Posted by Adam Ruth on Fri, Aug 13, 2010
Cloud computing is all the rage these days with online storage & backup being one of the most well-known aspects of it. Over the years I've played with a number of online file sync services and I always left a little less than impressed. Each service had advantages and disadvantages with the disadvantages outweighing the advantages (at least for me.)
I've been hearing about Dropbox for a long time and just assumed that it was like the others that I've tried and it was only recently that I decided to give it a go and I must say that I'm very impressed. Here's the scenario that got me started:
I am the current secretary for our local Lion's Club (Lions Club of Palm Beach-Currumbin) and the club recently decided to buy a laptop to be used by each new secretary, instead of passing CDs of files and big boxes of records around. I needed a way to keep the files on the new laptop backed-up in a way that I wouldn't need to maintain even after I leave the position and that would sync with my own computer so I don't have to keep switching back-and-forth between the two computers (I do most club work on my own laptop.) Back in my dusty memory I remembered hearing about Dropbox and that it had a free version, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. It worked perfectly right out of the gate, so well in-fact that I was stunned, I'm used to something going wrong at some point.
Here's the features about Dropbox that I really like, and work perfectly in my situation:
- It's free for 2 GB of storage. That's big enough for all of our Club's records and with it tied to the Club's e-mail address it keeps me out of the loop when I pass on the secretary laptop.
- The sync is seamless. And I really mean seamless. It's so simple to set up that practically anyone can do it and the sync just worked and kept working. At no point in the process was I wishing I could have some kind of manual control, the automated system worked great.
- LAN sync. If you are syncing files between two computers in the same subnet then it will copy the files directly instead of going up to the cloud and back down. Particularly helpful for that first sync on a new computer.
- Shared folders. I now have two Dropbox accounts, one for the Club and one for me. I share the files in the Club account with my account so that I can edit them on my own computer. It's also a very handy way to share some files with friends and co-workers.
- Web access. All files can be accessed on a web site that works very well, it's not slow and kludgey feeling like I've seen before.
- Previous versions. Works great as a backup solution.
- Cross-platform. Supports Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android and soon Blackberry.
Now, there are some disadvantages, but they didn't affect me. Your mileage may vary.
- Size limit. You can pay to get more than 2 GB of storage, but they only go up to 50 GB. That may grow in the future, but for some people it won't be enough. There is a 250 MB bonus for referrals (which I got because I referred myself... shhhh...)
- One Dropbox per computer. Each computer can only be tied to a single account. There are some workarounds, but they aren't perfect. Proper use of shared folders makes this much less of a problem than it seems at first.
- Only one Dropbox folder. You only get one folder syncing up to your Dropbox account. It would be nice if you could map different folders to different locations and there may be some workarounds for this. It's not a concern for me now, but I could see me wanting it in the future.
All-in-all Dropbox is a perfect solution for most cloud storage problems. They've left some things out that I'm sure make it easier to perfect those few things they do, so I won't quibble. It's free and so easy to install you really can't go wrong to take it for a spin.
Posted by Adam Ruth on Mon, Jun 28, 2010
One of the many tasks that system administrators deal with is managing one or more web sites. Over the course of a web site's life it will be moved, reconfigured, or have its structure changed. These changes can easily break links and the nature of the web is that there isn't a way to know a link is broken other than trying it. Not to mention any links to external pages that can break or decay over time, there isn't a way to be notified that a page no longer exists.
Enter Xenu Link Sleuth which is a fast no-frills link checker for Windows generously provided for free by German programmer Tilman Hausherr. I find it to be extremely helpful to periodically run on the web sites that I manage to make sure that nothing has broken. It's even more helpful to run after there have been some changes to the site, such as moving to a new host.
When you run it you will be presented with the starting point dialog.
Here you enter the URL you want to check. Xenu will check all files from this root down, so you can only check a subset if your site if you wish. You can also exclude some URLs from the check and set other options (how many threads to run, types of links to check, and even e-mail yourself a report when it's finished.)
That's it, once you run it you'll get a report back showing what's broken, if anything. Here's the report from the documentation for our new product PDQ Deploy.
The documentation contains some links to external resources, so I can know right away if any of them have broken and need to be repaired. If you've never run a link checker against one of your web sites you might be surprised at how much is broken. It's entropy at work, the system administrators ever-present friend.
I really like Xenu because it's both very fast and very thorough. It's got a very simple interface that doesn't get in your way so you can see what's important very quickly. The only thing that would be nice is if it had a command-line interface for running it as part of a script. But that's a small gripe for such a great tool.
Posted by Adam Ruth on Wed, May 05, 2010
Robocopy, for those of you who don't know, is an advanced file copy tool from Microsoft which improves on XCOPY. It has a number of features, notably the ability to restart and retry failed copies (Robocopy is a portmanteau of ROBust COPY.) For me, though, the most important option is /MIR which not only copies new and changed files but deletes files from the target that have been deleted on the source. Why it's a part of the Windows Admin pack for a separate download and not included has always been a mystery to me.
