Simplysimple.info » Computer Stuff

Suppressing read receipts in Outlook 2003

Benjy — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:21:10 +0000

@ Ref : EHA/End User Self Help/Common IT Services setup

These steps are mandatory for our mail server as return receipts are interpreted as spam by our smtp server. This might be a bug in Outlook as it happens exclusively in Outlook. Not following the steps outlined below, will ensure that your outgoing email is blocked by invisible return receipts cooling their heels in the Outbox which can be a veritable nightmare. Another option is to set-up your email in Thunderbird.

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Click on Tools > Options

On the Prerences Tab, click on Email Options

Next, Click on Tracking Options

Under Read Receipts, (towards the end), click on Never send a response and click OK

HTC Wildfire S Review

Benjy — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:58:25 +0000

I didn’t think I’d ever be doing a mobile phone review on simplysimple.info. However operating systems like Android and the iOS have pushed mobile phones into the computer category. For once -a computer that never sleeps. This brings in a lot of privacy implications, and at the same time a lot of fun too… being able to Tweet, check in and check on your friends without booting up Windows or Linux and hastily shutting down when there is a power failure -not to mention the joy of having a ticking computer with you as your sidekick. This is not a full fledged review with all sorts of tests to measure CPU, battery life and Graphics performance. This is the common man’s review -his experiences and recommendations on this phone.

I read a lot of reviews on the HTC Wildfire S before I bought it. Initially I planned to buy the Sensation, but went for the Wildfire S as it came with Android 2.33 and HTC Sense 2.1. HTC had better build quality than Samsung, although Samsung seemed to have more current features and faster hardware on the phone. The features I needed were…

Standalone GPS operation
USB Tethering and wireless hotspot (To use Internet on my laptop, Desktop, e-book reader etc.. without purchasing an additional Internet connection)
Blocking of unwanted calls and text messages
A mobile platform where I could be always online
To be able to catch up on news and personal emails while traveling
To be able to keep in touch with friends and relatives 24 x 7
To read my subscription to Linux Journal and my other pdf books while out of station without carrying a laptop.
To use Google Maps and other location based services

I bought the Wildfire S from Flipkart.com along with a screen protector and a 32GB micro SD card. I also bought a good leather flip case for it from pdair.com. It came well packed in a sturdy box but with scanty operating instructions. However a comprehensive operating manual is available from htc.com for download.

It came with a cute charger which has a USB connector into which the data cable can be plugged into and charges from a Desktop or laptop as well. In addition I bought an HTC car charger from amazon.uk ~~but it is in dispute since it never reached me~~ ( I finally received it after more than a month). It comes with headphones of very high build quality. I was not overly impressed with the sound quality though. However I do not intend to use this as a music player. That being said, the volume from the phone is very low. I kept missing calls till I changed to a ringtone which simulates the ringing of an old rotary telephone. Although people laugh in my office when my phone rings, I am glad not to miss my calls. The camera is pretty lousy and can’t handle scenes where there is too much contrast and it blows out the whites. Probably will work under studio lighting and under perfect sunlight conditions. The camera doesn’t have a dedicated button for clicking which makes it very awkward trying to take a photograph. I therefore use my trusty Nikon DSLR for photos and never access the Wildfire’s camera.

The phone itself is a piece of art and I like its sculpted shape which makes the iPhone’s design look like a slice of bread. Its touch screen is beyond words and very responsive and smooth as silk and so is the display on the screen. HTC sense too is a pleasure to use -especially its famous weather applet. I did have to Google a bit to get the current weather to display rather than an always on New Delhi weather display, but it now works great. I was however not very impressed by the friend stream, the HTC Facebook and Twitter apps. These would always stop working citing low memory.

: GPS Compass map for Android at work

The 512MB memory or what is left of it for use after Android and HTC Sense is a cruel stroke by HTC -particularly at a time when memory is so cheap. I have to continuously keep making choices as to what app to delete to make space for something else. In spite of that the Facebook for Android app uses up a lot of memory. Every time I clean out the cache, it wipes out everything including my login credentials. Another big memory hog is the HTC contacts application if allowed to link contacts to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. In spite of not linking, I still had to delete my Linux Journal app, updates to Google’s idiotic voice search, Angry birds(which incidentally plays OK), Google +, the excellent Aldiko e-book reader and Adobe reader. Many of the apps with came with HTC which do not work -like the stock video player which keeps repeating like a broken record that it can’t play this type of file cannot be uninstalled. I had to install MX video player which is thankfully free and very good.

