If you look at the top of my blog you’ll see an oddly place rectangle that touts “Stop Censorship.” Depending on your browser dimensions it might be obscuring the whole “logo” as well as a few tabs. What is this all about?

It’s about the American Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Both are American bills that I believe will have a terribly negative effect on the Internet as a whole and especially within America’s borders. Even worse, the bills have a shockingly large amount of congressional support. The loudest (and seemingly only) congressional voice against these bills seems to be Oregon senator Ron Wyden. The strongest voice for the bills is Nevada senator Harry Reid.

I will not attempt to convince you one way or the other about these bills. As an IT worker, you are undoubtedly an autodidact and can easily research and come to your own conclusions in just an evening or two. However, what I would like to bring to your attention is what you can do to oppose this bill if that is the stance that you take.

If you are one of my US readers, click on over to www.AmericanCensorship.org to find a list of Congressional phone numbers for those senators and representatives that you are a constituent of. Then call them and respectfully voice your opinion for or against. I believe that the American government already has designs on somehow making the internet (or an “alternate internet”) a place “where anonymity is not an option.” As such I take the opposition view on these bills and believe that we need as many voices as we can gather together to work against these threats to internet freedom.

Part of that opposition is getting the word out by utilizing a handy “Stop Censorship” banner at the top of my site. You can place that on your site too by going to the www.AmericanCensorship.org home page and scrolling one page down for some links and directions. Please consider it.

Also, take the time to thank senator Wyden through email, Twitter or give his office a call using the numbers that you can find on AmericanCensorship.org.

I fear for the future of the internet if one or both of these bills pass, and they could in just a matter of hours or days. Take action! All shares, +1s, RTs and etc. are appreciated.

While mucking about in bash with some files containing rather cryptic text, I needed to easily copy and paste it into a web browser. I had hoped that perhaps there was a built-in tool or interface that could help me. Perhaps /dev/clipboard? Yes, I’m that naïve.

The crux of the matter is that I’m using the X Window system to present Gnome to me. Bash needs to pass information up to X and to do that you’ll need a spiffy little package called xclip. It’s not standard in my distro and will likely not be in yours, so you’ll need to consult your repositories.

It turns out that there’s several different clipboard-like interfaces for X and I will not pretend to understand each of them. Simply saying that you’re going to put something into X’s clipboard isn’t specific enough. xclip can redirect bash output to various X displays (it defaults to $DISPLAY if no display is explicitly stated) and to the sundry X selections (primary, secondary or clipboard).

What would a more common usage of xclip be? Perhaps:

cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | xclip -selection CLIPBOARD

Now you can paste your hairy public keys somewhere useful and not have to worry if you captured any bad characters or not. Or perhaps puke your .vimrc file to pastebin for bragging rights. Do you have any other ways to pipe terminal output to X? Let me know in the comments.

This one goes out to Michael @Voretaq7 Graziano. He’s been sharpening his collection of wiggle blade daggers ever since he discovered that I access one server of mine using a password-less RSA keypair. I finally got around to rectifying that situation the other evening.

Obviously I didn’t want to recreate keypairs on my host machine and break all of the other applications that depend on them. Can one add a password to an existing RSA or DSA private key? Yes! Yes you can!

The key to the situation (pun intended) is to use the –p option for ssh-keygen (assuming that you’re using OpenSSH, of course) and then pointing it to the private key that you want to protect. For example:

ssh-keygen –p –f ~/.ssh/id_rsa

This also works to change the password on an existing protected private key.

Michael, this ssh-agent -D is for you. =)

As I’ve been making my way in the realm of the self employed, I’ve had cause to stop and consider the different ways and means by which people make a living. Just the other day, I made an interesting obvervation concerning how the generational view on employment has seemed to change. When discussing what someone’s family member does as their vocation, this seems to be the general breakdown of how it’s viewed:

“The Greatest Generation” – those who grew up in the depression and were young adults during WWII. My grandparents. They tend to be focused on the company that one works for. “Yes, he works for Boeing.” Only when their family member is self employed are they forced to consistently explain what role the person plays. “He’s self employed. He works on computers.”

The Baby Boomers. This is my parents’ generation. They seem to focus on a job title. “Our son is a Systems Administrator.” The focus is less on the company, likely because during my parents’ generation it was becoming less and less likely that a person would work for the same company for their entire life.

Millenials, AKA Generation Y. This is my generation, myself having been born in the poster year for Gen Y: 1982. When asked about our vocation, we seem to have two parallel thoughts. The first is that we don’t seem to see our work as separate from the rest of our life. We have had the fortune to build on the hard work of previous generations to be able to freely choose a vocation that we love and feel called to. “What do you do?” has a larger meaning to us than it seems to have for prior generations. The second thought is that we define what we do not by the company we work for, or the job title we’ve been given, but by a job or project description. “I work on the computer systems that allows a business to function competitively.” We also tend to inject our sense of “calling” into the description. I only just now realized that that’s probably why I’ve lately been changing the way I describe my work: “I make companies happy about the technology that runs their business.” That’s vastly more touchy-feely than my grandparents’ generation commonly expressed their vocation, and yet it’s effortless and natural for me.

I’m sure that I’m not the only one to make these observation. I’m certain that there’s plenty of scientific and pop-science writings on it. I’m just not terribly familiar with it personally. Have you noticed a similar thing? Either way, which culture do you come from? I’m sure this is a different experience in different countries around the world. What is your generation and how do you explain your work to others?

