____________________________INTRO MUSIC____________________________

[Keith] Welcome to A Couple Of Admins Podcasting. I'm Keith Albright...

[Rich] and I'm Rich Niemeier...

[TED] and I'm Ted Miller.

[Keith] This is Episode 9 recorded on July 17, 2007. We've got a great show planned; We're using new hardware for our show production, we've got some great listener feedback, and.....as you can tell from the intro, we have a special guest sitting in with us. My friend Ted is sitting in with us and has been helping me out with my sound hardware. Ted, welcome to the show.

Chit-Chat - What's going on with you?

[Rich] It's getting hot agian. I have been holding back and have tried not to compliant about the gas prices. But please somebody figure out how to stabilize the price.

[Keith]

Ted - What's going on with you. Anything new in your world you want to share?

It's my vacation week. The wife is away with the kids and I've been doing projects around the house. I moved an 80 ft. section of fence and finally made the built-in bookshelf for the basement rec room.

Housekeeping Items

Rich?

  • Format Change - No main topic. May alternate shows with main topic being a show itself and we could release more episodes.

Link: http://

Keith

  • As I mentioned earlier; I picked up a completely new sound rig for producing the show. With Ted's advice, I picked up a mixer, a condenser microphone, and about 300 feet of cables to tie it all together. So, hopefully our sound quality problems are behind us.
  • Remember this:

PLAY SIZE MATTERS PROMO AND FADE IT TO BACKGROUND

Now you can get yourself a 'Size Matters' T-Shirt at One Horse Shy dot com. It's not related to Rich's promo; I just happened to find this T-Shirt with the same slogan Rich used in the promo. I really want the "What happens in Rumspringa, stays in Rumspringa." T-Shirt.
Link: http://www.onehorseshy.com/highbrow/size_matters/
  • Rich and I are getting involved with a new podcast project that a friend of ours is getting started. We don't have all the details yet and how it will integrate and/or compliment this show, but it will be tech-related and we think you will be interested. We'll keep you posted.

Listener Feedback

From listener Jed

Jed sent us an audio comment regarding our discussion on Episode 8 about legacy devices:

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[KEITH] You are in a fortunate position Jed that the labor costs can drive the hardware refresh, unfortunately, many support personnel are internal and their salary is a sunk cost. It doesn't cost them any more to have their internal salaried IT work longer hours to support the old stuff. At least, that was the experience I had.

[RICH]

News Items

Sprint stands by its decision to ‘fire’ customers: Drops 1,000 customers who company says call customer service too much

Should we be able complain with out being afraid of Service Provider not offering us service? Or should we be thankful they are getting rid of these costly customers? Face it someone has to answer the phone and deal with these people.

[Rich]

I am a Sprint customer, I feel that it gives me some concern because I have gone to the piont where they felt they were done with me but I wasn't done with them.
This Nextel merger, I don't get it but I went into a store covered with Sprints signes and when I was upset with them got informed they were not Sprint. If someone has my company name and logo all over their store and no competetors. I assume they represent my company and there fore should act accordingly.

[Keith]

Complaining is one thing, but as I understand it,these people called on-average once per day. If I was complaining that much, I would be glad they released me from the contract. As long as it was without penalty. Now I've heard several new angles to this story about calls to service centers being dropped and unresponsive customer service, so maybe it's not the customers fault entirely.

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19681390

New Boeing 787 Cool virtual tour

[Keith]

I don't understand the fascination with having to make planes bigger. Aren't they having enough trouble filling the ones they currently have? Is this thing able to land on most of the runways currently in service? or are we going to see runway extensions being planned.

[Rich]

My current experience is that they have been filling the planes. Sometimes to the piont it is had to reboo.

Link: http://www.newairplane.com

OLPC and Intel kiss and make up

[Keith]

[Rich]

Link: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070713-its-official-olpc-and-intel-become-friends-collaborate.html

Rich's Topics

  • Virus's Silver Aniversary

How much longer will it go? Forever? The computer virus conception story begins in 1981, when a tech-savvy 9th grader named Richard Skrenta got an Apple II for Christmas. Over the following few months he began cooking up ways to trick his friends using the machine. "I had been playing jokes on schoolmates by altering copies of pirated games to self-destruct after a number of plays," Skrenta once told the tech news site Security Focus. "I'd give out a new game, they'd get hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from me on the screen."

