Posted on

Disc Golf Horse Shoes = Amazing!

So the other day at the place I’ve been staying we had a house party and during the prep we realized we had no lawn games!

Being the stubborn/resourceful person I can be, I decided to invent a game and after examining what we had laying around, and my overwhelming desire to play horseshoes, a new game was born: disc golf horseshoes!

It’s easy to play, easy to set up and take down, and super cheap… and I forgot to mention that it is totally fun!

What you need:
– five gallon buckets (2)
– disc golf discs (minimum 2, preferably 4)

How to set it up:
1. place the two buckets about 20 feet apart (you can change this based on your group’s skill level :-P )
2. fill the buckets 1/3 with water (weighs it down, prevents bouncing out if filled with rocks)

The rules of Disc Golf Horseshoes (DGH) are almost identical to regular horseshoes, with the exception being that in normal horseshoes only the highest scoring team keeps the points but in DGH any throws that score points count.

Ways to score:
Ringer – Get your disc in the bucket – 3 points
Leaner – Lean your disc against the bucket – 2 points
Close Enough – get your disc within 1 disc length from the edge of the bucket – 1 point

Games should be played to 21 or 11 for faster games

Try it out, have a blast and let me know what you think. Please share this with your friends and let’s take the tailgating/bbq lawn games by storm!

Posted on

list running processes in linux

i have always used

# ps awx

for listing system process information. but recently i wanted to list more specific memory and processor details in snapshot mode of the entire system. the command # top is great for monitoring a live system, but if you want to be able to store snapshots of processes for logging, # ps is the command to start from. i was led to the -u switch and have been using the following version:

# ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND

Posted on

Ubuntu 11.04

I am loving the newest release of Ubuntu – it is fastest, leaner and more user friendly than ever. I also really like the docking bar on the side – all of the ease of access that previously was in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but with an intelligent autohide feature.

benbernier.com - Ubuntu Review

Some of the complaints that I have about this version of Ubuntu Linux are:

  1. Nvidia graphics support has taken a step backwards, drivers are less stable, and you are encouraged to use the native linux driver, which is not as advanced as Nvidia’s
  2. The Start Menu – this new start menu has a great search feature and usually is able to find what you are looking for, but i’m stubborn and old fashioned and i really miss being able to open a fulll listing of my apps (i don’t always know what I’m looking for when I go to my menus)
  3.  Updates introduced issues – on two machines that are running the desktop version of this Ubuntu 11.04 hard crashes were introduced by system updates. One of them updated the grub files on a hard drive that was not the boot drive, and then removed the MBR records from the boot drive, this ultimately lead to the users data becoming corrupted due to a reboot link it introduced. The other user lost X (graphical mode) and was basically unable to dual screen (with Twinview) for a few days.

None of these issues are super-major, but they all were setbacks in the new version of Ubuntu. I guess that in the open source world when a person installs a bleeding edge software product, one must expect it to still be bloody

Posted on

Don’t Forget About Live CD’s

So I’ve been troubleshooting this computer. It’s a Windows XP machine, relatively new, decent hardware, all SiS integrated components. Video works fine, USB works fine all SATA components are fine. No matter what I do I can’t get the network card to work –> fails to obtain a lease, static IP configuration doesn’t allow me to ping my local gateway. I have tried all my tricks, hard coding the MAC address into a static lease in the router, setting up both DHCP and a matching static in the machine. The network cable is good, DHCP works fine on other machines on the same cable. Also, the HD audio is not producing any noise either.

 

I’ve ran my personal tools, (ComboFix, CCleaner, Advanced System Care and Malware Bytes Anti-Malware) and they found a few things but nothing major. The customer’s machine currently has Spyware Doctor installed and it may have interfered with ComboFix, but I did disable it. I even uninstalled the NIC and rebooted (there were no previous drivers to roll back to). After exhausting these resources onsite, I asked if I could bring it back to the office for diagnosis. My initial gut told me it was a software issue, but at this point I’m leaning toward failed hardware.

 

Why I didn’t think of it while I was onsite I am not sure, but it occurred to me that I could runfull hardware tests from a Live CD – I downloaded and burned to disc the most recent CD-sized Knoppix (6.2.11) – a great tool for trying out hardware, trying out Linux and just all around access to things Winbloze just doesn’t allow.

 

Sure enough I booted Knoppix and was instantly online on the same network card that ethernet would not work in Windows. Software issue.

 

I’ve since booted the AVG Rescue CD and was scanning overnight, and have burned the newest SiS network and audio drivers to disc for a reinstall. I am not sure what the final issue will be proven to be, but the point is, don’t overlook live Linux CD’s as part of routine testing. It can save valuable hours of troubleshooting and truly isolate the problems to hardware or software.

Posted on

DNS Server Basics

A description of DNS server functionality, and the steps required to remove a domain from one.

What is a DNS server?
DNS (Domain Name System) is the protocol that is used by computer networks to translate IP (Internet Protocol) addresses into domain names. A DNS server is a computer specifically set up to be queried by other computers for the IP-to-domain translations. There are many kinds of records that can be associated with a specific domain name, but the ones of primary interest for this document are A records (used to point websites to the computers that host them) and MX records (used to point email to their appropriate server). The result of a DNS query is a resolved IP address. Every time a web page is loaded or an email is sent, at least one DNS query has resolved by a DNS server.

What is required to remove a listed domain?
For a DNS server to stop answering for a domain, records associated with the specific domain must be removed from the list of records the DNS server has. In most situations, the minimum numbers of records associated with a domain for a website and email to function is 4. One record for each of the following:

1. A record domain.com XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX (ip address)
2. A record www.domain.com XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX (ip address)
3. MX record domain.com {name of email server} {priority 1}
4. MX record domain.com {name of email different server} {priority 2}8

How can having incorrect DNS entries affect domain and email queries?
When a potential contact sends an email to a company with a hosted email service ({user}@domain.com), the email leaves the client machine (by email client such as Outlook, or web client such as Gmail) and arrives at their email server for processing. First, the email server checks itself to see if it is the destination. If it is the destination server, the email gets delivered to the appropriate domain and account. Otherwise, the email server then performs a DNS query and resolves the address of the hosted email server and delivers the message to it.

When a queried server does not answer for a domain, it should return a result of Unknown or Failed. When a queried server knows the result, it returns the requested record type.