Author: Bill

Set Up Ubuntu-Server 6.10 As A Firewall/Gateway For Your Small Business Environment

Set Up Ubuntu-Server 6.10 As A Firewall/Gateway For Your Small Business Environment

This tutorial shows how to set up a Ubuntu 6.10 server (“Edgy Eft”) as a firewall and gateway for small/medium networks. The article covers the installation/configuration of services such as Shorewall, NAT, caching nameserver, DHCP server, VPN server, Webmin, munin, Apache, Squirrelmail, Postfix, Courier IMAP and POP3, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.

Link to Set Up Ubuntu-Server 6.10 As A Firewall/Gateway For Your Small Business Environment

I am almost curious enough to try this. Throw in a little Samba and you have a pretty good SBS competitor although it might be a tossup to use an inexpensive NAS box for the file sharing instead. The turn-off was the 11 pages of cut-and-paste instructions. Of course, the entire installation is done via the geek’s old friend, the command line. I guess my age is showing. I am spoiled with the ease of using Wizards to install and maintain computer systems.

Security Settings tabs do not respond after installing CSM on Windows2003/SBS 2003 with SP1

Solution Details
The Security Settings tabs do not respond after installing CSM on Windows2003/SBS 2003 with SP1.

I finally found this article. I do not use TrendMicro’s Dashboard very often but it has been a problem for me. Sometimes it would work. Sometimes it would not work. I did not think I had done anything wrong but I was not sure. Since I push the lower limits of the hardware requirements on my server, I did not push the issue with TrendMicro. When I checked my “Web Sites” settings as indicated in this article, they were set to compress application files. So I unchecked the block and clicked OK. Now the Security Settings tab in Dashboard works consistently for me.

The SysInternals tools are now on microsoft.com

The SysInternals tools — including Process Explorer, Regmon, Filemon, and many more — are now available here on microsoft.com. A couple of major highlights include Process Monitor, a new tool that supersedes Regmon and Filemon, and the SysInternals Suite, which combines the whole set of SysInternals tools into a single download package.

In addition, check out Mark’s new TechNet blog, and the SysInternals blog.

URLs:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx
http://blogs.technet.com/MarkRussinovich/
http://blogs.technet.com/sysinternals/

Link to The SysInternals tools are now on microsoft.com

andy » ScreenGrab 0.8 (now with untested FF2)!

 

The FF2.0 compatible version of 0.8 is available

Source: andy » ScreenGrab 0.8 (now with untested FF2)!

This plugin does not install unless you modify the install.rdf file in the xpi archive. Here is how to modify the install.rdf file so that you can install ScreenGrab.

  1. I used 7-Zip to open the archive and edit the install.rdf file. You probably can do this with other zip-type programs.
  2. Near the bottom of the file you should find the field, “<em:maxVersion>1.6</em:maxVersion>”. Change the 1.6 to 2.0.
  3. Save the install.rdf file and close the archive. When it asks you if you want to update the archive, click on the Yes button. The modified xpi archive is ready to install.
  4. Open FireFox and then open the updated xpi archive via Ctrl+O or File-Open Archive. Follow the prompts to install the addon and restart FireFox.
  5. After FireFox restarts you should be ready to use it.

Free Download of Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007

Office Accounting 2007

Microsoft Introduces New Accounting Software and Services for Small and Home-Based Businesses

Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of Microsoft® Office Accounting Express 2007, financial management software designed for early startups and home-based businesses that currently use pen and calculator or spreadsheets to run their operations. Office Accounting Express 2007 consists of desktop software available as a free download and seven integrated online services.

Thank you and have a wonderful day,

Eric Ligman

Microsoft Senior Manager

Small Business Community Engagement

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights

Link to Free Download of Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007

I downloaded this program and installed it on my Vista RC1 virtual machine. RC1 is my beta box. This program is a QuickBooks alternative so I should check it out. The installation program complained and said I needed to install SQL 20005 SP2 to avoid problems. They talk about SP2 but it is not available. Tomorrow I will import a simple QuickBooks company file and see what gets screwed up. Imports are typically pretty ugly. I thought I saw someplace a better time billing feature using the Outlook calendar.

