Tag Archives: Tutorial

Overkill Router for any small business (or advanced home user)

July 16, 2010 Andrew Bennett Leave a comment

Small businesses generally have an IT budget of 0, but need the best performance that money can buy.

Most small businesses rely on their little modem/router/wireless access point combination plastic box to perform all the needed tools and utilities to get the internet around their network to all their uses. But sometimes there comes a day where the little router just doesn’t have the functions required for the expanding network. (Such as complex block lists, cache, VPN functions etc). But at the same time, any left over IT budget goes into upgrading staff machines, rather than the network infrastructure.

But you don’t have to pay a lot for these extra features. If you have an old machine lying around the office, the only major upgrade that you might have to do is spend $15 on a new PCI network card and 10 cents on a CD to turn that machine into a fully fledged Firewall/Router/Proxy Server/etc.

What we are doing is turning that old Windows 98 machine into a dedicated (i.e you can’t use it for anything else) firewall and router for your small business network.

Basically all you need is a copy of either of the following operating systems:

IPCop (Excuse their website)
Smoothwall
m0n0wall
Endian*

And a machine with 2 network cards.

*Endian calls itself a Unified Threat Management & Requires better hardware than the others listed. It can perform virus and spam scans on the data in real time as it passes though the firewall. Pretty cool ey.

Check out Episode 718 of Hak5 to see how they turned a few parts they had lying around (Motherboard with a Intel Atom processor, 2GB of ram, 250GB IDE harddrive, please note they do stress that what they are using is an overkill but the process is still the same. Ed Note: The current Firewall at the office here is a simple 133Mhz processor, with 32 mb of ram & a 3 GB hard drive, it runs 24/7 and serves upto 8 users, IPCop or Smoothwall can run on almost anything) into a dedicated router and firewall.

Once you have it setup, just plug it into your network between the modem and your switch and let it go.

Tools, Tutorials

Command Line Mounting and Unmounting drives/volumes – Windows

July 14, 2010 Andrew Bennett 1 Comment

Today we came across an issue while working on a virtual server. We had created a virtual hard drive, attached it to the virtual Windows 2008 Server machine, added some files to it and wanted to unmount the virtual drive and then attach it to another virtual machine.

The virtual machine manager (XenCenter in this case) wouldn’t allow us to disconnect the drive, while the virtual guest OS was still using it.

A quick Google and we finally found this command:

mountvol

Creates, deletes, or lists a volume mount point.

That’s exactly what we needed. Heres how to use it:

Creates, deletes, or lists a volume mount point.

MOUNTVOL [drive:]path VolumeName
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path /D
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path /L
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path /P
MOUNTVOL /R
MOUNTVOL /N
MOUNTVOL /E

path        Specifies the existing NTFS directory where the mount
point will reside.
VolumeName Specifies the volume name that is the target of the mount
point.
/D          Removes the volume mount point from the specified directory.
/L          Lists the mounted volume name for the specified directory.
/P          Removes the volume mount point from the specified directory,
dismounts the volume, and makes the volume not mountable.
You can make the volume mountable again by creating a volume
mount point.
/R          Removes volume mount point directories and registry settings
for volumes that are no longer in the system.
/N          Disables automatic mounting of new volumes.
/E          Re-enables automatic mounting of new volumes.

To unmount the drive that was in use we just used:

mountvol E:\ /D

The E:\ drive was then released from Windows and this allowed us to use and mount the disk else where.

Tools

How to: Remotely Shutdown a PC from anywhere [Tools]

July 5, 2010 Andrew Bennett Leave a comment

Sometimes it’s useful to leave a PC running while your not at it. It is sometimes also equally useful to be able to turn it off while not at it. Luckily their are several ways of doing this.

Lifehacker recently reviewed a program called Switch Off. Its a small application that allows you to shut down (or restart, log off, lock, start VPN connections, run custom scripts) your computer based on a variety of factors. Such as on a schedule, on CPU load, or even remotely though a web interface. Which is designed for mobile devices. If you setup the correct port forwarding you can shut down your computer from anywhere in the world. For more information check out the lifehacker page

For a simple or quick one off solution you can do a time based shutdown using a built in command on any Windows XP, vista, 7, Server 2003, Server 2008 with the shutdown command.

