We install a lot of outdoor cams for various reasons. Security cameras for construction sites, Several ski resort outdoor camera solutions, and in store security camera systems to name a few.  One of the fun things we’ve done here was a job to play a multi-media loop in a ski lodge. The resort wanted pictures, videos, and live shots from the camera on the hill.

We found an easy solution to playing the live video in mplayer. We used an Ubuntu 8.10 Hardy install on a laptop to drive the presentation that was programmed in python.

mplayer -fps 25 -demuxer lavf -user <cam username> -passwd <cam password> http://<cam ip or dns name>/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?0.mjpg

This will connect to web based video cams; axis and stardot netcams have been tested.

If you have any questions regarding outdoor cameras for your business or location please call us at 509-465-1234 or visit our main site at http://www.interlinkadvantage.com/all_weather_security_cameras.php

Backing up data is critical to the success of your business. Whether you are an Ubuntu Linux shop or a windows shop. You must implement a sound backup strategy to ensure your business doesn’t suffer serious hardship if not outright failure. Consider the following scenario.

You open your office in the morning, grab a cup of joe, and sit down to get the day started. You open up your vertical market app to discover you have no client data. “What the heck??” your sales and billing data is gone as well. You search through the filesystem, in every app you can think of, and your data is gone. No problem I’ll retrieve it from the tape backup. You pop in the first tape only to discover the tape is unreadable. “No problem” you think and slap in the previous days tape. Same story different tape. As you work through your 14 day rotation of tapes you discover that your backups have been corrupted for months.

Can you survive the above scenario? Is it a little extreme or fear mongering? It is extreme but it’s real. A disgruntled employee erased a local businesses data AND the backups were unrecoverable. The odd thing of the story is that this business owner had a backup strategy. A lot don’t. Can your business survive the loss of the server or workstation housing the data your busines depends on to survive? How much is your business worth? $100,000, $400,000, millions? Can you afford NOT to have a backup strategy?

Whew, that was harsh but the fact is a proper backup strategy will potentially save your business some day. “So what do you recommend?” Glad you asked! Let’s look at two methods of backing up.

Tape Drive backup:

Historically tape backups have been the preferred method. Unfortunately it’s also proven to be error prone and without properly testing your backup strategy you won’t know until it’s too late that your data is unrecoverable. Ok, let’s look at the cost of tape drives and tapes.

EXABYTE 119.00500 Black 1.6TB Internal Ultra2 SCSI LVD Interface VXA-2 Tape Drive - 1100.00.
A 80/160GB tape is $60.00 x 7 - 420.00. Really you need 10 - 14 but we’ll just go with a minimum.
SCSI Card- $150.00. (Chances are good your server did not come with one.)

$1670.00

That’s average for the hardware. Depending on how much your time is worth you now have to design and implement your backup strategy. Full back up one day and incremental the other six? Full backup every day? We recommend at least one full a week. Ok, so now you’ve designed your strategy it’s time to implement it. Who rotates the tapes manually everyday? Who takes the others offsite? Who tracks what tape is tonights backup? etc… There is considerable planning and effort necessary to implement a proper tape backup strategy. You must factor in the human element as well. Someone must rotate the tape everyday. Someone must take tapes offsite. Invariably a step in the process gets missed with dire ramifications.

Let’s look at our other option.

Remote Data Backup:

Remotely backing up your data to disc is becoming more popular as bandwidth increases for business Internet connections. In our typical set up we backup data from a windows server via rsync or a network share to a Linux server acting as a firewall/fileserver. Then upload the data to a backup server. After the first initial full backup the backed up data is only files that have changed. This all happens at night, automatically without human intervention. You have a daily, weekly, and monthly snapshot of your data. The beauty of this solution is it’s simplicity and the fact it just works. No tapes to rotate, no tapes to test and ensure they aren’t at the end of their life cycle, no tape drives to fail. Once a remote backup to disc solution is set up it just works. Plain and simple. Your employees or your time is free to conduct your business. No need to worry “will the tapes contain data?”.

So how do you get your data. In our set up we provide you an account to access the data. Quite simple. You can access your data with an Internet connection if you need to 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world. Coupled with our server maintenance program we’ll monitor the backup daily and inform you of any problems. Additionally it can be setup to email you notifications of the status of the nightly backup. Great! So how much you ask. Please visit our remote backup solutions page for pricing.

