In Memory of a Fallen Soldier

I was playing some WoW last night and having some fun, when my wife said, "Asbury Hawn, why does that name sound familiar?" She said, "Wasn't your friend's name Hawn from the Guard?" I said yes, but I couldn't remember his first name. Apparently Asbury Hawn among other soldiers had died in Iraq last year. So she asked me how his name was spelled and did a google search. This whole time I was still playing and running the name through my head, Asbury Hawn. Then she says, "Oh my God", and I look over at her laptop screen and see none other then Hawn.

In the military everyone was known by their last names, and even when you get to know someone well you still called each other by rank and last name. That's how the rank system and military life worked. Then it came back to me, Fred, Fred Hawn. Last I saw of Fred was in 2001 when I was getting out of the Guard. Fred was having medical problems from his time in active duty and was trying to get out on a Medical Discharge, but the unit higher ups didn't like Fred too much and didn't really want to work with him. We had both transferred from the Gallatin unit, Lima Troop 3/278th Cavalry to Kilo Troop, to earn our Sergeant E-5 stripes. However, old Fred wasn't up to it anymore he was ready to get out or so I thought. He was recently married and was expecting a second child on the way. I was married for 4 years and my wife and family were worried for my welfare.

I was offered some things here and there to get me to stay, but the military life had lost it's luster to me and so I got out. I just assumed Fred would have done the same thing. I was wrong.

I first met Fred in Gallatin on my first day of reporting into Guard duty, after having been honorably discharged from active duty. I went into the Army with a vision of how it worked, based upon some of the things I saw in movies and what my dad told me. But I soon found I was mislead, todays Army consisted of street punks that had a choice between jail or the Army. Or country rednecks with their white supremist views that band together to influence things their way, and just a bunch of spoil brats that never learned to respect others. This was not what compromise the entire Army, but there was enough of it to turn my stomach. I got out of active duty and finished my 8 year term in the Tennessee Guard not knowing if I would be able to get back into civilian life with out problems. I found that the civilian life suited me after 4 years of active duty, that was another reason I left the Guard.

Anyway I met Hawn in Gallatin's Lima Troop, and we hit it off from the start. Mainly because we knew no one else there and we had both come from the same active duty unit, 2nd ACR in Ft. Polk Louisiana. He was in 3rd Squadron and I was in 2nd Squadron. He was in Haiti the first half of '94 and my unit arrived there to replace his in the latter half of '94. Fred wasn't the type of guy that everyone just came up to and made friends with. He wasn't very athletic or outgoing, so he really didn't make too many friends in that unit other than myself or Greene. I can't remember Greene's first name, which is a shame since he, Fred and I spent much time together. Fred was a real nice guy, but most people never gave him a chance because he wasn't as outgoing or up to par with the modern day slang.

I remember the first time I met his wife, I believe they were dating then. She had a child from a previous marriage, gosh I can't even remember if that was correct, who was about 6 when I met him. He loved that little boy, and oddly enough the kid had coke bottle glasses just like Freds, lol. The boy called him daddy, which really impressed me. Here was a step child and he apparently showed that child enough love to be honored by that name. Even my wife said she thought he was a little weird when she first met him at the Guard family day event we attended, but she also remembered that he went out of his way to make her feel comfortable in a strange surrounding like the Guard hall. She remembered that some of those guys just looked mean and untrustworthy and she felt uncomfortable, but Fred made her feel better about being there. Made her feel safe. That was the kind of guy he was, he was a good man when you get to know him.

My wife read to me the story about him from a website called Iraq War Heroes, a wonderful site I thank you from the bottom of my heart, about what happened and some comments from his family.

Iraq War Heroes

Then it all came back to me, all the stupid jokes and pranks he'd pulled. We were always having fun. I never could understand why the Seargent's in charge never liked him, but then I realized that he didn't care to put up a facade to fit in. He was there to do a job, not to just hang with his buddies. Even though we always had a good time. Another reason also was that he wasn't the most knowledgeable of Scouts, but he was no slouch to learn what he had missed out on either.

