TTC Shelbyville – Technical Blog

Tweaking your internet connection with DFUeTweaker is easy and fast.  Because there are different forms of broadband connections, you can ‘tweak’ these settings to get the maximum speed possible.

Download DFUeTweaker

Want to test your LAN’s Throughput?  Use QCheck.  Load QCheck on both computers.

Put the IP Address of the local computer on the left side  and the destination on the right side.   QCheck should be loaded on the opposite computer, reversing your IP addresses.

With the ability to measure TCP or UDP, QCheck can measure throughput and even Novell’s IPX/SPX along with several other features.

If you have several computers on your network and would like to see the computers on your network, Enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP to speed this process up.  NetBIOS allows computers to be seen by name on your network.  Enabling NetBIOS allows your computer to find other computers in your network (Network or Network Places).

To enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP on Windows 7:

1. Click Start, and then click Network. (click Start, type ncpa.cpl into the search box for Windows 7 or Vista, hit ENTER).
2. Click on the Network and Sharing Center
3. Click Manage Network Connections.
4. Right click on the Local Area Connection select Properties.
5. Select Internet Protocol version 4 (TCP/IPv4)
6. Click the Advanced button under the General tab.
7. Click the WINS tab.
8. Click Enable NetBIOS Over TCP/IP.
9. Click OK and Exit the settings.

Improve Your Internet Speed – Read the Article
Are you IPv6 Ready?

Setting up WINS

AMD vs Intel Quad Core Shootout

Want to optimize your computer? See our checklist!

See our review of Windows 8 and see how you can run 90% of your programs, virtualize other operating systems, use your network and more.

Windows 7′s System Restore adds a new index reader that lets you see exactly what will be changed based on specific restore points.

In the search box, type system restore, and press Enter.

Select a restore point and click  Scan for affected programs. A list of the files that will be deleted, added, or changed by the action will be displayed.

Review these changes.
 

Dawn M. Babian, GSAE

We wrote and article on Google and recently found another utility to find your fastest DNS Servers.  NAMEBENCH

What’s My DNS? – Global DNS Propagation Checker.

Excellent Network Administrator Questions -  Link

On Technorati I was surprised we were ranked at 21709 out of over 800,000 blogs.  Cool.   Link
That’s in the top 3% of blogs.

So you have the right setup for your Virtual Operating System and you need another OS added to your Virtual Computer.  This software does that in minutes and lets you know the progress.   After completion of the clone, open VirtualBox, Click on New, walk through the wizard and attach the hard drive (clone you created) and you are done.

Cloning your VirtualBox is easier than the command we listed in an earlier post this week.  There is a GUI interface someone created to do just this.

• Reads VDI,VHD,VMDK or RAW, writes VDI.
• GUI Interface.
• A CLI interface if you want
• Ability to discard unused blocks from the clone (no need to run SDelete/zerofree first).
• Ability to enlarge the maximum size of a virtual disk.
• User choice to either keep the old UUID or generate a new one (this identifies your VM).
• Diagnostics about the original source VDI, including the partition map and the fileystem.
• A Progress Bar

Link to Download

http://forums.virtualbox.org/download/file.php?id=1359

Microsoft has another excellent site to learn different skills used today.  Link

The express Editions from Microsoft allow you to learn the basics with:

• Visual Basic 2008
• Visual Web Developer 2008
• Visual C# 2008
• Microsoft Web Platform  (SQL and loaded with other goodies!)
• Visual C++ 2008
• Visual Studio

Free Microsoft Professional Development Skills - Ramp Up!

Ramp Up is Microsoft’s Professional Development Skills that covers several tracks from web development, programming and other free materials presented by Microsoft.

Need to tweak Windows 7 for max performance?  You can use AutoMz Ultimate.

Link

While Linux tends to be safer than Microsoft or Mac,  two recent vulnerabilities have appeared recently.  One a denial of service bug found in the Linux kernel fails to handle large packets correctly which could in turn cause the system to crash and the second could give a local user root permissions because of laws with the Ext4 file system.   These vulnerabilities are not just limited to Ubuntu.   Grab your updates as soon as you can.

Rarely Windows Explorer in Windows 7 will stop responding.  Several sources on the web say to delete or rename the MachineThrottling key.   While this is questionable, I have found that it is normally bad RAM.  While this is my opinion,  I found that it does work on some computers.   Before doing this, replace RAM or repair Windows first.

Investigate components (software) that become part of your context menu (right click)  Link This will look unrelated but because they are part of Windows Explorer, they can affect or have an effect on the Windows.

Solution One

1. Click on the Windows Logo.
2. In the Search Bar, type regedit and hit Enter.
3. Navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions
4. In the right pane of the registry editor,  delete or rename this subkey: MachineThrottling
5. Reboot Your Computer

Do NOT change your registry unless necessary and only after backing up your files.  Don’t have this key, keep reading.

Solution Two

Turn off private browsing in FireFox, yes Firefox.  Go to tools and click Stop Browsing.  Don’t have Firefox, keep reading OR, download Firefox, insure private browsing is off and go to the Control Panel,  Programs and Features,  Turn Windows Features On and Off and uncheck IE8. OR Microsoft’s ‘Research’ and ‘Discuss’ addons within IE8 should be disabled.

