldn’t be an issue (for some reason they couldn’t do the bypass on it but like I said it doesn’t matter). My mom will be able to visit him in 45 minutes or so. Thanks again to everyone for your prayers; obviously the surgery itself is over now but it’ll be a week before he’s out of the hospital, so if you remember to send some prayers his way in the coming week they would be much appreciated.

UPDATE at 11:15 pm on Friday: My dad is doing OK but because he lost some blood during surgery, his blood pressure was low and thus his vitals were not stabilizing after the surgery and he kept moving around too soon. So they had to give him two pints of blood and knock him out again. So far his vitals have not stabilized enough for them to let him become fully conscious yet, although he is conscious enough at times to know that my mom and brother are there. I will be visiting tomorrow, although I think I may have to wait a couple of days before he’ll be interested in my new iPod (it came today!). My son’s fever and accompanying lethargy came back all afternoon but went away again a couple of hours ago and he just went to sleep. My wife and I are following suit, but I may have to listen to a podcast or two in bed first, now that it’s so easy :-) Thanks for your continued prayers.

UPDATE at 8:00 am on Saturday: Found a text message this morning that I got overnight saying that my dad was up and talking with breathing tube removed at 2:46 am!!! Also, my son was a bit fussy this morning and is asleep again after his morning bottle, but he does seem to still be fever-free.

UPDATE at 5:00 pm on Sunday: I got to visit with dad for about four hours yesterday and it went well. He was still drugged up but was still talkative and making his usual jokes. Some were funny (I thought most were). As many as usual anyway :-) Will go again this evening. They moved him to a new room and out of the ICU today! My mom tells me he is tired from the move, but doing OK.

UPDATE at 2:25 pm on Monday: The surgeon stopped by to see my dad and said he can go home tomorrow! That’s faster than expected!

UPDATE on Tuesday evening: My dad came home today and my parents are settling in. I stopped by on my way home from work for a couple of hours. There is enough to do tomorrow that I will still be staying home to watch my son while my wife is at work, although my mom will probably be able to watch him on Thursday. We believe my son had Roseola, based on the rash he’s had after his fever, but it’s about gone now and he’s back to his normal, happy self! Thank God!

I finally did it. I can’t think of one Apple product I own — except for the new iPod Classic I just bought yesterday on Amazon for $228 as part of their after-Thanksgiving-day sale (aka Black Friday in the retail industry — they’re finally in the black for the year!). Now, to wait the 1-2 weeks for it to arrive via free shipping! I won a Creative MuVo MP3 player a couple of years ago, but never really found it user-friendly, and it didn’t hold many podcasts at 1GB.

The iPod Classic 80GB I just grabbed should take the 15GB of podcasts I currently have sitting on my laptop in stride, with plenty of room for a few tunes when I feel like a break (and also a few videos here and there). I keep running into podcast episodes that run over the 74-minute mark (1hr 14 min), and thus won’t fit on a CD. Plus, I’m tired of burning podcasts onto CD, not just because I only listen to them once, but because burning them to CD (fitting as many as possible in each playlist and labeling each disc) is a royal pain. The podcasts I listen to are good enough to be worth the effort, and I’ve patiently waited for over a year to have the money available for an iPod. It’s part Christmas present from my wife, and part me getting rid of about half of the 31 domain names I own (~$10/yr for one is not much, but ~$310 for 31 makes a much bigger dent!).

The domain names I am not renewing are, sadly, some pretty nice domains. Some are reasonably old, and all are reasonably good if you have an interest in the genre (ranging from Christianity to long distance services to Star Trek, and a few others in-between). If I let them expire, they will probably be registered by some domain-squatter and used for advertising, which I’d rather not do. So, I am considering the best way to dispose of the domains from our budget without literally tossing them out! Should I list them on a domain auction site? That’s probably not a bad idea, but I could also list them here. I’m not necessarily looking to make a killing, but a few bucks on top of the registrar transfer fee would help to offset the years I have paid for the domains (some just a few years, but my first domain is from back when Network Solutions had a monopoly and charged $100 for two years up front!). Any thoughts? Should I list them here? I have ten domains that I am for sure not renewing, and they all expire within the next year (some as soon as December).

