Archive for July, 2008

I have to rant here a bit… it is, however, my blog so I will!

I previously had Dish Network satellite and I have to say that I was pleased with the quality and the guide program as well. I would love those automatic channel changers at a scheduled time, which by the way my new cable company does not have and I hate.

The cable company that I’m currently with is ok… it has ok programming, and I like that it is all in real time. Unlike Dish where it was on a delay and would hate, because when talking to my dad while watching a game he would scream they scored, and on my side they still haven’t hiked the ball.

I have heard good things about Direct TV. What a lot of my friends have raved about is the NFL Sunday ticket… man that sounds great. But how the heck am I going to justify paying over $260 for 5 months of games.

I guess I’m really going to have to work hard on this blog to start making that kind of dough.

How many of you currently have Direct TV? How many have gotten the Sunday NFL ticket?? Should I let go of my cable company? recently i found out that Verizon will be installing FiOS in out neighborhood….  yeah baby! Now aren’t they associated with Direct TV for their tv package?

I’m gonna have to look into that and get back to you…

Lately I’ve been having more and more frequent issues with my web hosting company.  It’s a shame because I have been with the same company for over 7 years. I think they’re just upset with me because I’m grandfathered in at the original price of $40 a year.

Oh well! Who’s fault is that? Anyway, the issue has been with the uptime as well as how long the sites have been taking to download. At different time intervals the site may take 20 secs to load while some times it may take 4-5 seconds. What gives?

I may be searching for a new web hosting company. I found a neat site at http://www.webhostingpal.com/. It seems to be a comparison site of many different hosting companies and what I like the best is that they all seem to be within that $5 a month range. But also, I always seem to lean more toward linux accounts, they list which ones are and aren’t and the type of hosting panel each company provides.

Settling for a web hosting company seems to be a little daunting, especially when you consider having to move sites such as this one over….. that’s something to consider. MySql…. oh boy!

Okay, this was my dilemma and I couldn’t google this one to find a solution. I had to resort to calling the Cisco Gurus themselves.

This was the issue:

Client has an outside IP of 70.X.X.X and an internal IIS server of 192.X.X.100. They host an internal site that all within the 192 network can access.

Now they wanted me to help them allow outside access to the IIS server and access the site via the web using https, or as follows: https://70.X.X.X/web.

I created a static NAT using the https ports and I couldn’t get anywhere. I tried different things and nuffin! Ahhhhhh!

Called Cisco TAC (Technical Access Center)! This is what I was sent from the tech, whom in my opinion rocks. As soon as I followed his intructions it worked perfectly!

This is it:

“Look like we are missing a line.
The line you require is the following :

access-list outside_access_in line 1 extended permit tcp any host 70.X.X.X eq 443

That line will use the next 2 lines described below to allow access on port 443 to the server with the IP =192.X.X.100 if connection to the server is attempted from the Internet using IP=70.X.X.X as the destination address.

static (inside,outside) tcp interface https 192.X.X.100 https netmask 255.255.255.255 interface Vlan2 ip address 70.X.X.X 255.255.255.X

These last 2 lines are already part of the ASA current configuration so you don’t need to enter them.”

That was it… simple, but it works!

While visiting a client, I was asked to work on a PC because it was a bit slow. I suspected spyware and sure enough that’s what it was. But while working on the PC, or in this, while waiting for the PC to be cleaned the client asked if I by any chance knew of any sites that offered MAC games especially for kids.

LOL…. I dunno! I’m a PC guy. Anyway, I showed her my trusty tool, Google.com, and how to use it for better searches. So, I typed “MAC games for kids”.

Immediately we were shown a list of hits for kids games. As we scrolled and looked at each one, because of course we’re looking for free ones, on in particular caught my clients eye, Midoritech.com.

One game that was most interesting was the one listed as “Global Warming“. I thought it was an excellent idea to incorporate the current need of education on global warming and our environment into a game. It’s a nice way to teach kids at a young age on how to be responsible for their environment, and the future generation.

Shame I don’t have a Mac… I may just convert….

NOT!! Just give me Ubuntu any day! Plus,  I don’t have any kids…. I’ll get for my little nephew.

Now this was one of those stupid things that Microsoft decided to add to their new OS, Vista. The UAC, or User Account Control. Man, what crap…. makes my job as a technician more annoying now.

I worked on a laptop with Vista Business installed. After introducing the pc to the windows domain, I proceeded to add the Domain Admins network group to the local Administrators group of the laptop. Nice!

After which, I noticed I could not access the windows updates through Internet Explorer. I did not have permissions. What!!??!?? I just added it… ok.

Then I noticed that Internet Explorer 7 would always start at the Runounce screen where I have to choose my default search engine. Ahhhhhhhhh!!

So what is the issue….. UAC!!!

This can actually be an easy one.

This is how I was able to fix and there are other solutions!

1. I was able to turn UAC off.

2. Go to start and type msconfig  and hit enter.

3. Select tools from the above tabs and select ‘disable UAC’ and reboot.

That was it… man, I hate this!