DevOps, automation, how-tos and more since 2008
A very quick blog post today, seeing as though I have run this command on about 4 or 5 new servers I have deployed today. To allow a server to respond to incoming ICMP traffic (ping) you can issue the following command in the command prompt. Do this as an administrator of course!
netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8
Your machine should now respond to pings. You can also do this via the Windows firewall GUI but I find the command to be the quickest and easiest way of achieving this.
I know this is old now, but a while back I came across this blog post by the company Backblaze. They detail how they build these custom “storage pods” that get rack mounted in their datacenter for online storage. In their post, they show how using this method they manage to save tons of money that would have been otherwise spent on Amazon S3 storage, EMC / Dell or Sun solutions. Each storage pod can be looked at as one building block of a much larger storage solution.
I think this design is great and if I had the space / resources I would defintely attempt one of these as a project for myself. To quote their site, the storage pods contain the following hardware:
“one pod contains one Intel Motherboard with four SATA cards plugged into it. The nine SATA cables run from the cards to nine port multiplier backplanes that each have five hard drives plugged directly into them (45 hard drives in total).”
Here is a youtube video showing the design of one storage pod.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm7Rp5u8Q1g&feature=player_embedded
Read up more at Backblaze blog
Everyone has their own relax or zen area where they like to spend time getting away from reality and de-stressing. One of mine just happens to be the same place where I get a lot of work done – my main gaming platform and home office area! Since we moved into our new flat, I found that there wasn’t much space to set up my PC. Last weekend I whipped out the old jigsaw and sliced a couple of inches off the side of my PC desk in order to get it to fit into this corner.
I then decided to neaten up and organise everything a bit to enhance my working conditions when I do work from home. I made a “ghetto” iPhone dock out of the packaging the phone came in, using the plastic dish the phone is cradled in. I cut out a small area at the bottom for the iPhone connector to fit in, then routed the cabling into the box itself, which sits diagonally in the lid of the box, flipped upside down. The cable then comes out the back and plugs in to the power socket behind my desk. This keeps the cabling nice and neat and I just plonk the phone down into the dock when I get home for a charge. I don’t need a USB connection to the PC as I have SSH enabled via a jailbreak – I therefore use Wifi access and WinSCP or SCP from Putty to transfer files between PC and phone.
Behind this is my touch sensitive desk lamp, in front of the dock is my work IP phone which connects up to our VOIP server. Then we have my main PC which consists of the following: Asus P45 P5Q motherboard, E8400 3.0GHz Core2Duo CPU overclocked to 3.6GHz in Summer and 4.0GHz in Winter. 4GB OCZ DDR800 RAM running at DDR1000 speeds and an ATI HD 4870 graphics card which has a custom flashed bios which overvolts the GPU and applies a generous overclock. I used to have a nice quiet watercooling loop in the PC, but sold it recently and went back to air cooling. I plan on doing another Watercooling build soon and will hopefully post the process and worklog here when I do. The other peripherals consist of a Dell 24″ LCD (1920×1200), G15 Keyboard and Logitech MX518 mouse.
I use this PC for just about everything – all my PC gaming, Web browsing, a little bit of programming and Virtualisation (On top of Windows 7 Professional it is running VMWare Server 2.0) with a variety of guest VMs that I use for testing and practising various Windows and Linux server technologies.
Other hardware I have lying around is an old Dell Poweredge 2U server which I run VMWare ESX 3.5 and a Dell Optiplex machine running uBuntu 8.04, with VMWare Server 2.0 for linux and a guest VM operating system running on top of that which runs uBuntu Server 9.04 and this very website.
Anyway here are a few photos of my nice clean new workspace.
The computer management console for Server 2008 has changed slightly between now and Windows Server 2003. I was trying to ensure a particular user was setup as a local administrator on a Windows 2008 Small Business Server today, and couldn’t find the option to do this via the GUI. Anyway, for those wondering how this is done using the command prompt, here is the solution.
First you need to run command prompt as an Administrator. Open Computer, go to your C: drive, and navigate to your Windows\System32 directory. Find “cmd.exe” right click on it, and select the run as Administrator option. Once at the command prompt, type the following :
net localgroup Administrators /add (domain)\(username)
(Obviously replace (domain)\(username) with your domainname\username that you want to be the local admin) – That is without the brackets.
You should get a message saying the command completed successfully. If you get an access denied error, you more than likely have not run cmd.exe as an administrator.
I have been using Windows 2008 Server Standard as my operating system of choice at home for quite a few months now, and twice I have had to change my password due to the security policy in place by default. This setting forces you to change your password every 42 days. Anyway, up until now I had been too lazy to disable the policy. So for those of you who don’t know where to do this, here is how.
Go to Start – Run, and type in gpedit.msc
Click OK.
Expand the following branches by clicking the little arrow signs next to each one :
Computer Configuration – Windows Settings – Security Settings – Account Policies – and then finally, Password Policy
Select Password policy, and on the right hand side list double click (or right click – properties) on “Maximum Password Age”
Change this to setting to 0, and then click OK.
Close the Group Policy editor, and from now on you won’t have that annoying mandatory password change every month or so.