Solution Three

Third Party Sidebar Gadgets – disable the sidebar.  No errors?  Enable the sidebar and add the apps one at a time.

Solution Four

Adobe or any add-on software such as Google Desktop or Desktop Search Software.  Uninstall, test and re-install as necessary.

Solution Five

Anti-virus software.   Be aware that not using anti-virus software is asking for trouble.  Disable the anti-virus software, uninstall or re-install as necessary.

Solution Six

When did the error begin?   Look at software installed since the error started.

Many programs integrate with Windows Explorer and the offending program can normally be uninstalled or reinstalled and the explorer error goes away.

Windows 7 has telnet.   Although not installed by default, you can follow these steps to install telnet.

1. Click On the Windows Logo.
2. Go to the  Control Panel.
3. Go to Programs and Features.
4. Click Turn Windows features on or off.
5. In the Windows Features dialog box, check the Telnet Client check box.
6. Click OK.

In a technology driven world, IT Professionals are defined by certifications, skill and worker ethics.  Certifications are designed to give ranking to IT Professionals.  With a collection of simulated exams that are too close to the real exam, the real exams lose value and respect in the IT community.  I’ve watched people test and come back to a testing center continuously and hold up their final exam to say they are an ‘Engineer’ in a highly respected area of expertise, yet as they hung around for a lecture, they didn’t know the basic fundamentals of SNMP, Telneting, CIDR, Domain policies, basic security information or about virtualization.

Certifications are earned through hard work, studying and ‘hands-on’.   The motivation behind getting as many as you can in the past involved promotions, salary increases and time in the field.    While many young IT Professionals ‘think’ they know it all, an old IT dog like myself will tell you that it is impossible to know it all.   Information Technology is changing daily.  Daily.   Hmmmm.  Hourly.

Companies promising Cisco or Microsoft in a week or two are looking for candidates that pay extraordinary amounts of money and who can memorize an exam.   These boot camps should be limited to IT personnel who have worked in the field for a certain amount of time.    Exams should also be limited for students who have ‘x’ amount of time in a classroom and lab.   Where we teach topics that have certifications, students spend 432 hours in the classroom and labs at a minimum before the first exam.   More advanced exams that are layered (curriculum that overlays) on these certifications usually result in the student spending two to three times this amount of time in the classroom and labs before earning a second or third exam.

I’m not saying our methodology of teaching is better than others, I’m saying that their is a big difference in the quality of a candidate from our classroom and other places that have the same practice compared to facilities that have students memorize exams.   Our students even in this economy have been acquiring jobs with large corporations and the government.    I do believe the value of their certification is greater than someone who has memorized an exam.  Not only is it an understanding of the materials, it is the ‘hands-on’ that makes a candidate stand out.

IT Managers have their work cut out for them when hiring from a pool of ‘certified’ individuals.

Exporting an installed operating system that has been configured in VirtualBox is easy.    After an operting system is installed and configured with programs, this is called an ‘applicance’.  Exporting the applicance shrinks the OS and its applications.    Why would you do this?    If you had another site or you were moving the ‘applicance’ between servers.

Click on File – Export Appliance -  Select a path and name your applicance.  This is time consuming and resource intense.    To import, follow the above steps of starting VirtualBox and select import applicance.

The exported file is approximately 50% of the size of the original OS.  Also the import will appear to do nothing for a few and then the (10 minutes or so of hard drive activity) suddenly the progresss moves quickly.

Need more than one operating system in VirtualBox to test software, networking or for other reasons?

• Make sure VirtualBox is not running
• Open a command prompt (type cmd.exe at the run line or search box)
• Hit Enter
• type cd\program files\sun\virtualbox
• type vboxmanage clonehd c:\users\yourusername\.VirtualBox\HardDisk\ubuntu.vid C:\Users\yourusername\.VirtualBox\HardDisks\ubuntu clone.vdi  
  Example:  vboxmanage clonehd C:\Users\Steve\.VirtualBox\HardDisks\ubuntu.vdi C:\Users\Steve\.VirtualBox\HardDisks\ubuntu clone.vdi
• Hit Enter  – this is time consuming and can take a GREAT deal of time, CPU and other resources -  Be patient and wait for it to finish (Change the UUID before attaching the drive -see below), open virtual box and create a new operating system.  Attach the drive (during the new OS wizard’s setup)
• After completing this step you will change the UUID on the drive by typing the following at a cmd prompt-
  -VBoxManage internalcommands sethduuid C:\Users\yourusername\.VirtualBox\HardDisks\ubuntu clone.vdi
  (the above two lines will be on one line.)

This now allows you to have two identical operating systems.

Want to check the basic security settings in Ubuntu?  Install Tiger for an audit of your Ubuntu setup.

Open a Terminal window and type:

sudo aptitude install tiger

After the installation, in a terminal window, type:  sudo tiger

This is a CPU intensive program and your system may slow.