The Adventures of a Systems Engineer

I have been setting up a test Xen 3.3 box running on Ubuntu 8.04. I have been getting the following error: “Device xxxx (vbd) cannot be connected. failed to find an unused loop device”  where xxxx is some number. It turns out that by default only 8 loopback devices are enabled. The following command shows how many loopback devices are enabled:

ls -l /dev/loop*

To increase the number of loopback devices the following line needs to be added to the /etc/modules file. I used a value of 64 so I can run up to 32 virtual machines.

add loop max_loop=64

Now when you run ls -l /dev/loop* you will see additional loopback devices.

Recently I have been having a problem with Windows 7 not being able to sleep. After digging around in the power settings I found the culprit – media sharing. Here is how to turn it off.

1. Go the power settings in the control panel.
2. Click on “Change plan settings” next to the active power plan.



3. Go to “Advanced power settings”.



4. Scroll down to “Multimedia settings” and make sure “When sharing media” is set to “Allow the computer to sleep”.



There you have it. Now your pc will be able to sleep again.

It seems Windows has learned a lot since the horrifically terrible release of Vista. I have been running Windows 7 Professional for the last two weeks and will attempt to sum up the 5 reasons why Windows 7 Rocks! It no only installs quickly, it also runs like a dream … so far anyway.

1. The Task Bar- Windows 7 features a totally redsigned task bar. It like grouped icons on steroids. The task bar now only has a handfull of icons- one for each running application.


Multiple instances of a running program are grouped together and you can preview the window by hovering the mouse over the task bar icon. This features is great when web-browsing. IE and Firefox both support the preview of each open tab.



2. Media Center- Media Center seems to get better and better with each release. The UI is more smooth and usable then in XP and Vista. Amazingly Media Center is included in the Professional Edition of Windows 7!
3. Driver Support- I have installed Windows 7 on my MSI Wind u100 netbook and desktop, both of which are newer systems (less than a year old). An interesting thing happened after the install- All of the drivers were detected. I can truly say that this is a first. The driver support in Windows 7 is rock solid. I plugged my phone in and Windows automatically found and downloaded a driver from Windows Update (granted it was a Windows Mobile phone).
4. Speed- Windows 7 run much smoother then Vista. I saw a great improvement in usability on my netbook and my desktop was much more stable. Windows 7 requires less memory which frees up resources for your applications.
5. Battery Life – I have not done extensive tests, but am seeing a much better battery life on my netbook. So far I have seen around a 15%-20% longer battery life.

In short Windows 7 is a great improvement over Vista. That said there are still some caveats. The most major one being the price. Yeah its nice, but $200 nice – in this economy probably not. I have also found a few applications that worked well under Vista that refuse to run in Windows 7.

Google has had sync available for quite some time, but up until recently it has only allowed for contacts and calendars to be synchronized between your phone and Google.The feature has been a great and allowed users to easily back their data up to the “cloud” where it will forever reside. Recently this feature got even better with the addition of the ability to sync mail and the addition of push. Now your phone can maintain a connection with Google allowing new emails, contact updates, and calendar updates to be automatically pushed to your phone. So far the service has been great (flaky at times though). The only down side- watching your cellphone battery die much faster.

Apparently Firefox developers have implemented some state of emotional being into the latest version of Firefox.

I got back from my trip to Europe about a week ago. I have to say the MSI Wind U100 worked amazingly well. It was great for checking email and even doing some like php coding and photo editing with photoshop. The Wind’s card reader was also very good for unloading the 3,000+ photos  from camera memory sticks as they filled up. This of course all ended about a week and a half into the trip. I happened to get off a train at what I thought was Rome, but was not. After realizing that it was the wrong stop I ran back toward the train while my netbook flew out of my pack in the other direction. Once I got back on the train I opened up my netbook to reveal a broken screen .

I just ordered a new screen for around $100 from eBay and it should arrive soon. It was an expensive mistake, but on the bright side I now have an excuse to rip the netbook open and replace the screen. Look for the results in a post within the next week.

I recently order an MSi Wind 10″ Netbook. I will be traveling to Europe in a week and wanted something small and portable that will let me surf the web and do some on-the-road web development. After hours of searching the MSi U100-451US seemed like the best choice. I picked one up for $279.99 at eWiz.com.

Specs

Processor: Intel Atom N270 1.6 GHz (with hyperthreading)

RAM: 1 GB DDR (PC5300 (upgraded to 2GB)

Included Peripherals: On board mic, 0.3 MP digital camera, wireless, 10/100 Ethernet,  bluetooth

Adding a 1GB RAM Stick

A great how to on installing RAM in the Wind is available here: http://www.laptopmag.com/advice/how-to/msi-wind-ram.aspx. One thing that is not mentioned on the webpage is that some models of the Wind have a “warranty void if removed” sticker covering one of the screws on the bottom of the netbook.  It took me far longer then it should have to realize that there was a screw under the sticker that was preventing me from removing the bottom.

A word to the wise, do not go with really cheap RAM. I bough a cheap RAM stick from ebay for $12 and it did not work. I ended up going to the local computer store and getting a Crucial 1GB PC 5300 RAM stick for around $40.