You save that initial outlay of $2000 for hardware, the cost for proper backup software, the cost to have someone install and configure everything, and the employee costs associated with the strategy. That’s a big factor to consider when implementing a backup solution. Is it worth the $2-3000 to get it running and will it pay for itself. Remember that hardware doesn’t last forever so you’ll want to factor in replacement costs as well over the lifetime of your solution. Tapes only have so many hours available so plan on replacing them every other year or so.

We do not believe that the tape back up is the best way to go for most business at present. We have seen too many tapes brought into the shop with unrecoverable data. Granted it’s not “normal” for tapes to fail but it does happen. Many times it is a drive failure, a software failure or a configuration issue. Tape drives are not as transparent (easy to verify) that things are going according to plan and many do-it-yourselfers wind up with backups that were not as complete as they thought they were.

Backups matter if it’s your business data that’s unrecoverable which is why we prefer the remote backup, also known as a disk-to-disk solution. Your data is far safer and easier to access with that method. We’ve never had to tell a remote backup customer “sorry, no data….”

So you’ve installed ICVerify. Your here because you’ve run into some installation issues. We’ve documented a couple solutions to problems that gave us hours of headaches. Simple solutions when you read them but if you’ve never used the software and tried getting help via their support well…. your here. Having said that ICVerify is a decent product once it’s setup and you get the necessary steps down to manage it.

We’re assuming you’ve installed the software on the C:\ drive in a Master\Substation setup. In this setup  z:\ is the mapped drive on the Master station and t:\ is the drive on the subs mapped to the master. This particular installation was in a simple five workstation workgroup not a domain.

The standard disclaimer applies. This was our experience your mileage may vary.

A good one to know.
Connection to MSSQL:
<master workstation name>\icv

Installing the Sub-Station

Install ICVerify for Windows only.

Copy icverify.SET from <master workstation name>(Master)
Map T: to \\<master workstation name>\ICVerify\ICVer403
Multiple Set up change to t: and connect.

In ICVerify options set workstation #, Drive = t, ReqDir = t:\<path to reqdir>

ICVerify Troubleshooting

Problem: Substations cannot connect to master.
Resolution: Verify the icvlm32.exe process is running in the task manager on the master station.

1. Right click on your taskbar and select “Task Manager”
2. If it’s not running run the ICVerify Multi-User program
3. If it IS running click it and hit the “End Process” button at the bottom.
4. Run the ICVerify Multi-User program
1.In the Multi-User program verify the Request Directory is pointed at z:\ICWin403\reqdir NOT c:\ICWin403\reqdir. Note the z:\ and the c:\, c:\ is wrong and the program likes to change it on you. ICVerify at the time of this writing did not know why it does that….
5. Once you’ve verified the path then click the “Initialize” button. Leave minimized on the Master
6. Go to the sub station, log out and close the program if it’s open, and log in again.

Problem: User is already logged in or the program ended unexpectedly. The program thinks the user is “logged in” but they really aren’t.
Resolution: On the master log into the ICVerify User Manager. Select the login tab. You should see that user as logged in. Click on the user and log them off.

Misc. Notes

Master:
All paths in the Master ICVerify programs need to be pointed at the z:\ drive. Z:\ is the mapped drive on the master pointing at the c:\ICVerify directory. Disregard ICVerify support telling you to use c:\. We were told both ways depending on what day we called. Use your mapped drive letter. Trust us.

Sub-Stations:
Once logged into the sub-stations you verify the paths under Edit -> Options -> Substation tab. The “Master Station Drive” should be T. The “Request File Path” should be t:\icwin403\reqdir.

We recently set out to find hardware that is compatible, out of the box, with Ubuntu’s latest Long Term Support (LTS) release 8.04 also known as Hardy Heron. This proves to be a bit more challenging than you might think since many of the motherboards sold today hit the market after Hardy, as geeks like to call it, was released. Most motherboard and their respective component manufacturers are on a fairly rapid release schedule these days. So the challenge is to find a motherboard built from components that are at least a couple of months older than the release of the the Linux operating system you wish to run.

One of the standouts that we found was the Asus M2N68-VM socket AM2+ based motherboard. It has integrated an nVidia 7050 video chip with analog VGA and digital DVI based connectors. The video chip is supported out of the box on Hardy both with the open source nv driver and nVidia’s proprietary but functional nvidia driver. Nvidia supports X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC) on hardware up through the 7000 series so this chip should be supported with possible MPEG 2 assisted decoding. This has not been tested yet though. Coupled with the built in HDMI connector it seems like it would be part of an ideal solution for a low cost MythTV / Mythbuntu machine especially when coupled with one of AMD’s low wattage processors.