Comment on Office Live Collaboration Site

I am not sure it has much value for SBS customers. I setup a collaboration site and tried to envision our Habitat for Humanity affiliate using it. Although Office Live Collaboration looks like it has the potential to do the job, it would require a lot of customization to get board members to look at it on a regular basis. My first guess is that it would require too much customization work for the perceived benefit. I expected a bit more CRM, project tracking, and accounting features. I guess I was expecting something that looked like an integrated Salesforce.com and QuickBook Online application. Right now it looks too much like a standard Sharepoint site.

As the Treasurer for the last couple of years I have been keenly interested in making our affiliate make better operational and strategic decisions. Charities are competing for the same funds and volunteers. Donors and volunteers are expecting a better experience for their time and money. They can make a different choice. I do not think I am stretching things too much when I compare a charity’s donors and volunteers to a small business’s customers. A charity has key performance indicators and line of business(LOB) activities that are very much like a small business. Making timely operational and strategic decisions is key to survival. With a geographically dispersed workforce this decision making process becomes more difficult. The areas of improvement I feel there is the most potential for are:

  • Improve collaboration amongst the board of directors members.
    1. Collect committee reports in one location.
    2. Access a common schedule for meetings and other key events.
    3. Keep track of committee’s monthly objectives.
  • Identify and report on key indicators.
    1. Construction status by house/project
    2. Donation status by house/campaign
    3. Mortgage/Delinquency status
    4. Partner family application status
  • Improve operation
    1. Track employee hours.
    2. Track expense account forms.
    3. LOB activities reporting and approvals.

Getting QuickBooks to run as non admin on a stand alone workstation setup

With a shout out to Mike in the blog comments… he said “I was troubleshooting an installation of QB07 on a 2003 Terminal Server. I had all the security modifications that I have used for the previous versions and it still wouldn’t work. What I discovered is that normal users don’t have but need rights to: Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Common Files\Intuit\QuickBooks\qbregistration.dat I added rights to that file and the program ran properly. Bad news about having to be logged in at the server for the Database Manager. When I called support before installing on our server they never mentioned that to me. I was initially happy they had come up with a solution that didn’t require running full QuickBooks on my server. For the 2006 version I had installed QB running the Database piece on a different computer with a drive mapped to the server and it work fine for us. I may have to uninstall the 07 version and try that trick again.”

I originally could not get QuickBooks 2007 to run without admin rights on a stand alone machine… one I gave “Users” Full control to Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Common Files\Intuit\QuickBooks\qbregistration.dat just like Mike said… it worked like a champ.

The official way to do it from the Intuit folks is to flip it so that the QB runs as a “service”

http://www.threatcode.com/quickbooks_2007.htm

Look at the screen shots here and do that extra step of changing the permissions of the “dat” file.

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Link to Getting Quickbooks to run as non admin on a stand alone workstation setup

–> I blogged this to keep track of the best way to install QB07 and run it as a normal user until Intuit updates their documentation.

Mozilla – Home of the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client

Mozilla – Home of the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client

The number one reason for me to update to version 2 of Firefox is spell check. This should improve my blog writing throughout the internet. It will probably be some time for me before I update IE6  to IE7. I am still using QuickBooks 2004 in several places and it requests that for a continued happy experience with QuickBooks I should not upgrade to IE7 until I upgrade to QuickBooks 2007.

WP installation keeps reverting to default theme « WordPress Support

WP installation keeps reverting to default theme « WordPress Support

For the last couple of days I have been struggling with a sneaky “bug” with  WordPress. I had changed over to a new theme but it would revert back to the default theme at irregular intervals. The problem I eventually found was related to the fact that internet bots were still accessing my old website directory. Every time they accessed the “old” code it would reset the theme to the default because WordPress could not find the new theme in its “old” directory structure. The only solace was knowing that other people were having the same problem.

