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How to Reset VTONF Password
A couple of months back, Mo, our Sys Admin setup a test server with Open VZ server virtualization.
Open VZ is a cool way for us to have separate *nix OS instances running on one server. So for example we can run CentOS, Ubuntu or Redhat etc., on the same machine. This is great for testing on various flavors of linux.
The OpenVZ installation is not easy, but there is a great deal of support and documentation on the web that helped us. Patience is a key 
Here is a good OpenVZ installation tutorial
Once OpenVZ is setup, most operations can be performed from the shell prompt.
Mo did install a nifty web management console called “VTONF”. It is a PHP application that does pretty much all that we need to do to manage the VZ containers.
We forgot the password for the VTONF console – yes we did . We searched online for help changing the password but no luck. Also it seems that the VTONF site is down.
So after going through the PHP code (the code is documented well) this is how we reset the password:
$ cd /etc/vtonf/
The username and password are stored in a file called “.vtonf.shadow”
Edit the file in VI or Nano
$nano .vtonf.shadow
The username and password are separated by a :
username:password
Once you’ve changed the above, save it and login to the console.
http://OpenVZServerIPAddress:8001
Hope this saves you some time.
Comments (1)Florida Everglades
Our undying love for the Florida Everglades prompted us to set up an Everglades information site. Filled with stories, advice and photos from our many trips to the Everglades.
To me this is one of the most magnificent places in the world.
If you’re visiting Florida (from out of state 
and would like an airboat tour guide, one of us would be glad to accompany you for the adventure – lunch and drinks on us.
To learn more visit: http://www.everglades-info.com
Comments (0)Ubiquity @ FOWA Miami
Recently our team was at FOWA and saw a demo of Ubiquity from the Mozilla Foundation.
So what’s Ubiquity? In simple terms Ubiquity is purported to be a really new cool way to interact from your browser with your desktop applications by using natural language commands.
Watch a demo by Aza Raskin on Ubiquity. That’s probably better than me trying to explain how it works. Sometimes a video is worth a thousand words.
You can download Ubiquity if you’d like to try it out yourself. I downloaded it as I got home and played around with it for a few hours. Keep in mind though that it’s still in beta.
I highly recommend trying it out – very simple to launch (ctrl + spacebar brings up ubuiqity in FF)
When I talked about with some other folks who had heard about Ubiquity their main concern was how long it would take them to learn how to use it since you need to remember the commands. (Are we going back to the days of DOS?
I think the key to Ubiquity being ubiquitous is its learnability – how quickly people will be able to learn and remember the commands. For now, I’m pretty excited by its potential.
Comments (1)“Malicious Insider Attacks to Rise ” – BBC — Hype or Real?
I read this article on the BBC [Malicious insider attacks to rise - link] It brought back memories of old times.
I was privileged to work for a start up during the dot.com hay days. I remember when things were great, massive sign up bonuses, gadgets and goodies galore. Then things started to go south. Every Thursday was a tense day, we would be guessing who’d get the axe on Black Friday. Then Black Friday came and lunch time was the designated Axe time! We’d see a supervisor walk into our department with a box or two, stand next to our friends/colleagues and give them the bad news. It was a terrible, gut wrenching feeling. The poor soul hurriedly packed up his belongings and was then ‘escorted’ to the front door – A Royal Thank You for all those many nights we stayed up doing amazing things for the company.
I kept asking “why should they treat their fellow employees with such distrust?” Why?
A few months later(yes I survived for quite some time) they decided to let go a senior SW developer. This guy was fuming, fuming mad. He had threatened to ‘bring down the place’ quite explicitly. So needless to say, the day they were letting him go, 2 supervisors came to escort him out.
My turn eventually came up at the very tail end of the companies existence. By then, no one really cared even if I ran away with our beloved gumball machine!
I never thought we’d see another dot.com like era of boom and bust for a long long time. But here we are in 2009, looking down another long dark stretch. My advice to senior executives is be compassionate to their workers. They helped grow your company with their sweat, so don’t treat them like some balance sheet figure that has to go away in an instant. They’ve got feelings and families too. Try to work with them as if though it was your job on the line at Axe time on Black Fridays.
My advice to those on the Axe line ‘hang in there – things will get better’. It’s hard to know that you’ve worked so hard and yet, in an instant these so called pigs at the top can cut your job without much remorse.
