So you’re about to rebuild your WinXP system on another box, but you can’t find all those damned product activation keys. How annoying. You’ve got the software working already, you just need to activate the products on the other box. Enter RockXP, a tool that lets you quickly scan and recover all installed MS product activation keys on your Windows box. I ran it yesterday on one of my XP VMs, and recovered activation keys for XP, Office XP 2003 Pro, and Visio 2003 Pro, all within seconds. Good times. Thanks, Stephen, for cluing me in to that one.
Archive for the 'Information Technology' Category
Gotcha. No secrets here. Once you’ve worked that hard and endured that stress-ball of an examination, second only to Cisco’s CCIE Lab in terms of mental strain, you will NOT want to risk losing it by violating Red Hat’s confidentiality agreement. They can sue you, too, so you won’t event want to do it for money.
I sat for the exam yesterday. I arrived early, as it was in the center of traffic hell in Tysons Corner. I picked up a drink at the Blimpie (THEY HAVE A BLIMPIE IN THE BUILDING. HOW COOL IS THAT?) There were maybe ten of us total. I’m pretty sure everyone I spoke with had taken it once before. I had not. I have, however, sat for MANY other exams, so I wasn’t intimidated. It COULDN’T be as hard as CCIE, right? RIGHT??? No cell phones during the exam. Check. No students from Syria, Iran, or a few other hostile countries may sit for the exam. Something about encryption export regulations, he said. Maybe they don’t want any of them obtaining the cert, for which they will be actively recruiting shortly. That could be a good sign. “They” being high-dollar employers, hopefully.
First part, break-fix. Instant feedback. Nailed it 100%. Called home for congratulations. Catered lunch. Would it violate the CA to discuss the coffee and lunchmeat varieties available? Yummy.
Second part, install-config. I swear, I touched EVERY technology I could think of during this portion. I approached it by making circles next to each task, putting a dot when I thought they were done, filling them in when they had been tested as well as possible after reboot. I was surprised when I had been through all tasks and still had 35 minutes left. I used the time to double-check each task after another reboot, making checkmarks down the left side of my pages.
Training? Nil. I used Red Hat’s own exam/course objectives as a guideline, alternating between the Red Hat Deployment Guide and Jang’s study guide (updated for RHEL 5), spending the last two days cramming on the subjects in which I knew I was weak, and practicing break/fix scenarios in VMWare machines on my laptop. It’s easy to solve a problem when you know what caused it, BUT… if you DO it enough times, you will recognize the symptoms right away and find the solution immediately.
I called home again to report that I felt really positive about the experience, especially after nailing the first half. I was pretty positive that I had nailed the second half as well, but since some of it wasn’t described quite as clearly as I would have liked, and some of it was virtually untestable, I wondered how much that could potentially take off of my score.
I got home and immediately checked my email. First half: 100% as expected. Second half: RHCT portion, 93%. RHCE portion, 89%. WELL within the passing range. I didn’t just pass, I kicked its ass.
I wish I could tell you exactly what you need to know to pass that exam. All I can tell you, honestly, is do what I did, and be prepared to know EVERYTHING. It’s that kind of exam. They WILL test you on objectives in which you are weak. So don’t be weak.
I had a good day today.
Section 1: 100%
Section 2: 93% on RHCT requirements, and 89% on the RHCE requirements.
New Owner- Parallels Buys ModernGigabyte
As a valued ModernBill client we want to provide you with information about the acquisition of ModernGigabyte, LLC by Parallels (formerly SWsoft) prior to the public announcement on Thursday, March 27.
We are pleased to inform you that Parallels has purchased ModernGigabyte including ModernBill and its ancillary product offerings. Further, we would like to assure you that Parallels has no intention of discontinuing ModernBill or eliminating support for any of the popular control panels that it supports today.
This purchase is great news for our team and our customers. The latest version of ModernBill is the ideal complement to the Parallels family of control panels including Plesk, Virtuozzo, Parallels Pro and Helm. Development will continue to be performed by our development team and support processes will remain in place to ensure no interruption to your existing business. The acquisition will provide access to a wider array of resources to maintain the product more efficiently and effectively over the long term.
In the near future you will see Plesk being bundled with ModernBill by many of Parallels channel partners. This will provide one of the most advanced control panel integrations produced to date.
Further information about the acquisition will be available on the Parallels’ website, www.parallels.com/modernbill, following the official announcement on Thursday.
New Conference-Parallels Summit 2008
Normally at this time of year, we would all be gathering in Louisville for our 4th Annual Hosting Workshop. However, it turns out that Parallels has an excellent program planned for all of their customers, including you. We are combining our resources with theirs to have a huge blowout in Washington DC on May 19-20. We will be offering all of the traditional labs that we have previously offered at our event and you will also get so much more.
To get more information or register for free, go to the Summit 2008 Website: www.parallels.com/summit.