The FM radio is a dud and doesn’t function at all. My Sony NWZ B-153 picks up all the FM radio stations while my HTC can’t find a single one. I’m hoping my phone gets some sort of update, but there are always no updates. Hoping to get an upgrade to Android 4 is only a pipe dream what with the measly left over MB’s in its internal memory.

I understand why some of the applications insist on installing in Internal memory. When the phone is used in disk drive mode, all the applications installed on the SD card become unavailable. This means if system apps were allowed to be installed on the SD Card, the phone would crash when using the phone in USB mass storage mode to access its SD card through the computer.

As a phone it works very well and even in noisy locations the sound the other person hears is clear. The sound however in hands free mode is mostly inaudible even at full volume unless you are in a very silent room with fans and other things turned off. The battery is pathetic and although I have stopped turning on Wi-fi and GPS (I’ve never turned Bluetooth on yet) on an average I charge every 12 hours which is again pathetic as I make or receive only about 2-3 calls a day (or less). Thankfully the phone charges reasonable fast -particularly from the supplied charger. The supplied handsfree earphones with mic are extremely comfortable and fit well and are the best earphones I’ve ever possessed.

HTC Sense has been quite good, I haven’t used a lot of its features though, except its gorgeous weather app and its online features. For example, I can log into www.htcsense.com and click on various buttons to locate my phone, lock it, erase it and make it ring at full volume. I tried only the ringing part, however on the day I truly misplaced my phone it was unable to connect to my phone. After I found my phone later on, I tried to investigate and figured out that it wont work if GPS is off even though the 3G connection is on. This is a big shortcoming or a bug, as the GPS is useless inside my house, but the locate feature seems to be tied to GPS being switched on. A note here, a few weeks later I misplaced my phone twice and when I tried locating my phone, the website could not locate my phone in spite of GPS and wireless being on in addition to 3G. this happened twice when my phone was at an arms length away and I can no longer trust this app anymore. It is more of a gimmick in its beta state. I prefer to call from my other mobile and make it ring.

In conclusion, if you don’t want to install apps and have easy access to battery charging facilities, this is one heck of a phone to buy as it fits in your palm beautifully, has a wonderful browser which actually enables you to read web pages and a beautiful crisp, colorful, bright display with an excellent touch screen.

Some of the apps that I use:

Adobe reader : Miraculously very small and fast.
Mobile Manager : Block those rude callers and junk text messages
GPS Compass map : A weird name, but an excellent GPS tracking app, can be used like the Bushnell backtrack.
Tuk Tuk2 : A much needed auto fare calculator for India, uses GPS
WordPress for Android : Enables me to keep track of my blog visitors
Facebook for Android : Self explanatory
Quick Mark Barcode : An excellent Bar code and QR code reader
MX Video Player : Plays all the formats of videos that I have
Adsense Dashboard : Gives me stats and totals of my Google Adsense earnings.
Delhi Metro Navigator : A boon for those confused by all the different colored routes on the Delhi Metro
No lock : Helps to disable phone locking when I’m using my phone a lot.
Tiny Compass : Turns the Wildfire S into an analogue compass
~~Flashlight Zaphrox : Turns the camera flash into a flashlight. A good use for the otherwise lousy 5Mp camera~~. Am now using a smaller flashlight app downloaded from the HTC hub.
King James Version : An offline Bible
You version Bible : One of the best Bible apps I’ve used. However needs to be online mostly.
Astro File manager : An excellent file manager for Android
Color Note Notepad : Sticky notes for Android
Locale : An app I purchased to reduce battery consumption by turning on/off services by location. However to know my location, it kept turning GPS on so often that my battery life worsened. $3.99 down the drain.
Astrid Tasks : Also purchased the Astrid power pack, however it embarrassed me a few times in the lift by reading out items from my TODO list. An excellent task management app nevertheless! Uninstalled it for more space, am currently using Color Notepad to manage my tasks… Another $3.99 down the drain.

