MoCA Adapters

As a geek, I tend to have a lot of gadgets. This includes a nice cable distribution panel in my basement that makes the cable and satellite guys turn green when they think I need them to do anything on it.

I live in a newer house, but for some reason, Ethernet is not a standard feature of houses like cable outlets and phone jacks.

For the few years I've lived here, I've always wanted to be able to stream HD video to a Windows Media Center Extender up in my bedroom because I record a lot of shows on the Media Center. I use my Media Center to pull ATSC HD off the air. Anything on satellite is recorded on the Dish Network DVR.

A very handy feature of the Dish DVRs is the ability to modulate the second video output to a cable channel for viewing on a separate TV. Basically I can turn the TV in my bedroom to channel 63 (or whatever) and get the full DVR interface. However I was always out of luck when it came to the Media Center.

For a long time, the only extender that could play back HD content was the XBox 360, and I bought a second one just for this purpose. I quickly found out that 802.11g was not fast enough nor reliable enough to do this in my house (AP is in the basement, bedroom is on the second floor). There wasn't any good way to get high speed WIRED network up there.

I have been reading about Ethernet over Coax (aka MoCA) adapters for a few years, and they always seemed like they were about to release. I decided to stop waiting and picked up a couple of Actiontec HME2200 boxes off of Amazon.com.

WHY AREN'T THESE THINGS ON THE SHELF AT EVERY ELECTRONICS STORE?!?!?

I couldn't believe how EASY the install was. It took about a minute per end. Here's a basic layout.



Typical cable uses about the first 1000MHz of the frequencies available on a cable. However most RG6 or Quad Shield is rated to 2350MHz. This leaves quite a bit of bandwidth available for other things. The MoCA adapters put the Ethernet signal onto the unused bandwidth at one end, and pull it off at the other. It's basically a diplexer.

Now if I had an actual satellite tuner in my room (which I don't), I wouldn't be able to use this since it uses the additional bandwidth for that signal.

This has got to be one of the easiest and most useful network devices I have ever used. Powerline is basically worthless, but you can get it at any Best Buy. I'm looking forward to seeing these devices become more available and cheaper in the future.

FixMAPI

Clearly, keeping up on this blog hasn't been at the top of my to-do list. We've made some big changes at Artech, and business is booming at the moment, so I've been busier than ever.

This blog was originally going to be a collection of articles that I could spit out at my own pace, and then use in a newsletter format on a periodic basis to send to our clients. However most of my clients wouldn't really care to read any of this, so it's basically turned into a collection of fixes for which I couldn't find anything on Google when trying to fix an error myself.

A recent example of this came up when I migrated a client from GroupWise 6.5 to Exchange 2007 with Outlook 2007 on the client side. The vast majority of people could no longer use any mailto links or the "Send to" function of Explorer when choosing Mail Recipient. The only solutions people tended to talk about was to verify that you had Outlook selected as the default email program under Internet Explorer.

So if you are being prompted to "Choose Profile", and then nothing happens when trying to use any of these functions, check out the version of your mapi32.dll. There's a program that's been pushed out since IE5 called fixmapi.exe in your system32 directory, which makes a backup of the current MAPI DLL, and restores the correct version. Be careful, because this will break older versions of Outlook.

Hopefully this will help other people when looking for a solution to this issue.

Almost Three Months???

I was guessing it was more like two months since my last post. My bad.

I'm working on a few posts that I will hopefully have time to finish in the next few weeks. The biggest one I need to finish (it's been done for months - just need to get a screen shot and make some minor edits) is using AuthAnvil to secure Citrix Web Interface for Presentation Server. We wrote a custom plugin that just adds a passcode field to the login screen. Very handy.

Not really ready to talk about the other ones, but I have experience in a lot of areas. Feel free to shoot me an email or comment if you have anything you'd like to see. Just about anything in the SMB IT market is fair game.

Home Wi-Fi Security

I remember when just about every household wireless router made it difficult to add security to the connection. It wasn't part of the setup wizard, or the setup wizard didn't do a good enough job explaining why it was important.

I think we have definitely crossed a bridge in this area. Some routers (e.g. 2Wire) enable it out of the gate and put the key on the bottom of the unit (a practice we have started doing whenever we install them in a household now). Others require it as part of the setup wizard. Whatever the reason, people are finally doing it. I opened up my list of wireless networks while sitting on my couch and here's what I saw:



There were three more networks, all secured, below these that are visible. I'm glad the message finally got through. Let's just pray the ISM Band isn't toxic or something with this much Wi-Fi going around. =)

New Hyper-V Server Standalone

Microsoft has announced a new product called Microsoft Hyper-V Server. It's a free, standalone version of Hyper-V server with limited features. Based on what I have read, it's a core-install of Server 2008, meaning you will need to use external tools, or a command shell to configure and maintain it, and all it will run is Hyper-V.

If one of your guest OSes is going to be Windows Server 2008, and you need to license it, you're probably better off just buying a license for Windows Server 2008 Standard. If you run Hyper-V on Standard, you are allowed to extend that license to a single guest OS. This is probably what most small businesses will do, and run it on a full install of Server 2008 so all of the tools to manage it are in the same spot.

