Thursday, September 14, 2006
A flying Me-262. I'd never thought that would happen but some crazy americans are actually building them again. Check out: Stormbirds
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Weber makes some very fine barbecues. Since my 33rd birthday a few weeks ago I'm the proud owner of a One-Touch Gold. Tried it out tonite and wow! That's grilling made very easy. My burgers tasted like ever before. The chimney starter makes it incredibly easy to get the thing started. 
Saturday, September 09, 2006
snapshot
My wife had bought herself a new cap (or perhaps a baret, I'm not sure). My son Bas also liked it a put it on. I was just in the garden to try and take a picture of a spider when I turned around and saw this. Had perhaps 2 seconds to take this shot so considering that it's not bad.
What I should have done is sit down, now his arm is cut of. Still, I'm pleased with this. Even the out of focus background turned out rather nice (bokeh?) and that with the humble 18-55 kit lens.
What I should have done is sit down, now his arm is cut of. Still, I'm pleased with this. Even the out of focus background turned out rather nice (bokeh?) and that with the humble 18-55 kit lens.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Moving day is tomorrow! Since we got the keys to our new house it's gone from "well, not much to do in the new place" to "and that needs painting, and that, and that...."
Most important bits are now wallpapered, painted or possibly both. Which is just in time because tomorrow I've rented a van, asked some friends to help out and we are going to move from this 2 bedroom appartment to a three bedroom house with a garden.
I'm curious to see if KPN will move my internet connection in time.
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Rhianne eating a muffin
is a pic I shot yesterday with my new D50. Since I got it I've been reading and posting in various photography forums. What amazes me is how easily amateur photographers discuss getting this 700eur or that 1100 euro lens.
OK, granted, there's some very nice optics on the market these days but why the **** does a hobby photographer need a 70-200/2.8 G AF-S VR IF ED (1800 euros) or a NIKON 17-55/2.8 G AF-S DX IF ED (1400 euros)???
OK, granted, perhaps I am a bit envious that I can't afford to spent that much money on my hobby. Since I can't I find that I'm more and more discovering and enjoying the challenge of doing nice work with inexpensive gear. Take this picture for example, it was shot with my current favourite, a 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6D which is a sub-100 euro lens.
I'm considering getting myself a 50mm 1.8 because of the 1.8 aperture. A 1,8 does allow for very extreme playing with out of focus areas.
Funny, 20 years ago you'd shoot with an f/8 or f/11 even and you'd be pleased to get your target properly focused. These days it's all about bokeh. Anyway, that 50mm is just sub-100 at 99 euros new. But perhaps the best thing to do is save my money untill I've had a few lessons of the photography course I signed up for. Then I may have a better idea of what lens would be the best investment.
OK, granted, there's some very nice optics on the market these days but why the **** does a hobby photographer need a 70-200/2.8 G AF-S VR IF ED (1800 euros) or a NIKON 17-55/2.8 G AF-S DX IF ED (1400 euros)???
OK, granted, perhaps I am a bit envious that I can't afford to spent that much money on my hobby. Since I can't I find that I'm more and more discovering and enjoying the challenge of doing nice work with inexpensive gear. Take this picture for example, it was shot with my current favourite, a 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6D which is a sub-100 euro lens.
I'm considering getting myself a 50mm 1.8 because of the 1.8 aperture. A 1,8 does allow for very extreme playing with out of focus areas.
Funny, 20 years ago you'd shoot with an f/8 or f/11 even and you'd be pleased to get your target properly focused. These days it's all about bokeh. Anyway, that 50mm is just sub-100 at 99 euros new. But perhaps the best thing to do is save my money untill I've had a few lessons of the photography course I signed up for. Then I may have a better idea of what lens would be the best investment.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Logparser comes in handy once again!
I got a call this morning to have a look at a client's application server that has been misbehaving for the last few days. A quick glance learned me that from saturday until tuesday morning the application had sent out way too many emails. For the 4 period I had 1.3gb of IIS smtp logs.
Curious how many mails had been sent out exactly I copied the logs to my workstation and started logparser.
logparser "SELECT c-ip, COUNT(c-ip) FROM *.log WHERE cs-username =
'OutboundConnectionCommand' GROUP BY c-ip" -i:iisw3c -o:csv
Gave me a result which I'm still doubting. According to the query the server had sent out 4.3 million emails. During this time the server's cpu never spiked higher than 40%.
The recieving party wasn't totally ignorant either and took their own precautions so I'm now getting NDRs in a rate of about 60000/hour. Since this tends to eat up diskspace rather quickly I scheduled a script that cleans out the badmail every 10 minutes.
I got a call this morning to have a look at a client's application server that has been misbehaving for the last few days. A quick glance learned me that from saturday until tuesday morning the application had sent out way too many emails. For the 4 period I had 1.3gb of IIS smtp logs.