MistyLook Theme for a Charity blog

I got distracted again! The Development Dirctor for our Habitat affiliate was complaining about the stale content on the affiliate’s website. For some time I have been thinking about the appropriate format for a charity website. I have begun to believe that a blog style website is a natural fit for charity websites. The social networking advantage of blogs(e.g. comments, rss feeds) is probably a good tool at communicating with a diverse group of volunteers. Working off of this sketchy premise, I created a blog that I intend to offer to our affiliate.

Design Decisions

  1. My favorite blog software is WordPress.
  2. WordPress is generally available at most host providers and has lots of free themes to choose from.
  3. WordPress does not have licensing issues.
  4. I envision that most of the updates will be via posts. We need an easy method of posting with photos by non-Geeks. The ability to use multiple authors is a plus.
  5. We will need about six static pages(e.g. Volunteer, Donation, Family Selection, etc.). These will be updated quarterly to annually.

Implementation Decisions

The key for me was seeing the themes available at themes.wordpress.net. After browsing through a part of this immense collection I settled on MistyLook from the creators of WordPress Garden. It has a nice, clean, widget friendly, two column design with tabs across the top of the page for the static pages. Only the key pages are shown across the top. All of the static pages appear in the sidebar, too. I already have a widget template for Paypal donations. I don’t expect many PayPal donations but it will be easier and it requires almost no effort on our part to collect the money. The only drawback to the theme was that I had to tweak it a little to get it to work.
I added three WordPress plugins:

  1. Imagemanager to handle the photos. WordPress’s default features are pretty good but Imagemanager adds resizing and default sizes for thumbnails.
  2. Widgets plugin.
  3. FeedBurner plugin. RSS feeds are typically associated with a younger crowd. Since we have quite a few older volunteers who have just recently gotten comfortable with email, FeedBurner Email looks like a potential winner for us. Volunteers can get website updates via RSS feeds or Email.

So here is the fruits of my labor.

Server Guide part 2: Affordable and Manageable Storage

Our server guides’ goal is to give a you a comprehensive overview of server technology. In this second part we introduce you to server storage technology and what you must consider to find decently priced, high performance, and manageable server technology.

Link to Server Guide part 2: Affordable and Manageable Storage

This is a really nicely written article explaining some of the technical differences between regular IDE drives(PATA), SCSI, SATA and SAS drives. For performance and reliability reasons SCSI drives have been the preferred drive type for servers in the past. Recently I have seen where server manufacturers have been encouraging the use of SAS drives. SAS and “enterprise” SATA drives are gradually replacing SCSI drives in many areas. They have achieved the performance and reliability of the SCSI drives at a lower cost.

Solutions from PC Magazine: Left- and Right-Align on One Line

 

I use Microsoft Word from Office XP. I would like to know how I can left-align and right-align separate pieces of text in the same sentence; for instance, in a resume. I would like to apply this formatting to existing documents as well.

Jason Dubz

That’s easily done. Select Tabs from the Format menu and click the Clear All button. In the Tab stop position box at top, enter the width (in inches) of the editable area of your document. You can get that value by looking at the right-hand end of the ruler above the document. Check the Right option and click OK. Now type some text, press the Tab key, and type some more text. The text before the tab is left-aligned; the text after the tab is right-aligned. Easy! If you want to end the right/left alignment after you’ve typed some lines, open the Tabs dialog again and click Clear All.

The drill is almost the same when you apply this effect to existing text. First, highlight the lines you’re going to change. Use Find/Replace to replace any tabs (represented by ^t) with spaces. Then proceed to set the right-side tab as above. Finally, insert a tab character at the desired location in each line.

Source: Solutions from PC Magazine: Left- and Right-Align on One Line

Autodiscover RSS Feeds with IE7

I had a feed that was specified as a RDF+XML feed. Firefox’s autodiscover would find the RSS feed and put a little orange chicklet in the address bar. IE7 was not changing the color of its RSS chicklet when I visited the site so I surmised that it was not finding the feed. In conjunction with switching the feed over to FeedBurner,  I changed my <link rel=alternate> statement from type=rdf+xml to rss+xml. Now IE7 correctly finds the feed.