3rd Dec 2011:

I’ve more or less come to terms with my phone now. I leave wireless and GPS on and I always carry a charger. This sucks, but overall the phone was still a good buy. I’ve stopped reading books on it, including the Linux Journal, as I’ve now got a Sony PRS-T1 E-book reader. However I use the Wildfire S’ News applet regularly to keep in touch with the headlines and update my self by the time I reach work. I used Google maps a few times and got lost, so I’ve started using my head as well.

Getting USB Tethering/wireless hotspot up on the HTC Wildfire S

Benjy — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 06:13:11 +0000

I’d been a bit down lately after purchasing the HTC Wildfire S. The purpose was not only to have 3G data access on my phone, but also to tether it via USB and use it as a modem in lieu of my Tata Photon +. This was not because of poor performance (Tata’s performance and customer support were of a very high standard, although technical support was not too good -thankfully I didn’t need much of that.) It was more because footing a total of Rs. 2000+ plus for Internet access for which a large percentage went for office work was just not feasible. I have to admit that the Photon or Reliance do not work very well in far flung places where I occasionally visited (and where I needed their service the most) so I switched over to MTNL and the Wildfire S.

For the month or so that I was out after getting the Wildfire S before I could get my SIM, I used standalone GPS, Wireless -where available and Internet pass through via USB and it was a wonderful experience even without a SIM. I also became aware of the biggest shortcomings of the otherwise excellent HTC Wildfire S. Insufficient internal memory and lousy battery backup.

The internal memory was the worst as I had to keep uninstalling applications to install new ones in spite of buying a 32GB micro SD card. In addition, there was no obvious way (unless you rooted the phone) to remove HTC’s apps that you didn’t or couldn’t use -an example is that Facebook’s app works quite well, whereas the built in HTC app refuses to run complaining of insufficient memory.

It came as a shock to me when I got my SIM that USB tethering would not work on my Windows 7 desktop which had the latest version of HTC Sync installed on it. I tried it on various Windows 7 computers and laptops and the results were the same. It randomly assigned an IP address and a gateway which I could ping but seconds later Windows would show the exclamation mark on the network connection showing no Internet connection. This seems not to be an HTC issue but more of an Android issue so the fix should work for other Android 2.3x phones as well.

I turned off the firewall and it did not help. Searching the forums, I found some overseas Orange customers complaining about the same issue. They suspected that Orange had blocked tethering so I likewise assumed that MTNL Delhi had blocked mine too.

Finally today I dashed off an email from the HTC website for support as there was no way that I could consume my 6GB plan on the phone. However after filling in all the details including my serial number and submitting my details, the small window turned white and there was no acknowledgement of my request either on the page or on my email address. Frustrated, I searched Google one more time and got lucky!!!

Here is the fix!

From the home screen, tap the Menu button (The three lined icon).

Tap Settings from the pop up (The gear icon)

Tap Wireless & Networks.

Scroll down to and tap Mobile networks (In small text, “Set options for roaming, networks,APNs“)

Click on Access point names

Here mine shows MTNL GPRS, choose yours -probably the default shown by the green radio button.

Tap “MTNL GPRS” or whatever your AP is

Scroll right down to APN type and tap on it.

Without changing any of the existing types (Mine says default,hipri) add a comma and add dun (no spaces anywhere). I suppose it stands for Dial Up Networking.

Click OK and come back to the main screen. You’re done! Mine worked without restarting.

This is my first post using USB tethering on my new phone, now I can surrender my Tata Photon without worry.

This should sort out the wireless hotspot problem as well. I will test it in office tomorrow.

Note: Yes the wireless hotspot works too

Components of a Network

Benjy — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 08:11:00 +0000

Back to Networking Simplified

The Network schematic showing how the parts of the network connect to each other are detailed in the next post. You might want to take a peek. In this post, I want you to get familiar with each of the devices and the connectors you would find on them and how they can be accessed for configuration.

Keep in mind that specifications and design change constantly. In addition, I will be mentioning only those features on the device that need mentioning, there may be other features which would be beyond the scope of this post. One more fact that needs mentioning is that the web administration interface on each device is different, so it is impossible to put up screen shots and provide customized guidance for each and every model out there, so treat these series of posts as a generic guide.

