Josh Wieder

Spam has been going out appearing as sourced from DocuSign. Examples are included below. According to DocuSign, this issue has been ongoing since at least as early as January 3rd . Recent activity has accelarted in the last week, with new evidence and examples coming to light. Stay safe out there.

EDIT: Due to squatting issues, joshwieder.com has been taken from me. Use www.joshwieder.net instad. I just acquired a block of new domains names and DNS settings are in the process of being updated. If you ever have issues and want to confirm your resolution with this site, we load balance the following domains : joshwieder.blogspot.com joshwieder.com joshwieder.org joshwieder.info joshwieder.net With the following IPs: 216.239.32.21 216.239.34.21 216.239.36.21 216.239.38.21

Do you resell bandwidth as part of your suite of services? You might be interested to know that Level 3 announced yesterday that they will be launching a new, tiered partner program . This will replace the legacy Partner program in place at Global Crossing, 16 months after their acquisition by Level 3. Commission rates will be changing. Most VARs have yet to see new contracts, however the tiered structure of the new program could spell lower commissions for smaller integrators, or VARs who simply do not prioritize Level 3 within their book of business at this time. Michael Jerich, Channel Chief with Level 3, has stated he expects the changes in program structure to result in 5% of their current partners having their partner status canceled as a result of minimum sales requirements.

For managing fragmentation of NTFS (Windows Server 2003/2008, XP, Vista, and Windows 7) : For general disk defragmentation, the following utilities offer a substantial improvement in overall performance and efficacy over native operating system tools: Auslogics Disk Defrag  or Raxco PerfectDisk For use on disks unsupported by the above tools, frequently executed and/or locked files or even a straightforward command line utility that can easily be used as part of a shell script: Contig from the Sysinternals Suite Contig has been of particular value when managing backup servers - servers storing huge files with substantial writes on a regular basis. Being able to specify the backup files allows for properly scheduling defragmentation by backup job, and in the process eliminating the need for downtime on these systems as part of this manner of disk maintenance. Can also be used for per-file fragmentation analysis and reporting. For managing fragmentation of ext4 file systems (new

I wish all the best to his family and I wish he had been able to weather the storm. Aaron spent 15 years making the internet a better place; his achievements will not soon be forgotten. Here is a video of a brief talk with Aaron .

EMC purchased iWave Software last week. iWave designs storage automation applications - their IT Automator looks a lot like Eucalyptus or Cloudstack, and provides the same sort of functionality (a pretty GUI for private Clouds). Whether its been configuring vSphere, chatting with their account executives from Boston to South Carolina, studying for their certifications or cutting my fingers on the rails to their cabinets EMC and I have grown close over the years. They have been the undertow shaping the currents of our industry for some time now. I'm very interested to see whether the plans for iWave will extend beyond VMAX . iWave's IT Automator

NPR's Sami Yenigun has a story discussing the importance of high performance video streaming making the rounds on their site and radio properties today. The time when companies could get away with a poor web presence is over. Here is my favorite quote: "What we found was that people are pretty patient for up to two seconds," Sitaraman says. "If you start out with, say, 100 users — if the video hasn't started in five seconds, about one-quarter of those viewers are gone, and if the video doesn't start in 10 seconds, almost half of those viewers are gone."

I will be publishing a large article dealing with file fragmentation across a variety of operating systems, tool recommendations outside of the defaults included with popular operating systems, and how file fragmentation relates to SANs and virtual machines over the next few days. If you are a Linux administrator and chuckling, well, you may want to give it a read (if not here, than please, read some more about ext* somewhere ).

http://www.bradreese.com/ - A water-coolerstyle discussion and forum for Cisco CCIEs http://ardenpackeer.com/ - "Network Fu" tutorials (excellent series on conditional route injection with BGP) http://jonsblog.lewis.org/ - Notes from a respected former colleague (and creator of a well known RBL) http://juniperhacks.wordpress.com/ - Honorable Mention - An inactive, but still useful, collection of JunOS hacks All of them worth checking out!

In a shameless  maneuver  to keep the traffic coming, I will be adding a new semi-recurring column to Tech Info. Called the C Note, this column will consist of missives from executives of technology companies in the tone of C. This will not be an 'Inside the Actor's Studio' for the ultra-rich, nor will it be an exposé where something is 'Occupied' . Attention will be paid to real articles of interest: identification of industry trends, justification for controversial decisions, in short, musings upon experience worth repeating. Do you find this distasteful, thrilling, a waste of time or something you would like the site to focus on more? Leave a comment or send an email or text message! Reproduced in entirety due to linking trouble with the in-appropriately-named-at-this-moment LinkedIn What I got wrong in the Peanut Butter Manifesto Brad Garlinghouse In 2006, as an executive at Yahoo! I wrote an internal memo outlining my observations about the state o