Well, I got a reply from the DiskWarrior folks I mentioned on Saturday and it turns out you must run it while logged in as an administrative user, simply elevating privileges at the usual prompt is not enough (a useful warning or something more descriptive would seem more in line for, you know, a Mac program… :-) Sure enough, that did it. Turns out there were some new OS X updates needed, so I started those while DiskWarrior was scanning the array. When I started the program, it actually recognized the array, told me that it was ready to scan and what file system it was, that it wasn’t on the desktop, all the nice details that gave me what I hoped was not false hope. I clicked Rebuild and let it run for about 45 minutes. It said it could do the repair but it couldn’t write the repaired directory structure to the disk and that I should run the bootable CD version of DiskWarrior (the disc is in the mail). The friend that recommended DiskWarrior suggested that I contact Alsoft and see about downloading an ISO, which I was about to do, but I thought, I have one more trick up my sleeve!

So I restarted the computer, which by that time was finished running software updates and demanding as much anyway. Logged in, and didn’t do anything else other than run DiskWarrior this time. Same process, but this time after it finished the option to Replace the repaired directory structure was available! Click, wait ten-or-so minutes. Ta-da! It works! Nothing like the good ‘ole “reboot” Windows trick to get a Mac fixed!

I grabbed some nice screenshots of DiskWarrior in action (thanks to some quick Googling to determine how to use the built-in screen shot capture feature I knew existed on the Mac — Command+Shift+4, Spacebar, click on window to capture), so I thought I’d give you a sneak peek, in case you want to get your geek on vicariously without going through the near-data-loss experience yourself!

Thanks to the commenters from my last post with suggestions, they were helpful to my sanity over the weekend since I knew I had some good alternate options if DiskWarrior failed! I could find plenty of options on my own, but it’s difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff without spending a lot of money trying various things, so the recommendations are very much appreciated.

Who needs backup?

Yep, we do! I mentioned in my last post that this server wasn’t originally intended for critical data storage(just temporary video where the RAID 5 redundancy was plenty of backup), but over time with staff turnover and other random happenings, it has sort of become much more critical. Several years ago, backing up the 1.6TB of data on this server was cost-prohibitive. Now? 1TB hard drives are $300 each, and even nice things like the Drobo are $500, which will hold up to 4 of those drives and give 2.7TB of usable data storage for right at about $1700. Or, since the array is 1.5TB, put three 1TB drives in for $1400 and get 1.8TB usable space, which is still 0.2TB ahead of our needs for a mirrored backup.

Is this the best backup solution? I know there are less expensive NAS enclosures out there, some possibly directly-networkable and not just USB 2.0 like the Drobo is currently. Right now our internal data server (RAID 5 array) is being mirrored by another server with another RAID 5 array. We have 1TB of storage and backup between those two servers, but a third backup would be nice to have. What about maxing out a Drobo and backing everything up to it? What about other options? What about picking up an iSCSI SAN from StoreVault for $3k with 1TB, or expanding that a bit and put all our main storage there (including several virtual server hard drives) , and using the existing arrays we have for backups? Lots of questions to answer, and this almost-data-loss is a useful catalyst to demonstrate the need to spend money for backups. And by “useful catalyst” I mean, I have been asked to make sure this can’t happen again :-)

I know similar things have been a hot topic of discussion on the Church IT Podcast and in other similar forums lately, but if anyone has specific information or suggestions, you can make a blogger happy with the comments form :-D Oh yeah, and sorry about that corny title. I couldn’t resist. It’s so much fun to make my wife roll her eyes when I make weird word plays like “HurRAID!” I imagine most of you rolled yours right along with her…

Last night, Friday evening at about four thirty to be precise, I get the call that a user has attempted to restart the Mac “server” (running OS X 10.4 but attached to an external RAID5 array and used as a file server) by doing a hard power cycle of the external SCSI RAID array. While the host computer was still on. For some reason, the shared volume on the array is not accessible now. Rebooting the host “server” produces an error on boot about a volume not being available because it is corrupt. Disk Utility fails to Verify or Repair due to errors, and the array is showing up but the volume is simply “disk3s3.”

This is a 1.6TB array, around since our previous Evangelism and Media pastor who did quite a bit of video editing and used the array for video storage while working on projects. Fast forward to today, when the Marketing/Communications (MarCom) department is using the system to store–everything. However, we don’t have a backup solution in place because the system wasn’t intended initially as mission-critical storage and the budget hasn’t been there to change that. 1.6TB is the largest amount of storage in one server that we have right now, so there’s no place to even copy the data for a backup, like we do with our primary file server.

