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Backups Blogging Equipment Hardware Networking Projects Tech Talk Thoughts

Half-Full or Half-Empty Hard Drive?

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Over the past couple of weeks, I have been slowly consolidating Hard Drive space within my home-office network.

Because of my background as an backup administrator, I am especially concerned and focused on having redundant copies of data, just in case.

Murphy would be proud…

With that being said, I looked at my various existing 100GB-250GB internal and external hard drives that were sprawled all over the place, and bought a couple of TB hard drives.

Then the fun part, looking at the life cycle of the house data.

There is current local stuff, the Live Data for the house, and then the Secondary Backup.

Next was writing the various robocopy scripts, and making sure I use /e and /mir correctly…

Several more days of data transfer, I finally think I have ALL the data in a nice consolidated fashion!

For the first time in 5+ years, I have everything on one Hard Drive!

Yeah!

But now, as I now am analyzing the capacity of the Live Data drive, I find myself evaluating the situation.

Is my new Half-Full or Half-Empty?

In my 30 plus years of IT, very rarely, have I heard of a hard drive referred to as Half-Empty.

Seems that the when we talk about technology and storage, we tend to be optimistic!

When was the last time your thumb drive Half-Empty? or that CD/DVD that you just burned… Half-Empty?

When was the last time you checked your backup?

Thoughts?

– Andrew
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Categories
Blogging Software Tech Talk

WordPress and CrystalTech – Posting Issue Solved

Back in February when I first made the cut over from DotNetNuke to WordPress, the basic installation went without issue, but upon occasion, while I was trying to add blog entries, for some reason I had problems posting a new entry.

Initially, I thought it was just the revision of the WordPress software I was using, and waited for the next iteration which I installed, and the problem seemed to disappear.

For a period of about 4 to 5 weeks, I was able to post to my blog and continue on as if nothing had occurred.

Then on May 9th, when I was trying to post a new blog entry announcing that one of my photos had been selected as VisitPA profile picture on Facebook, the Posting issue resurrected itself, and cause me much grief.

What should have been 5 minute Post, ended up taking nearly 30 minutes as I fought to get my blog entry online.

Thankfully, I was busy with several other projects, and my posting issue dropped onto the back burner.

Then last night, as I was watching TV and surfing the net, I ran into a posting on WordPress.org, that sounded very similar to what I had been experiencing.

With this new information, I started a live chat with technical support at CrystalTech, and asked if they would check out the settings for my site in regards to their firewall blocking packets of data thinking they were a SQL injection attack as mentioned in the posting.

The technician was quickly able to find and confirm that my site was indeed being blocked by CrystalTech’s SRX firewall, and created a ticket, requesting that my site be added to the white list.

I have since been able to confirm that posting issues seems to have disappeared even with posts that I had issues with in the past!

Needlessly to say, I am now very happy to be able to post again!

– Andrew
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Categories
Add-Ons Backups Browsers Flickr Hacking How to(s)? Information Reference Tech Talk Tips

flickr Award Counter – Backup, Restore and Transfer

If you get involved with the Flickr photography groups that have awards, you will notice that there is no really good way to track what you have, until flickr Award Counter (fAC) by Andy Felton (PhazeShift).

flickr Award Counter can take some time to initially setup, because you have to enter in each Award Title (think of a naming structure), and the URL to the Award image for the greasemonkey/javascript counters to work, but once it is done, fAC works great!

But beware, once done, there does not appear to be a direct way to back up all your filter/counter work.

Backup

After some hunting, I found a thread on the Flickr Hacks – “Award Counter – backup?“, which suggested that one backup the Firefox “prefs.js” file, which can be found (example: Win XP):

C:Documents and Settings%profilename%Application Data ¬
MozillaFirefoxProfilesdm24ria8.defaultsprefs.js

where

%profilename%

is the current user, and

dm24ria8.defaults

could be “any-name.defaults” within this path, and includes “prefs.js”, and all the more fun if there are multiple users! A-)

The simplest backup, is to copy/duplicate the “prefs.js” file within the same directory and adding the “.bak” extension (“prefs.js.bak”) or copy the file to another location, and leave yourself a reminder of where!

Restore

To restore, just replace the damages file with the backup from above.

Transfer

Many times, all you want to do, is to transfer your filter/counter information from one machine to another.

If you use the Restore method mentioned above, one of the immediate down sides is that the destination machine, will inherit the “prefs.js” settings from the source machine.

In some cases, this might be sufficient, but what if you ONLY want the filter/counter information.

about:config

On the machine that has the Main/Source of filter/counters, launch Firefox, and type about:config in the address bar.

You will get a warning screen, and just agree.

[Technically, you are on your own now, so...]

Scroll down to the following filter:

greasemonkey.scriptvals.http://www.phazeshift.co.uk/download//flickrAwardCounter.awards

Double click on the entry, and a new window will open up.

In the “Enter string value” window, copy the string value.

Move to the destination machine, and find the similar entry, and paste in the source filter information.

Quit your browser, and re-launch Firefox, and check your work.

This has been done transferring an existing series of Firefox 4.0 XPro filters to Firefox 4.0 Win7Pro (destination):

C:Users%profilename%AppDataRoaming ¬
MozillaFirefoxProfilesx5lnhhwl.defaultpref.js

with out issue (“x5lnhhwl” will change).

Your mileage may very.

Feature Request(s)

  • Ability to Export/Import filter/counters
    • These could be “traded” via Flickr

Please feel free to add Comments or Feedback.

– Andrew
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Categories
Blogging Online Life Projects Software Tech Talk Web Website

WordPress vs Drupal – Novice POV

A forum Post that looks at both Drupal and WordPress as a Novice User…

Highlights WordPress as the easier of the two to get up and running…

I have looked at Drupal, but really do not have the time to get into the coding aspect any more…

WordPress.org does hide allot of the Developer stuff, which I am now slowly wanting to explore…

Good read for those that might be interested…

Wake up community – WordPress.org should scare you!

– Andrew
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Categories
Reference Tech Talk

listsrv – PatchManagement.org

If you are an Systems Administrator that is responsible for Patching and Updating Servers and Workstations, it is HIGHLY recommend that you subscribe to the FREE PatchManagement.org’s listsrv!

PatchManagement.org is hosted by Shavlik Technologies, and is updated continuously!

Since the “group” is geared toward Sys Admins, the conversation are very topical and technical and one can learn a great deal!

Again, HIGHLY recommended!

– Andrew
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