We were both active duty 19 Delta Cavalry Scouts, but he got injured and was transferred to a headquarters unit to drive supply trucks. While I spent my 4 years ground pounding and doing recon in the swamps of Louisiana. So I think many of the Seargent's didn't feel that he deserved to be there because of that. But what did they know, their unit was initially a Tank brigade before becoming Cavalry. They had to learn to become real Scouts so they were kind of depending on people like Fred and myself for knowledge. We don't call Tankers DATs for nothing, Dumb Ass Tankers, so true to form they never gave Fred a chance. But it seems that he earned some respect from them finally and made his Staff Sergeant E-6, I'm proud of him and proud to have known him. I just wish I had known about his death and funeral so that I could have been there to offer my condolences and support to his family.

Here's to you Sergeant Fred (Asbury) Hawn, a wonderful father and husband, a good friend and a great Scout. God bless you and your loved ones.

(What is a Cavalry Scout?)

Vista Beta: Day one and a half

After trying some new things and trying to install apps without success, stupid UAC, note to self next reboot try to see if I can turn off UAC from Safe Mode, I figured out that my laptop does not have sufficient memory to run Vista properly. I only 512 MBs of RAM and Vista is using 403 MBs of RAM doing nothing but looking pretty. Of course 200 MBs of that is paging file, but still the performance is slow in some areas. Also it turns out that my 32 MB GeForce 440 GO video card is lacking as well when trying to run some of the apps that came with Vista.

I know RTFM, I should have checked out the minimum requirements first. Anyway, most important thing, other than being able to install applications, is how to speed up this laptop short of scavenging RAM from another laptop? Well that's where Vista's ReadyBoost comes in, supposedly you can take a USB jumpdrive/flashdrive, what ever it is you call it, and plug it in and use it for file paging. This is supposed to be much more efficient then running page files off of the hard drive, makes sense since you're not fighting for read/write heads with other operations that the hard disk is performing. So I will be testing to see how well that works, apparently Sidebar Geek has found that it works very well for him.

Check out his blog it's all about Vista and well other technologies that have come with it. Looks like an interesting read, another favorite to be added to my list of so many.

Longhorn blogs

Windows Vista Beta Day 1

Well got my Vista beta download and key, and I am giving it a run through the ringer. At first sight it was pretty neat, all of the new fancy looks and screensavers. Every thing flows pretty nicely, but after the initial shine wore off the multitude of pop ups that annoyingly ask if I am sure that this is the task I want to run every time I click something becomes a pain. Again MS has decided they know what's best for the user. I hated the secure IE functionality they added to Win2K3 server, it was nothing but an annoying little bug that gets under your skin and chews away at the layers of flesh underneath. So my first task with a Win2K3 server install is to uninstall the Enhanced Security configuration.

Well, it didn't take long for Vista's UAC, User Access Control, to get on my nerves also. How ridiculous is it that every time a user, with Administrator access to a PC, has to click on a box to verify that this is the action that he/she wants to run. So my first decision after the awe of the pretty new Applesque look of Vista wore off was to figure out how to shut off the UAC. Well it turns out I have to sign in as the local Administrator account in order to be able to do that. Haha, funny joke MS. Another thing I hated about XP and now Vista, you can not access the local Administrator account on a PC that is not part of a domain. Thank God, MS knows what's good for me or else I'll probably be found running down the street with a pair of scissors in my hand. Anyway, I can see a point to locking out the Administrator account to Home user's, but the Professional edition will more than likely be used by none other than IT Professionals and people who are a little more techno savvy then grandma who doesn't know how to do anything but play Solitaire.

So I went on a quest to figure out how to turn off the UAC with out joining a beta version of an OS to my existing domain. Besides when I run this on my home PC I don't want to have to deal with it either. Well a little google search got me to an MS Technet site about the Vista UAC:

Technet article

The site gives an explanation of what UAC is supposed to do and how it works, it also shows how to get around UAC. So you can use the software compatibility option to set a specific software to be able to run without UAC popping up all the time. It also states that when signed in as local Administrator you can shut off the UAC, well that's great if you're on a domain and have access to the local admin account. So I had to use the ever powerful google once more and gather more data. That's when I came across this website. Apparently, according to one of the posters, you can access the local administrator account by booting into safe mode. I'll try it out and get back with you on it. Here's the post:

Longhorn Blogs

Change Local Admin Password

One of the worse things that could happen to an IS Department is to have someone find out your local Administrator passwords for your PCs and Laptops. We've had problems with that before at work. A user accidentally over hears or sees a helpdesk technician type it an and now they've got full access to the PC/Laptop. Well how does and admin change the admin passwords on 600 some devices overnight?

