I launched NickJr.com for my daughter a few minutes ago and found that their website was hacked or seriously misconfigured …
The Digital Home of Steve Bostedor
Geek Zing
Hiding From The Limelight
I’ve been taking a break from the public blogging and broadcasting thing for a while. I’ve just been so busy with Bozteck and personal life happenings and I’ve had little to no time to continue the podcasting and blogging.
The VNCScan product has been doing excellent and I’m still excited after all of these years to make contact with so many customers all over the world. It seems that everyone who uses my product has grown to rely upon it so heavily that they feel that they can’t function as an IT admin without it. It’s extremely humbling to hear their stories and know that I’ve done something that has changed the lives of so many all over the world.
I have something in mind for the “next big thing” to come out of my Bozteck company and I’m preheating the oven as we speak. This new product will make just as big of an impact on the consumer market as VNCScan has made over the past 10 years in the IT field. In fact, it will be equally desirable to both industries!
I’m going to join a DotNet developer group in Ann Arbor (yes, there are still user groups in existence) so that I can network with other software developers. I wrote VNCScan entirely by myself but this time, I’d like to find a programming and business partner because when it’s done, it’s going to be bigger than something that I can handle on my own.
So, I say all of this to say … I will still be in the background and not very web visible for a while besides this blog. I need to commit to this new venture so that I can be first to market.
Video From Disney World 2006
This is footage from our 2006 Disney World trip. Most of this is Hollywood Studios but there was also some Epcot and Magic Kingdom.
Enterprise Computing In The Home
I have a subscription to Microsoft Technet. That allows you to download and use just about any of their business applications, servers, and operating systems for learning and testing purposes for one annual cost. For as much development, research, and geekery that I do on a daily basis, this is priceless.
I have a pretty powerful server in my basement. It is powered by a quad core XEON with 16GB of RAM. I decided to install Windows 2008 r2 Datacenter on it so that I can play with Hyper-V. At work, we use almost exclusively VMWare ESX servers. Due to their greedy tampering with their already overly taxing pricing structure, I am seriously considering switching to Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution.
My first Virtual Machine on the server was a Windows 2008 R2 domain controller. I also added the roles of DHCP and DNS for reasons obvious to anyone who has read this far and is still with me.
I’ve added every computer and laptop to the new BOSTEDOR.NET domain but I left them logging in as local user accounts until I either have time to migrate their settings manually to a domain user profile or find a good tool that will do it for me.
My next bit of bringing the Enterprise into the home is to play with various Internet security gateway products to see which one delivers the speed, accuracy, and security that works best for home users at an affordable cost.
IT Unwrapped–A Technology Show
Dean Bostedor and I have started a new technology show called IT Unwrapped. The show will focus on IT related topics in a laid back and fun atmosphere. A lot of the existing IT related podcasts are great sources of information for the Enterprise class CIO types but we wanted to aim our show at the full spectrum of IT admins from the small guys to the Enterprise.
I started out broadcasting on the classic airwaves with a former employer and long time friend, Tom Diroff. After doing a couple of shows in “old media”, I decided to focus on the new podcasting world instead.
There is so much more creative freedom with your own podcast … you are free to make the mistakes required in order to get it right. While doing The App Show and in the early days of The iPad Show, I’ve made (and learned from) plenty of those mistakes. I’m sure that I’ll make more as time goes on and I hope that each of them lead to new insight that makes the IT Unwrapped show the best show ever.
Dean is a super bright guy (I’m not just saying that because we’re cousins) – he truly does have the brain for this industry and the ability to grasp new technologies extremely fast. We do a lot of work together, share similar humor styles, and differ on opinion in just the right way to make a show like IT Unwrapped something that will really fun to do – and we hope that you have fun with it, too.
VNCScan Network Troubleshooting (Part 1)
Introduction
VNCScan is a powerful tool that can you can use to administer most aspects of computer management. The vast majority of our feedback says that we’ve done a great job so far of making the tool as intuitive and easy to use as possible for a program with this large of a feature set. We’ve looked at how competing products have bloated their options to almost usability and have been trying hard not to let that happen to VNCScan.
With that being said, there are some common pitfalls that you can run into with any application that needs to access remote computers in an administrative role and this article series is here to help you though some of the most common of them.
If you have a suggestion for this series on VNCScan Network Troubleshooting, please leave a comment. I read them every day.
Access Denied
This is probably one of the most common support requests that we see here. There are a lot of causes for getting an “Access Denied” error when deploying VNCScan, running scripts, or performing the many other remote Windows management tasks. Some of these may seem like a no-brainer to you while others may be unexpected.