Torpark as a network diagnostic tool

Yesterday I had just finished creating an add-on domain for one of my web sites when the site went down. I waited a little while but it did not come back up. I could not even ping the server. I was pretty sure it was an internal problem that they would resolve pretty quickly so I filed a trouble ticket and went back to work on other stuff. A little while later I cranked up Torpark and tried to reach my web site. Surprise, surprise, Torpark could reach my web site. My web site was really up! That was good news. Since the primary feature of Torpark is its ability to allow you to surf the internet anonymously, I knew that the problem was with my route to my web site. I have a another website with the same provider and I could get to that website so this was quickly becoming a fascinating problem.

I remembered that I had seen a really nice visual trace route program in the past but I couldn’t remember its name. So I googled for visual trace route and found it, VisualRoute. At their website I ran their online version and confirmed that they could get to my website. To confirm that my problem had to do with my IP address, I downloaded VisualRoute. Visualware offers a 15 day trial. The downloaded version told me the last IP address it got to on the route. I checked my other website and it flew right through this router. Hmm..its been a long time so I think I better call them on the phone and see what’s going on.

Just got off the phone. They had banned my IP because I had too many failed password attempts. In a way I am glad they ban IP addresses if they have failed password attempts. However, as a long time system administrator I would like to know when someone is trying to break in so I was puzzled why I was not notified. They said they did not provide that functionality at this time but they would pass the request on.

I guess what I learned from this episode is that Torpark is a quick way to see if your IP address is banned. It is not a tool I plan to use everyday but it is nice to tool to use to get around IP blockades.

Not all backups are created equal

A few months ago I got an external USB drive. My plan was to use it to backup my laptop. It came with some software that came with it called Bounceback Express. The software was easy to use and it looked like it would do the job. Bounceback is not complicated. It mirrors my drive. At least I thought the process was simple.

The problem occurred when I needed to free up a lot of disk space on my laptop drive for a long video. My desktop is ancient and underpowered so the dual processor laptop is the best choice. I decided that I could delete the virtual machines I had been working on in VMware Server since I could restore them later using BounceBack. The Vista virtual machine was a real disk hog. I completed the video yesterday so today I decided to restore the virtual machines in between other tasks. Guess what? Neither machine will boot! Both the Vista and Suse 10.1 virtual machines complain that the virtual disk is not a virtual disk. They were when I shut them down so I can only think the backup did not work right. I tried a couple things but to no avail. Smaller virtual machines do not seem to have the problem. My work with Vista and Suse is toast! It is not a big loss since this work is experimental. So I re-installed Vista. I tried compressing the folder containing the Vista virtual machine but that took a real long time! I was curious whether the dual processor would help much. Obviously the dual processor did not help enough. So I tried my favorite free Microsoft utility, Synctoy. Synctoy took less time to copy the directory than the compress but I was more confident that the compress would work. I knew compression worked from all of the VMTN machines I have worked with in the past but I wasn’t sure about a plain Jane copy that Synctoy uses. It should have the same result as BounceBack Express. When I opened the virtual machine from the copied directory, it worked.  I am curious what went wrong with Bounceback but I am already at my curiousity limit. I can realistically expect that I can copy the virtual machine folder back to the laptop drive and it will work. Boy, I sure did not expect to get shot in the foot with a backup program!

Update to Excel Macro to import IIF transactions

 

A while back I wrote a new macro to import IIF transactions, New Excel Macro to import IIF transactions. Last week I put it to the test and found several bugs. All of the bugs were minor but annoying. They created a lot more work for me but I am hopeful the next time I test this macro, it will save me time. Most of my bugs were spelling issues. I used different spellings on one customer and I forgot to include the group item. Naturally the spellings are very important if you want the invoices to end up with the right customer and account. The sneakiest bug was the one I got when I started a row with TRN rather than TRNS. QuickBooks complained about an out of place SPL row rather than pointing out my transaction should have started with TRNS rather than TRN.

