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I and several neighbors will be participating participated in the National MS Society fundraising walk in Chicago’s northwest suburbs on May 2, 2010. If you’d like to sponsor our team (The College Hillers) please visit my Walk MS Personal Page.
We do have a commitment from a private party to match the contributions we receive and we haven’t hit the limit on that yet, so anything you donate will effectively be doubled.
The walk was a great success, and we (our local team and the event as a whole) did a great job!
Update 2010-08-07: Several updates of note pulled from the comments.
- The main site and Andy are back, see the last few comments for more info.
- Downloads of 2.0.5.7 are available, see the 2010-04-08 update at the end of this post.
- Updates beyond 2.0.5.7 are not currently available, but people are working on it.
- Most discussion should probably be moving to the ESVA Interim Forums at http://rbe1.de/ESVA
- There is a semi-commercial fork of the project at ESVA.Libra.IT, there has been some controversy over it but the developers of that project are also involved in the discussions and further project work at the forums. It also has its own forum.
Update 2010-04-12: The problem is being worked on; read for details.
Just a note because I’ve been seeing searches hit my site looking for information on this.
The Email Security Virtual Appliance (ESVA) website is down, I do not have any information on why but it doesn’t appear to be a domain registration or DNS issue – it’s something on the hosting side. I’ve been unsuccessful in contacting the creator/maintainer of ESVA, but I wasn’t corresponding with him before so I don’t have a known-good email address – just two old ones that may not still be in use. He does travel for business and has disappeared from the ‘net in the past while doing so, so everything may be restored at any time if he’s simply out of contact.
Continue reading ESVA Website (global-domination.org) Down, 2010-March, Back 2010-July
Frequently when troubleshooting or cleaning PCs (ah, the joys of small business IT) it’s useful to have a bundle of tools that you can use. I generally use multiboot antivirus CDs created with Shardana Antivirus Rescue Disc Utility (SARDU) with additional utilities put in the Extras directory, but sometimes it’s hard to beat the convenience of a USB flash drive. Unfortunately very few flash drives still have the hardware write protect switch that was common years ago.
Here’s a listing of drives that still include that hardware write protection, along with some other options that might work though not as well. This listing is based on reports from several discussion boards in 2009-2010 as well as a list prepared and maintained by c’t Magazine (German) (or via Google Translate). Where available I provide links to the manufacturers and possibly to stores where the drives are available. Please comment with any corrections or additional drives to be added to the list.
Continue reading List of USB Flash Drives with Hardware Write Protection Switch
We had a problem last weekend with Postfix not accepting email for a single domain when it was coming from outside our network, while messages from hosts on the local network were accepted and routed with no problems. Messages from outside the network were rejected with a 450 (temporary) code and the error message “Recipient address rejected: Domain not found”. The cause did end up being a DNS problem (apparently the most common kind of issue with Postfix), but not one that I would have expected (a missing host entry for the top-level domain, so example.com wouldn’t resolve even though mail.example.com did). Finding the source of the problem was complicated because of a set of several changes during a weekend maintenance window.
Continue reading (Fix) Postfix: Recipient address rejected: Domain not found
I recently needed to add monitoring of a UPS powering network equipment to a Linux server already monitoring one USB-connected UPS. Since the second UPS also uses a USB connection for monitoring apcpusd (the standard UPS management package for Linux systems) was not seeing it. This is not a fault of the software – it’s designed to work pretty much seamlessly with detection of a single UPS and does so, but autodetectin multiple battery backups would still require some level of manual configuration – at the very least, which one(s) are powering the monitoring system in case it needs to shut down? The solution is to set up udev rules to let the system recognize each attached UPS as a distinct device using the serial number of the UPS, then follow the instructions for managing multiple UPSes in the manual. Continue reading Configuring apcupsd on Linux for Multiple USB UPSes
I ran into a minor difficulty recently on a Linux desktop PC (CentOS 5.4) updated to the recently released OpenOffice.org 3.2, specifically the Go-Oo.org variant that includes some options and tweaks left out of the primary branch. OpenOffice.org 3.2 would start without difficulties, but as soon as I started to type the application would completely freeze up or hang. I only checked this in Calc and Writer, but I suspect that it applies to all of the other components as well and from what I’ve read it’s not specific to CentOS (or other RedHat-derived distributions).