Curious how many mails had been sent out exactly I copied the logs to my workstation and started logparser.
logparser "SELECT c-ip, COUNT(c-ip) FROM *.log WHERE cs-username =
'OutboundConnectionCommand' GROUP BY c-ip" -i:iisw3c -o:csv
Gave me a result which I'm still doubting. According to the query the server had sent out 4.3 million emails. During this time the server's cpu never spiked higher than 40%.
The recieving party wasn't totally ignorant either and took their own precautions so I'm now getting NDRs in a rate of about 60000/hour. Since this tends to eat up diskspace rather quickly I scheduled a script that cleans out the badmail every 10 minutes.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
70-294 passed!
Yep, this morning I sat and passed 70-294 with a very reasonable 795 points. Not bad, especially considering the fact that I spent most of saturday night at the office sorting out an exchange problem, had my birthday party on sunday and we were too shorthanded at the office on monday to let me take my customary afternoon off to prep for the exam.
Anyway, the exam itself. First of all the title, Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure, is somewhat misleading. A better title would have been "Group policies in Windows 2003 and some other Active Directory subjects". No questions were very difficult or ambiguous. Out of the 39 questions, 5 of those were simulations by the way, 25 were about group policies quite a few of those were drag & drop type questions. Up until a month or two ago a lot of people would tell you that the simulations didn't count. You'd only get two or three of them at an exam. The fact that I got 5 on a 39 question exam leads me to believe they definitely count towards your score.
A lot of the other questions were about structuring your AD in a way that it allows a specific delegation of control scenario. Only a few were about AD replication issues, troubleshooting (answers involving AD restore mode are usually right). I've also seen three questions on the "your company bought another company and you need to setup trusts between the forests to accomplish XYZ".
I prepared for the exam with the official microsoft self paced kit:
and a Transcender Cd. So, things to study
GPO concepts
Difference between computer and user policy
Software deployment with GPO
Troubleshooting GPOs
How to apply a GPO to a user or computer depending on OU, group membership or site.
How to delegate GPO administration
Everything else GPO related you can get your hands on
OU structures and delegation of control
Domain replication between site
Schema administration
Domain trusts (know what incomming and outgoing means, the term is used often on the exam and not much in the book)
AD disaster and fuck-up recovery.
That's pretty much it. Not one of the hardest exams. When you do them in sequence about 80% of what this exam covers should at the very least be vaguely familiar to you. If you want to setup a home lab for this you'd need at least two machines to experiment with GPOs. More if you want to try your hand at AD intersite operations.
That's it for this month, on the 23rd I'll finalize the purchase of my new house, the weeks after that will be full with moving and redecorating. My 70-297 exam is planned for the second of october. Until that time you can probably expect a lot of pics from my new Nikon D50.
Yep, this morning I sat and passed 70-294 with a very reasonable 795 points. Not bad, especially considering the fact that I spent most of saturday night at the office sorting out an exchange problem, had my birthday party on sunday and we were too shorthanded at the office on monday to let me take my customary afternoon off to prep for the exam.
Anyway, the exam itself. First of all the title, Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure, is somewhat misleading. A better title would have been "Group policies in Windows 2003 and some other Active Directory subjects". No questions were very difficult or ambiguous. Out of the 39 questions, 5 of those were simulations by the way, 25 were about group policies quite a few of those were drag & drop type questions. Up until a month or two ago a lot of people would tell you that the simulations didn't count. You'd only get two or three of them at an exam. The fact that I got 5 on a 39 question exam leads me to believe they definitely count towards your score.
A lot of the other questions were about structuring your AD in a way that it allows a specific delegation of control scenario. Only a few were about AD replication issues, troubleshooting (answers involving AD restore mode are usually right). I've also seen three questions on the "your company bought another company and you need to setup trusts between the forests to accomplish XYZ".
I prepared for the exam with the official microsoft self paced kit:
and a Transcender Cd. So, things to studyGPO concepts
Difference between computer and user policy
Software deployment with GPO
Troubleshooting GPOs
How to apply a GPO to a user or computer depending on OU, group membership or site.
How to delegate GPO administration
Everything else GPO related you can get your hands on
OU structures and delegation of control
Domain replication between site
Schema administration
Domain trusts (know what incomming and outgoing means, the term is used often on the exam and not much in the book)
AD disaster and fuck-up recovery.
That's pretty much it. Not one of the hardest exams. When you do them in sequence about 80% of what this exam covers should at the very least be vaguely familiar to you. If you want to setup a home lab for this you'd need at least two machines to experiment with GPOs. More if you want to try your hand at AD intersite operations.
