Aperture

With the introduction of WordPress 2.7 upgrade capabilities for local installations are available right out of the box without the need of 3rd party plugins or manual update process.

While this is cool, can also be a tricky, not so straight forward process. If your blog is hosted by WordPress, you do not have to worry about anything as the upgrade is done automatically for everybody. If you host your own blog and use only standard themes an no additional 3rd party plugins, upgrade is also safe for you, as no compatibility issues can occur between versions upgrade. On the other hand, what’s the point of having your WordPress blog self hosted if you do not need the added value of 3rd party plugins?

You’ll need this guide if you host your own WordPress instance, you are using 3rd Party plugins and you are planning for an upgrade. I decided to write this guide after Aperture.ro was not available after upgrading from WordPress 2.7 to WordPress 2.8 via build in upgrade feature. Server displayed HTTP 500 error while loading the main page. Problem was fixed in 5 minutes. Here is how.

Continue Reading »

So, like the rest of the planet you are just another Yahoo, Gmail, Live, or whatever free web mail service. That’s good, but what can be better? How about buying or renting a domain name and setup unique email addresses?

Do you currently own a domain and you’re not willing to go through the hassle of setting up a mail server? How about a small business, where spending on setting up IT infrastructure isn’t the wisest thing for the moment but still want your employees / partners to communicate under a standard company email addresses. Would you allow Laurence, the sales guy to send messages to customers from Laurence@gmail.com and even print that on the business cards? Nah!

A few years ago a simple trick would do the job. That was: going to your DNS service provider and activate email forwarding. Meaning that all messages that were sent to “someone@yourdomain.com” would be forwarded to you free web mail service of choice. My choice at the time (and present also) was Google. Google, likewise other free web mail services would allow you to setup a “send as” address upon validation that you own the address “someone@yourdomain.com”, which was fairly easy, since “someone@yourdomain.com” was already forwarded to your web mail service with the validation code inside.

While the solution above is fairly easy and practical, has a single drawback. Messages are forwarded OK, however, upon replying or composing a new message designated to be send via “send as” feature would appear as “your_gmail_account@googlemail.com on Behalf of someone@yourdomain.com”. Not good…

Continue Reading »

Today wireless is everywhere. In any point of your city you’ll find a dozen wireless access points with your laptop/PDA, more or less secured. In office buildings, on the streets, in the parc, in your neighborhood (no matter if you live in a residence or an apartment building).

Adding wireless to your home is cool since you can connect devices to your home LAN without drilling holes in your walls and fill them with wires to enable internet access from your bedroom or connect your HTPC to your wireless NAS.

Choosing an access point is easy since the technology itself is already matured enough and usually you cannot go wrong with products from Asus, Acer, MSI, Netgear, D-link, Zyxel and others. My pick however is Linksys. Mostly because is a Cisco Systems OEM (I feel a bit nostalgic for my network administration period). Secondly is price (more expensive in his class, but still very affordable). The third reason is signal strength: 2 layers of concrete walls are not a problem for a Linksys (I can pick up my network from across the street actually, or browse the internet from my toilet – well, I’m not actually doing this, but the potential is there and ready to be leveraged… ).

But why should you get a wireless access point when you can get a wireless router for the same money, while having increased functionality of the equipment? A wireless router can be setup as a plain a wireless access point as well as directly connect your home network to your ADSL modem, PPPoE ISP, just plain WAN ethernet interface. Wireless router can also be used to connect 2 or more wireless networks. In need of a DMZ? Can be done.

Continue Reading »

So, why will somebody want to run a Hyper-V Virtual Server with Domain Controller role in production? There are lots of reasons, but the main one is simple: It’s a cool think.

Domain Controllers & Global Catalog Servers are not resource hungry machines in case of small-medium organization. Global Catalog data store is not huge if you have only a few OUs & couple of hundreds objects (groups, users, computers, GPOs and other Active Directory objects).  If you talk about geographically spread organization with multiple domains and Global Catalog replications within the forest, it’s wiser to switch to physical machines, but for the sake of this article we will assume that you either administer the infrastructure of a small-medium sized business, want a secondary DC in your network (great candidate for a Virtual Domain Controller) or you just want to be cool (like I am 8-)).

Continue Reading »

Users of S3000 & S5000V/X/S chipsets running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 will experience “General Access Denied” error when Hyper-V host machine is restarted after Intel IPMI driver installation.

IPMI or “Intelligent Platform Management Interface” is a piece of software that sends status messages from vital system parts also allowing management applications to interact at low level hardware layers for real-time system health checks (yes, also temperatures, fan speeds, voltages, etc.) / configuration changes.

Intel IPMI driver is installed by one of the following products: Intel Active System Console 3.0; Intel Server Management Pack 3.0; Intel One Boot Flash Update Utility 9.7; Intel System Configuration Utility for Windows 5.0.1 & Intel System Event Log Viewer (SEL) 2.0.1.

Continue Reading »