Austin Maliszewski's Blog

I’ve known about DreamHost for about 7 years now and have often considered moving my website there.  However, I never had any real motivation to do it. This weekend, my motivation came along in the form of a year of hosting for under $10. That far beats me hosting my sites on my own server. (Though, I’m still going to maintain my own server for ease of development; developing locally is simply easier).

In honor of Earth Day and DreamHost’s being carbon neutral, they had a special for new accounts for a whole year of hosting (and free domain, which I have yet to claim) for $9.80.  I’ve pulled over this site and my Dad’s site, however, I have a lot to consider with maliszewski.us and maliszewski.net. The DNS for those sites is pretty complicated because it was pretty much happy-go-lucky as I set it up. There have to be at least 50 records for maliszewski.us. I need to rethink the way I set that up. I moved my VPN subzone into its own zone file,  so I’m on my way to moving those over to DreamHost. In the mean time, I think I might just setup an A record and hope the IP doesn’t change. (I doubt it will).

All in all, this move has been pretty painless and simple. I had a little bit of a problem moving over the DB for WordPress. I ended up SFTPing it and using the shell to insert it into mysql on their server (their phpmyadmin configuration is a bit messed up). However,  shell access is included on all accounts for anyone who wants it.

Generally speaking, I’m quite pleased. We’ll see.

EveryDNS.net was founded by the same person who founded OpenDNS. EveryDNS provides both static and dynamic DNS services for your TLD. I’ve found that’s it’s really hard to find good DNS services for free. My registrar, 1&1 provides free DNS service for any domain you register. However, it’s very limited in nature. You can only have only have a limited number of records such as one A record. 1&1 does not offer dynamic DNS services.

EveryDNS has both static and dynamic DNS services. You can manage up to 25 zones with them and up to 200 records for free. For a small payment of $15, you can have as many zones and records as you want. EveryDNS is very reliable. They’ve been around forever, and they’ve had pretty much 100% uptime. For free, what more could you want.

I’ll also plug 1&1. 1&1 is one of the cheapest registrars. They’re not particularly fast, but once you register the domain and port the DNS to EveryDNS, who cares how fast they are.

I’ve recently been playing around with VMware’s ESX 3i server virtualization system. So far, my feelings are rather mixed. It’s not particularly easy to get running, and beyond that, it’s not particularly easy to use. However, once you get past that, you’ll see the power of a low-level virtualization system.

I have a lot of experience with VMware Server 2.0, which is far easier to install and configure. Just run the executable on your favorite Windows or Linux system. I’d recommend Linux because it has lower base requirements. One of the things I liked about Server is the web based interface for managing the VMs. ESXi makes you download the VMware Infrastructure Client to manage the server and its VMs. Now, that’s not bad, but I like the web interface better. It feels nicer.

I’ve not had any luck getting my VMware Server machines to run on ESXi. For me, that was the killer. I spent some time trying to get it to see those VMs. I copied them to the datastore, tried setting up new machines pointing to the VHD, however that didn’t work because it wouldn’t find the VHD. All in all, it was a painful process. I gave up after a couple of hours.

ESXi seems to be a really powerful engine. That’s one thing it has going for it. It’s also free, that’s another huge thing. It also has a really steep learning curve. That being said, if you want the highest performance for your virtual servers, and you can deal with the learning curve, go for ESXi. If you just want it to work without a lot of trouble, go for Server.

Happy Pi day everyone!
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A few years ago, VMWare released VMWare Server at no charge to customers. VMWare Server v. 1 had demanding requirements to run on Windows. You needed a Windows Server machine configured with IIS and ASP.NET. You no longer need Windows Server, nor do you need IIS. You can run Server 2 on any NT based system including all versions of XP.

VMWare Server is certainly nothing new, but I’ve only recently started dabbling in the world of virtualization. There are two types of server virtualization systems. One is hypervisor based and runs as its own operating system. The other is software based and runs on top of another operating system. VMWare Server is the latter type. It can run on any NT based Windows system or any recent Linux kernel. There are several differences. Hypervisor based systems generally run better. They’re more efficient and use less resources to run the VM software. However, software based systems have their advantages. You don’t need to dedicate a server to run your VMs on; you can run them on any Windows or Linux based systems.

Server virtualization systems are not like desktop virtualization systems. They are optimized for services that are mission critical and that need to run whenever the system is on. Desktop virtualization systems, such as Parallels or VMWare Workstation, generally don’t have options to start the VM when the system starts, whereas the server virtualization systems.

VMWare server provides a web based interface to manage the VMs. There is no need to install a client (except an Active-X plugin or Firefox extension for remote console). I personally liked this. When compared with VMWare’s hypervisor based solution ESX, this for me, is a huge advantage. I like being able to control the virtual servers from wherever I am without needing to install client software. For me, neither is a huge deal since I have my laptop everywhere, but the convenience is still nice.

All in all, I really like VMWare Server as a virtualization solution for consolidating servers. Check back later for an article on ESX 3i

This weekend, I was browsing the web and I came across an interesting MSIT Whitepaper on using Terminal Services for remote access and new components of Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services. In TS2008, Microsoft developed really neat new features which make Terminal Services a viable solution for remote access. In fact, I think these new services make TS far more attractive than an ordinary VPN; it’s significantly more secure, too.

As part of Server 2008, Microsoft built new TS components. First, I want to start with TS Gateway. TS Gateway allows you to send RDP traffic over HTTPS. A TS Gateway server relays the RDP traffic to its destination inside the network. This is really neat; you don’t have to poke a billion holes in your firewall to have remote access to your computers nor do you need to establish a full VPN connection.

