All posts by SunSaturn

New Server

Time to build a new server!

Seems we have outgrown our current server, and an upgrade is needed. Currently we are having issues with not enough memory, and not enough disk space. Other issues include older cpu chipsets that do not do full hardware virtualization, which is a known problem on the Dell 2850 servers. What I propose is we order a barebones new server and upgrade components inside it to bring us exceptional speed, full hardware virtualization, lots of memory and diskspace, and everyone is happy with how fast their websites load and databases perform.

We use enterprise SSD’s for speed/reliability and load it with tons of memory to ensure we never have a memory shortage again. I thank everyone for their patience on this upgrade, I did comment to many people I would commence on this after the new year, and I have, I am hoping to have this completed by worse case scenario, end of March/14. For anyone interested in technical builds, read on below, for the rest, I look forward to bringing you a great hosting platform for March /14.

Completed:
a) Ordered a barebones Dell 2950 generation 3(will provide full virtualization support on 2 quad cpu chipset(8 cpus total @2.83ghz))
b) Ordered a memory upgrade to bring it up to 32gb(arrived and installed today – system detects full 32gb)

In Progress:
a) Memory checks
b) Order bay trays
c) Order Icy Dock Units
d) Order Sata Power Splitter + SSD cabling for checking onboard sata performance vs raid controller.
d) Order Intel s3500 SSD’s
e) Test SSD’s against perc 6i controller for single disks, raid 0, as well as onboard sata performance in software raid configurations.
f) Configure linux operating system using deadline I/O scheduler, VM’s with NOOP I/O scheduler, virtualize with KVM, convert all openvz hosts over to new KVM virtualization.
g) Ship unit to colocation and do final setups over a week period before conversion.

Dan.
SunSaturn Wishes You A Happy New Year

Moving to windows 8 from windows 7

So it got in my mind with Microsoft moving from windows 7 to windows 8, and the much needed upgrade to make their operating system work on smart phones, that this was the start of a needed upgrade to the future as they will eventually drop support for anything previous to windows 8 to stay in competition with the likes of iphones, androids and blackberries.

Reasons to upgrade from top of my head:
1) Developers must upgrade in order to learn how to stay up to date with technology, i.e.: writing apps for windows phone, or playing with latest features to see what apps they can write, or just in general to help others with their OS from experience with it.
2) It boots faster, and if done up right, can serve just as windows 7 did, just faster and better(as developers stop coding for windows 7 and backwards)
3) You will most likely want the latest and greatest software, and this will most likely only run on windows 8 on in the future.
4) Windows 8 incorporates all your Facebook, LinkedIn, personal email, Gmail, Hotmail, Skype, and even China’s Facebook equivalent: “Sina Weibo”, so you have one app called “People”, where you can talk to everyone at once which is very handy.
5) You will be able to use latest internet explorer browsers. If your a developer you should be using internet explorer, firefox and chrome for testing your website builds to begin with, so another good reason to upgrade.
6) The list goes on, but what it comes down to regardless, is every new laptop sold will have windows 8, so the move is inevitable, embrace the change, and move on.

Reasons not to upgrade:
1) If you are running on really old hardware, and still on something like Windows XP, then you might not meet specs to even install it, and even if you did, it would run to slow because you most likely do not have the computer memory to handle it.
2) You are anti-Microsoft. Well even though there are a lot of those, wouldn’t it make more sense to install their latest and greatest so you aren’t just giving intelligent people un-useful lip service and just get flamed in forums from your lack of knowledge of the new product?
3) It is an unnecessary expense when windows 7 works fine. Well then you cannot play with all the new toys and how much fun is that? Surely if you do not want to pay for it, you can just download a copy off a torrent site and use MS toolkit to run it for free, so really comes down to time vs money in this situation, so get your tech family member to do it.
4) You run Linux or Apple as a client. Well biggest problem here is people write new apps and then you cannot use them unless they lend support to these 2 OS’s. In either case you are still better off installing a virtualization technology like “VMware” and running an instance of Windows 8 inside there so you have the best of all worlds. Personally I run Linux only on servers, and use Windows as a client to access them so I don’t have complaints from my better half wanting to use my PC or I cannot run this and that because I am limited. There are free virtualization technologies, I don’t suggest going out and spending money on one if you have tech ability and can get a free one. Things like KVM under Linux or open source projects on sourceforge.net for windows ones are just fine. I ran Windows 8 beta when it first came out under KVM in Linux and it was fine, but I would not do that on my main desktop as I have triple monitor setup and want to utilize all my monitors. Graphical power users I know usually have MAC laptops and run a Windows 8 instance inside it as well.