I purchased DiskWarrior, which comes highly recommended, but it’s throwing a funky error about a corrupt configuration file when I try to even start it. It says to delete the old configuration file to continue, but it doesn’t exist–thus, a support request has been logged and we wait until Monday to continue the saga (I tried calling their support number but they had just closed for the weekend. Probably for the best, it was dinner time, and family time, and homework time! I didn’t get out of there until 7 pm anyway). Meanwhile we are faced with the prospect that if this doesn’t work, the only option I can think of is to ring up one of those fun services that do awesome data recovery at a price on par with their awesomeness. The array itself says it’s fine, no lost drives or anything weird like you would expect for a failed system, it appears that the partition just got corrupted somehow when the power was unceremoniously yanked. To protect the guilty, I’ll spare you the details of who and why, but let’s just say my happiness level is not quite up where I like it to be…

If you have any recommendations of good (and preferably inexpensive) RAID5, Mac filesystem recovery services, I’m open to suggestions if we end up having to go that way (and can justify the cost given the data). I will update you next week on the progress with DiskWarrior when it gets up and running.

On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, I assisted one of our maintenance staff with running twelve wires around the building. We made two runs, each with six cables (four network and two coax). Running six cables at a time through dropped ceilings in an old building (mostly, some parts were in the new building) takes a lot more work that you’d think at first glance. One of the runs was about 250 feet, and the other was probably a bit less but I haven’t checked for sure.

It does go a lot faster with two people; one person would likely take several days to make one of these runs! We set up a makeshift spindle to allow the cable to somewhat easily unwind as we pulled it through the ceiling; I’ve provided a picture I snapped to show our (somewhat ingenious, if I do say so myself) cable pulling setup! The second run, with the setup shown in the picture, actually splits halfway through and three of the lines go one way (to our children’s auditorium) and the other three continue on to the office of our Facilities Manager (technically, Facilities Director, but then I can’t say FMer :-) (If you don’t get that, you had to be at the Roundtable at CoR in October!) Being this active for two days took a bit of a toll on my legs, but my eyes relished the break from the oft-near computer screens!

I finally took the plunge and upgraded VersaMail on my Treo 650 to version 3.5 (the default is 3.1), for $9.99. This upgrade adds several features, the biggest being the ability to sync Contacts over-the-air in addition to Email and Calendar when using an Exchange ActiveSync account, and Direct Push so you receive immediate notifications of new items (like incoming email) from the Exchange server. You can also now search the Exchange Global Address List when sending an email from the Treo! I had decided not to upgrade when the new VersaMail version came out because some people were reporting stability issues, but these seem to be better after applying the EAS Update available from Palm (for $2.99, still a ripoff for a patch, but it’s inexpensive enough that I’m willing to be ripped off) that must be installed after the VersaMail upgrade. The update fixes some Direct Push issues.

While I was at it, I threw in the VersaMail 3.5 EAS Meeting Invitation Update for good measure, just in case I needed it (and it was free!). I got all the updates available, basically; I must be used to Windows Updates where you should install it all, just in case it closes a huge gaping security hole or fixes something you don’t care enough about to research every time :-)

Everything went much more smoothly than expected! I installed VersaMail 3.5, installed and applied the updates, and did a sync. After the first sync, I was able to modify my account preferences to specify that I wanted to be notified “As items arrive,” which enables Direct Push.

So far, so good. Except that several minutes later, I hear my “New Mail Alert” sound and the message I get says, “EAS Account: Please press the Sync button.” Well, that’s fun. I go from email every 30 minutes to an annoying notice to manually “automatically” sync every five minutes! What is this? A Microsoft-like “improvement” from Palm?! Oh no! Things like “I wonder what would happen if I threw this phone through the window” started to go through my mind, but instead of following through with that I reverted to my backup plan:

Must…use…Google. Which I did, and I found this thread on the Palm forums that sounded like a broken record of my problem (not helpful) until I got to the last reply in the thread (which was helpful!). It had links to a blog entry from You Had Me At EHLO about Direct Push and Heartbeats, where, right there under list item 3 under the heading “Deployment Considerations for Direct Push” (I know, so easy to find in such a “short” entry :-) it talks about firewall connection timeouts with a link to an MSKB article (the same one the forum post linked to): 905013, Enterprise firewall configuration for Exchange ActiveSync Direct Push Technology. It’s reasonably short and sweet, and they’re kind enough to include step-by-step instructions for making the needed configuration change to our ISA 2004 firewall. Seriously, the instructions are so good and easy, I won’t even repeat them here. Click, click, click, type numbers, click, click, Apply, done. Or something like that.

