The Windows DNS system is central to ActiveDirectory so you can’t exactly get rid of it.  Unfortunately, it suffers from performance issues, especially when its coupled together with your primary domain controllers.

I’ve experienced these issues on iSCSI storage, Fiber channel, and high speed 15k RPM SAS drives (albeit I haven’t tried solid state).  The remedy I’ve found (and it rather cheap), is to using a caching DNS relay.

My particular setup uses CentOS and Unbound.  It also uses paravirtualization mode and vmxnet3 adapters on a VMware ESX cluster for enhanced performance.  If you read further into the Unbound Optimization Documentation, you’ll get some really good tips on how to optimize the setup for your particular environment.

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I seem to deal with the most obscure scenarios known to computing, and here’s another one.

So you’ve installed Ubuntu on your Mac running a dual boot with OSX, but you messed up and accidentally installed the bootloader to the MBR.  Well this will render your system useless as Mac’s use EFI and GPTs, rendering MBRs rather useless, outside of its MBR emulation mode that is.  However in order for it to function properly, it needs to be on your first Ubuntu partition, not in the whole disk’s MBR segment.

You could just reinstall, but that’ll will leave another icon of Tux just sitting there in your rEFIt menu.  Its a little annoying in my opinion so lets get rid of it.

Within OSX, pop open your Terminal (yeah, that thing that none of you Mac-heads ever use but us UNIX guys can’t live without).  If you’re running a Mac with only 1 hard drive then its pretty simple.  Just type in sudo fdisk -u /dev/disk0^{See note} and just type in your password and go.  This will write a new MBR to the proper segment and remove the extra logo from rEFIt.

If you’re running multiple hard drives with ZFS concatenation, or RAID, or whatever the heck you may be doing, you’re on your own, sorry

Note: Be careful in performing this action, because it does mess with your MBR. I don’t think your Mac is going to be that picky with the MBR since it uses a GPT by default but it still could render your system unbootable. As such I obviously take no responsibility for your actions. You break it, its your fault, not mine.

The Alfa AWUS036H, based on the Realtek 8187 chipset, is a really nice unit, but it tends to have a few quirks on Ubuntu. Here’s how I got mine working.

First make sure that you have the rtl8187 driver installed and loaded by running (do NOT plug your Alfa in yet, if you already have it plugged in, unplug it, disable any existing networking equipment, restart the wireless by right clicking on the network manager and unchecking “Wireless”, then recheck it)
Code:

sudo modprobe rtl8187

Now plug your Alfa in. You should see that the Network Manager identifies the dongle as a “Realtek RTL8187″. Go ahead and associate with a network if you can.

Now I was using the Alfa with an 8dBi antenna. You do the math to realize how much power that is, and you’re probably getting a bunch of reflections and echos. We need to turn the power down.

Code:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 txpower 50mW

Where wlan0 is the name of your dongle.

I also had an issue where the dongle was identifying the signal strength as much lower than it actually was, so it set my bit rate really low (like 1Mb/s)

To fix this, run
Code:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate auto

And it should read 54 Mb/s when you do another iwconfig

Now you need to reassociate to the network. You do this by going to your network manager and right clicking on the network you’ve already associated to.

After doing this my networking was screaming fast. Also continued to work after reboot, but the power went back up. I left it alone and things seemed stable. Held a stable ping over 2000 sequences with around 1% packet loss.

Hope this helps.

This is an article in two parts, the first explains search engines and searching, while the second explains actual tips about searching, skip to the second part if you don’t want to read about search engines and searching.

Part 1: Understanding the Google Algorithm and computer searching

The internet is a big place.  What amasses in the petabytes (1 petabyte = 1,048,576 Gigabytes; possibly even larger) of information, culminates one of the largest data archives in the known universe, and best yet, it’s actively archived by search engines such as Google, Microsoft Live, and Yahoo.  However, in it’s initial days, search engines were loaded down with poor information and bad sorting algorithms.  Fortunately, this is no longer the case.  Ever since Google came into being, the original revolutionary search engine sorting algorithm, pretty much everyone has updated their algorithms to be more efficient, and thus more useful.