-The computer virus turns 25 from the Machinist
-Link: http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/07/12/virus_birthday/index.html
  • The Joy of the Hack
Skrentablog - the originator
The only consolation is that the genie would have gotten out anyway. But it's fun to be the first to let it out.
-Link: http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/the_joy_of_the_hack.html
  • Title
-
-Link: http://

Keith's Topics

  • Network Management Software
-I started out with the belief that many network hardware vendors offered free software to centrally manage your network devices. I was wrong. Most now offer network management systems that you have to buy. You can download trialware, but at the prices they are charging, it doesn't seem worthwhile. Some do still have free software and I've outlined the ones I could find here.
-Let me be clear, I'm not talking about monitoring devices, but more managing configurations. Some of these have monitoring functions and I will go into that as well as open-source, free monitoring packages at a later time. For this, I was focused on configuration.
-I should also point out that I normally disdain these types of packages and the "easy way out" instead of learning the command-line, etc. But I've recently come to understand why they can be handy for some admins that have their plate full as jack-of-all-trades especially in the small business area.
-While I realize money can be made from selling these add-on packages, I think the vendors need to offer at least a basic, limited scale package to sell themselves to the SMB market.
-Cisco Network Assistant from Cisco
-Works only with Cisco devices
-Requires http server enabled on Cisco devices which can create a security exposure
-You do need to have a Cisco CCO login ID to obtain the software, but you should be able to easily obtain one if you don't already have it.
-Link: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5931/index.html
-3Com Network Supervisor from 3Com
-Requires licensing, but it is free
-Automated Update feature
-Ads for full product are a little annoying, but not too distracting.
-Link: http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/detail.jsp?tab=features&pathtype=purchase&sku=3C15100E
-ProSafe? NMS100? from NetGear?
-Trialware downloadable
-Network Management System 1.0 for sale for $682
-Link: http://www.netgear.com/Products/Software/NetworkManagementSoftware/NMS100.aspx
-HP ProCurve?
-Free 30-day trial although their website is confusing. Indicates it is free and comes with most switch models or via download. Yet, download indicates a 30-day trial with links to buy at CDW.
-Link: http://www.hp.com/rnd/products/management/ProCurve_Manager_2.2/overview.htm
-EPICenter? Network Management System from Extreme Networks
-30-Day Evaluation License Key
-Link: http://www.extremenetworks.com/products/epicenter.aspx
-D-View 5.1 from D-Link
-Trialware downloadable
-Standard version does only Layer 2 devices, Professional version does Layer 3
-$289 for the standard version, no price given on the Pro
-Link: http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=2&pid=544
  • Sysinternals/Microsoft releases AD Explorer
-It's basically a raw LDAP viewer/editor. Microsoft had the ADSIEdit? tool in one of the support packs, but this If you ever wanted to see the true structure of the AD database, this is a neat little tool.
-It also let's you create a snapshot of your AD database which you can view offline later.
-Now for the bad news: It also let's you create a snapshot of your AD DATABASE which you can view OFFLINE later. Don't misplace or expose that DAT file it creates or you've just given a map of your entire AD infrastructure; sites, transports, computer names, user names....You might as well include the Visio diagrams as well.
-If you have two snapshots, you can perform a comparison of the two (like doing a diff) and see what is different or has changed, etc. I'm sure it's not tested for forensic usage, but it might be something to keep in the toolkit.
-Link: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/adexplorer.mspx
-An entire wiki in a single HTML file.
-You can put it on your thumb drive and have a document you can edit from any browser or you can push the page up to a website and have a wiki up and running in less than a second.
-I use it as a scratchpad on my thumb drive.
-Link: http://tiddlywiki.com/

____________________________PLAY TECHNO BUMPER____________________________

Website Picks

Keith - http://www.espgame.org/

-Interesting psychological experiment with the added advantage of collecting information. There is a similar effort with using Capscha's to help convert books to text where traditional OCR fails.

Rich - http://www.nliteos.com/index.htmlNlite always building bootable setup for Windows XP

http://www.vlite.net/ Vista version of NLite? - called Vlite

brought to my attention By ED M. Thanks

http://supercocktails.com/ Cocktail Recipes, Wish they had this when I was in college. Hey those inclined to have an adventure.

Ted - http://www.timeanddate.com/

Last Call

Buy now most of you should know how to get ahold of us. In case you don't or you are a new listener; There are many ways to contact us or leave feedback On the website there is a link for Listener feedback We have several email addresses If you want to direct a comment specifically at either one of us Keith's email is Keith [at] acoupleofadmins.com mine follows a similiar format Rich [at] acoupleofadmins.com Our general Mailbox for most responses is RichandKeith? [at] gmail.com which we both review daily 

 Yes, we have frappr map mostly for our own interest, but please there is nothing interesting about an empty map.

You can also show support for our site by leaving feedback with I_Tunes.

If you would like to become more interactive, send us an email to be a geust. We invite hardened criminals, freshmeat(those just starting out), paper dragons (you know the guy with all the certs and no idea the only thing they will ever do for him is help him start a fire.), and those hands-on field seasoned IT survivor men. So come on add to the content of the show by being content. Thanks Jed for being our first.

All right, well that is it for the show. And Cheers to the Geek in all of us.

Thanks everyone