Just open a Run window (Start – Run or Windows Key + R) Type in:

shutdown -s -t [number of seconds] -f

(The -s is for shutdown, to restart use -r. The -f is to force all programs to shut down, works 99.9% of the time)

So to turn off your PC in 30 minutes you would use the following command:

shutdown -s -t 1800 -f

Some common Seconds to Minutes conversions are:

15 minutes – 900 seconds
30 minutes – 1800 seconds
45 minutes – 2700 seconds
60 minutes – 3600 seconds
120 minutes – 5400 seconds.

This shutdown command also works if you want to shutdown a computer after using Remote Desktop Connection (RDC). When you go to shutdown after using RDC you’ll notice disconnect rather than shutdown. By using this you can shutdown the remote server (or restart) without having to go the the physical machine.

More information on Switch Off or on LifeHacker

Tools, Tutorials

How to clean your Blackberry’s track ball

July 3, 2010 Andrew Bennett

A user on Lifehacker has recently posted a video on how to clean the little track ball on a blackberry. (I would say it works for any mobile device with a track ball).

I tested it out on my Blackberry which was having issues scrolling to the right and it fixed it up.

All that required is a blank piece of white paper and you just need to rub the trackball on the paper to clean it. Check out the video

[YouTube via Lifehacker]

Another method that I used just after Christmas involved pulling out the track ball assembly and cleaning the rollers.

Tutorials, Web

Taking the Plunge – WordPress 3.0 Upgrade with Cpanel Backup.

June 21, 2010 Andrew Bennett 1 Comment

There is always a risk involved in any upgrades, any of the following possibilities could happen:

1) WordPress doesn’t successfully complete the upgrade of the new files (maybe because of file permission issues) and corrupts your current Word Press install.

2) WordPress doesn’t successfully complete the upgrade any database changes and corrupts your Word Press install.

3) Upgrade to the new version of WordPress was successful, but due to plug-in conflicts your WordPress install is broken.

But there is also a risk involved when you walk outside of your house. So how do we manage the risk? The answer is simple, do a backup.

Before installing any update, WordPress recommends that you go read and apply tips from the Article “WordPress Backups”[http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups] from the Codex, which gives a great list of resources of how to backup using multiple tools. But one of the methods that they left out was using the Cpanel backup that is built into most shared hosting services these days. This tutorial is going to cover how to do it.

The main reason for using the Cpanel Backup wizard is that it quickly allows you to restore the backup without needing to know anything technical. Just a simple follow the steps in the Backup Restore wizard.

Backing up your WordPress install with Cpanel:

Time to complete: About 20 minutes (depending on how quick your internet connection is/size of your blog).

Skill Level: Easy.

1). Login to your webhosts Cpanel and find the “Backup Wizard” Icon.

2). Select Backup under Backup and Restore.

3). As tempting as it may be to click on full backup for our purposes today we need to click on “Home Directory” under the Partial Backup (this allows the backup to be restored under Cpanel if required).

4) Click on the Home Directory button to download the backup. – The size of this will depend on how big your blog is/how much storage that you are using with your hosting account.

5) Once the download is complete, click on Go Back, so you are presented with the screen from step 3, then click on MySQL Databases.

6) Download the Database that corresponds to your WordPress install. This screen shot shows that I have 2 databases. One is for a Joomla install and one is for WordPress, since they were automatically installed in the Cpanel they have generic names such as “sample_wrdp1” which makes it easy to do this.

7) Once you have everything downloaded, log into your WordPress Admin. Along the top there should be an alert that WordPress 3.x.x is available! Please update now. Click to update.

8) WordPress then asks if you want to update automatically (easy option) or download the update to upload later (harder, but works on more hosts). I chose to update automatically.

9) WordPress will then perform the update and let you know when it’s finished.

10) The first thing I noticed after the update was a new fresh Admin Theme.

11) Now check out your blog to make sure things are still working, also check to see if your plugins are working or if any need updates.

Photo: Thanks to zephyrance via Flickr

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