After a bit of searching, I ended up at this thread: OpenOffice-3.0.1 hangs if SCIM is active. Boiled down to something for those not interested in the technical details, OpenOffice.org 3.x has problems with some configurations of SCIM, the “Smart Common Input Method platform.”
Continue reading (Fix) OpenOffice.org Hangs When I Start Typing
I occasionally get requests from clients for assistance with sending out email marketing to their existing clients. My advice in these situations is always the same: Use A Service.
Every client that I’ve dealt with that’s interested in this kind of marketing starts out planning to do it using their regular email account, but there are good reasons not to do so. The reasons for using a service break down into three key areas: creation of your content, distribution of your content, and management of your address list. Keep reading for some notes on those.
Continue reading Email Marketing – Use A Service
I’m regularly asked by customers “Which laser printer should we get?” or “What’s the cheapest good laser printer?” Here’s an initial stab at answering those questions. I’ve been pulling together some numbers on the costs to purchase & run assorted monochrome laser printers. While there’s still work to be done on tracking down some items like maintenance kit part numbers and prices, none of the outstanding information is likely to lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a printer.
The preliminary numbers have surprised me quite a bit.
- Brother – a company I’ve always looked at as being a good choice for a home printer – is hands-down the winner on a pure cost standpoint over almost the entire range of print volumes.
- Hewlett-Packard/HP, which I knew would command a price premium, is never even within 15% of the best TCO, with toner costs in its low- to mid-range LaserJet printers more than twice most other manufacturers.
- Lexmark, another brand that I expected to be somewhat pricey, was within 15% of the best TCO only with one low-end printer under very light loads typical of household use.
- Dell, while the numbers are incomplete, looks like a very solid value for higher-volume printing or over the long term (300,000+ pages)
Read More for print volume numbers and some specific printers.
Continue reading Monochrome Laser Printer TCO/Cost – Preliminary Results
I’m currently working up an article on the total cost of ownership (TCO) for printers and choosing printers for your office, but while I work on the details (including researching costs for a variety of printers) here’s some information on the calculations involved. This is important for small to midsize offices because the variation in cost between different printer manufacturers and between low-end, midrange and high-end printers can add up to thousands of dollars a year in consumables.
Currently I’m only focusing on monochrome/black & white laser printers. The same calculations can be applied to color and multifunction/all-in-one printers as far as printing is concerned, but they don’t take into account the potential added value of the additional features (and volume of color printing will vary by office). I’m also not factoring in the cost of paper, since it’s effectively a constant – it’s unlikely that paper cost will vary based on which printer is chosen.
Continue reading Calculating Printer Costs and TCO
I had an interesting problem with a server (Windows 2003 Standard) at a small business (6 users total) the other day – a very long startup time. The server in question is a standalone domain controller/DC as well as a database/application server and file/print server. Terminal Services is installed & configured, but rarely used – mostly for access from outside the office. Database and domain services/authentication were available fairly quickly, as were console logins (via UltraVNC/uVNC) – probably 15-20 minutes to that stage, but more than an hour before terminal services/remote desktop was available.
Digging around on the console attempting to track down the source of the problems, I found multiple services listed as “Starting” – all of them malware-based, with the actual infection cleaned out. My suspicion is that these non-startable services were causing the startup of other services to be delayed, though in this case I’m not really planning on setting up a test system to verify that.
In the rest of this post I’ll give a bit more detail on the scenario, what I found, what was needed to clean it out, and a few more notes on what I suspect was happening.
Continue reading Slow Startup with Multiple ‘Starting’ Services After Malware
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