Set your Administrative account in VNCScan.
Let’s start by making sure that you have supplied Administrative credentials to VNCScan for it to use when connecting to remote computers. Even if you are currently logged into your computer as a Domain Admin, it’s still a good idea to tell VNCScan what username and password to use when running scripts because it needs to pass those credentials to commands that don’t necessarily run under the context of the currently logged in user.
If you would like to use your domain admin username/password, the best place to put this into VNCScan would be the main program preferences.
You can fine tune this by overriding this username and password in the group properties as well as the individual computer properties.
Multiple Connections Error 1219
This problem may be affecting your ability to log in even if you don’t see the actual error message. You may simply get something that says “Access Denied” when in reality, it’s happening because you’ve already logged into the remote workstation with an account that doesn’t have administrative access.
Here’s how to test that:
- Open a Command Prompt window on your computer
- Type:
NET USE \\ComputerName\c$ /user:administrativeaccount password
Replace ComputerName with the name of the remote computer
Replace administrativeaccount with your administrator username
Replace password with your actual password - Hit Enter and make note of the result
If you get an Access Denied, then the username that you are using is not administrative on the remote system. You’ll need to stop there and resolve that problem before moving forward. If you get an error that reads “Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed. Disconnect all previous connections to the server or shared resource and try again”, you have already connected to a shared resource on that remote computer using a username other than the one that you are attempting to use with VNCScan. You can see your list of connections by switching back to that Command Prompt window and simply typing NET USE then hitting Enter. That will show you something like this: U:\>net use Status Local Remote Network —————————————————————————– If the above connections were made with my normal user account and I try to deploy VNC to \\dell_200, I will likely get denied access even though I am supplying VNCScan a domain admin account. This is simply a limitation of SMB connections in Windows. Lucky for us, there is a work around for this problem. As it turns out, Windows only keeps track of this login-to-workstation relationship on a per-computername basis. This means that you can simply re-authenticate with the remote computer using the IP Address instead of the hostname and it will let you connect twice to the same computer with different credentials! We’ve placed a checkbox just for this in VNCScan. It’s in the main program preferences right here: As with most of the settings in VNCScan, you can override this in the group properties as well as the individual computer properties.
New connections will not be remembered.
OK U: \\dell_200\Steveb Microsoft Windows Network
OK W: \\dell_200\Apps Microsoft Windows Network
OK X: \\dell_200\Groups Microsoft Windows Network
OK Z: \\dell_200\express Microsoft Windows Network
Other tricks around this include assigning multiple DNS names to a computer on your DNS Server or simply using the /DELETE switch for NET USE to delete the preexisting connection. NET USE /? will give full details on how to use this command.
Conclusion
Well, that’s it for this article. In the next article, we will discuss firewall ports and other network related connectivity issues that may come into play.
I look forward to reading all of your comments and suggestions for this topic.
More information about this can be found at the Bozteck VNCScan Blog
Rolling Back UltraVNC
In the latest build of VNCScan, we needed to roll back to the previous UltraVNC 1.0.8 server and viewer. According to our friends at UltraVNC, there is a pretty serious bug in the latest version of their server. You can read about it here.
While they are working feverishly to fix the bug, we’ve decided to release an update to VNCScan to deploys and uses the previous stable release of UltraVNC.
If you have already deployed the UltraVNC 1.0.9 and are experiencing problems, you can fix them by installing this 2011.3.15 update of VNCScan Console, then re-deploy UltraVNC to those desktops.
Download: VNCScan 2011.3.15.exe
VTC Online Training Is A Waste
I recently asked a representative at the VTC.COM technology training company what their timeline was on and iPad tablet friendly format for their videos. Their response was pretty shocking.
Hello.
The demand we have received for this format option does not reflect the time and effort required to re-compress the thousands of video tutorials in our library to another format. Over 70,000 QuickTime .mov files would need to be re-compressed to .mp4 or .m4v files.
It should be noted that the tutorials themselves are somewhat difficult to view at the required screen size.
However, should Apple allow for full Flash support on the iPod / iPhone/iPad you could then view our tutorialss via Flash. Also, we may offer a download option of newer courses in a mobile (including iPhone) friendly format.
Don’t they know that you can convert videos in mass using modern tools? It’s really pretty trivial. It sounds like they are just lazy to me.
If I can watch The Matrix on my iPad, I’m pretty sure that it’s big enough to watch some guy fumble around a screen narrating to me what he’s doing. Did mention that I think they are just lazy?
So be it, there are plenty of competition to choose from. Check out Lynda.com or iTunesU.