That's actually easier than you may think. There are many different ways of doing it, you can either use the built in NET USER  command or use MS's cusrmgr program, this app can be found on the Win2K Resource Kit. What's that you say? The NET USER command? What the heck is that?.

NET USER is one of those rarely used commands that most admins don't even know about. It is built in to Win2K and WinXP. To see the uses for net user, type in net user /? in a command line window and you should see this:


C:\>net user /?
The syntax of this command is:


NET USER
[username [password | *] [options]] [/DOMAIN]
         username {password | *} /ADD [options] [/DOMAIN]
         username [/DELETE] [/DOMAIN]

So how does this work? Even though MS thinks that their cryptic explanations of how command line options work is easy to understand, they really aren't. So how to use this command, you would type this into a DOS command prompt on the computer that is the target:

net user Administrator newpassword

This would set the local Administrator password to newpassword. Now the question is how does one deploy this tactic on a remote computer? Well I personally use Altiris to run an embedded DOS script on a computer so that works for me. But for others who may not have access to this technology will have to use another method.

The second way I mentioned is to use a small little executable supplied by MS called cusrmgr. How does one use this little executable? You call the exe from a DOS command or using a script. I use WSH and call the exe like this:

cusrmgr.exe -u Administrator -m \\computername -P newpassword

I have had to do a mass password reset with this once before, so I used an AD Group Policy to launch the script on logon for users and reset all of the local admin passwords. Works very well.

Here's how to change a password for any network account, as long as you have the ability to do so, is to hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete, and choose the Change Password option. This works as long as you know the original password. In the user name field just type in the network user's name and then change their passwords for them, with out having to pull up AD Users and Computers. Saves a few steps to change a password for a user.

So have fun and hope I helped someone.

Certifiable

I've got to get some certifications under my belt, but it is so difficult when you work in an environment where things come up with out prior notice. For a medium sized company we do so much with technology. I'm learning new things all the time and get so bogged down that I just don't want to do any kind of studying or practice labs when I get home. I've got to at least get my MCP, then I'll after that my CCA. Citrix Certified Administrator certification is only one exam and an on-line quiz kind of thing.

God, I dread even looking at Altiris Certification. The product has so many pieces and is updated so often that it would just be difficult as hell. But I've got to get off my butt and get some certs this year. I may actually get a raise this year, or so it was hinted, if I get some certs. So another goal, what is this like 10 now this year, is get some certs. At least get my MCP, that's just the XP pro exam. A little studying and practicing and that should be easy enough. Right?

Too damn busy

Well this year has just got to be my busiest. I've got work and family commitments, as well as getting the house and car repaired from hail damage. Well nothing else I've discovered some new things and learned some new things. I will have to continue my How To segment later, with my next segment being Remote control any PC anywhere in the world..muwahahaha. It's really not meant to be a bad thing, mainly for helping out others or for your own entertainment.

I have many computer illiterate family members, mainly in-laws, so it is a pain to do computer support over the phone when they are still running Win 98 and I've been running XP for the last 2 or 3 years. So I had to find a way to "take over" the computer from my house and do the troubleshooting of the problem first hand, rather than talking them through it. It is a savior for a systems admin or a family computer guy.

Until then I found some interesting blogs that others may want to look into:

4SysOps

This is a great blog I discovered just yesterday, many technical how-tos and helpful information. As a corporate systems admin I find that I am a jack of all trades and master of none. You get so bogged down with day to day stuff that it's hard to learn new stuff, so it's a relief to find other systems admins that may have skills and knowledge that they are willing to share with others. Makes life easier sometimes.

Palantar

This blog is pretty interesting, another computer guy go figure I read blogs by other computer geeks. I first came across his blog when he started on his Sleep Hack segment, lol good stuff. Polyphasic sleeping, wish I had a job that allowed me to try this. He's got some neat code that he's writting in Ajax posted too, check it out.