It's a command line tool and that's all well and good for us command line jockeys but Microsoft has recently (in the sense that I just learned about it) released a GUI. This is good news for people who haven't used it before and aren't accustomed to all of the options. I like that it can create the command line equivalent, making it a good way to discover options and move to the command line when needed.
If you need to copy a lot of files around and haven't yet used Robocopy, give the GUI a whirl an see what it can do for you.
Posted by Shawn Anderson on Fri, Apr 09, 2010
While playing with my iPad (it's still a toy to me until it supports Google Docs) I realized that Apple is very good at eliminating three obstacles that hamper innovation.
1. They remove unnecessary layers.
2. They question the status quo.
3. They don't second guess their decisions.
As a Windows administrator you can use the same approach to provide the best service to your organization.
Remove Unnecessary layers.
Let's consider martial arts. One of the benefits of using an actual instructor (versus videos or books) is that he or she can observe you directly and then help you see where you are making unnecessary movements which drain your energy and can otherwise hamper your ability to master a form.
Apple did this very well with the iPod. They set out to offer a product that would provide an excellent listening experience. Everything else (the unecesary movements) got cut. The result was a product which boasted far fewer features than its competitors, but which succeeded in providing a great listening experience.
Your practical application of reducing layers could be cutting the little activities in your daily routine that get in your way. They may seem like good routines to have, but are they getting in the way of your end goal of providing excellent support to your customers?
Question the status quo
With all of the breakthroughs in computing over the last thirty years, one area has seen very little in enhancements. Communication between a human and a computer. It's been pretty much limited to keyboard and mouse.
Apple changed that.
Multi-touch gesture, introduced in the iPhone, is nearly as revolutional as the graphical user interface. (Anything so simple that you don't need to be taught to do it is truly an amazing accomplishment.)
Questioning the status quo isn't about playing devil's advocate just for the sake of argument. It's simply an extension of number one. Isolate each move and determine if A) it is necessary, and B) it can be improved.
Don't second guess yourself
In January 2010 the world was screaming that Apple should allow Adobe Flash onto the iPad. This wasn't new, either. Since the launch of the iPhone customers have been begging for Adobe Flash support.
Apple said no.
(I feel a sports analogy coming on.)
A good basketball coach doesn't change the game plan simply because his homecourt fans are setting arena noise records after he substitutes his star player for a second string nobody.
Noise levels... negative reviews... sports announcers flying off the handle... yet through all of this the coach remains unphased. He knows the strengths of his players AS WELL as the those of the opposing team. His strategy is set and the fans can like it or not (with the obvious exception being World Cup fans, in which case the coach's life my well hinge on complete capitulation).
When it comes to Adobe Flash, Apple didn't want to compromise user experience with technology that they consider unstable and buggy. Doing so would jeopardize their ultimate goal.
When you carefully analyze each movement, remove the unnecessary and then enhance the rest, you will be confronted with screaming fans. Be prepared to stand your ground. It's okay to take a second look, but don't hit the brakes just because the sky seems to be falling. You may realize, just as
Truman Burbank did, that his sky was a farce and what lay beyond was a far better reality.
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Posted by The Admin Arsenal Team on Mon, Feb 22, 2010
My oh-so-cool dual keyboard set up
Author: Adam Ruth
(Note:
last week I said that this week I was going to write up a tutorial for running Perforce, but it was getting so long I decided it was best to expand into a
whitepaper, we'll all be better for it.)
What follows is a story of hope. That even when things seem their bleakest a kludge can come along and get things limping along.
For the last couple of years I've been dreaming of getting a second keyboard, something that will allow me to take the myriad keyboard shortcuts I have now and give me one-key access to most of them. While developing in Microsoft Visual Studio, there are a lot of tasks that I perform regularly that require two hands and a bit of contortion to operate correctly. There's only so much I can do with changing the keyboard mappings, since I have more common tasks than buttons. An example is the default keyboard shortcut to debug all of a project's unit tests: Ctrl+T, Ctrl+A. This is easy enough to type, but it requires two hands and 4 keystrokes. Even if I wanted to simplify it, there just aren't many free buttons left to use.
This is exacerbated by the fact that I run my development inside of a
VMWare Fusion virtual machine on an iMac. OS X takes some of my precious keys away for its own use, and I don't want to give them all up. If you've ever looked at an Apple keyboard, you see that the function keys double as system keys for such things as volume control, Dashboard, and Exposé. Now I've got one more modifier key to worry about, the Fn key.