Installing Vista

One of my first orders of business was to install Vista Ultimate on my new netbook. At this point you are probably laughing “haha Vista on a netbook, what an idiot.” I was a little apprehensive about installing Vista on such an underpowered machine (my main pc running Vista has 8 GB of RAM with a Quad core processor). I was inspired by this article: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4505 which actually says they saw an important in running Vista over XP in terms of both performance and battery life. Low and behold Vista runs like a dream, even with the sidebar running and the Aero theme running. In fact the thing that really hurt my “User Experience Rating” the most was the GPU, which actually scored respectably for a netbook. Aside from the GPU, the CPU scored the next worse which again is not surprising from the atom chip, but this is still respectable for a netbook.

These results were after I downloaded all of the drivers and MSi utilities from the MSi website. Surprisingly all of the Vista drivers are available from the support site. The version says Windows XP 32bit oallthe downloads, but they contain Vista drivers as well.

Adobe CS4

After installing Vista and downloading serveral hundred megabytes of updates I loaded up Adobe CS4. Again you are probablly saying something to the effect “Photoshop won’t run on a netbook”. That was my exact initial response, but I figured I would give it a try anyway. I was pleasently suprised. Photoshop actually ran very smoothly and the layout changed to take advantage of the netbook’s quirky resolution. Now I’m not saying that I have an amazing editing machine, but I can open and edit psd files on the go as well  as fire up dreamweaver to do some web developement.

Conclusion

The MSi Wind is a solid mobile computing solution. I find myself using my netbook more and more. Its ultraportable and ultralight design make it perfect for a college student who wants to take notes in class or those that want to be able to use the internet on the go without havng the carry around a heavy full-sized laptop. It also can run some fairly intense applications like Photoshop with only a slight delay.

I recently worked with Jim Kukunas on implementing a parallel GPGPU merge sort algorithm that utilized the NVIDIA CUDA architecture. The project and source code can be seen at: http://jamesdevine.info/index.php/projects/cuda-parallel-merge-sort.

1.) If you receive a suspicious email don’t open it! If you get an email from a website that you do not have an account at just delete it. A lot of viruses and attacks will try to look like a legitimate message from a bank or other website like EBay.

2.) If you happen to open an email you think is suspicious there are a few tell tail signs that something is not right. Look for broken English. People sending fake and malicious emails are not very intelligent and often are not from the US. An email from your bank or any account you have online will almost NEVER have misspellings and poor grammar.

3.) Never click on a link in an email or webpage unless you are 100% sure where it goes. It is possible to make a link like ebay.com go to an entirely different site. Try it- click the previous link that says ebay.com and you will be taken to my website! There is a very easy way to look out for this. Whenever you put your mouse over a link you can see the actual website link in the bottom left hand of the web browser. Take a look at the following image for a demonstration. If you see a site that does not look right DO NOT CLICK on the link. If the link contains and odd extension like .hk (for hong kong) it is probablly a site that will contain a virus. Another sign of bad site is if the link has a series of numbers such as http://10.128.11.111. The series of numbers is called an ip address which is a unique number for each computer on the internet, much like a telephone number. If you click on a link like this there is a good change you will be directed to a site containing a virus.

4.) Any time that you enter your personal information into a webpage make sure that the address bar has https:// instead of http:// (see the picture below for a demonstration). This will ensure that your information is being sent encrypted to the website you are viewing. If you do not see the https:// in the address bar then any personal information you enter will be sent in clear text across the internet. Any legitimate website with a login (such as your bank) will use encryption (the https:// in the address bar).

5.) Run an antivirus program. If you are running a PC you absolutely must run antivirus. My personal recommendation is Panda Antivirus (http://www.pandasecurity.com/homeusers/solutions/antivirus/). I have had found Panda to work the best and its only $50 a year for a version that can be installed on up to 3 computers. If $50 a year is too much (and believe me its not) there are free programs like AVG Free (http://free.avg.com/) and Avast (http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html).

6.) Update your system. Antivirus programs should be set to automatically update and automatically scan. Windows updates should also be set to automatically update. Software manufactures put out updates for a reason. Most of the time systems updates address security vulnerabilities.

These tips are not meant to be the end all guide to web browsing safety. People writing malicious code are always at least one step ahead of antivirus manufacturers. The key is to be proactive and use caution when browsing the Internet- it can be a very dangerous place.

As part of a project I am working on for my internship with MITRE I was tasked with building a Domain containing a Server 2003 Domain Controller, exchange 2007 Server, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services (MOSS) 2007 Server, and SQL Server 2005. Each service was installed in a server 2003 virtual machine and configured several months ago. The Domain Controller virtual machine was having some issues yesterday so it was wiped and a new Domain Controller was set up. All of the virtual machines were able to rejoin the domain without problem. However when the Exchange server had a number of quirks. The virtual machine hung for about 20 minutes on “applying security policy” during start up and was having a host of authentication issues that prevented outlook web access (owa) from working properly. Since the exchange server was part of a testbed environment the easiest solution was to build a new exchange virtual machine. The moral of the story is that exchange is extremely reliant on the domain controller and very sensitive to its configuration. Since the environment is entirely virtual there should have been more backup copies and snapshots of the virtual machines to revert to, both are good practices that will be applied in the future.