What happens if Google goes down?

As I listened to the Net At Nite podcast hosts discuss Page Flakes this morning, I was thinking about personalised home pages and online presence. I realized that, like hosts Leo and Amber, I'll try a service for a while, then let it trickle off.

Right now, I seem to have many of my eggs in Google's basket. Blogs, homepage, rss, etc. I started to wonder, "what would happen to my stuff if Google went down?" Not as crazy as it might seem, as Google recently shut down it's pay video service and the corresponding DRM server, effectively disabling all videos purchased by customers over the past few years. Although they later extended the shutdown notice, users will still lose the ability to play their videos six months after final shutdown.

So, when I went to look at the Fake Steve Jobs blog a bit later, I was rather ironically shocked to discover that blogspot was down. "Server error. Try again in 30 seconds." I tried my blog. Same thing.

As you can see, it's up now, but this situation gives one pause in storing stuff online. At the very least, I think I'll be backing up my posts monthly, even if it's to something as simple as an html file.

(BTW, Page Flakes is very cool.)

Friendly HTTP Errors Are Not

Debugging ASP pages? Then friendly HTTP errors will drive you mad.

Friendly errors will show you something like HTTP error 500 - server error, instead of
Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0126' Include file not found. Needless to say, the latter is much more helpful.

This is easy to turn off within IEs advanced settings. However, minds greater than mine have decided I don't need access to that tab.

If this is the case for you, simply run RegEdt32 and look for the following value name: Friendly HTTP errors. It should live under [KEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]. Change the value to NO, exit RegEdt32 and restart IE. You may also have to dump your browser cache.

Using WINDIFF to compare 2 directories

Have you ever copied the contents of a folder and the operation erred out midway because of a permission conflict or corrupt file? How do you determine which files are in the new location, so you can restart the copy operation? File-by-file comparison can be difficult if you're dealing with a large number of files.

The DIFF command has been around for a while in the Unix world, and does just what we want. It compares two directories (or files) and reports the differences between them. With WINDIFF, this functionality is available for Windows.

Syntax: C:\>windiff path1 path2

Example:

C:>windiff \wwwroot\GLOBAL\img \Backup\global\img

Generates this:
.\thumbs.db identical
.\vsd.gif identical
.\vssver.scc identical
.\windows.gif only in \wwwroot\GLOBAL\img
.\xls.gif only in \wwwroot\GLOBAL\img
.\zip.gif only in \wwwroot\GLOBAL\img

If you don't have WINDIFF, it is available as part of the WinXP SP2 Support Tools suite (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=49ae8576-9bb9-4126-9761-ba8011fabf38&displaylang=en).

No remote access to Macs for updates? No problem!

I was looking into getting remote desktop access to some of the Macs I manage. The reason? As a lazy (in a good way) sysadmin, I didn't want to keep going down to my lab to update the Macs when security patches came out. I wanted something that came with the box, a la Windows Remote Desktop (RDP). I didn't want to install third party products like VNC or pay for anything extra.

Voilà, here is the solution:

ssh username@remotehost
sudo softwareupdate -l
sudo softwareupdate -i name_of_update

Firefox 2.0.0.4 doesn't like limited users

I run as a limited user on my XP machines, and Firefox 2.0.0.4 doesn't like this. Even after I install/upgrade Firefox as an admin user, I get "One or more files could not be updated..." each time I run Firefox as my regular user.

Josh Flanagan has a fix for this. I hope the Mozilla folks fix this for the next release or my confidence will begin flagging.

DNS Attacks

Interesting reading about the internet's Achilles heel.

DNS Amplification Attacks (packetstorm)
DNS Amplification Attacks (ripe)
DNS Cache Poisoners - Lazy, Stupid, or Evil?