If you’re in the industry, and you’ve been paying attention recently, you probably know that Parallels software recently picked up both Plesk (SWSoft) and Hsphere (Positive Software). For some, this may plant seeds of fear, especialy those who have been around long enough to remember when Sun Microsystems came in and gobbled up Cobalt,released the RaQ550, which was a big change to the RaQ4, and then shut down the operation. Where a lot of us in the industry were comfortable with the appliance hosting model for shared hosting, we were then forced to scramble to find software solutions. Some settled with the Japanese open-source releases of the RaQ550 software, while others such as myself decided to settle on Plesk. While Hsphere seemed to offer more granular control to the end user, Plesk seemed more simplistic in its interface and more scalable. Also, Hsphere includes integrated billing, and Plesk does not, but rather offers an API to process orders through your own billing system.
Parallels has announced their intent with these purchases.
Product Comparisons
H-Sphere delivers a complete hosting solution for small and medium sized hosting providers who want to offer shared hosting and virtual private servers with integrated billing.
* Parallels System Automation - Telecom providers, ISPs, and larger hosting providers who manage a large number of accounts, a large number of service plans, or require customized deployment architectures should use Parallels System Automation.
* Parallels Business Automation and Plesk - H-Sphere contains features of both Parallels Business Automation (ordering, billing, service plan management) and Plesk (control panels, provisioning). H-Sphere provides a single easy-to-understand platform, while Parallels Business Automation and Plesk provide specialized software systems with larger development teams and robust product roadmaps. We recommend Plesk as the platform for future business growth.H-Sphere will continue to be developed and supported by Parallels. Future product plans will be largely customer driven and will focus on integration with other Parallels hosting products.
I’ve been waiting for this announcement, to see if there would be a point of convergence between the products. It seems like Parallels System Automation is the new name for SWSoft’s PEM product.
Have you suddenly found yourself between jobs, or potentially between jobs? Don’t let it bring you down. Keep yourself busy. Here are a few ideas:
Don’t put google blocks anywhere you don’t want garbage to show up. You would be SURPRISED at what can come up on a Google ad block, when you least expect it. Don’t assume that if it’s fine when you look at it, it will always be fine. Google’s algorithms change over time, and they could be triggering ads from ANYTHING they read in the page. For a good example, start keeping track of the ads you see when reading and composing mail in your Gmail account. You will be surprised at how it interprets your words. Sometimes the ads are spot-on relevant to your discussions, to the point of being spooky. Other times, they could take something out of context, and present ads which could be considered insulting or even offensive. It’s funny how Google won’t let you put ad blocks on a porn site, but they have no problem putting p-o-r-n ads on your non-p-o-r-n site. It’s the last thing you would expect to see, and there it is. I’ve been burned twice on this now. This is why I put dashes in the magic P-word. The last thing I want is for those offensive ads to show up here.
SO I had an engineer build a server and try to rsync some data to it before lighting it up. Problem is, he rsynced the entire /var partition, which included the RPM database. Now the new system thinks it has all the stuff installed on it that the old system doesn’t. Dilemma….
So I wrote a quick script to remove the “missing” packages from the rpm db.
#!/usr/bin/perl
open (RPMPIPE,"rpm -qa |");
while (
$package=$_;
chomp $package;
print “Package: $package “;
$missing=`rpm –verify $package | grep ‘missing’`;
if ($missing) {
print “might be missing…\n”;
$verify=`rpm –verify $package`;
print “\n$verify\n\n”;
} else {
print “\n”;
};
};
Note that this code doesn’t automatically assume the package is actually missing. It’s quite possible that you have deleted one or more files which belong to a package, in which case you might not want to assume the package is missing.
If you determine that a package is indeed missing, just issue the following to get rid of it.
rpm --nodeps --justdb packagename
Let’s face it, RHCE is a tough exam. Those who fail it the first time should not feel defeated. Failing the RHCE exam the frist time around is like failing the Cisco CCIE exam the first time around. Lots of fully competent Linux jocks still fail the RHCE exam, and my guess is that it’s mostly from a mixture of arrogance, self-reliance and a lack of preparation.
Most of the RHCE exam guides were written “long ago” in terms of Red Hat releases. A lot of linux jocks learned their chops even longer ago. How many of you date your Linux skills back to Redhat 7, 6 or even 5? How many go farther back than that, to Slackware or even farther? How many of you are still using those chops that you’ve picked up so long ago? And why not? They’ve served you well all these years, and they still get things done. The problem is that Red Hat has changed. They’ve done some things that make it easier for us, and they’ve done some things that will require you to unlearn old habits (I won’t call them bad) to keep up. Remember, they’re not testing you on your ability to keep Red Hat 7 up, running and stable for eight years or more. They’re testing you on your ability to properly administer the current version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They’re not testing you on your ability to run a web server. They’re testing you on your ability to manage all aspects of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that could potentially come up in a corporate environment. DHCP. LDAP. Installation and configuration. Samba. Yes, interoperability with Windows. Encryption. You need to know it all. Or, more specifically, you need to know greater than 70% of installation and configuration and greater than 70% of troubleshooting.
Now for the meat.
A certain percentage of RHCE candidates have the budget and learning style to fit the RHCE training classes. I’m willing to bet that a greater percentage has a tendency toward self-learning. If you’re going to go that route, you need to know what’s expected of you. The meat of the RHCE exam can be found in Red Hat’s own documentation. Your greatest resource is going to be the RHEL Deployment Guide, a 904-page all-inclusive reference which could be considered the Red Hat Bible.
