Currently messing about with Clonezilla and DRBL server to make a nice cloning system for our network that will work with all computers, Mac and Windows based! Will post my findings once I have had a chance to test it!

It is recommended that all users upgrade as soon as possible.
This is a security release, which hardens some areas of the code, specifically a fairly large fix to prevent a traceback file DOS attack.
Update can be applied from your dashboard as usual. Another interesting link they put on the upgrade post is that there is a useful plugin that allows you to scan your WP Blog for some current known exploits. The plugin is Wordpress Exploit Scanner

Happy upgrading

Tried the auto upgrade feature and it wouldn’t work at first, just kept getting stuck at the “Unpacking core files” bit. After a little bit of digging, I then deactivated ALL plugins and retried. Worked perfectly at that point. Then just a quick reactivation of plugins and Bob is your mothers brother!!

First impressions are that it is noticeable faster in all areas, a welcome improvement. And I would therefore assume that it will put less of a load on the web server as a result.

It can be downloaded from wordpress.org or upgrade automatically from your admin panel!

I reinstall Windows quite regularly as part of my job, so anything that will make this process less painful is welcome. I have created a Windows CD that answers all the setup questions for me, and has all the latest Windows updates pre installed, which makes installing Windows an almost completely unattended process. This allows me to turn machines around and get them back out to the classrooms much faster than doing it the normal way.

So I decided to throw together a little guide on how to make one of these CDs. You can use this guide as a basis and change bits and piece to suit your own needs. For instance if you are only making the disc for one PC, you can slipstream in all the drivers for your computer, saving having to look for them after a reinstall. I prefer to leave drivers out as they are updated quite regularly and I like to run the latest versions (with the exception of LAN or network card drivers, as having these in the CD means you can get online instantly after install to download the rest of your drivers).

This tutorial must be carried out on a Windows PC, as the tools needed are all Windows only.

Things you will need:

• A Windows XP Home or Pro CD (legal of course)
• nLite
• XP Service Pack 3 (only if your CD is older than SP3)
  
• Xable Updates Pack
• Windows Media Player Slipstreamer (optional)
• Windows Media Player Installer (optional)
  
• DriverPack LAN Pack (optional)
• 7zip (optional for unzipping the driver pack)

Once you have all these items, start by installing nLite. I won’t patronise you by talking you through a program installation. After this you can optionally install the Windows Media Player slipstreamer if you wish to have WMP11 as part of your CD.

Using 7zip or your other 7z compatible unzipper, unzip the DriverPacks LAN pack to your hard drive. Anywhere will do, just make sure you remember where as you will need this folder later in the guide.

Now fire up nLite. Select your language and then point it towards the location of your XP CD. It will ask you to provide a location to save the XP CD files to. I recommend making a new folder in C: called nlitexp. You can place these files anywhere you like, just for the rest of the guide substitute c:\nlitexp for your path if you do. This step will take maybe 10 minutes or so depending on the speed of your CD drive and PC.

Select XP CD source

The next screen will ask if you wish to load a previous session. As you do not have any previous ones, just click next.

Now you will be given options as to what you would like to customise. I recommend you make the selections as in the image below. Service pack, Hotfixes, Drivers, Unattended, and Bootable ISO. Then click next.

Select custom options

Now you will be asked to provide the location of the downloaded service pack. Simply browse to wherever you downloaded the Microsoft Service Pack 3 Network Installer to and select it.

Next you will be asked for any updates or hotfixes. Click insert and choose the Xable SP3 update pack you downloaded earlier. This will now appear in the list as shown below. Click next.

Xable Updates Pack

Driver adding time. Select Insert and choose “multiple driver folder”. Now browse to where you extract the DriverPack LAN pack earlier. There will be a folder called “D”. Choose this and hit OK. On the window that appears you will see a list of all the drivers contained in that folder. Just click the All button and hit OK. You drivers list should now be populated with all the drivers and you can proceed to the next step.

Drivers added

This is the unattended step. This is the interesting part. Just go through all the menus and tabs, and fill in as much or as little as you want. The more you fill in the more unattended the install will be. No more having to sit around waiting to tell the Windows installer what timezone you are in every single time!!

Unattended section

After clicking next, nLite will start the slipstreaming process. Go make some tea, this can take some time depending on the options selected and the speed of your PC.

On completion you should be at the ISO/burn screen. I always make an ISO as opposed to burning the CD. This allows me to boot the ISO in a virtual machine to test it first before burning it. And it allows you to keep an image of the CD so you can burn more copies in the future.

Once the ISO creation is complete you can burn it using your favourite burning app (mine is currently the excellent free ImgBurn).

Now just pop it into your machine you wish to wipe and reinstall Windows on, answer the first few questions about partitions to install on and then go do something nice while Windows installs unattended!! Then when you get back smile at how you don’t have to install a million updates and restart 40 times!

Have fun!

Then I tried using the Apple Remote app, for controlling iTunes. Again nothing.

Yet both the laptop and iPhone were clearly connected to the wireless network, and both had communications with the Internet, and could communicate directly with each other (I tested browsing to a website I have running on the laptop using the iPhone and all was well.)

After much head scratching I decide to turn the router (O2 Wireless Box III) back to B/G wireless mode only. BAM! Everything back to normal. Switched back to B/G/N mode again and sure enough comms were lost.

It seems that the bridge between the N clients and G clients blocks multicast traffic. This was a known issue on the older O2 routers between the wireless and wired networks, but I never thought the seperate channels of wireless would be so widely separated!

So stick to B/G mode for now, I am going to contact O2 and also Thomson who make the modem/router for O2 and see if there is a workaround. I liked having 130Mbps link to the network!!