Life Hacker

Last but not least lifehacker, this is just a cool site. All kinds of topics and fun stuff and of course another computer geek. Well that's it for now.  Check them out.

Altiris: Upgrade to SP3 round two...

Well after my first fiasco with upgrading to SP3 I wasn't in any hurry to try it again. Last time I just got frustrated with it and got tired of everyone complaining that it was down for 6 days so I just returned it back to SP2 with the help with Altiris Support. Well this time, after doing a repair of the NS install after it somehow got messed up, I decided to upgrade to SP3 again since the repair failed to fix the original issue anyway.

The first time I attempted the upgrade was at a bad time, my boss need to get reports on our assets and their allocations to the individual departments for billing purposes, so it couldn't be down for too long. Even so it took me 7 days to get it back to where I started. It seems that when I lost a hard drive in my SQL server last November my Altiris database developed some corrupt tables. So I had 2 corrupt tables that kept giving me I/O bad page errors. I did some research and ran dbcc checkdb to find the corrupt tables, it turns out that one of the tables was not even in use and the other was a core table, the String table.

So I had to find a way to fix these tables. I tried truncating them but that didn't help, and since the repair of the NS couldn't bring it back up to working condition I figured that this would be the perfect time to call Support and get help upgrading to SP3. After some work with the tech, he told me to try moving the database to another SQL server incase there were hardware errors with my current SQL server. I couldn't find a spare one so had to install SQL server on a spare server and use it for testing. Still was getting the I/O errors and Altiris could not configure the database. The tech suggested I upgrade the SP2 install to SP3 and connect to a newly created database, then try to upgrade the old database.

Same problems, it would try to upgrade the old SP2 database and get to about 4% then crash. Still getting the same I/O errors. So that was Friday at 5:00, and I was determined to not work over the weekend since it was going to be a busy one anyway. My wife's cousin was graduating from college and it was a friend's birthday, as well as we were determined to spend time with our nephew and her mom and grandma who come down for the graduation.

So this morning, since Altiris' office hours were Mountain time, I did some research on how to fix corrupt tables. I came across a SQL forum website that an actual SQL team member from MS frequents. He had some good suggestions for others that had almost the same problems, so you may want to check it out and he may respond to your questions. The website is http://www.sqlteam.com/, check it out tons of good stuff and smart people.

So anyway, I found that I can run dbcc checkdb with the repair_with_data_loss option and fix my database. I would have preferred to have done repair_rebuild, but that didn't work and still left the database with some errors. So I had to lose the data from the two tables, the good news is that it fix the database and I was able to upgrade it to SP3. Thank god. Now I've got to call Altiris Support and have them close the ticket, I'll wait until the end of the day just incase anything goes wrong.

How To #1: Backing up DVDs

Well I figured out how to do this mainly out of necessity, or actually my brother's necessity. Ever since my nephew was 18 months old and able to waddle around the house, he had also been able to turn on a DVD player, eject the DVD tray, put in the DVD, close the tray and push the play button. So he would get his daily fix of Caillou, Thomas and the Wiggles with out the help of his parents. The problem was my brother works night shift and my sister in law doesn't want to be disrupted every time he needs a new DVD.

So my brother would just leave the DVDs on the coffee table and my nephew would just change them out when ever one was done. Well you can probably see the problem in this situation. The DVDs, as resilient as they were, were lucky to last a month, so my brother would have to buy new DVDs every month or so. Well he comes to me and asks if I can help resolve this problem.

The first thing I tried, after doing some research on the issue, was buying a crappy product called DVD Xcopy Platinum from Best Buy for $100. Xcopy worked on some DVDs, the quality was alright and some DVDs would just skip. I also could never get it to backup an episodal DVD. Well eventually after the Digital Millenium Copyright Act went through, thanks a lot Clinton, the makers of Xcopy had to remove the ripper component of their software. The ripper component actually decrypted the CSS encryption I believe, so according to the DMCA that was illegal. So now they still had a working product, barely, but it didn't do a very good job. As a result they went under not too long after.