I thought the solution would be a second keyboard with a bunch of keys that I could map to different functions at will. But I wasn't sure how to do it. I didn't want to spend money on a specialized second keyboard, they can get expensive. I was looking for a way to plug in a normal keyboard and use it's keys as all brand new. I couldn't figure out how to do this because a second normal keyboard just duplicates the existing keyboard. Until I figured that out I installed a program called
Keyboard Maestro which at least let me use all of the extra keys on an Apple keyboard with Visual Studio (F13-F19, in particular.) But I was still running out of keys.
Then a product came to my attention called
QuicKeys. It has the ability to map separate devices to different actions. I tried plugging in another Apple keyboard, just like the one I already had and it seemed to work. But unfortunately, because it was the exact same type of device, QuicKeys kept losing the new mappings and it was a chore to get it working again. I had an older Bluetooth Apple keyboard in a box, which I dusted off and tried. It worked great, now I have a whole 78 keys that I can use for single-key access instead of the carpal tunnel inducing keystrokes I was using.
Only one problem. QuicKeys, for some reason, doesn't work with VMWare Fusion. When it sends keystrokes to Fusion the modifier keys (Shift, Ctrl, and Alt) get stripped off. Damn! I had just spent a few hours getting my new keyboard up and running and figuring out the QuicKeys mapping interface. I e-mailed support only to be told that the problem was VMWare, not QuicKeys (how many times have you heard that excuse?) That didn't sound right, because Keyboard Maestro worked just fine.
Aha! Wait, if Keyboard Maestro works maybe I could use it along side QuicKeys. An idea so crazy that it just might work. I set it up so that QuicKeys maps a keystroke from my Bluetooth keyboard to a keystroke that Keyboard Maestro then listens for and translates it for VMWare. An example through the Kludge-o-train:
The normal keystroke to build a project in Visual Studio is Ctrl+Shift+B. Not the simplest thing in the world to type, especially when you do it 5,000 times a day. So I used QuicKeys to map the second keyboard's B key to Shift+Ctrl+Cmd+B, and then Keyboard Maestro maps Shift+Ctrl+Cmd+B to Shift+Ctrl+B and voilà I can build my projects with a single hand easily. I use the Command key modifier for all of my QuicKeys -> Keyboard Maestro keystrokes because the Command key is rarely used in Windows with other modifier keys (it maps to the Windows key by default.)
My kludge is limping along just fine and I've even started to use my extra keyboard for other programs like iMovie and iPhoto. I'm in geek heaven.
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Posted by The Admin Arsenal Team on Fri, Feb 12, 2010
Author: Shane Corellian
Tobias Weltner wrote this article on the Powershell.com site. It is definitely worth the read. For those of you planning on implementing Powershell Version 2, pay special heed.
An excerpt:
"When you search for PowerShell V2 downloads, you will find tons of articles and download links. Only some of them point to the correct final "RTM" link. A lot of people are still blogging about "CTP" versions which really were beta versions with limited functionality. Even worse, it turned out that these out-dated PowerShell versions are still up for download from the Microsoft Download center, so when you follow the "wrong" link, you could get the impression that these CTP versions really were official and up-to date releases."
I have been playing with V2 now for about 3 weeks and so far I am pretty excited. Extending Admin Arsenal with a good CLI is important and Powershell will definitely be the foundation on which it is built.
Posted by The Admin Arsenal Team on Wed, Jan 20, 2010
Author: Adam Ruth
At last year's
Business of Software conference I received a copy of a book called
Coders at Work. It was fortuitous because I was planning on buying a copy of it anyway. It's a collection of interviews with some of the world's most influential programmers, modeled on
Founders at Work (which is also a good read.) It's a really interesting book for anyone who has ever done, or who wants to start, programming.
Each of the interviewees have different takes on things such as debugging, reading code, designing new software, and the philosophies of different programming languages. I found myself at times in strong agreement with their answers, sometimes disagreeing, but most of the time humbled by their accomplishments and clarity of thought. These individuals have been amazingly influential on the current landscape of programming, and none of them is satisfied that programming has really achieved its potential. From the original implementer of SmallTalk (Dan Ingalls) to the Chief Java Architect at Google (Joshua Bloch) you will find something fascinating from getting into each of their minds.
Of particular interest is what books they each recommend that programmers should have in their collection. I've read many, but not all, of them so I can see I've got some reading ahead me! Also, since I'm a bit of a programming language geek, I liked the interviews that talked about the genesis of a new language. I find that learning the philosophies of any language can only make you better in every other language (usually… Perl may be an exception :-)) I think this holds true for things in the system administration realm as well (e.g. learning something about OpenLDAP can only help in administering Active Directory.)
It's a pretty light and quick read, even though it weighs in at 601 pages. Its format is something that you can put down and pick up days later for a few minutes of reading without getting lost, which is pretty much how I got through it. If you've got a small gap in your reading list, I can recommend this book to fill it.