Hartung Computer & Networking

I have a customer with a problematic laptop that I keep seeing. Originally I received the laptop because was “running slow”. I get these all the time. This one was bad. After some extensive troubleshooting I determined that the hard drive was going bad. It was at about this time that I discovered SpinRite . So I purchased this software from Steve over there at grc.com and ran it. It was so bad that even SpinRite couldn’t fix it. So, I ended up purchasing a new hard drive and copying the data over. This was problematic because there were bad sectors on the drive that could not be read. Eventually I cut my losses and just copied over the EISA partition and reinstalled Windows on the new hard drive. The old hard drive still booted so I ran the File Settings and Transfer Wizard over the network and reinstalled all the usernames and data on the new drive. Back in business, or so I thought.

I received the laptop back some time later, perhaps a month or so, and the hard drive showed bad sectors after a SpinRite run. After running it everything was good and I moved on.

Just yesterday I received the laptop back again and ran SpinRite again. It found one bad sector on the hard drive that was preventing Windows from booting. The machine now boots fine. I’ve run the the five step chkdsk and everything is good.

I guess the quandary of the day is: Is this hard drive going bad or is there something in the laptop hardware causing these bad sectors on the harddrive?

I’ve thought about possibilities

1. ECC is broken on the hard drive, but SpinRite showed ECC working correctly or at least it appeared that way.
2. Bad hardware on the laptop is causing the problems, but I would know where to begin with that.
3. I have an incompatible hard drive installed in the laptop, but if that were the case I most likely would be having other problems.
4. This laptop gets thrown around a lot. This doesn’t seem to be the case because I’ve asked this customer about this.
5. Its just the way this laptop is going to be, the customer will have to run SpinRite and chkdsk more than normal.

Sony VIAO VE-550G

Seagate Momentus 5400.3 ST9100828AS 100GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s Notebook Hard Drive

I’ll do some searching and report

Dale

I needed to add freetype support to my php install on my webserver, but I wanted to do a backup first. Since my webserver is a virtual server on an openvz node backup of the webserver was easy. On the hardware node I downloaded vzdump (instructions here) Installation was flawlesss. After which I did some more reading and used the “suspend” feature to back up my webserver with the following command.

vzdump –suspend 156

Of course use the node number of your ve to back up. By default the image is store in /vz/dump/ on the hardware node.

Now I have a back up of my server and if I needed to restore it I would issue the following command:

vzctl stop 156

vzdump –restore /vz/dump/vzdump-156.tar 156

vzctl start 156

Now I have no worries when trying to upgrade php on my webserver and it only took a few commands.  There are other features and caveats, they can be seen at the following links

http://wiki.openvz.org/Backup_of_a_running_VE_with_vzdump

 http://weblogs.amtex.nl/index.php?blog=2

Cheers

Dale

I want to do some testing on Macs for a few customers so I need to get some experience on the Mac Platform. I want to use the Virtual PC app provided by MS to accoplish this.

1. I need to obtain an image of Mac OS X for intel x86 arch

2. Install it on Virtual PC and run

3. Report here

Resource Links:

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/01/18/PearPC.html

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

http://pietschsoft.com/post/2007/04/Can-you-run-Mac-OS-X-within-Virtual-PC-2007-on-Windows.aspx

 http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

I’ll update this post with more details

Dale

I am going to create a new site called lazypaddle.com.  It will hold most of my posts and other interesting stuff.  Some of my stuff on the web is not being seen correctly by the search engines even though I know where it is.

I will plan the entire site before implementing and have all the associated content ready somewhere ready to go.

The main site should be http://www.lazypaddle.com

All folders and different site stuff will reside as subdirectories of this address.  In dghartung.com I dont use this method, rather I create subdomains and link appropriately.

This should be an exercise in finding out how google operates its crawelrs and my ability to adjust accordingly.

I am going to start here :

http://www.asiostudio.com/website-planning.html

They have a marketing plan that I will start with found here:

http://www.asiostudio.com/website-marketing-plan-outline.html

Google Webmaster Tools

What are the Google Webmaster ToolsStatistics Diagnostics and Management. Sitemap submission and repoting

What I did to improve my site

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools

Add your site to the list

Verify your site

Sitemaps

Old Config

My old configuration consisted of website names that were different the left. such as http://photos.dghartung.com and http//it.dghartung.com . These are normally called subdomains and I have my reasons for using them. I still have those names like that. I modified my index.php page, the first page you see at http://www.dghartung.com and created sitelinks instead with redirects on my server to make up the difference. You can still get to those sites the old way, but now you can get there the new way and google will record all of the links under one web domain. Its seems that Google tends to read and index your url’s with everything right of .com but I had set up my site with different names the left of dghartung.com. Now I have both.

My old set up had urls on my front page as such:

<a href=”http://photos.dghartung.com”>Photos</a>

So Google wouldnt crawl down the site and see as a subdomain of dghartung.com even though technically domain name speaking it is.

New Configuration

Now my front page has links similar to the following:

<a href=”http://www.dghartung.com/photos/”>Photos</a>

and I had to add a Redirect to my webserver config:

RewriteRule ^/photos/ $ http://photos.dghartung.com [R,NC,L]

So now its referenced as both. Google will “crawl down” this site and it still remains a subdomain of dghartung.com I did this for each of the sections on my front page so Google will crawl the www.dghartung.com correctly.

sitemap_xml_generator

After created the necessary links in front page I had to create a sitemap and submit it to google.

wordpress_sitemap_generator

I found a handy wordpress plugin for those of you who dont have any subdomains and just have a blog. This plugin will generate a sitemap for you and submit. No dirty work at all, its pretty simple.

Examples of Sitelinks

grc.com

msn.com

avg.com

Resource links

SEO by the SEA

Google Sitelinks Blog

I will try to update this document at a later time

Dale

I posted a question on the grc.com newgroup thinktank.  If I were to tell you that I built or created an intelligent object, what questions would you ask?

Any comments here welcome!

Dale