I would also like to state: I have 2 HP printers, one of them I always had to go to website and manually install driver in Windows 7, in Windows 8 I did not have to do anything. As you can see support is starting to drop for Windows 7, and it will make your life harder not better.

My experience of dislikes with installing Windows 8 and how to fix the issues:
Now remember I am a power user, so moving quickly around to do things is very important, so I will go over the issues and how to deal/cope with issues.

1) There is no start menu. This makes it difficult to work with desktop, where if your like me, where you will spend most of your time being productive instead of in the app screens. Solution: Install one. Go here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/classicshell/ , now you can install whatever version you like of it, XP, Windows 7 etc. and it is a time saver especially when first installing to quickly right click apps off it to pin to your taskbar.
2) You cannot go directly to desktop after logging in. The great folks who wrote classic shell above solved this issue to, now waking my computer up I go right to the desktop or even rebooting.
3) Too many clicks to find the shutdown or restart button. Again classic shell solves this above putting it back in place it should be.
4) You have to click through a start screen in order to login all the time. Who wants to do this? This is annoying and an extra click to get into your PC. Here is a quick way to disable that lock screen:
http://blog.laptopmag.com/how-to-eliminate-the-win8-lock-screenz

1.Hit the Start key, type gpedit.msc, and press Enter. This will open the Local Group Policy Editor.
2.Navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Personalization
3.Double click “Do not display the lock screen,” and select Enabled from the dialog that pops up. Click OK.

5) Power users really dislike UAC being enabled and Windows always asking to confirm this and that all the time. Unfortunately our old way of sliding slider to bottom to disable UAC in Windows 7 does not actually disable it. I was trying to patch a program in Programs Directory or modify system files and it would not let me! That’s great security against hackers, but just more annoying for people cracking programs from torrent downloads. Other issue completely disabling it is Microsoft chose to make sure apps on app screens do not run till you re-enable it again. So with this knowledge in hand this is what we do since we are to lazy to go into registry every time to disable it. Create this file called , “disable_UAC.reg” on your desktop and put this code into it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin"=dword:00000000
"EnableLUA"=dword:00000000

Now every time you need to modify system or program files directly, double click on that on desktop, reboot, do what you need to, then go click on any app on app screen after that will give you a link to enable it again, then reboot, and your good to go.
6) Another annoying issue is when we store things on network drives and install programs from there. Microsoft seems to detect if file is not owned by you and denies the install! Good security from someone trying to elevate their privileges as a hacker, but bad for us. Solution: copy program from network drive to your desktop, files will then be owned by you, then you can install as usual.
7) Triple monitor setup and I want screen saver to run on all 3, different wall papers on each monitor, and use a different monitor as my primary monitor , my center screen, instead of one on left. Solution:
install “Ultramon” and this solves all the problems.
8) Microsoft’s way of moving mouse to top of right screen to go to apps menu has a key flaw, in a triple monitor setup, instead of just throwing my mouse over there, I have to be exact so my mouse does not go over to next monitor, this is really annoying and more of a pain than anything. Unfortunately something we seem to have to live with, hoping to find a solution to this issue, but overall I do not go in apps screens enough to care, all 3 usually in desktop mode just like Windows 7 was.
9) Pain to close apps and move around to different ones. Only 2 solutions I could find was drag app from top to bottom to close it or use the old Alt-Tab trick to move around between different things quickly. The other way of going over to top left of screen and right clicking to close, takes way to long.