My Problem:

I have an HP ML 115 G5 server that uses a NVIDIA NFP3400 Chipset for storage. I have two pairs of hard drives that are mirrored. The Windows Server 2008 event log was displaying the following errors reported by the nvstor64 driver:

Event 129 nvstor64 “reset to device, DeviceRaidPort2 was issued”

Event 5 nvstor64 “A parity error was detected on DeviceRaidPort2

Sometimes the errors would appear five to seven times per second and bring the server down to an unusable crawl. Windows started seeing disk errors with the drives that were presented to it by the controller:

Event 51 “An error was detected on device DeviceHarddisk0DR3 during a paging operation”

Eventually NTFS corruption began to be seen:

Event 55 NTFS “The file system structure on the disk is corrupted and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume [volume name]“

My Solution:

The drivers are likely to be old or corrupted. In my case they appeared to have been corrupted after performing a bare metal restoration of Windows SBS 2008. Download the latest MediaShield package for the nForce chipset that is in your server or workstation from NVIDIA’s driver page (in my case with an HP ProLiant ML 115 it was the nForce Professional 3000 Series chipset). Then, carefully consider the danger of installing the drivers. In my case one of my two mirrors were broken apart and I had to delete one of the disks in the RAID utility and rebuild the mirror pair. Make a good backup of your system if at all possible (rather difficult if you’re having storage controller issues. You may want to remove and image your hard drives for safe keeping.

Installing fresh, new drivers may solve your problem. It did for me.

The Long Story:

I sought out help from HP’s own technical support and was pointed in the direction of this HP Support Forum thread. From that thread, you will be led to many others with similar troubles. It all seems to be centered around the nvstor driver and its interaction with the NVIDIA nForce chipset. It was as if the driver had been corrupted somehow. The ML 115 uses a NVIDIA NFP3400 Chipset for storage. That chipset uses the NVIDIA MediShield suite of tools that contains the drivers and utilities to manage it all. You can find specific NVIDIA drivers here at NVIDIA’s driver page. It just seems wrong to be on NVIDIA’s site parsing through graphics card drivers to find storage drivers for a server. Oh yeah, that’s because it is wrong!!

What’s especially troubling is that there is no link for the Windows version of the NVIDIA chipset drivers or the MediaShield suite of tools on the ML 115′s own drivers and support page. The only drivers on HP’s official page are for RHEL 5. I’m all for more Linux drivers in the world, by why not also offer the Windows version? The crazy hoops one has to jump through to find the exact chipset model number and then learn about NVIDIA’s nomenclature concerning how they package their drivers in a MediaShieled bundle is less than ideal.

Nevertheless, after finding the latest drivers on NVIDIA’s own drivers page, I installed the MediaShield package. Unfortunately, it broke apart one of my two mirrors, so I had to delete one of the disks in the RAID software and rebuild the array. That was an unnecessary bit of drama. Once that was rebuilt, I monitored the event log for days and none of the nvstor64 errors returned.

Disclaimer: I have and do write for various RedGate Software websites as an independent author. I have received no kickback from writing this blog post other than perhaps making David Convery smile for a fraction of a second.

RedGate Software has recently announced a promotion called “DBA in Space” in which one hard working DBA will be shot into space. Said DBA will presumably be given sufficient bodily protection for the journey as part of the deal.

The competition is in three stages. The first stage is explained by the DBA in Space website thusly:

The competition starts with our five week video quiz. All you have to do is answer the questions and complete some simple SQL tasks. Each week, new questions and tasks will be released. You can get started right away, or join in any time you like – the competition is open till 18th November.

Once you complete the SQL tasks that are presented, you then need to fill out a simple application form. After November 18th, fifteen finalists will be chosen. At that point, those fifteen finalists will need to campaign for votes. The DBA with the most votes gets to be a satellite for a day!

As with any competition, there is some fine print. Due to legal restrictions, Tennessee, Wyoming, Northern Ireland, and Quebec residents are excluded from being shot into space. The actual catapulting will not be done by anyone at RedGate (although I’m sure Robert Chipperfield would give it a go), but rather Space Adventures Ltd. For full details, please see the DBA in Space website.

If any one of my readers get picked as one of the final fifteen, let me know and I’ll plug you on the blog for some votes! I’m already hoping that Sean and Jennifer McCown try out for it. I’d like to see them fight each other for votes in the final fifteen. =)

This is a short “reblog” of a post that MXToolbox recently made concerning their favorite email related tools. Every year for the last three years they compile a list of their employees’ favorite online tools for email troubleshooting. Check out this year’s list of ten. Sure, three of them are their own products, but those rock too. I’ll include a short snipping of some of the products they listed:

From MX Toolbox’s Third Annual List of Email Related Tools:

2. Send Test Email- This tool is from Wormly and is pretty cool. All you have to do is enter your SMTP server and then a sender and recipient. Then just hit the button and it shows you the SMTP conversation.

6. Quick Zone Check – Performs a series of checks on your name servers and email servers. Returns WHOis, MX, Name Server and more info all in one place.

9. [email protected] – MxToolBox Ping is one of the Free Tools provided by MxToolBox to help you determine if Inbound and Outbound mail flow is working. Simply send an email from your network to [email protected] and the tool will look at the email headers of your message and send you a notification back immediately. Please note that the subject and body do not matter. The response email will include several helpful troubleshooting tools including your Outbound IP, server hops, any transaction times or delays and it can help trace the route your email is taking to discover any outbound gateways you might be using.

I would personally like to recommend that you try [email protected] Right now, send a blank email to that address. Do it! It’s fun!

Do you have any other online email tools that weren’t on MX Toolbox’s list? Are you making the next best tool right now? Or is it a script that you only share with the cool kids? Let me know in the comments below.