However, despite this, the ever growing Google index can be difficult to navigate and find useful information.  With literally trillions of entries (link) in the index, searching through it to find anything from a niche topic to the latest big news article can be an absolute nightmare (and just imagine what it’s like to INDEX all of this).

First however, you need to understand a little about searching.

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Been a while since I last posted but I think I have the problem with Pidgin crashing every so often in Vista 64-bit figured out.  My guess is that it has to do with UAC (User Account Control).  Disable this and it seems like it’s a lot more stable.  I haven’t totally tested this theory yet but I’m going to do some more research on it and see if I can isolate it.  And no, silent mode of UAC doesn’t help matters either.

Little known secret about Pidgin that I can’t seem to find anywhere but that I somehow figured out.

Obviously it uses GTK for it’s window engine.  Logic tells us that it would use GTK themes in the same way.  This is correct.

You can grab your themes from Gnome-Look (only from the GTK 2.x category) and then extract them.

One you have your files, grab the folder that contains a folder with the name “gtk-2.0″ (id est, you would find the “gtk-2.0″ folder then hit “go up one level” one time, and then take that folder) and put it under C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\share\themes or C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\GTK\2.0\share\themes if you’re on 64-bit Windows.

This is the default location of GTK, if you installed it to a different you’ll need to go under /Share/themes from the root GTK install directory.

Then go to your start menu, find the GTK+ folder and launch “Theme Selector”, select the theme you chose from the “Global” list, hit ok, and now restart any GTK applications (like Pidgin).  You should have your new theme.

A note for those of you who followed these instructions on getting JSP to run transparently on IIS 6.

This method, in my experience, would only function if IIS5 Isolation Mode was enabled.

I’m not sure why but the ISAPI plugin started up just fine after enabling IIS5 isolation mode.

Check this thread out.

Microsoft has this to say about the modes of operation.

Here’s how to enable IIS 5.0 Isolation mode.

If you’re not into running Isolation mode (I wasn’t) I setup Apache 2.2 on a different port specifically to run JSP apps.  Instructions after the break…

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I create a video for TiltMobility.com that explains and shows how to flash a ROM to your AT&T Tilt, check it out.

IMPORTANT! Flashing your ROM is a potentially dangerous activity and I take NO responsibility for you messing up your device or anything else.

Please read this post on TiltMobility for important information about the video prior to flashing your ROM.

Some of you probably read about the vulnerability in Vista that doesn’t just take advantage of any new exploit but rather Vista’s fundamental architecture all together.

Well the way this systematic attack is approached is via an arbitrary browser exploit.  But what if browser exploits were cut off from the main machine?

Meet ZoneAlarm’s new security tool that’s been a bit long in coming in my opinion.  It’s called ForceField (and with good reason).

What the product does is put your browser inside of a virtual environment that’s totally cut off from the underlying OS.  It also cuts off the OS from the browser (helping negate the effects of keystroke loggers and such).

Now earlier they were giving away free CD keys for ForceField and I registered for a copy (1 year subscription).  It doesn’t have Vista 64-bit support unfortunately but it is on my laptop (32-bit Windows XP) and I’d say that it runs rather well.  My laptop is a machine that’s gaining a little age (although it’s far from old) and typically has some trouble running Firefox 3.0 with all my normal extensions.  However even running virtually, it still runs rather fast (negligible performance decreases).

So aside from negating this proposed attack, it can also protect against a wide variety of other problems, and it’s existence (albeit probably inevitable) is certainly welcome.  It will certainly be nice to be even less concerned about visited websites leaving cookies, ads containing exploits, and the like.

Hey everyone, check out tiltsite.com, I’m a writer here now and you may see a couple of my posts.  I’m working on the first article right now in fact.

By the way, Microsoft Live Writer(and a lot of the Live suite of software) is very cool(using it right now for this article)

Also….I’m on the President’s Honor Roll for last semester, WOOHOO!