As a general rule, "Popular Science" has always struck me as a laughable oxymoron. And while this rule has served me well over the years and insulated me from all sorts of traps there are occasionally some quite fascinating exceptions. One of them is Peter Turchin and the notion of Cliodynamics. Essentially Turchin is creating a framework for understanding periods of historical upheaval in what I like to read as economic cyclicalism. Instead of viewing history eschatologically or as utopian, Turchin's 50 year cycles of upheaval and violence provide a startlingly accurate framework for understanding humanity's frustrating repetitions of the same mistakes. Its a generational thing. Turchin came to prominence by correctly predicting a long stretch of elections. Of course he is not the first to do so. Markets have been correctly predicting elections and there margins with vast accuracy for some time - take a look at IEM and Intrade , for example (Remember that old HL

Sigh.

I'm an engineer. I am the first to admit that I don't 'get' art or creative people (things I do 'get' are: jobs, contracts and projects delivered on time). But this site is about computers and how we can use them to make things better and faster. I recently came across the work of one Meg Mitchell, Artist, who is using code in her installations. One example is a brief applet to arrange text input into an Archimedean spiral . She then designed her own font to imprint her own genome into metallic spirals. Neat.

Just a brief note, I have started to run a few very low circulation advertisements for the site on Google and Bing. Mostly this is an experiment to test whether having an active, but ultimately unpaid, marketing campaign improves search engine results. I don't expect any big changes to the site, and I am not selling advertisements. As always, any business practices will continue to match those outlined in the Commitment page .

Pidgin is a popular IM client. I've been using it for years, mostly because of its simplicity when used within alternate operating systems. I need a non-browser based IM client that I can use in Fedora and Windows with the ability to easily transfer log data between the two. My only complaint is that the log search function is not very great, and Pidgin does not provide you with the ability to locate or change the log file path within the application. For those of you who need to find Pidgin logs, here are the paths for both Linux and Windows. Installations include an actual  pidgeon. Rabies sold separately. Linux-based operating systems store log data within the root directory like so: ~/.purple/logs Windows XP stores your logs here:  C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\.purple\logs Windows Vista and Windows 7 store your logs here: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\.purple\logs When running Pidgin within Windows, Pidgin uses the PURPLEHOME en

Josh Wieder Checking SNMP Setting on 400 kW switch gear

Yeeesh posts have been MSSQL-heavy. I've just been working on this stuff for quite a bit lately - by no means is this my favorite database. Anyway, you're not here for that. You're here because you need to fix something that's broken and Google says I have it. Here you go: Find Database Table Size Your database is growing and you need to know why. First step would be to find out which table is responsible for the growth - but how? Right click the database in question and run one of the following queries: Displays the size of every table - exec sp_Msforeachtable 'exec sp_spaceused ''?''' Displays a specific table - exec sp_spaceused TableName Disable a Maintenance Plan Let's say you want to temporarily disable a maintenance plan. You are trying to troubleshoot it, but you don't want to delete the entire thing and re-create it. You may have noticed SQL Management Studio's GUI has not straight forward way of doing this. First,

The Problem The configuration of the system when this error was encountered is as follows: A. Windows Server 2008 R2 Redundant Domain Controllers - we will call these DC1.joshwieder.com and DC2.joshwieder.com B. Windows Server 2003 Web Server with Windows Remote Management enabled / part of the Active directory deployment - we will call this WEB.joshwieder.com C. For the sake of our example, let's say I have configured an OU named "Web Servers" on those domain controllers Whenever the Windows 2003 Web server reboots, or WinRM.exe service on the Windows 2003 Web server restarts, the following error was logged into the Event Viewer: Event ID: 10154 Source: Microsoft-Windows-WinRM Version: 6.1 Symbolic Name: LOG_WSMAN_SPN_CREATION Message: The WinRM service failed to create the following SPN: %1. Additional Data The error received was 8344: Insufficient access rights to perform the operation. User Action The SPN can be created by an administrator using sets

Classic ASP works a bit differently then the .NET framework. To many administrators (like me), the subtle differences can be a bit of a nuisance. Tasks that are performed daily with .NET are just different enough with Classic ASP to force an admin to consult the Google Brain. If that's why you're here - don't feel bad and don't worry. We have all been there, and we have a solution for you. This post will focus on error display using IIS7 and Classic ASP. In .NET, this is a simple matter of configuring the customErrors imperative in the web.config file. With Classic ASP, a bit of work needs fixin' within IIS Manager. Launch IIS Manager (Start --> Run --> inetmgr). Highlight your server name onthe left-hand menu. Then on the right side, you should be looking under the IIS heading. Select Debugging Properties and set the "Send Errors to Browser" setting to true. Back under the IIS heading, select Error Paged and then the 500 Error Page.Select Edit Fea