I initiated a manual sync again to establish the connection with the new timeout values, and waited. Fifteen minutes later, no sign of the EAS Account error message! And now I get new emails popping up on my Treo usually before they show up in Outlook, whether connected via Cached Exchange Mode or not! Time will tell how good of a thing this actually is, but the concept is excellent!

A few weeks ago, I ran into a post (I think it was from Matt Cutts but if I saw it somewhere else, I apologize for the lack of credit) that talked about a little tool called Synergy. It hasn’t been updated since last year, but it seems to work well enough for its purpose: two computers, one keyboard and mouse, connected via network. It’s a bit arcane to set up (and I’ve just used the Windows version, there are Linux and Mac options available), but it works as advertised. Here’s a quick overview, but the Matt Cutts post and the documentation on the Synergy website provide plenty of help:

1. The computer whose mouse and keyboard you want to use is the server. Install Synergy and configure the Server options, and enter Test mode (make sure to use the computer’s network name when creating “screens,” or create a pretty name with an alias that is the network name).
2. Configure the positioning of how each computer’s screen is related to the other (you have to create the link in both directions).
3. Click Start once you’ve finished with Test mode and it works.
4.  The computer you want to control with the server’s keyboard and mouse is the Client. Install Synergy on this computer, too.
5. Enter the network name of the server you already set up, and click Start. Use Test mode to see if it will connect without errors; you can then try it out to see if it works (if the server is running).
6. Click Start once you’ve finished with test mode and it works.
7. Have loads of fun!

I set this up at work, with my desktop as the server and my laptop as the client. Ta-da, now I can use my nicer mouse and Natural keyboard on my laptop, just by moving the cursor off the desktop’s screen! This is really slick.

What is it missing? Security, for one. There is no authentication between the client and server. So someone else running this software on your network could connect depending on how your computer is configured. I assume the traffic can be sniffed and interpreted, if someone were so inclined (but this would likely be difficult, on a switched LAN, and with the need to decipher mouse and keyboard controls). I imagine the keyboard would be much more useful to sniff than the mouse, which would be almost useless. On a home network, this probably isn’t an issue. At work, it depends on your co-workers: if they’re probably never heard of this software and you’re the only IT guy, it is very unlikely they would even know to look for such a thing! One way to slightly increase security would be to use a non-standard port. The default is 24800, but if you change this on the Advanced button, someone running the same software would have to do more work to figure out how to connect (don’t forget to set the same port on client and server!).

The other thing that’s missing is a polished interface. There is a GUI for Windows, but you should probably read the Using Synergy guide on their site the first time through when defining Screens and Links (positions relative to each other). Mac and Linux appear to be configured via text file only, but they do have the steps listed on their site. I haven’t tested this, but it does sound exciting to use a Windows computer’s keyboard and mouse to control a Mac or Linux machine right next to it! Or any of the other directions you could go.

With those caveats, if you have the two computers in close proximity you need to test this, I highly recommend going geek crazy and testing this. Just be sure to keep the computer equipment out from under your chin; it doesn’t generally take kindly to liquids, including drool!

I say the Ministry Technology Institute “went live” because it opened last month, and I was too busy with school (ironically, I suppose) to notice! Nick and Steve, two great guys I got to know much better at the recent (not that they feel recent any more!) Church IT Roundtables, have done a great job pulling together this program since the original announcement. They were kind enough to honor me with an invitation to be on the MTI Advisory Board, which I have accepted. They even force me (at gunpoint!) to write a bio. OK, not at gunpoint, but I recall a nice friendly reminder email :-) Sadly, I think the bio there is probably better than the About Me page here…anyway, the program has limited availability and the price will go up in future classes, so apply now if you’re interested. $1500 for all the classes they’re offering, over a year, is a pretty good price! They have a course list on the site along with application materials.