However remembering to periodically check all those sites for the latest version and download it is a pain in the backside. This is where Ketarin comes in, specifically with a little help from filehippo.com

It is effectively a portable app, as it doesn’t install as such, and just runs as a single executable with a dll file.

Best thing to do is go onto filehippo and find an app that you would like to keep an updated version of. Then in the URL of the filehippo page for the app, it will be something like /download_firefox. The bit after the download_ is the filehippo ID for the program.

In Ketarin choose “Add new application”. In the next window simply type in the FileHippo ID into the relevant box. This will automatically fill in the Application Name box also. Then just choose the folder that you want the installer file to be saved to. I just have mine all in G:\applications (G is my external hard drive).

Adding applications

Then once you have added all the application that you want from FileHippo, simply hit the update button.

Ketarin will now search for updated versions of all the apps on your list, and download them. You can set in the preferences if you want it to overwrite the old installers or not.

Ketarin doing its update thang

For anyone in IT, especially if you are managing a network of machines, having an easily updated central location for your apps like this is a fantastic timesaver.

Highly recommended

Then by complete chance one day, while watching an episode of Hak5 (excellent video podcast, go subscribe to it now!), I spotted @hak5matt using his MacBook Pro to demo some software, and noticed the app name CoRD in the title bar.

On further investigation I found CoRD is a remote desktop client for OSX that utterly rocks. It has a really useful sidebar that you can keep all your commonly used servers in so they are just a double click away. Makes switching between servers an absolute breeze.

Definitely one of the best apps I have come across for sheer usefullness. And of course like all the best software, it is FREE!!

Get it at http://cord.sourceforge.net/index.html

Enter Artisteer!

I found this little tool almost completely by accident. But what a find! It is basically a point and click template generator. It can generate basic HTML/CSS templates, Wordpress themes, Drupal themes and Joomla themes amongst others.

Currently it is only available for Windows, but with the excellent VMWare or VirtualBox programs, Mac and Linux users can still access the program with relative ease.

Once installed you can simply click “Suggest a theme” and it will randomly pick colour palettes, header styles, button styles etc for you. Sometimes jsut clicking this button a few times will at least give you something you like and can then simply tweak to make your perfect theme.

You can select everything, right down to button styles and the wee arrows and dots you get on list items!

Also from my experience, all code that it generates is 100% valid HTML and CSS, and passes all the tests at the w3C Validator, a massive plus point now that even Internet Explorer seems to be wanting to be standards compliant!

And it is very keenly priced. Home/Academic edition is only $49.95 and the Pro version (which allows custom widths and a larger graphics library) is $129.95.

I would make a lot of websites for friends and small businesses, and Wordpress is a great solution for that, allow the client to easily update their own site. With Artisteer you can easily make custom themes for your clients or even just your own blog, quickly and easily.

Recently I have been using the free VMWare Server (old version 1.0.8, as I am not a fan of the new 2.0 web only interface, seems very laggy). It does what we need to virtualize a few servers. Basically allows me to run 4 servers on one physical server, and means they are easily backed up and moved if anything goes wrong. However VMWare Server needs to be installed as an application on either Windows or Linux. This means there is an Operating System (OS) already running and using up system resources which could otherwise be used by the VMs.

This is where “bare metal hypervisors” come in. They are the program required to run and create VMs, but can be installed directly onto a blank server. They effectively are the OS and virtualization program all in one package, but tend to be much smaller and more efficient than a normal OS. This is because Windows, Linux etc are general purpose, they have to be able to do multimedia, games, file access, internet and a whole manner of other things. The hypervisor is designed to one thing only and that is run Virtual Machines and run them well.

On this note I had been looking around for “bare metal hypervisors” for a while, to try and eek out some more performance for our servers. I had been looking at the free one from VMWare, ESXi, however to be able to use it effectively (i.e. not by command line only) you need to purchase relatively expensive management software.

Enter Citrix XenServer.

Today they have released their hypervisor for free. Out of the box you can use it with a management tool called XenCenter which is also free. This gives me all the functionality of VMWare but with the added bonus of using a bare metal hypervisor which means extra resources for my virtualized machines.

Another neat tool it has is the ability to add an ISO repository. We have a shared folder on our network with ISO images of all our important CDs, such as Windows install CDs. This means when you wish to make a new VM, you can simply select the install CD you need to use from the list in your network repository. No more hunting about for CDs, and no need to physically visit the hypervisor server.

The install process for XenServer is fairly straight-forward. Download the ISO from here (after filling in a short form), and burn to a CD (it is only 360Mb or so). Pop that into your server, and boot from the CD. Then just follow very simple instructions.

You will be asked for your location, keyboard preference, IP addresses and the likes. Simple stuff.

Once it has finished installing just fire up the XenCenter app (download from the same page as the ISO for XenServer) and add your server to the list. You will now be able to browse your new server and see its stats (CPU, Memory usage etc).

From here you can also create VMs, repositories etc.

Click here for a link to Citrix videos section, showing how to do many of the basic tasks with the server, nice short easy to follow videos.
Still testing the water with this one, but it seems to be an amazing piece of software, and remember ITS FREE!! So what have you got to lose?

Not so! There are things known as “zero-day” exploits, which rely on exploits for your system that are not yet released. There can be 100s of security holes in your system, but until someone finds those holes then the software is considered “safe”

Doubly so for Apple users, we tend to be a little complacent as far as security is concerned. “It’s an Apple, there are no viruses for it, and Safari is totally safe!”.

And as I mentioned in my last post, IE 8 being the “best protection ever” would be brought into question and it appears that at the PWN2OWN contest both these browsers have been exploited already, with Safari being “PWNed” in under 10 seconds!!!

More reading at this link courtesy of Ars Technica.

So far it would seem the only browser that has stood up to the test is Google Chrome, which I have to say I love and am patiently waiting for them to release a Mac version!