That's it for this month, on the 23rd I'll finalize the purchase of my new house, the weeks after that will be full with moving and redecorating. My 70-297 exam is planned for the second of october. Until that time you can probably expect a lot of pics from my new Nikon D50.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Enumerate the list of installed Hotfixes using WMI
Shows a very simple way to display all hotfixes installed on a machine.
Just do a wmic qfe list full /format:htable>c:\somefile.htm and you'll end up with a nicely formatted list of hotfixes.
Shows a very simple way to display all hotfixes installed on a machine.
Just do a wmic qfe list full /format:htable>c:\somefile.htm and you'll end up with a nicely formatted list of hotfixes.
Friday, July 28, 2006
DSC_0443
Some sort of Butterfly sitting on an orchid. Taken at Blijdorp Zoo with an old 28-80 zoom. Not bad considering the lens I was using.
Here's how I did it:
Here's how I did it:
| Camera: | Nikon D50 |
| Exposure: | 0.003 sec (1/320) |
| Aperture: | f/5.6 |
| Focal Length: | 80 mm |
| Exposure Bias: | 0/6 EV |
| ISO Speed: | 800 |
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
I've taken a week vacation. The kids also don't have to go to school so we've got the time to do fun things with the kids. And I got time to try out my new D50!
I'm also skipping class this week so that means a lot of reading next week to catch up. I get the feeling 70-294 may me more difficult than it seems at first.
I'm also skipping class this week so that means a lot of reading next week to catch up. I get the feeling 70-294 may me more difficult than it seems at first.
Monday, July 24, 2006
DSC_0470
Renkoekoek aka RoadRunner in the Blijdorp zoo. Having a white mouse for it's afternoon tea.
Monday, July 17, 2006
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
70-293 passed!!
Yesterday morning I sat and passed the 70-293 exam. It was a tough one but I managed to score 844 points. As always I used the Microsoft Press book and a Transcender CD. This time I followed the advice of Transcender and downloaded the exam file from the website instead of using the file on the CDROM. The transcender questions were a lot more difficult than the real exam questions.
One thing that wasn't covered nearly enough in the book but which you should understand is certificate templates and the difference between version 1 and 2 templates.
A lot of the subjects should be familiar to you if you've passed 70-290 and 70-291. DNS and DHCP are repeated. This exam does pay more attention to WINS than the previous ones.
RRAS also comes back in this exam. Be sure you know exactly how it is decided wether or not a user has access at a specific time. Also study the various protocols and know which client supports what.
Clustering was also covered, study NLB and know the differences between unicast and multicast with one or two NICs and when you can expect NLB members to talk to eachother.
Have a look at real clustering and at least understand the various architectures and the way load balancing can be handled.
IPSEC, try it out, play with it, test it, get the hang of implementing it via policies.
Study everything you can find about certificates and their usage from mail signing to file encryption to smart cards. Know what rights are needed to perform admin tasks and know when you can and should use auto-enrolment and when you shouldn't.
The exam is hard but nowhere near impossible. From all the exams I've done so far this one and 70-284 I really do advise you to set up a lab and try a lot of things out!
Yesterday morning I sat and passed the 70-293 exam. It was a tough one but I managed to score 844 points. As always I used the Microsoft Press book and a Transcender CD. This time I followed the advice of Transcender and downloaded the exam file from the website instead of using the file on the CDROM. The transcender questions were a lot more difficult than the real exam questions.
One thing that wasn't covered nearly enough in the book but which you should understand is certificate templates and the difference between version 1 and 2 templates.
A lot of the subjects should be familiar to you if you've passed 70-290 and 70-291. DNS and DHCP are repeated. This exam does pay more attention to WINS than the previous ones.
RRAS also comes back in this exam. Be sure you know exactly how it is decided wether or not a user has access at a specific time. Also study the various protocols and know which client supports what.
Clustering was also covered, study NLB and know the differences between unicast and multicast with one or two NICs and when you can expect NLB members to talk to eachother.
Have a look at real clustering and at least understand the various architectures and the way load balancing can be handled.
IPSEC, try it out, play with it, test it, get the hang of implementing it via policies.
Study everything you can find about certificates and their usage from mail signing to file encryption to smart cards. Know what rights are needed to perform admin tasks and know when you can and should use auto-enrolment and when you shouldn't.
The exam is hard but nowhere near impossible. From all the exams I've done so far this one and 70-284 I really do advise you to set up a lab and try a lot of things out!
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Wired News: 'UFO Hacker' Tells What He Found Is it just me or does this read like a scene from the X-Files or the lone gunman?