However, it gets better… There’s another component, TSRemoteApp which allows you to encapsulate applications in Terminal Services. That is, you can send an app without the background environment over TS. It appears as a window on the client computer without a second explorer interface, etc. In fact, it will match the client’s theme if you install the Desktop Experience plugin on the server. That’s incredibly cool because then you can have apps that people can access from home without having to wait for them to load over a VPN connection, which is generally pretty slow, given the speed of most people’s DSL. Even better is that you save bandwidth because TS uses less bandwidth than transferring whatever application.

This has some amazing security benefits. One, it takes the security of the client PC mostly out of the picture. You don’t really have to worry about an infected client because the scope of potential damage is significantly reduced; i.e., the infected client does not become part of the network through VPN, it’s avenues of infection are significantly limited. This also has majoer confidentiality benefits. If you have confidential information that you need protected, that stays on the server this way. Employees/volunteers can access the files from home, but you’re free to lock them to the terminal server. They no longer would be copied to someone’s home PC for editing, etc.

This can also integrate with some new rights management features of Active Directory. It also is fully integrated with AD DS. Users logon to the server using their AD username and password. Permissions are managed by AD and group policy, etc. It also integrates with AD CS and Rights Management.

It also will relay RDP traffic to properly configured workstations. That is, an end user could connect securely, through TS Gateway to the PC on his or her desk and work as if he or she were sitting at his or her desk. There’s no need to make a VPN connection, nor expose the network to potential viruses on the end user’s home PC, the user can work seamlessly with RemoteApp or RDPing into his or her desk PC.

To tie this all together, there’s another component, TS Web Access which provides access to all these resources in a nice, easy to use web interface. You logon to the ASP.NET app, that is TS WebAccess, with your AD username and password and you have access to all your RemoteApp apps, your desk PC, (server manager, if you’re an admin), etc.

All in all, I need a little more time to play with this before I try implementing it, but it definitely looks promising as a way of controlling access to enterprise resources but still allowing end users to work from home. Way to go Microsoft!

I recently discovered this program by Bartels Media, a German software company, called MaxiVista. Despite the name, this has nothing at all to do with Windows Vista. It’s actually a really neat multimonitor package that allows you to use old laptops/computers as a secondary, tertiary, etc., monitor for your main PC/Laptop.

I have this configured with two monitors connected to one of my main laptops (I have two main laptops, one that leaves the house with me and one that doesn’t.). Then I have MaxiVista setup using an older laptop as a third monitor. This gives me a total of three monitors of screen space.

Quite frankly, I’m impressed with this program. There’s no latency between the monitors. I wouldn’t show video over the third monitor, but, it might actually work. I even pulled iTunes over to the third display and coverplay ran, albeit a little blocky, but it ran. Take that, Remote Desktop. Right now, I’m typing this message with Firefox in the third monitor, so that’s working nicely. I thought having two monitors was nice, but having three is really incredible. When I build my new desktop, it will probably have three or four (depending on how far over budget I run) monitors on two dual head video cards with 1GB DDR3 VRAM each. I haven’t decided which ones yet, though.

I just had to share this really neat program. I forgot exactly where I read about it, otherwise I’d give credit. Link: http://www.maxivista.com

I finally got around to installing Vista on my Gateway CX2724. I made a pledge to wait until at least SP1 and since that’s here, I did it. I pulled a copy of Vista Business from MSDN, burned it to DVD, resized my XP Tablet PC partition with GPartEd on Knoppix and installed it. The installation process was pretty painless. Put in your product key, time zone, if you want it to automatically update, it installs everything, about 30 minutes later, you put in your new username and password and it’s done. It rebooted a final time. Loaded, and well, it’s pretty and seems to run pretty nicely, etc.

First thing I notice, the pen doesn’t work. Well, I knew that would happen. Connected it to my WiFi and went and downloaded the pen drivers from Gateway.com. (Well, I downloaded Firefox first.) I installed the drivers based on the HWID of the HID. Then I installed the Tablet Buttons drivers based on its HWID. And what do you know, I point the pen at the screen and the mouse moves. Well, it’s a good deal away from where it should be. I fiddled with Calibration which failed every time. I decided I should do Windows Update, so I go do that, and in my list of updates are drivers for the pen device. Well, it does its thing and an hour later, I’m prompted to reboot. It tells me that the updates for the pen device failed, which makes sense since I already had the newest drivers. Upon reboot, everything works perfectly.

This morning, I played with it a bit more. I tried out the Input Panel. Boy, the handwriting recognition is so much greater than XP TPE. It could make everything I threw at it. I wrote in cursive, manuscript, mixed it up (that is pseudocursive), neatly, messily, it could read it all. It even got my name. I had to wait until about 4 o’clock before I could download OneNote because MSDN was being updated. Loaded up OneNote and did some sample

The way OneNote’s handwriting recognition works is based on the OS it’s running on. It makes a hook to the host OS’s handwriting recognition API if it has one. It installs TPE’s if you’re running it on any version of XP besides TPE, and on Vista it uses the native API except on Home Basic which doesn’t have one. (This is to the best of my knowledge, not sure if 2007 still works that way). So, handwriting recognition worked nicely, again recognizing everything I threw at it.

The best part is it’s supposed to learn your handwriting and improve over time kind of like the way Speech to Test works now. Well, we’ll see.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way Vista and Tablet PCs work. In the near future I should be getting a new Tablet (HP tx2525nr) with Vista Ultimate which should be a pleasure to work with.

Another thing: If anyone has computer questions, shoot me an email. I fix/can help with PCs (XP, Vista), Macs (OS X), *nix boxes, networking, servers, and hardware problems. Oh yeah, I also do programming and web design.