The ability to make a backup of your DVDs is still a heated debate these days. According to "Fair Use" rights you are allowed to make a copy of your legally owned media, as long as it was not for profit and for personal use. However, even though that is so the DMCA states that a copy is able to be made under Fair Use as long as it does not circumvent the protection that is used to preserve copyrighted material. Well here's where it gets iffy, I found a product through a friend that is totally free and has a very small footprint. It does not have a ripper, so the CSS encryption is not touched, but it is able to copy the DVD. So the question is does that mean that it has circumvented the protection of the copyrighted material?

Well as far as I'm concern until the MPAA or any other institution bans DVDShrink I'll continue to use it. One of my favorite websites that I go to for video editing help and software is afterdawn.com. This is a great site for starters and they host a ton of software for just about anything you want/need to do with digital media.

Well anyway let's get started. Go to afterdawn and download DVDShrink, then install it. The install is pretty basic so I won't go through that process. Now that you have Shrink installed, double-click it to open it. Insert a DVD into your DVD drive. I would recommend first making some preference changes and get to know some of the options available to you. Click on Edit then click on Preferences. You should see the first page of the Preferences window and it should look like this:



On this first tab you can choose what size DVD you want to make, I uncheck the Run in low priority mode box that way it will not take as long. So don't plan on using your computer for anything while this is running. Now go to the next tab, the Preview tab, I uncheck the Enable Audio and Video Preview button because it will just use up more processing power. Not only that but it is annoying watching it go by at a hundred miles an hour. Now go to the next tab, Output Files, I make sure that the Split VOB files into 1Gb chunks is checked. This seems to work well and move a little quicker for me. Now the last and final page, File I/O, now this one is kind of important it can make the whole process into a one stop shopping event or a two step process. If you use Nero Burning Rom then you can just check the box that says Enable Burning with Nero and Shrink will copy the DVD and Burn it to a blank DVD in one step.

So now that we've configured our preferences it's time to get down and dirty. Click OK to close the Preferences window then click on the Open Disc button to open your DVD disc, which should be in the DVD drive already, Shrink will analyze the DVD disc and it should take no more than a minute or so.

Now we have two choices, do you want to copy everything that is on the DVD or do you want to copy just the main movie? I figure that since I'm just creating a back up for a 2 year old child to abuse as he wishes I might as well just backup only the main movie. By doing this there is much less compression that is needed and that means the quality of the video will be much better. If you think of it most DVD movies are 9 plus Gigabytes of data while your normal single layer burnable DVD is only 4.75 Gigabytes, so the compression is gonna reduce that 9 Gbs to fit into a 4 Gb disc. Here I usually uncheck all of the non-English items, unless you speak one of the other languages of course, and I also only take the first audio track usually the one that is 5.1 Dolby or if not available the only english audio track. However, if you want to just get the whole thing then you can go ahead and hit the Full Disc button then hit the Backup button and sit back and watch while Shrink does it's job.




Or if you want to minimize the amount of compression and get a better quality image then just burn the main movie. To do this click on the Re-Author button, then you'll see this window:



All you have to do is drag the Main Movie, title 1 in this case, to the left hand side window and drop it on the DVD icon. Now click on the tab labeled Compression Settings and here I usually change it to no compression that way I get a better picture quality, however some compression does still happen because of the size of the actual movies. Now just press the Backup button and sit back and wait.

Depending on whether you have Nero and chose to burn with Nero automatically or not will determine what happens next. If you chose to burn with Nero then you will have a backup copy of your DVD disc, but if you don't have Nero then you will have a folder that contains .VOB files. These files can be burned to DVD with any type of DVD burning software, just select burn a DVD movie and you will be prompted for the location of the .VOB files. Or you can do what I do, because I've been doing a lot of traveling and don't feel like carry a bunch of DVD discs with me, I leave my movies in .vob format in individual folders on an external hard drive then just view them with Power DVD or any other media player that can read .vob files.

There you are, hopefully this will help anyone who may have a need for this. But keep in mind that the DMCA barely allows you to do this with just your DVDs, so don't get into the red area by doing otherwise. Also if anyone is interested in reading the DMCA here is a link to an article concerning the subject as well as a link to where you can download the pdf format of the DMCA and read it for yourself. If somehow I've misinterpretted it tell me would you?

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119549,00.asp

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,22180,00.asp