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Wrote something yesterday about the new Clarkconnect box I installed. For some reason the people at Clarkconnect didn't find it necessary to include the gcc. I was about to install it by hand but then I remember that they have some apt packages for extra installation. So I opened a console, logged on as root and typed:
apt-get install cc-devel
Waited 5 minutes and voila, the gcc and a load of other stuff you need when installing software from source.
apt-get install cc-devel
Waited 5 minutes and voila, the gcc and a load of other stuff you need when installing software from source.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Last night I replaced my old home server with a new one. The old one, a P2-350 with 128mb ram was showing signs of age. Also the 13gb disk wasn't sufficient enough for my needs anymore. I installed the new one with the latest release of ClarkConnect.
For hardware I use old Compaq Deskpro small form factor workstations. They're very nice for this sort of thing since they're small, silent and don't use much electricity.
I got mine from the office where it had been sitting in a storeroom for some years. I had two old maxtor disks, a 40 and a 30gb and 384mb of pc133 ram. Fitting two disks into this tiny case seemed a challenge at first untill I decided I didn't need the floppy drive anyway.
During install the clarkconnect installer suggested combining the two disks in one file system so now I have 70gb of storage.
Mine didn't have a cdrom player which wasn't too much of a problem since I only need it during installation, just a matter of hooking up a normal cdrom player temporarily with the case open. I could have installed one of course but these machines take those slimline players and they're expensive and hard to find.
You can often find these machines or simular ones from Dell or HP in shops that sell batches of old company equipment, in this country a nice one will set you back about 70 euros. If you do shop around for a machine like this try to find one with a lot of memory. They often have only two SDRAM sockets. PC133 RAM is still around but new it's very expensive. On ebay you can expect to pay around 25 euro for 256mb and prices are going up. Clarkconnect will run on 128mb but runs a lot better on 256mb. With Ram it's just like money, it's difficult to have too much.
I realize that a 500mhz CPU and 384mb of memory doesn't sound like a lot in this age of multiple Ghz CPUs and multiple Gb memory but it's quite sufficient to run a fileserver, webserver and low volume mailserver. I'll post some load statistics later on.
If you are running a server don't forget to enable port forwarding on your ADSL modem (or whatever you use to connect). Here's a guide for the Alcatel Speedtouch modems that are extremly common in the Netherlands.
Clarkconnect is a nice Soho linux distribution. I had it installed in 45 minutes. Configuring it took me about an hour. There's still a lot of work to do however, I need to install a website on it, setup easy access to postfix monitoring and fine tune the spamfilters.
For hardware I use old Compaq Deskpro small form factor workstations. They're very nice for this sort of thing since they're small, silent and don't use much electricity.
I got mine from the office where it had been sitting in a storeroom for some years. I had two old maxtor disks, a 40 and a 30gb and 384mb of pc133 ram. Fitting two disks into this tiny case seemed a challenge at first untill I decided I didn't need the floppy drive anyway.
During install the clarkconnect installer suggested combining the two disks in one file system so now I have 70gb of storage.
Mine didn't have a cdrom player which wasn't too much of a problem since I only need it during installation, just a matter of hooking up a normal cdrom player temporarily with the case open. I could have installed one of course but these machines take those slimline players and they're expensive and hard to find.
You can often find these machines or simular ones from Dell or HP in shops that sell batches of old company equipment, in this country a nice one will set you back about 70 euros. If you do shop around for a machine like this try to find one with a lot of memory. They often have only two SDRAM sockets. PC133 RAM is still around but new it's very expensive. On ebay you can expect to pay around 25 euro for 256mb and prices are going up. Clarkconnect will run on 128mb but runs a lot better on 256mb. With Ram it's just like money, it's difficult to have too much.
I realize that a 500mhz CPU and 384mb of memory doesn't sound like a lot in this age of multiple Ghz CPUs and multiple Gb memory but it's quite sufficient to run a fileserver, webserver and low volume mailserver. I'll post some load statistics later on.
If you are running a server don't forget to enable port forwarding on your ADSL modem (or whatever you use to connect). Here's a guide for the Alcatel Speedtouch modems that are extremly common in the Netherlands.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Darik's Boot and Nuke is a very nice tool if you need to wipe your disks before selling them or otherwise disposing of them. Burn it to a disk, boot, fire and come back an hour or two later to a disk wiped to DoD standards.
Dutch Paedophiliacs start their own political party. Only in this country people actually think they can get away with it!!
Main points in their party program seem to be lowering the age to star in porn from 18 to 16 and allowing kids from age 12 and up to have voluntary sex. They also want an independent organisation to screen child pornography for unwilling actors.
Main points in their party program seem to be lowering the age to star in porn from 18 to 16 and allowing kids from age 12 and up to have voluntary sex. They also want an independent organisation to screen child pornography for unwilling actors.
I think whatever 2 consenting adults are up to is between them and I sincerely hope this party will get nowhere and be outlawed. Almost makes me ashamed to be living in the same country.
Just in case you're wondering, the wikipedia article on this distasteful practice can be found here.
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