Checking out Windows Vista RC1

I finally decided to give Vista a whirl. I was not terribly interested in being a beta tester. RC1 sounded a little more up my alley. Recently Microsoft had made it even easier to try out Vista so I downloaded the iso. Despite using their downloader I had to restart the download several times. I guess it would be too much to ask that Microsoft offer the download via bitTorrent.

For my test case I installed Vista as a virtual machine under VMware Server. My laptop has a dual core processor, 80 GB disk drive, and 1 GB of RAM. The virtual machine requirements are pretty hefty, 512 MB RAM and a 16 GB disk drive. I followed the instructions VMware provides for guest operating systems. The special instructions that Vista requries with unpartitioned disk space was amusing. I did not time the installation but Vista appeared to install slightly faster than XP. I did go back and install a sound card to the Vista virtual machine since the Vista virtual machine template did not include one.

I did not really have a formal plan for testing Vista so I decided to try a little web surfing. The first thing I noticed was that I needed to install Flash. It installed without a problem. That got me to thinking. Who am I? After a little searching I found out that I was the “Administrator” but with my own login name. So I created a standard user since I think that is an important Vista feature. Now when I tried to install Trend Micro’s PC-cillian for Vista Beta using my standard user id, it wanted me to enter the Administrator’s password. The is just like the way Linux handles system changes.

For my next trick I decided to add the Vista system to my SBS network. This was a little more complicated since I needed to swap some cables around. My laptop normally connects to the network via its wireless connection which is not part of the SBS network. Sean Daniel provides some very nice instructions on his website on how to join Vista to a SBS network.

The “old” Firewall client installs but the client will generate an occasional application not compatible message. The “new” Firewall client does not install. The SBS Diva provides instructions on getting the “old” Firewall client to work without generating those annoying application is not compatible messages.

So far I have not noticed a performance issue with running Vista as a virtual machine. I did not expect to find a performance issue since it is relatively new laptop. The internal video card does not support the graphics intensive Aero interface but appears to be plenty adequate for everything else. Excluding the graphics index my Vista machine reports a “Windows Experience Index” between 2.9 and 4.1.

Over the next couple of weeks I will start loading on some of my favorite apps to see which ones install and which ones do not. I think installation issues will be the biggest problem I face. I already found out that PDFCreator does not install.

I did read an article on the internet by James Goskin in which the author claims that upgrading to Vista will cost corporations between $3,250 and $5,000 per user. His premise is that the “Aero” interface is the “primary upgrade inducement”. I would think businesses would be far more interested in the security enhancements provided by Vista. For those businesses who use Volume licensing and Software Assurance from Microsoft, the cost issues are considerably less expensive. Like previous operating system upgrades, computers manufactured in the last two years will probably match the hardware requirements just fine for business use.

Microsoft addresses NAT conflict introduced by SP2 | Tech News on ZDNet

Microsoft addresses NAT conflict introduced by SP2 | Tech News on ZDNet

Recently I decided to buy a copy of Tom Shindler’s Configuring ISA Server 2004. As I was glancing through it I remembered that I was still running PPTP on my VPN connection. So I decided to give L2TP another try. L2TP is generally regarded as a more secure method of using a VPN connection than PPTP. I followed Tom’s instructions and I got the same certificate error, 80090016, again. This time I decided to keep going with the procedur and found that the certficate really did get in. So I completed his procedure and tried to make the VPN connection using L2TP.  It timed out. Then I tried something different. I made a copy of the connection and changed the host name from the public name to the local IP address. It worked! After a little research I found this article. It may explan why it does not work locally for me. My server is NAT’d and Windows XP with SP2 has NAT problems with L2TP but not with PPTP. That would explain why one works locally while the other does not. This would mean that the L2TP should work for me at a remote site using the public name.