It’s easy to get revenge. You may have inside access to everything, passwords, customer lists, company secrets etc. In some cases you ‘can’ bring the company to its knees. But take it from someone who’s been there, its not worth it. Although you were escorted out, doesn’t mean that everyone in there now hates you. On the contrary, there would be many that are willing to help, even those at the top. Get in touch with them via phone/email (I say this as in our case, we were not allowed back in the building) the sooner they hear from you the better. They may know of other openings or opportunities.
Keep an open mind – If you’ve worked in one industry, let’s say IT, doesn’t mean to say you’ve got to work in IT for the rest of your life. There are many other opportunities out there that may surprise you. As my friend says “Stay open for business”.
Comments (0)The Procedure Entry Point GetProcessImageFileNameW Could Not be Located in Dynamic Link Library PSAPI.DLL
Error message: the procedure entry point GetProcessImageFileNameW Could not be located in dynamic link library PSAPI.DLL Macromedia Adobe Contribute 3
I was trying to install an old version of Macromedia Contribute 3 on a client’s PC. The installation went through smoothly, however at the end when I clicked on the Contribute Icon to launch the program, I got the above Error msg. Seems that most PC’s running XP or newer have a new version of PSAPI.DLL and Contribute is calling an older version located in the Contribute directory.
To fix the error simply rename the PSAPI.DLL in the programs directory (located in C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Contribute 3 – maybe in a different location on your PC) to PSAPI.DLL.old.
Click on the Contribute Icon to launch the program. Contribute will now look for the PSAPI.DLL in the Windows directory.
Contribute is a great application for minor web design changes. It doesn’t require any prior knowledge of HTML.
Comments (0)Customer Relationship Management – CRM
Open Source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
There are many commercial CRM packages out there. Our favorites are Sugar CRM and Tiger CRM, both very comprehensive and feature rich. The best part is the basic editions are totally free!
Over the years we’ve done a few Sugar CRM installations and things can get a bit hairy when it comes to getting all the SW requirements in place. However the installer in the latest version is amazing. All opensource software programmers should take a hint from Sugar. My favorite part is how it automatically creates the database and tables in MySQL.
For those interested in quickly installing one of the above CRM’s I would recommend a using an bundled Apache, PHP & MySQL installation such as Apache2triad. With Triad you only have to worry about one installation file.
I would love to hear about other opensource CRM’s out there.
Comments (0)Deleting QMAIL Email by Date
One of our customers had checked the “leave message on server” box, by accident in Outlook and over 8 months accumulated over 20,000 messages (mostly spam) on the server. The mailbox was close to 1.5GB in size.
Its a Qmail mail server.
First, find out exactly how many messages are in the box and sort by the largest message
ls -Slh | – less
The | less will allow you to go page by page. To exit type :q
He requested that we delete all the emails that were over 30 days old.
Then stop the server
/etc/init.d/qmail stop
Command to remove all the old messages:
find /var/qmail/mailnames/<domain>/<user>/Maildir/curr -mtime +X -print | xargs rm
replace +X with the number of days (so in our case it was +30)
the Maildir/new folder contains messages in the queue.
Depending on how many messages are in the folder the above command can take a few minutes – do not cancel until you get back to the prompt $.
/etc/init.d/qmail start
Comments (0)Three Tips to Get Your Site on Google
One of the first question we get from new clients is “How quickly can I get my site on page 1 of Google?” Some clients think this can happen overnight but new websites setup on a new domain name have to build credibility (page rank) with sites like Google. Search engines want to make sure that your site is not the latest Big Foot scam site. While search engines take time to index sites there are some tips you can implement to speed up the process.
Tip # 1 – Target Relevant Keywords
Keywords are the descriptors of your content. Be selective in the keywords you choose and try to use them throughout your website, links, meta tags etc. Just don’t overdo it Here’s a good article on selecting keywords.
Tip # 2 – Analyze Site Structure
Make sure your site is setup correctly from the very beginning. Each page on your website must have unique content, especially unique “Meta tags” – these include Meta Title and Meta Description. Sites that have similar Meta details run the risk of being flagged as having duplicate content. Talk to a professional website design company and have them analyze your site. They’ll make sure your site is SEO friendly and may have additional suggestions on how to drive more traffic to your site.
