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Ivan Versluis August 7th, 2008

I am working on a redesign project for a CMSMadeSimple website and today I planned to upgrade the version. The website is running for two years and until today no updates have been installed. CMSMadeSimple version 1.4 “Jamaica” has just been released and because I want to add couple of new CMSMadeSimple modules I will first need to get the version up to date. The process is really straight forward and it took me 15 minutes in total.

• Download the latest version from here–> cmsmadesimple-1.4-full.tar.gz
• Extract the file with 7z and upload the content to your webserver by using ftp,sftp, ssh.
• I am using WinSCP to the files to my linux box. I dragged the files from left pane (my c drive) to right pane where the current CMSMadeSimple files were located. At some point I was asked to overwrite files and I clicked yes.

• Go to your admin page.

• I have couple of warnings I need to solve like removing the install directory and the “Site Down for Maintainance” message but most important is that you perfom the CMSMS schema upgrade. Click Start Upgrade Process.
• Verify your config.php is writable.

• I checked my config file from ssh console and the permissions were not configured as required.

root@ubuntu-jeos-7:/var/www/cmsmadesimple-1.2.5/hubo-roneijgelsheim/site# ls config.php -all
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 5829 2008-08-06 10:16 config.php

• To fix this problem I executed: chmod 777 config.php; chown www-data config.php and chgrp www-data config.php
• I went back and click “Try Again” in the Upgrade System wizard.

• The schema version was upgraded to 31 and now I could finish the upgrade by clicking on the last step.

• Setup Finished all required steps in the upgrade process and my website was up and running and up to date.
• I fixed my other two warnings and my site is now secure, updated and most important the process went very smooth.

Tags: CMSMadeSimple, howto, upgrade, version

• CMSMadeSimple
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Ivan Versluis August 3rd, 2008

Since I am dual booting between Ubuntu and Windows Vista on my desktop workstation I am missing my linux volumes on Vista. I have three large 500GB SATA2 disks and one of them is partitioned and formatted with Ext2 linux file system. I have two options to read my linux volumes from windows:

a) Explore2fs which is a simple tool and I don’t need to install any low level system drivers. Explore2fs only operates in Read-Only mode.
b) Ext2IFS which is a pure kernel mode file system driver Ext2fs.sys, which actually extends the Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista (x86/x64) operating system to include the Ext2 file system.

I want to have full read-write mode on my linux volumes and I installed option b.

• Go to http://www.fs-driver.org/download.html and download Ext2IFS_1_11.exe
• Run the setup file and walk though the installation wizards.
• In the Drive Letters Wizard choose your linux partition and assign a drive letter. I used drive L:

Drive L:\ is now mounted in READ/Write mode from my Windows Vista SP1 x64 operating system.

Tags: ext2, file, howto, linux, mount, system, Windows

• Windows
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Ivan Versluis June 29th, 2008

Since two weeks I am becoming Ubuntu fan and I am missing some of my windows applications. Nero is one of those and thanks to Nero they ported their burning solution for Linux also. Download the trial from Nero.com website here.

Start a  new terminal session and run dpkg to install the Linux version of Nero Burning Rom.

Go to Applications / Sound & Video/ Nero Linux and start the burning solution.

Pretty straight forward; right? Think about when installing Nero on Windows ;). First we have this 100MB+ installation source and than install the complete suite of tools; with Linux installation I get what I want.

Continue Reading »

Tags: howto, install, linux, Nero, screenshots

• Nero , Ubuntu
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Ivan Versluis June 28th, 2008

I am using the following CSS font-family setting for Networknet.nl font-family:”Lucida Grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;. When opening Networknet.nl blog on a Linux machine Firefox displays my blog as show below; the fonts are not corresponding with my style sheet. Why ;)? My Ubuntu has no Lucida Grande fonts installed. Common Windows Fonts are not installed by default  on Linux and some can be installed afterwards. After installing the msttcorefonts package I was  still missing the Lucida Grande.

The msttcorefonts contain the following fonts:

• Andale Mono
• Arial Black
• Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Comic Sans MS (Bold)
• Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Impact
• Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Webdings

These can be installed with running sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts .

