The Vince Files » Technology

My First Google AdSense Cheque

Vince — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 06:28:04 +0000

I got my first Google AdSense cheque in the mail today! I’ve finally crossed the $100 USD mark for the first time ever. Google pays on a monthly basis if you have a minimum $100USD accumulated.

I’ve been displaying AdSense ads on my blog for quite a while. It’s just been in the past several months that my traffic has increased due to the popularity of one of my blog posts. It’s on this post that most of the clicks have occurred.

So it seems good blog content is rewarded after all. I better think of other things to blog about now.

Just bought a DLink DNS-323

Vince — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:26:23 +0000

So NCIX was having another one of their sales again. This time the deals were pretty good.

The DLink DNS-323 is a network-attached storage enclosure that holds 2 SATA drives. I decided to buy 2 1-terabyte Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives which were also on sale.

For the past little while, we’ve been mostly using stand-alone drives with USB enclosures. Some of them we’ve bought as a retail package. Others, we’ve bought the drive first and then slapped an enclosure around it. But all are USB-attached and provide no fault tolerance.

Herein lies the appeal of the DNS-323. This unit can take 2 SATA drives and can use them in the following configurations:

Normal – The 2 disks are 2 individual drives
JBOD – aka “Just a Bunch of disks”
RAID 0 – Striped
RAID 1 – Mirrored

For our purposes, we will be storing some valuable data (pics, videos, etc.) on this unit so reliability, redundancy and fault-tolerance is top priority. I opted, therefore, to configure this in RAID 1.

Installation was a breeze – install hard drives, connect to router and power up. I did have a problem with my VMWare Server’s built-in DHCP server assigning the DNS-323 an IP address. The DNS-323 was supposed to get its IP address from my Linksys WRT54G router instead. Luckily, the DNS-323’s included software has a tool to find your unit on the network. Once I found the unit on the network, I accessed its web-based configuration interface and assigned a static IP address.

The DNS-323 has a built-in FTP server, iTunes server, BitTorrent client and also acts as a UPnP AV media server. The DNS-323 runs Linux and is accessible via Telnet. For more info on the DNS-323, you can visit the Wiki.

The bottleneck with our setup will most likely be our network until we can upgrade our router to Gigabit Ethernet. My aging WRT54G is only a 100 Mbps router. So transferring files from my computer to the DNS-323 will run at 12.5 megabytes per second at the fastest. It will most likely be around 10 MB/s.

Switching to VMWare Server

Vince — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 06:07:54 +0000

I’ve mentioned before that this site is running in a VirtualPC environment.

VPC_W2K3

I’ve decided to switch to VMWare Server. I’ll be bringing the server down so I can import my Virtual PC image into VMWare.

UPDATE: VMWare Server’s import tool failed to import my Virtual PC .vmc file. Luckily they have a separate converter tool available available at http://www.vmware.com/download/converter/.

UPDATE: OK. We’re back and the server is up and running. It took me a while to get the networking figured out but everything seems to have worked out in the end. Networking in Virtual PC seems much easier since the Virtual PC handles it all like it were a separate computer. In VMWare, additional network adapters are added to the host. Then you specify which adapter the guest OS connects to.

UPDATE: The hardware in my virtual machine has changed so much that Windows is asking to re-activate with Windows product activation. After I established network connectivity, I just activated over the Internet and we’re officially, legitimately, back.

VMWARE_W2K3

Rogers hijacking failed DNS lookups

Vince — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:26:34 +0000

If you are a Rogers Internet subscriber and you try to reach a non-existent URL (e.g. http://asdfzxcv.google.com), you will be redirected to a Rogers search page displaying ads.

Look here, and here for more info.

So if I were a domain owner and someone enters “ww.mydomain.com” instead of “www.mydomain”, I’d be pretty upset if the user’s ISP redirected them to one of its pages.

The solution is actually fairly simple: make every conceivable subdomain valid on your domain. So, http://asdf.thevincefiles.net is just as valid as http://showmethemoney.thevincefiles.net. There may not be sites there, but at least it’s my server you’re hitting and my IIS6 “under construction” page that you’re seeing. So, in the future, I’ll have the option of setting up multiple sites under my domain:

http://gallery.thevincefiles.net (my gallery)
http://sp.thevincefiles.net (my test SharePoint site using Windows Authentication)
http://sp2.thevincefiles.net (extends “sp” using Forms-based Authentication)

All you have to do is add a wildcard entry to your nameserver:

wildcard_dns

This basically tells my DNS server (ZoneEdit.com) to redirect all .thevincefiles.net requests to my server at 24.87.52.208. I then set up the host headers on my webserver to serve different sites depending on the subdomain.

Simple.

Virtual PC 2007 Blue Screen of Death

Vince — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 07:07:00 +0000

I logged in to my Virtual PC 2007 running Windows Server 2003 and pressed ALT+Enter to go in to full-screen mode and suddenly, I see this:

W2K3 on Virtual PC 2007 BSOD

I reset the Virtual PC, captured a printscreen then proceeded to try to upload my photo to my gallery. I didn’t realize my gallery and this blog are being hosted by this Virtual PC. Whoops.

The only thing I remember was that I was watching Windows Media Center TV on my host computer (running Vista Home Premium) so maybe there was some display driver conflict when my Virtual PC tried to go into FullScreen mode while my Hauppauge PVR-150 was busy. Luckily, I just had to reboot my Virtual PC, without having to restart my physical computer.