The board uses an nVidia 630a chipset which seems to be well supported so other boards based on this chipset may be supported as well.

Every component that has been tested including Cool N Quiet and CPU frequency scaling work out of the box. If you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comments section.

-Kirt

A couple questions a business should seriously consider when building their Internet presence is how important is stability, is there room for growth and what is their purpose on the net. If your business is strictly looking at a brochure type website then a shared hosting account at a reliable provider is the correct answer. If you are only displaying a few informational pages so people can learn a little about you and how to contact you then shared hosting is the way to go.

Now if you are proactive at your growth planning and are looking at harnessing the power of the Internet then you really need to consider a dedicated or colocated server. Let’s start by looking at the difference between the two.

Collocated Server: If you have an IT person or staff then this option is appealing. You store(colocate) your server at the provider’s datacenter. It i’s your hardware, your software, and your data. The provider gives you rack space, power and typically IP addresses. They provide the essentials to power and “see” your server on the Net. You own and manage the rest. This allows the most freedom to do pretty much as you wish with your server and the data on that server.

That freedom has a trade off. You and you alone will be responsible in the event of a hardware, software and data failure. If anything goes wrong other than your Internet feed you will be solely responsible. This is the main reason to only consider this option if your an experienced IT professional or are technically savvy enough to stomach that risk.

Dedicated Server: A dedicated server is like a hosting account, only you have complete access to the server and the freedom to install whatever applications and data you need. The benefit over a shared hosting account is you are not competing with all the other sites on the server for hardware resources. It only takes one poorly coded site or a high traffic site to impact the performance of the other sites on the server. Including yours. A dedicated server provides you a much higher degree of stability and reliability over the shared server.

If it’s important that your site be accessible as well as functional at all times then a dedicated server should be considered. The hosting company will provide the hardware and in the event of a hardware failure will replace the failed component or server. The hardware liability is on the shoulders of the provider, not yours. Granted, hardware failures are not common but who wants to scramble around at 2AM looking for a spare stick of RAM or a hard drive that matches the one in your server. That kind of issue is covered in your monthly fee.

The downside is that you do not own the hardware and if you decide to move to a different provider you will have to migrate your data to the new server vs. simply moving the server. This could potentially be a serious time consuming undertaking.

The advantage to both options over shared hosting is numerous. Your data is housed in a secure location with redundant power with failover capabilities. Your server is in a location monitored and run by specialists in that field. Your accountants son’s best friend that knows how to run a game server is not running the show. You free up resources at your location, home or business, that otherwise would be taken by the equipment necessary to run a server.

The provider is responsible for the security of the location. Is your home or business monitored by security camera’s? Is there dual factor authentication to get into your location? In addition to security there are natural disasters to consider. A provider will should have generator backup, gas fire suppression and the necessary equipment and procedures in place to ensure your server is accessible. Your provider will have dual internet backbones at the very least. This allows your service to be uninterrupted in the event one of it’s internet providers goes down.

What kind of things require a dedicated or collocated server? That’s really another article but in addition to your website you could house applications for access from anywhere in the world, your B2B portal, your own email server, and more. Your only limited by your imagination. The Internet is not just for web sites, remember that. -Bill

So you’ve inherited your cousins best friends uncle’s Mac running OS 10.x and above. Ok, maybe not, but for some reason you’ve forgotten your login password to your Mac. You can use the DVD/CD it came with but if you don’t have it try this.

Restart your machine while holding down the Command Key (or “Apple Key”) and the “S” key. This will start your Mac up in “Single User Mode.” You should be at the command line when all is said and done. Now type the following.

• #sh /etc/rc
• #passwd yourusername
• #reboot

Another method we’ve found on the net is the following.

1. Boot into single user mode (press Command-S at power on)
2. Type fsck -fy
3. Type mount -uw /
4. Type launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist
   
5. Type dscl . -passwd /Users/username password, replacing username with the targeted user and password with the desired password.
6. Reboot

Good luck!

Welcome to the Interlink Advantage technological blog!

Here you will find posts relating to our technological experiences. Whether it’s business or personal we plan to discuss all things technological from the serious “solve your business network problem” to the “Hey! Now this home theatre setup is cool!” technologies.