I found a good post how to get the Lucida Grande font but than I was forced to install wine and safari applications. If you own a Windows installation and than you can copy the fonts from your C:\Windows\Fonts directory and place them /usr/share/fonts/ttf and that’s what I did.

Don’t forget to get them configured. Run sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig. After restarting Firefox my blog was pretty much as on Windows.

Font is OK now, but still some things with spacing. Anyway this is how I quickly got my Windows fonts on Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 desktop machine.

Some links for Linux and Fonts

http://packages.debian.org/stable/x11/msttcorefonts

http://www.convexhull.com/mandrake_fonts.html

http://avi.alkalay.net/linux/docs/font-howto/Font.html

Tags: font, howto, linux, lucida

• Ubuntu
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Ivan Versluis June 12th, 2008

If you need to create 5 or more of Virtual Port groups on a vSwtich and you don’t want to use the VI client than logon on the service console and run the commands below.

For creating a new Virtual Port Group use:

Assigning a special VLAN to this a Virtual Port Group:

With these two simple commands I was able to push my sh script and create same “Networking” configuration on dozen of my ESX servers.

esxcfg-vswitch [options] [vswitch[:ports]]

  -a|–add              Add a new virtual switch.

  -d|–delete           Delete the virtual switch.

  -l|–list             List all the virtual switches.

  -L|–link=pnic        Set pnic as an uplink for the vswitch.

  -U|–unlink=pnic      Remove pnic from the uplinks for the vswitch.

  -M|–add-pg-uplink    Add an uplink to the list of uplinks for a portgroup

  -N|–del-pg-uplink    Delete an uplink from the list of uplinks for a portgroup

  -p|–pg=portgroup     Specify a portgroup for operation

                        Use ALL to set VLAN IDs on all portgroups

  -v|–vlan=id          Set vlan id for portgroup specified by -p

                        0 would disable the vlan

  -c|–check            Check to see if a virtual switch exists.

                        Program outputs a 1 if it exists, 0 otherwise.

  -A|–add-pg=name      Add a new portgroup to the virtual switch.

  -D|–del-pg=name      Delete the portgroup from the virtual switch.

  -C|–check-pg=name    Check to see if a portgroup exists.  Program

                        outputs a 1 if it exists, 0 otherwise.

  -B|–set-cdp          Set the CDP status for a given virtual switch.

                        To set pass one of “down”, “listen”, “advertise”, “both”.

  -b|–get-cdp          Print the current CDP setting for this switch.

  -m|–mtu=MTU          Set MTU for the vswitch.

  -r|–restore          Restore all virtual switches from the configuration file

                        (FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY).

  -h|–help             Show this message.

Tags: commandline, ESX, howto, Script, vlan

• ESX
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Ivan Versluis June 11th, 2008

You have a Windows File Server and you want to migrate the windows shares. What options do you have to complete this job? A) recreate them or B) migrate them from ServerA to ServerB. Sometimes option A is the only one you have but in most cases you want to keep those Windows Shares available as they were before and using some kind of script would be nice. Microsoft published a KB125996 article based on following procedures and my option B:

• Reinstall Windows over an existing installation (a clean install, not an upgrade).
• Move all of your data drives from one server to another.
• Install Windows to another folder or drive on a computer that already has Windows installed.

I am performing a clean installation of a application server which has several file shares associated for application functionality. I don’t want to recreate them manually and I am using the next steps to complete this task.

a) Verify the shares you want to migrate and the drive letter location is the same on both servers.

b) Export the Shares key from HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares

reg export HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares LanmanServer.reg

c) Make sure the user and group still exist in the domain! When migrating from DomainA to Domain B make sure you recreate all users and groups. Copy LanmanServer.reg to ServerB and import the registry file.

Reboot the file server and verify the share with “net share” command; also check the System Eventlog for any warnings or errors.

Tags: file, howto, lanmanserver, Migration, move, server, shares, Windows

• Migration
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Ivan Versluis June 4th, 2008

For weeks my local Infopath 2007 installation failed to open forms located on SPS server. See warning below.

InfoPath cannot open the following file: http://sharepoint/ChangeMgmt/Forms/abc.xml InfoPath cannot open the form. To fix the problem, contact your system administrator.
Form template: http://sharepoint/ChangeMgmt/Forms/solution.xsn. There is an error in the form’s cache. To correct the error, open the form again.

