www.soapboxit.com is a website where anyone can write/search reviews about anything. I came across it when I learnt that one of my old colleagues is going (looks like I got the wrong company. The company he is going to work at is www.soapboxreviews.com) to work at this company. I think it is an interesting idea. As with all social networks, the challenge will be to gain momentum.. As I was browsing the site, I noticed that each new user is given a ID. At this point, the ID seems to just be an increasing integer. I found that my ID is 212 🙂
RDP over SSH tunnel
Necessity is the mother of invention.. Or so goes the old saying. I was on-call this weekend for off hour IT support. We usually provide our on-call engineers a wireless broadband card in case they need to get connected to the corporate network to troubleshoot/fix issues. This week, I was not able to get the wireless card, since we had to loan it to an exec. The only method to get onto the Internet was using my new 8700 blackberry. We have the EDGE service from T-mobile, which is not as fast as the Verizon BroadbandAccess.. We typically get ~128kbps with the EDGE connection and is enough to get our work done.. The problem with using the BB as a modem is that T-mobile blocks PPTP/IPSec traffic with this plan. Not to be outdone, I came up with a way to use the BB to connect to our internal network. Most of our support work is done on Windows, so we need to remote console into one of our servers to provide support. I did the following to get this working using our corporate SSH gateway to tunnel RDP traffic.
1) Download Putty (SSH Client).
2) Create a new session on Putty to the SSH gateway. In the “Tunnels” option, add the following options
Note: Replace the REMOTE_HOST with the IP address or hostname of your Windows server.
3) Click on ADD
4) Click on Open and connect to the SSH server with your credentials
5) Log into the remote serve by running the following command “mstsc /v:127.0.01:3390”
Note: You can change the local port to any number you want. Make sure not to use 3389 as the local port, since it is already used by the remote desktop service on your windows workstation.
Labour day weekend : Good Beer, Good Friends.. Good times :)
It’s amazing how fast holidays zip by :). Wish, it was the same with work days…. Lakshmi and I didn’t get a chance to travel during this long weekend, but we caught up with some sightseeing in Chicago. We visited the Field museum, using the free family pass you can get at the Chicago Public Library. For those of you who are not aware, you can get free passes to most of the attractions in Chicago. All you need is a membership at the library. Each library has limited quantities of the passes and it is given out on a first come first serve basis. A great way to explore the city without breaking your bank :). It was great day to visit the museum. I took some snaps from the trip and posted them on Flickr
We also got a chance to catch up with old friends..Sudheer and his charming wife, Neelima flew down to Chicago for the weekend and all of us got together at Ravi’s place for a night of fun, beer and food :). It was great to catch up on life and fondly remember our days at school. As usual, me and my camera were busy snapping pictures of the night…
[Left to Right: Back Row: Shekar, Achi, Ravi, Byna, Sudheer Front Row: Nirmala, Pallavi, Madhavi, Deepthi, Lakshmi, Neelima]
Picture your website
I ran across Aharef’s blog while I was browsing the net. Was pretty impressed by a applet he wrote to visually represent a website, using the HTML tags as a source. Here’s a picture of my website
You can get a graph of your website using the URL below
http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/.
Disaster strikes Kudithipudi.Org – Part II
One makes mistakes in haste, or so goes the ancient saying :). As soon as I discovered that my hosting company for the past few years did not store backups for longer than a day, I switched to 1and1.com, but little did I know that 1an1.com doesn’t provide web site logs (statistics) with their basic package. Well, serves me right for not doing my research right. Now I am with the third hosting provider in as many days. While the admin interface is not as polished as 1and1.com, I like that hostrocket provides all the features that I want for a relatively inexpensive price and the fact that it has a 20-something CEO.Hopefully I am going to be here for a while.. 🙂
One a side note, I am working on restoring all my old posts. Expect to see them up in a few days. Need to engage my uber-database-guru friend for help with the restore :).
Disaster strikes Kudithipudi.org!!
As many of you might have noticed, Kudithipudi.org has been down for the last couple of days. The database containing all the posts got corrupted and my hosting provider didn’t have backups from which I could restore the data.. As you can imagine, I have a new hosting provider now. I am trying to restore as much data as I can from the old site. This is pretty embarassing for me, since I am in the business of providing IT Services. This just validates the need for a good backup :). I am going to start using the new feature in WordPress which automatically sends a backup of the database to an e-mail address. Live and learn!! 🙂
Chicago : O'Hare : Terminal 1 : Fast Security checkin
Terminal 1 at the O’Hare International Airport in Chicago is dedicated to United Airlines flights and is one of the busiest terminals in the airport. Accordingly, it is a pain in the rear to get through security here. Try the security check-in at the extreme left of the terminal (next to the bag check-in counters) and you will be surprised, how empty and fast it is :).
HOW TO : Update non-domain members using WSUS
WSUS is a free tool from Microsoft that enables administrators to easily manage and deploy updates across the organization. WSUS is mainly used is enterprises with AD deployments, where the WSUS settings can be easily propagated to the workstations using group policy. So how does one keep their workstation/server updated without being part of the AD domain? You can do it by
1) Edit the local computer policy of the workstation/server by running “gpedit.msc”
2) Drill down to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update and change the settings for “Specify intranet Microsoft update service location“.
3) Restart the workstation.
R u LinkedIn???
I have started using LinkedIn as a way to keep in touch with my colleagues (past and current) and expand my professional network. LinkedIn boasts more than 6.5 million members and is growing pretty rapidly. It is fascinating to see how social networking works :). In less than a year, LinkeIn has become one of the top destinations on the web. Here is a graph, showing the popularity of LinkedIn for the last one year, as compiled by Alexa
Link to my profile on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/a65/110
Qmail : Domain specific relaying
Recipe to forward e-malis destined to a particular domain in qmail
1) Edit smtproutes (usually located in /var/qmail/control) and add the following line
DOMIAN_TO_FORWARD:HOST_TO_FORWARD_TO
2) Edit rcpthosts (usually located in /var/qmail/control) and add name of the domain
3) Restart qmail
Note: Make sure that the domain is not listed in the virtualdomains files too. Or qmail will process the virtualdomains file first and ignore the smtproutes entry.