Cramming is no substitute for experience, but the RHEL Deployment Guide will take your years of experience, update them to the current version, and give you a definitive idea of where you need to focus your studying prior to taking the $799 exam.
Here are the objectives for RHCT/RHCE candidates. Understand that RHCT is a lesser cert, representing half of the RHCE.
Prerequisite skills for RHCT and RHCE (check out redhat.com for recent updates)
Candidates should possess the following skills, as they may be necessary in order to fulfill requirements of the RHCT and RHCE exams:
use standard command line tools (e.g., ls, cp, mv, rm, tail, cat, etc.) to create, remove, view, and investigate files and directories
use grep, sed, and awk to process text streams and files
use a terminal-based text editor, such as vi/vim, to modify text files
use input/output redirection
understand basic principles of TCP/IP networking, including IP addresses, netmasks, and gateways
use su to switch user accounts
use passwd to set passwords
use tar, gzip, and bzip2v
configure an email client on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
use mozilla and/or links to access HTTP/HTTPS URLs
use lftp to access FTP URLs
RHCT skills
Troubleshooting and System Maintenance
RHCTs should be able to:
boot systems into different run levels for troubleshooting and system maintenance
diagnose and correct misconfigured networking
diagnose and correct hostname resolution problems
configure the X Window System and a desktop environment
add new partitions, filesystems, and swap to existing systems
use standard command-line tools to analyze problems and configure system
Installation and Configuration
RHCTs must be able to:
perform network OS installation
implement a custom partitioning scheme
configure printing
configure the scheduling of tasks using cron and at
attach system to a network directory service, such as NIS or LDAP
configure autofs
add and manage users, groups, and quotas
configure filesystem permissions for collaboration
install and update RPMs
properly update the kernel RPM
modify the system bootloader
implement software RAID at install-time and run-time
use /proc/sys and sysctl to modify and set kernel run-time parameters
Troubleshooting and System Maintenance
RHCEs must demonstrate the RHCT skills listed above, and should be able to:
use the rescue environment provided by first installation CD
diagnose and correct bootloader failures arising from bootloader, module, and filesystem errors
diagnose and correct problems with network services (see Installation and Configuration below for a list of these services)
add, remove, and resize logical volumes
Installation and Configuration
RHCEs must demonstrate the RHCT-level skills listed above, and they must be capable of configuring the following network services:
HTTP/HTTPS
SMB
NFS
FTP
Web proxy
SMTP
IMAP, IMAPS, and POP3
SSH
DNS
For each of these services, RHCEs must be able to:
install the packages needed to provide the service
configure the service to start when the system is booted
configure the service for basic operation
Configure host-based and user-based security for the service
RHCEs must also be able to:
configure hands-free installation using Kickstart
implement logical volumes at install-time
use PAM to implement user-level restrictions
There is a lot of confusion and misinformation out there regarding SPF. Despite the fact that its target implementation date was over three years ago, there are a lot of folks just getting around to implementing it, including ISPs, and there isn’t a lot of guidance, besides the basic configuration document at http://spf.pobox.com.
I thought I would take a moment to clarify some of the more confusing aspects of SPF, especially as it pertains to spam filtering services such as Postini, MXLogic, MessageLabs, etc.
First of all, SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework, and it will help a lot to remember that, because the policy applies only to the SENDER domain.
When a domain publishes an SPF record, that record includes all servers from which hosts should EXPECT to receive email from that domain. Usually, this is only the sender’s mail server or ISP.
When SPF policy rejects an email, look at the bounce message to determine why. There are two general reasons why SPF would be rejected — (a) the SPF record was entered incorrectly, leaving out a correct mail server, or (b) the message was received by an unexpected source, such as pre-filtering anti-spam services (Postini, MessageLabs, MXLogic, etc.).
When SPF is rejected because it comes from a Postini-like source, this is not the SENDER’s problem. This is the RECIPIENT’s problem, because the RECIPIENT, as the subscriber, is responsible for that spam filtering service, and needs to add the spam filtering service’s SPF record to its trusted list. This is NOT accomplished in the SPF record itself, this is accomplished in the SPF policy LOCAL RULES.
To accomplish this, find the configuration file or interface whereby you would inject SPF settings to include in your local rules. Then determine the SPF settings for the spam filtering service you wish to authorize.
Some examples — for Postini, you would include spf.postini.com. If you use DNS tools to do a “dig” for TXT records for spf.postini.com, you will see that an SPF record is published. This is how that inclusion works. For mxlogic, you would include mxlogic.net. For messagelabs, you would include spf.messagelabs.com. Confirm this with your spam filtering provider(s) before using, as everything on the Net is fluid and subject to change.
Don’t let anyone talk you into adding Postini or its equivalent to a domain’s SPF record. While it might solve the immediate issue, it doesn’t fit in the big picture, and is an incorrect application of the policy. Postini does not SEND on behalf of a domain. It RECEIVES. Educate the recipient about local rules. Print this out and put it on your wall until you understand it.