This was my solution is solving the problem. Before you start clean the Internet Explorer Cache!

For Windows Vista

• Locate C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\InfoPath\FormCache2 and delete complete folder. If this fails than rename the subfolders to something else like abc and try again. I got a warning and the action failed if I did not rename the folder.
• Run C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12>INFOPATH.EXE /cache clearall

For Windows 2000/XP

• Locate C:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\InfoPath\FormCache2 and delete the folder.
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12>INFOPATH.EXE /cache clearall

After these steps my Infopath forms opened again

Tags: 2007, cache, Error, form, howto, infopath, office, solution, warning

• Office 2007
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Ivan Versluis May 29th, 2008

Last two days I worked with a VMWare Premium Support engineer troubleshooting my VMWare ESX problem for booting the system. I will post another post with exact error messages, but we were not able to get into the service console nor did the other two boot options work. At some  point he asked me did I have a Linux Live-CD? I was think ooh Yeah going back to old school and grabbed my case and found a BackTrack2 cd from two years ago.

After the reboot  and boot into BackTrack we went trough couple of system settings and logs and he asked hey can you forward me the esxcfg-boot.log to me  by email…. I was using the DRAC console and copy and paste is not going to work ;-(.  Guys from past remember the real tricks when we did those back than with IIS and within couple minutes I was able to get the orginal file to one of my tftpd daemon on the network.

How did I get the log files?

•  
  • Download, burn the iso and boot from CD-rom
  • Login with root/toor
  • I prefer the GUI and start KDE by running startx
  • Open Console session
  • ifconfig eth0 up
  • dhcpcd eth0
  • check you ip address with ifconfig eth0
  • now run tftp
  • open ip address
  • put esxcfg-boot.log or any other.

That’s all. For more information and download go to http://www.remote-exploit.org/.

Tags: ESX, howto, livecd, logfiles, network

• ESX
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Ivan Versluis May 18th, 2008

Today I moved my data using the robocopy.exe tool and using the /move switch; the tool migrated data from one usb disk to another one. Before returning my usb disk to the IT department I checked the disk partition with one of the tools I use to check deleted files. Guess what the tool found 18000 files in 10 minutes scan on the usb volume which was empty…

Before I will return this USB disk for re-use I will make sure no data is left which can be recovered by any tool. With physical disks I used gdisk with dod option to wipe all data. For the USB disk I am going to install tool called Eraser which is freeware.

Continue Reading »

Tags: clean, data, delete, disks, erase, harddisk, howto, manual, secure, usb

• Security
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Ivan Versluis April 23rd, 2008

If you manage multiple computer systems than BgInfo tool from Microsoft (formal SysInternals) is the right tool to display relevant computer information (CPU,Hostname, IP/DNS/DHCP/Default Gateway, Memory,Disk,etc.)  of the system. I am using this tool on all my virtual and physical host machines to identify what kind of system I am logged on. You can implement different background colors and identify type of machine your are working on. For example use RED for physical host machines; BLUE for virtual machines and YELLOW for lab machines. Couple years ago I also implemented this tool and used the corporate wallpaper on 500+ desktop clients; we also included the numbers of helpdesk and other important information.

Picture 1. BgInfo Netowknet Wallpaper

Below I will summarize 10 steps how to download, configure and prepare your system with Networknet BgInfo template.

1. Download the tool from Microsoft website here; open the the zip file
2. Copy BgInfo.exe to C:\Windows
3. Run BgInfo.exe to register the .bgi extentions
4. Download my Bgi file from http://www.networknet.nl/apps/content/Networknet.bgi
5. Open Networknet.bgi file and modify if needed; save the file to C:\Windows like bginfo.bgi
6. Right click BgInfo.exe and select “Create Shortcut”
7. Right click the BgInfo.exe - Shortcut and change the target to C:\Windows\Bginfo.exe c:\windows\bginfo.bgi /timer:0; click OK
8. Copy the shortcut
9. Goto C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
10. Paste the shortcut

Tags: BgInfo, computer, desktop, howto, information, installation, visual, wallpaper

• BgInfo , Microsoft , Tools
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