Switches

Let us start off with the most familiar device that would be found on any network -the network switch. For those who have lived longer, they would remember the predecessor of the the switch -the hub. Don’t bother about the difference between a switch and a hub, the switch does the same thing that the hub did, only it does it better -and faster. Switches come in two types -managed and unmanaged, which can probably be explained off as programmable (managed) or dumb. We will be dealing only with “dumb” unmanaged switches.

When buying a switch, always buy a switch that has a metal box which would also have an inbuilt power supply, rather than switches in plastic boxes with bulky unwieldy external power adapters. The metal body shields the electronics from stray RF fields.

: A 10/100 Network switch without its rack mounting brackets attached. A more expensive and faster switch would be a Gigabit switch ( 10/100/1000)

The switch in the photograph above can also be rack mounted. The rack mount brackets are basically two L shaped brackets which attach to the switch body with four set screws each. You can see a picture below. All you will find on this switch, (apart from all the Ethernet sockets) is a AC power socket which is identical to the socket used for powering your desktop or monitor.

: Two switches mounted in a standard 19″ rack.

If you run out of ports on one switch, you can daisy chain another switch by connecting the last free port on the existing switch to an empty port on the new switch. However for optimum performance and reliability, this must be kept to a minimum and used only when there are two groups of computers in physically different locations such as on two different floors of a building, this saves on the number of wires but machines connected to the second switch will not be able to connect at the rated speed of the switch to a server on the first switch. (This is not true for expensive managed/stackable switches) This is why, it makes sense on a busy network to go in for the fastest switch that your wallet allows. If you expect your network to expand, it is good to buy a switch with additional ports (normally 16, 24, 48 etc) the additional ports also help if one or more ports fail in operation.

Wireless Access points or AP’s

Wireless access points act like wireless switches. They need to be connected to a port on a network switch before they can be usable. They can usually be configured in two modes -as wireless AP’s or as wireless repeaters. In wireless repeater mode, it does not need to be connected to a wired network switch. It repeats or amplifies and rebroadcasts an existing wireless signal. It works well for extending the range of an existing wireless signal. As with network switches, if the wireless signal is repeated from repeater to repeater in succession (which is like daisy chaining switches) you end up with degraded performance.

: A wirelss AP for Small office/Home (SOHO) use

You can see the connections in the photograph above. A LAN (Ethernet) port for connecting to the wired network, a DC socket (yes it has a boxy external power adapter) and a hole to access the reset button which resets the AP to factory settings.

: An AP for business use having primary and secondary antennae

AP’s come in two speeds -54Mbps (older AP’s) and 108Mbps. The above AP has its power supply built into it instead of an external adapter. Wireless access points are programmable and come with their own web interface through which they can be setup. This means that you can open Internet Explorer or Firefox, type the AP’s IP address in the address bar, enter the default user name and password when prompted and configure the AP according to your preferences. More on this later in a separate post.

Modem/Router

Finally we move on to the Internet modem/router. Since our target audience is basically Home/SOHO, we will only be discussing DSL connections under this section. All the DSL modems I’ve come across from MTNL, BSNL, Airtel etc.. seem to have their IP addresses set to 192.168.1.1 By connecting to its web interface through a web browser, it can be configured in a similar fashion to that of the AP’s above. DSL modems come with a reset button too, but keep in mind that initiating a factory reset on one of these boxes would wipe your ISP settings and you might need to call up your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to send their representative to re-program the modem.

: A buch of assorted modems/routers

Please note that both Modem/Routers and Wireless AP’s have built in DHCP servers. Some manufacturers foolishly leave them on by default to ease initial connectivity/configuration. Unfortunately sometimes they get reset and start broadcasting which causes chaos on the network as only one DHCP server should run on the network. If this DHCP thingy sounds like Greek, then you need to re-visit the post on networking basics as this is important.

Some Internet modem-routers come with a wireless antenna, I haven’t found this very effective. Avoid buying it except for home use. Some routers also have a few additional ports as they have an integrated switch which saves users from buying a switch for home use. For an office with a busy network, these are more or less toys. So choose the right stuff for your network.

How it connects together

Benjy — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:26:09 +0000

Back to Networking Simplified

You now know enough about your networking basics to start putting things together. However don’t rush into it as this post would be incomplete without the upcoming posts on wiring your network so that you can setup your wiring once and forget it for a long time to come. Then there are also power considerations to ponder upon. Networking equipment is very sensitive and your switches, routers and modems do not need too much of a spike to damage them making them die a premature death or making them unreliable due to reduction in capacity or intermittent operation. They are also affected by RF (Radio frequency ) and other strong electromagnetic fields, so whenever you have an option of buying any of these devices in a metal enclosure instead of plastic, go for it.

