Jin Wicked painted a portrait of Richard Stallman: To make it more interesting, she released it with the terms: “In the spirit of the subject of this painting and the GNU Free Documentation License (which is a bit over my head) , I am granting permission for anyone to copy, redistribute, alter or publish this […]
RMS Painting Released GNU Style
Free Windows Server 2003 Evaluation Kit Available
If you would like to try out Windows Server 2003, Microsoft will send you a free evaluation kit. Here is the link. They even pay for shipping. Oh, and for the first time I remember, Mozilla works when ordering. You don’t have to use IE.
Put Your Old Computer Cases to Good Use
Check out this article on coprolite that shows how to make a pumpkin head out of a computer case: The left over parts become Lobstora: Read the article here on coprolite.com.
The Network Administrator (.com)
Check out TheNetworkAdministrator for some good reads. We have some strange stuff on NetAdminTools, but a full tab just called Conspiracy Theory. Very enjoyable. Visit the site and realize that you aren’t the only Monkey Life-Partner out there.
Transform dot com Schwag Into Something Useful
I have a cap from hardware.com. [I actually turned down a job offer from these folks in the fall of ’99. They only lasted a year or so after that. They intended to be a place where people could order tools, wheelbarrows, etc. on the Internet.] I also like to read at night. I happen […]
Virtualization Between the Platform and the Application With Java
What if Java is it. Java has virtualized the world between the platform and the application to the point, really, that all of the knowledge you are building to run the OS of your server is becoming somewhat trivial. True, you can install a new version of glibc, and know how to solve dependencies with […]
Click-Free Web App And Mouse Movement Fingerprinting
Check out DONTCLICK.IT for a very cool concept site that shows an example of navigation without mouse clicks. One interesting implication is the biometric fingerprinting possibilities. One area of the site allows you to see the movements of previous visitors to the site. It seems possible to us that tracking the movements of a mouse, […]
HP and the Business Domain
I was thinking about HP and their decision to get out of the PC market and purchase Autonomy. It makes sense to me. HP can do well in the business information domain. Domain… information… There are three main domains for information: personal, business, and public. The Internet was primarily used as public after the burst […]
Using DJGPP and other UNIX-like tools to manage NT servers
What is it? DJGPP is a collection of UNIX-like tools for DOS/Windows that has been ported from the GNU project. For a better understanding of what we mean by UNIX-like, see gnu.org. We’ve found DJGPP indespensible for tweaking files for automated installs from the command prompt. With this version you can run the utilities from […]
Compiling Opensource programs on NT/95/98
Windows users are at a disadvantage in the open source environment becase they are not used to compiling programs. The idea of recompiling the NT kernel just simply doesn’t cross the mind of a typical MCSE. Programs are usually shipped precompiled. In the *nix world it is routine to download the source code for a […]
Creating an NT Server Test Lab Using VMware
One thing we do quite often here at netadmintools.com is install and reinstall NT Server and friends over and over again. This article describes how to setup, configure, backup to tape, and restore an NT Server installation on Vmware. We installed Vmware using the simple directions that came with the distribution, and then ran a […]
Using XP to Administer Linux with Cygwin
We loaded up a copy of Windows XP Professional today, and the first thing we needed to do was administer our Linux boxes. There are a lot of stand alone tools out there. For SSH, PuTTY works well. What is even better, though, is to use Cygwin. The Cygwin collection of utilities is very complete. […]
Ping Monitoring Over a WAN – pf and rf routines
Pf and rf are the two final subroutines we need to discuss for our Ping Monitoring Over a WAN perl script. Both modules use the Net::Ping::External module, which we chose because it works on Windows and GNU/Linux (and because of this, probably works on most every platform that perl runs on). Here is the pf […]
Make Windows Talk to Syslog
One of our networks has just a few production Windows servers on it, and a whole bunch of Linux boxes. Being a Unix sysadmin by trade and inclination, this situation is mostly dreamy except for one thing: auditing the event logs on the Windows servers. We can’t just put our head in the sand and […]
Graphical Ps With Xps
Xps shows *nix processes as a tree. The status is indicated by color. Compile and run: u-1@srv-1 xps $ ls xps-4.2.tar.gz u-1@srv-1 xps $ tar -xzf *.gz u-1@srv-1 xps $ cd xps* u-1@srv-1 xps-4.2 $ u-1@srv-1 xps-4.2 $ ./configure checking for a BSD-compatible install… /bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane… yes checking for […]
Using Ps-watcher to Monitor Processes
Ps-watcher can run ps periodically and match patterns based on the output of ps. You can check for memory usage, number of processes, etc. Let’s grab the program and try to compile: [root@test psw]# ls ps-watcher-1.0.tar.gz [root@test psw]# tar -xzf *.gz [root@test psw]# cd ps* [root@test ps-watcher-1.0]# ls aclocal.m4 configure install-sh mkinstalldirs README touch.pl AUTHORS […]
Disabling Performance Counters on Windows
One extremely annoying thing to get alerted about in the Windows application logs are the Perflib errors: The Open Procedure for service “pcAnywhere” in DLL “C:\Program Files\ Symantec\pcAnywhere\PcaPerfCtrs.dll” failed. Performance data for this service will not be available. Status code returned is data DWORD 0. or: The Open Procedure for service “ISAPISearch” in DLL “QPerf.dll” […]
A Simple Perl Load Monitoring Script
I wondered how to monitor load on my GNU/Linux boxen. Sure, there are a lot of canned apps out there. But what if I wanted to use Perl? (IUD SIS, you must use Perl, cuz Perl’s the best… Readin’ from my Camel book like you wanted me… script the pain away…) Anyhoo… I wanna use […]
Monitoring Windows CPU Performance With Perl
The Win32::PerfLib module is a glorious way to extract performance data from Windows boxen. Check out this site for more information. We used perl 5.6.1. Here is a script that shows how to use this module: use Win32::PerfLib; $processor = 238; $proctime = 6; while (6 ne 9){ if(my $perflib = new Win32::PerfLib(‘srv-48’)){ $proc_ref0 = […]
Troubleshooting Slowness/Lockups Over a WAN or VPN
One problem with network monitoring is that latency and router performance do not tell the whole story. What you really want to know is if you can transfer data at the application level across the WAN/VPN. This is particularly useful if you are skimping on your connection to your remote offices by using DSL or […]