Overall if your a Windows 7 user, you can see how I solved most issues to function just as Windows 7 did, plus having next operating system at my disposal now. It is a bit of a pain to get use to, but spend an hour or 2 with interface and you’ll be an expert in no time.

Till we meet again,

Dan.

SunSaturn

University students

For students I have taught or any educational institutions, I have opened a special offer. $19.99 for the year which includes a domain of your choosing and free hosting for the year on any of the TLD’s from main site. Ie: .com, .net etc.

This is to show SunSaturn’s strong support for the next generation of talented designers and programmers as a way for you to show case your skills to future employers with examples of work for them, or to develop your skills further on live productions systems you will encounter with all the latest technology installed for your use.

To apply this offer, email support@sunsaturn.com the domain you would like to use for your website or me personally after you have filled out: https://secure.sunsaturn.com/register.php so I have you on file, then I will send you an email back, how to pay the invoice, ie credit card, or paypal and you should be good to go!

Dan.

SunSaturn Washington DC, at presidents inaugeration

Will be at canadian embassy on Inaugeration Day, Jan 21/2013, I look forward to getting good pictures of event, should be an exciting day. Do give me a call if you are in the area! I am going to spend some time here, I plan on returning to canada on February 20th, helping a friend drive their car back for 5 days from February 15th-20th, should be a nice road trip! In past many weeks I have spent some time at Myrtle Beach, and virginia beach having a nice holiday, I am enjoying my vacation, I also celebrated a birthday yesterday, it has been wonderful so far…

Dan.

Washington D.C.

Happy new year everyone, I will be in Washington D.C. in January, I will have my laptop with me, and 800 number should reach my cell phone if any issues. I expect to be back in Canada end of January, but definitely no later than end of February, again happy new year, and do call me up if anyone in Washington, we’ll have dinner!

Happy Holidays,

Dan.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

I tend to listen to a lot of music while doing anything during the day, my tastes differ so much depending on time of day and how I am feeling, that I listen to songs from almost every different country, language, and genre. Here are my Christmas Lyrics to you this year, compliments of Rod Stewart with slight modifications:

May the good Lord be with you
Down every road that you roam
And may sunshine and happiness
Surround you when you’re far from home
And may you grow to be proud, dignified and true
And do unto others as you’d have done to you

Be courageous and be brave
And in my heart you’ll always stay
Forever young.

May good fortune be with you
May your guiding light be strong
And may you never love in vain
And in my heart you will remain
Forever young….

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,

Dan.

Authenticating users with freeradius on Centos

You may want to authenticate users with radius at some point, perhaps your backend stores all your users there, perhaps you do not want to login to many boxes to change password for same user, I will describe here how to authenticate users with almost any service.

First setup some repository depending on if your running 64 bit or not:
#64 Bit

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-7.noarch.rpm

#32 Bit

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-7.noarch.rpm

Install it and configure it:

yum install pam_radius
alias pico='nano -w'
pico /etc/pam_radius.conf

Setup your radius details here
#server[:port] shared_secret timeout (s)
127.0.0.1 your_radius_secret_password 3

Add radius authentication to SSH

cd /etc/pam.d
pico sshd

#now for any users you want to authenticate, just toss following line as second line in any service
auth sufficient pam_radius_auth.so debug

Just open any file and edit it and its authenticating off radius
IMPORTANT NOTE: Do NOT think you can just add users to radius and login, you must actually create the user first! This is not LDAP, we are simply just providing another place to store passwords for users, nothing more, you can lockout the account on the system and still login with users radius passsword.

To add a user is simple as : adduser username
Delete a user just as simple : userdel -r username

Verify everything is ok:

ssh -l radius_user localhost 
exit
tail -100 /var/log/secure

You hopefully see something as follows:
pam_radius_auth: Got RADIUS response code 2

Exactly what we want, response code 2 from radius is Accept-Accept, so we typed in right password and should have been logged in.

Try some other services, pop open dovecot for instance:

pico /etc/pam.d/dovecot (add the same line)
telnet localhost 110
user radius_user
pass radius_pass
retr 1

You can do this for all your services,

Until Next Time,

SunSaturn.com