My good friend Nick has given me an early Christmas present. I had previously mentioned that I have been laid off. I have been planning on finishing Nanobyte in my spare time beginning next week.

Nick was nice enough to get Nanobyte an official website. The new home of Nanobyte is now www.nanobytecms.com!. So far I have just copied the files over, so it looks identical to the test site. I soon plan to make it "pop" if you will..

All Nanobyte news will now be posted on NanobyteCMS.com.

Well, I had planned a great post for yesterday, seeing as I got Bacula working on my domain at home. Unfortunately I was dealt a blow and had to skip out on the posting for the night.

I was informed yesterday that my last day at my current job will be Friday. This is not due to any reason other than over budgeting. Thus is the life of a contractor - thrown to the proverbial curb. What is even worse is I was in the middle of several automation projects and I was defining standard procedures for PC imaging - something that was needed desperately here.

My next few days will be busy - but I sincerely hope I can get some posting in, as I have been having slight withdrawls from it.

I spent the majority of last week trying to set up my server as a PDC (Primary Domain Controller). I followed a tutorial online to do this, and got pretty far in. When it came time to add users however, I received several errors.

I was trying to add a user using the smbldap-tools, which once working proved to be very handy.

The road I took to get the scripts working on the other hand - not so fun.

I tried various tutorials, then decided to stick with one that seemed the most relevant for my situation on the opensuse wiki.

I Googled this error and came up with the solution:

There is another trick: go to Local Area Connection Properties of windows >
Tcp/ip properties > Advanced TCP/IP Settings > WINS tab, then add the ip
address of your PDC server (assumed it's a wins server either) and in the
netbios setting choose "Enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP". Good luck.

I plan on writing my own tutorial that is more explanatory about how to go about this massive configuration, but for now, please refer to the tutorials I have linked.

Well, last week was no less eventful that the week before it. Taranis - my server - was having some issues and it turns out the OS drive in it went out. This was due to a few reasons. Windows Home server balances storage every60 - 90 mins regularly, and the OS drive was having some write errors which were aggravated by the constant activity. On top of that, I ran some hardware diagnostics and saw the Hard Drive operating temperature was about 120 degrees F. With proper airflow, they should be closer to 90 degrees or less.

Unfortunately, I only had an 80GB hard drive for a replacement. Instead of putting the smaller drive in the server, I replaced my desktop hard drive, then used that drive for the server. I spent alot of time debating whether I wanted to use Linux, or stick with WHS. After hours of backing up my data, I decided to try openSuse.

OpenSuse is great. It's very easy to install and very robust. It has a package manager similar to aptitude on Debian. My plans for the server now are being extended to PDC, File and Printer server, as well as VM host for 1 or 2 virtual machines. When the server is Idle, it uses 244 MB of RAM and 300-400MHz of CPU. I am very very happy with the performance of Novell's Linux Distro.

To find out more about openSuse, you can visit their website at Opensuse Dot Org .

In other news,, not much has been happening. I hope to have some time to put more work into Nanobyte soon, since the server has taken priority. Once I get the server into a functional state once more, I'll have a chance to post a few tutorials based on the new setup - including Bacula, tightvnc, xrdp, samba, ldap and more!

The past few days have been extraordinarily busy. Mary ended up winning the contest to play onstage with Weezer, and I didn't get home that night until 1:30 AM. She did awesome, and rocked..Hard. Unfortunately, they were having security issues so no one got to go backstage, and Weezer didn't even do autographs, so Mary was pretty bummed.

I also ended up working on the theming for Nanobyte quite a bit more, and I really like it now. I'm going for Blues and Blacks for simplicity and professionalism.

I also have been working Second shift Yesterday and Today to cover for a Co-Worker that just got married (Congratulations Chris!!), so my entire schedule has been thrown off this week so far - and to add to it, I get to come in at 7 AM tomorrow.

Ive decided I am going to try to go back to school and get my AA degree in Network Administration, and maybe persue a BA. I've taken up some scripting tasks at work and I'm trying to relearn VB and VB scripting, which is actually not as hard as I remember luckily. Maybe I can get out of the Helpdesk someday!

Anyways, I guess that is it for now, but stay tuned!

P.S. - The picture is from the concert, Mary is the Violinist up front in the skirt.

Ironically, the day I post a YouTube video, XKCD posted a comic about YouTube commenters.

I found an article from an interview with Steve Balmer regarding Microsoft's future, and loved this paragraph:

Microsoft does "very well on balance" when it comes to software developers, he said. But the company has two areas of weakness, according to Ballmer: high-performance and technical computing -- which is important to Microsoft because "there are 5 million engineers and they use a lot of compute power" -- and in Web server applications, where it is losing out to Linux and PHP.

Go PHP and Linux!!!

You can read the full story on PC World.

I spent the last few days helping my wife enter a contest for a local radio station. The contest involved playing a Weezer song on a string instrument and then uploading a video of the performance to YouTube.

YouTube ended up surprising me - allowing me to upload a 925MB file without timing out (first try too!) and then converted the video into whatever codecs they use. I could have played with teh video some more to cut down my upload time, but it was late and I was tired... and sadly, Youtube's video Quality is very poor..

Well .LAN 2008 was a a great success. We had 9 people show up, but we had plenty of room for more. We are talking about .LAN 2009 already, and we are pumped. It sounds like we will have double the attendees next year.

Since I missed an entire weekend of productivity, I've been playing catch-up. I accidentally infected my Home Server with a virus (it was late and I wasn't thinking). I was able to get it removed yesterday, and then decided to install WHS on a new HDD today, so I feel like it was time wasted, but I know more about manually removing the virus I had now (no clue what the name was, some downloader tojan).

I started playing Spore and O. M. G. is that game addicting. I love it. I started out with a carnivore, and made it into space, then realized that there was more to the game then blindly killing things.. so I started over and have a 4 legged omnivore this time.. hehe.

Ive been burning through some of my tasks that I had planned on Nanobyte. The menu system is pretty much done, Permissions are pretty much done, and it is looking good. I think the next goal is to make everything paginate automatically, which is just going to require a lot of rewriting my queries, but shouldn't be too hard, only time consuming.

I have many topics to write about this week, and as much as I would like to post them all now, I think that it will be a slow week for me, so I need to pace myself.

One last note: I was put onto the Early first-shift at work, so I'm now working 6AM to 2:30 PM, and I am pumped, more time at home!!

Well today is Day One of .LAN. It starts in about.. 6 hours give or take. It feels like Christmas. I'm wrought with anticipation to get my first frag for my team.

More later..