Tip # 3 – BackLinks
Backlinks (a.k.a incoming links, inbound links) are links from other web pages to your site. Try to get as many backlinks to your site as possible. The more, the better. Let’s say you’ve invented the next latest gadget that reduces gas consumption by 60%. Your brandnew website is going to get a gajillion hits and hopefully the same number of backlinks to your site. Not sure if you can get anyone to link to your site? Try this free backlink tool that will list potential sites that may add a link to your site. How do you know how many backlinks you have to your site? Copy and paste this line into google (link:www.yourdomain.com) . For a more accurate way of finding out the number of links, check out this article on How to Count Inlinks / Backlinks to Your Site using Yahoo.
The key with SEO is to be consistent – just 30 minutes a day can go along way.
Comments (0)Optimizing Skype to Work in a LAN with Routers and Firewalls
Network administrators can positively impact the quality of Skype communications
conducted by their network’s users by tuning the network’s handling of transmission
control protocl (TCP) and user datagram protocol (UDP) packets for best Skype performance.
By this we mean that network administrators can exercise a great deal of
control over their users’ networking experience by adjusting control parameters on
networking appliances such as routers, fi rewalls and network address translation devices.
In the broadest possible terms, Skype considers an ideal network confi guration
8
to be one that’s set up according to the rules shown in Table 1-1, below.
Optimizing Skype to Work in a LAN with Routers and Firewalls
Skype Network Settings
Network administrators can improve the quality of Skype calls by tuning the network’s handling of (TCP) and (UDP) packets for best Skype performance.
Configure settings on Firewall, Router or NAT device.
1. Outgoing TCP connections should be allowed to remote ports 1024 and higher.
2. Outgoing TCP connections should be allowed to remote ports 80 and 443.
3. Outgoing UDP packets should be allowed to remote ports 1024 and higher. For UDP to be useful
to Skype, the NAT must allow for replies to be returned to sent UDP datagrams. (The state of UDP
“connections” must be kept for at least 30 seconds, and Skype recommends that these translations
be maintained for as long as an hour, if possible.)
4. The NAT translation should provide consistent translation, meaning that outgoing address translation
is usually the same for consecutive outgoing UDP packets.
Skype relies heavily on UDP packets to help maintain the best possible quality of connection among peers because UDP packets
can be transmitted quickly and require very little overhead to manage.
However, for UDP communications to work properly for Skype through NAT, the translation rules for
UDP packets must be consistently handled, meaning that UDP packets set from one
external network address and port number must be consistently translated to an internal
network address and port number without varying either the network address or
port number.
Although the use of UDP is optional — meaning Skype will work fi ne without the ability
to transmit UDP messages — the call quality experienced by Skype users will be much
better, on average, if the caller is able to send UDP packets to the called party and
receive UDP answers in reply.
Tip: Checking your network for P2P friendliness
Many of our customers have told us that they use a freeware program called “NAT
Check”, written by Bryan Ford, to see if their network’s UDP translation is compatible
with P2P protocols including Skype. The NAT Check program is available for free
download from the program’s website at http://midcom-p2p.sourceforge.net and
is available in a precompiled form for platforms running Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X
and Linux. (NAT Check is not Skype software.)
UDP RESULTS:
UDP consistent translation: YES (GOOD for peer-to-peer)
UDP loopback translation: YES (GOOD for peer-to-peer)
UDP unsolicited messages filtered: YES (GOOD for security)
In the result of NAT Check shown above, we see that the network’s UDP translation is
applied consistently (“consistent translation”), that the input and output ports are identical
except in the event of a confl ict (“loopback translation”) and that unsolicited UDP
packets sent to the network are discarded (“unsolicited messages fi ltered”).
Although not strictly necessary, it is preferable for the network’s fi rewall or NAT gateway
to support IP packet fragmentation and reassembly. In addition, the fi rewall must
not block an attempt to send parallel UDP packets or TCP connection attempts to
multiple ports at the destination address. Some fi rewalls misclassify such behavior as
port scanning and therefore block the host altogether. Such behavior could not only
impact the ability of Skype to run but would likely impact other legitimate network applications
running on the same host computer.
Skype and proxies
Skype fully supports SOCKS5 and HTTPS/SSL proxles, including optional authentication.
For SOCKS5, the proxy must allow, at a minimum, unrestricted TCP connections to
at least port 80, or port 443, or high-numbered ports, meaning those numbered 1024
and higher. For HTTPS/SSL proxies, the proxy must allow unrestricted TCP connections
to port 443.
On Microsoft Windows platforms, Skype uses the proxy settings in Microsoft Internet
Explorer to determine what proxy settings, if any, to use. However, the Skype user can
set the SOCKS5 or HTTPS/SSL proxy manually, including any needed username and
password for proxy authentication.