I can definitely see how this standalone product will come in handy for a few niche projects. It's always better to have the option for something like this, especially since VMWare has a couple of free virtualization server options.

Custom NTBackup Script

Here is the script I referenced in the previous post. You can download this script from here, or use the one below along with sendemail, which you can download from here.

Disclaimer: Use this script at your own risk. You assume all responsibility for your data if you choose to use this script to protect any systems. It is assumed that you can understand and modify this script to fit your environment.

---

@echo off

:: ARTECH-NIGHTLY
:: 19 JULY 2008
::
:: COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 ARTECH SOLUTIONS, INC.
:: Author: Alexander Romp - alex@artechsolutions.com
::
:: THIS SCRIPT IS LICENSED TO THE CLIENT FOR USE
:: AND MAY ONLY BE MODIFIED TO CHANGE VARIABLES AS
:: NEEDED. IT MAY NOT BE MODIFIED IN ANY OTHER WAY OR
:: COPIED EXCEPT BY ARTECH SOLUTIONS, INC.


set semail=administrator@customerdomain.com
set demail=BackupReports@yourdomain.com
set subject=Customer (%computername%) Nightly Backup
set destfile=X:\Nightly-Backup.bkf
set selsetname=Nightly-Backup.bks
set smtpserver=emailserver:25


:: =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
:: No Modification Below Here Should Be Required
:: =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=


for /f "Tokens=1-4 Delims=/ " %%i in ('date /t') do set dt=%%i-%%j-%%k-%%l
for /f "Tokens=1" %%i in ('time /t') do set tm=-%%i

set tm=%tm::=-%
set dtt=%dt%%tm%

if "%1" == "/full" goto full
if "%1" == "/incremental" goto incremental
if "%1" == "/emailtest" goto backdone

echo.
echo Please sepcify backup type with /full or /incremental
echo or /emailtest to test sending the last backup file.
echo.
goto EOF

:full

%windir%\system32\ntbackup.exe backup "@%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\data\%selsetname%" /n "%computername% %dtt%" /d "%computername% %dtt%" /v:no /r:no /rs:no /m normal /j "%dtt%" /l:s /F "%destfile%" /UM

goto backdone

:incremental

%windir%\system32\ntbackup.exe backup "@%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\data\%selsetname%" /a /d "%computername% %dtt%" /v:no /r:no /rs:no /m incremental /j "%dtt%" /l:s /F "%destfile%" /UM

goto backdone

:backdone

cd "%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\data\"

for /f "tokens=1 delims=" %%M in ('dir *.log /B /O-D') do (
if "%%~xM"==".log" (
type "%%~fM" > %computername%-Backup.log
goto next1
)
)

:next1

sendemail -s %smtpserver% -f %semail% -t %demail% -u "%subject%" -a "%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\data\%computername%-Backup.log" -m "Logfile Attatched"

del /q "%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\data\%computername%-Backup.log"

:EOF

Backup Solutions for Small Businesses

I think it's probably fair to say that the days of tape are in the past. At least when it comes to the majority of small businesses. I think the only client of ours that still "requires" the use of tape is an advertising agency that frequently has to pull very old files off of tape. And even that is somewhat debatable.

Most of our day-to-day file protection is done using shadow copy now. To me, that is probably one of the best features that was introduced with Server 2003. Most of our clients are using SBS 2003, which includes a front-end for using NTBackup complete with reporting and easy scheduling. However, one huge thing that is missing from this is the ability to recognize portable hard drives as valid backup destinations. It will recognize tape drives, and any drive that shows itself as removable, like the Dell RD1000 drive (which is just a 2.5" SATA drive in a housing that acts like a tape cartridge).

That is why I was glad to hear about the changes to backup in the new SBS 2008. It is specifically geared towards using portable hard drives to protect your data (however it no longer supports tapes). The drives are setup using a configuration wizard which labels the drive and "commandeers" them for use exclusively by the backup system. The system accesses the drives using low-level API and optimizes them for speed, and therefore they are not accessible by drive letter or visible to Windows Explorer.

The system is smart enough to know the difference between multiple drives and performs an ongoing differential backup and keeps the disks so that any of them can be used for full disaster recovery. This greatly simplifies the issues we have had in the past with sites that required cumulative incremental backups due to the size of their backups.

Until all of our clients are on SBS 2008, our current backup script is pretty handy. We had cobbled pieces of it together from various other samples over the years, and I finally put it together into a single script a couple of months ago. You simply define what you want to backup and save the selection set as a BKS file in the usual spot. The script requires one of three parameters. You launch it with either /full, /incremental or /emailtest. The first two should be self-explanatory. The third tests the scripts ability to figure out which of the log files from NTBackup is the most recent, converts it to ASCII (side note: even though NTBackup log files can be opened with Notepad, they are actually binary files) and then sends it to the specified email server and recipient.

Our script calls sendemail.exe by Brandon Zehm to use as the email engine. If you are interested in seeing it for yourself, I will put it up in a separate post, or you can download it here.