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/.
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 :).
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!! 🙂
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
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.
If you are using vpopmail and qmail to host virtual domains, you can get a list of all the aliases in a domain by using valias. The syntax is
valias -s DOMAIN_YOU_WANT_TO_LIST_ALIASES
If you want to list the users (and NOT aliases) in a domain, you can use vuserinfo. The syntax is
vuserinfo -D DOMAIN_YOU_WANT_TO_LIST_USERS
I flew Lufthansa, on my recent trip to India and was very impressed by the hospitality and the services offered. One of the coolest service on the flights was “Wi-Fi” hotspots offering Internet service. While the service was a bit expensive at $10.00/hour, I tried it out just to satisfy my geeky urgings. It was a blast chatting with friends and telling them that I am doing it from 35000 feet in the air ;). For anyone wanting to try this, I would reccomend getting the “unlimited” access for the entire duration of the flight for $29.95. I would love to look at the technology behind this setup. I am sure they are using satellites for the Internet access. Just interesting how they make sure that the connection stays steady while the flight is moving, since satellite service is very dependent on “point-of-view” access to the satellite.
NMAP is an open source network scanning utility. It has tons of options and is a very powerful tool that every administrator needs to know about. Recently, we were checking if UDP port 88 was open on a certain server. NMAP to the resuce :)..
nmap -sU -p 88 DESTINATION_SERVER_IP did the trick. The “-sU” option forces nmap to only scan UDP ports and “-p” forces nmap to only scan the specified port.
Challenge: You are asked to update ~500 records on your DNS servers running Windows 2003 SP1.
Solution : Spend hours and hours updating the entries using the pretty MMC based GUI
or
use some creative scripting to do the work for you. Here is the recipe
1) Download the Windows Support Tools for SP1 from here. The support tools contain a useful utility called “dnscmd”. The tool allows one to add/update/delete entries for Windows DNS servers through a command line interface. DnsCmd /help returns the following
| Usage: DnsCmd []: IP address or host name — remote or local DNS server . — DNS server on local machine : /Info — Get server information /Config — Reset server or zone configuration /EnumZones — Enumerate zones /Statistics — Query/clear server statistics data /ClearCache — Clear DNS server cache /WriteBackFiles — Write back all zone or root-hint datafile(s) /StartScavenging — Initiates server scavenging /ResetListenAddresses — Set server IP address(es) to serve DNS requests /ResetForwarders — Set DNS servers to forward recursive queries to /ZoneInfo — View zone information /ZoneAdd — Create a new zone on the DNS server /ZoneDelete — Delete a zone from DNS server or DS /ZonePause — Pause a zone /ZoneResume — Resume a zone /ZoneReload — Reload zone from its database (file or DS) /ZoneWriteBack — Write back zone to file /ZoneRefresh — Force refresh of secondary zone from master /ZoneUpdateFromDs — Update a DS integrated zone by data from DS /ZonePrint — Display all records in the zone /ZoneResetType — Change zone type /ZoneResetSecondaries — Reset secondary\notify information for a zone /ZoneResetScavengeServers — Reset scavenging servers for a zone /ZoneResetMasters — Reset secondary zone’s master servers /ZoneExport — Export a zone to file /ZoneChangeDirectoryPartition — Move a zone to another directory partition /EnumRecords — Enumerate records at a name /RecordAdd — Create a record in zone or RootHints /RecordDelete — Delete a record from zone, RootHints or cache /NodeDelete — Delete all records at a name /AgeAllRecords — Force aging on node(s) in zone /EnumDirectoryPartitions — Enumerate directory partitions /DirectoryPartitionInfo — Get info on a directory partition /CreateDirectoryPartition — Create a directory partition /DeleteDirectoryPartition — Delete a directory partition /EnlistDirectoryPartition — Add DNS server to partition replication scope /UnenlistDirectoryPartition — Remove DNS server from replication scope /CreateBuiltinDirectoryPartitions — Create built-in partitions |
As you can see, there is ton of stuff you can do with this utility. I am mainly interested in the /RecordAdd function for this example.
2) Write a small perl script to massage your raw data into the form you want. In this case, I was given the hostname and the IP address in an excel spreadsheet. I exported the spreadsheet to a command delimited file and the following perl script finished the job for me
| #!/usr/bin/perl -w # use strict;my (@File, @Column, @HostID, @NetworkID, $Line); my $infile = ‘NetworkCore.csv’; my $outfile = ‘NetworkCore_Processed.txt’; open(READ,”$infile”) open(OUTPUT,”>$outfile”) foreach $Line(@File) |
Note : The DNS_SERVER, DOMAIN_TO_ADD and xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa need to be replaced with your own values
3) Open a command prompt on the DNS server and copy and paste the contents of the file that the perl file spits out.. Did, I say that I love technology?? :)..
I have been maintaining my @kudithipudi.org address for some time now. I had all my E-mail from 1998 saved on my laptop until I had a hard drive disaster (ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR DATA), and lost all that E-mail. Ever since then, I have been trying to come up with a method to make my E-mail “crash” proof. I could have moved to using any of the popular free mail platforms (hotmail, yahoo, gmail etc.), but I didn’t want to loose the ability to send E-mail from my personal @kudithipudi.org address.
Google to the rescue – I was checking the settings on gmail the other day and noticed that I could setup a different E-mail address (which has to be verified) as my default “from address”. So I started forwarding E-mail from my domain to gmail. The problem now was to upload all the E-mail I have in Thunderbird up to gmail. That way, I would have all my E-mail in one single place and allow me to search through it. Google to the rescue again :), a query for “upload mail from thunderbird to gmail” returned this cool utility by Mark Lyon. It allows you to specify the source of your email and uploads the mail to your gmail account.
The next challenge was to find the directory/file where Thunderbird stores all the email. Google to the rescue again. You can get the location of the mail files from the account settings screen –> Local Folders in Thunderbird.
I am in E-mail bliss now. Use Gmail for all my messaging purposes. Next task would be to start using the Google Calendar.