The network that we will be looking at will have a few computers connected through a network switch. Unlike electrical wiring, you cannot splice two or three networking cables together to extend your network. The signals on the 4 twisted pairs of the Ethernet cable must be amplified and then split into additional channels by a network switch.

To this network we will be adding an Internet connection so that everyone can browse the Internet, a network printer (an unlikely purchase for a small network) and one or more wireless access points to serve the needs of devices that connect through wireless, like mobile phones, laptops and other WiFi enabled hand held devices.

A simple office network (Network printer is optional as it is pretty expensive)

Note that the Network switch is at the center of everything and it ties your network together. It’s predecessor was called a hub for obvious reasons. A wireless access point works as a wireless network switch. All service recipients and service providers, connect to the switch through which information interchange takes place.

The main network consists of the Desktops, Laptops and smart phones. All others only add value to the network by providing services, For example, the Network printer provides print services and the Modem/router provides a gateway for Internet access and the wireless access point extends the network and provides network access to devices wirelessly.

This network diagram is only indicative of the connections, you can add more than one network printer or wireless access point. If you run short of wired network ports, you can connect another switch to one of the free ports on the existing switch and extend the network. However I advise against this as it creates multiple points of failure on the network, so preferably try and use a single network switch for such a small network.

If you remember what a DHCP server was, [ Go back to Networking basics and brush up if you've already forgotten] then it needs to run on a server. All of the devices -the router, wireless access point, network printer are servers and they mostly run Linux from flash memory i.e they have no hard disks. So all of them have DHCP servers built into them. This means that you must configure and turn on only one DHCP server for your network or there will be chaos. The printer might be turned off if there is a paper jam. Your DHCP server must always be on so the ideal place to run the server would be on your Internet router. In addition, each of these boxes also run a web server -a complete “website” is running on each of them. This is its web administration interface. we can configure/program these devices using a web browser such as Firefox (preferred).

We will look closely at each of these devices in the next post and also on how to configure the devices.

Networking basics

Benjy — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 06:41:41 +0000

Back to Networking Simplified

Remember, you are going to get only as much basics as you need to set up your own Home or small office network. If you need additional information please look elsewhere as this post is written with a particular audience in mind and too much information is overwhelming and confusing.

I’m assuming you want to do one or more of the following.

Share your Internet connection on your network
Share printers
Share folders
Connect to your network via wireless on mobile devices

This is what most people would want to do. Any thing beyond this is also beyond the scope of these series of articles titled Networking simplified. However without a wee bit of theory, understanding the practical aspect will be a bit difficult, so here goes.

To start with, we all know that each of us needs to have a unique postal address or email address for either post or email to be successfully delivered to us. This is no different for computers, only in their case, these addresses are called IP addresses short for Internet Protocol addresses. This is standard for computers communicating over the Internet and we will use the same to setup our local network. These are not only required for delivering email, but for any kind of communication between two computers.

The format of an IP address is XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX . If any of the numbers are less than three digits then zero’s to the left of the number are omitted. There are various classes of IP addresses and we will not go into details. We will be using only one type of private addressing scheme often called the class C address.

For any class of address, an address can be assigned to a machine either manually (statically) or dynamically through a DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server. Assigning computers static IP addresses is tedious and dumb and is only done for machines which need to be uniquely identified such as a server or other networking appliances providing services to other computers on the network.

An example of an IP address would be 121.245.8.55 This is the IP address of my computer right now and is assigned to me by my Internet Service provider (ISP) from their DHCP server. This changes every time (mostly) I connect to the Internet and when I disconnect, it is assigned to the next subscriber who connects to my ISP.

This is a common way of assigning a limited range of addresses. The IP addresses are recycled and leased to new users as and when they connect to the network. This way, if we have 100 laptops on a network, and only 40 of them on average are in office at any given time, I can safely setup a pool of 60 addresses on the DHCP server. In addition I wont have to keep a list of who has which IP address (for all 100 of them) which is crucial if IP addresses are assigned manually as two computers having the same IP address will have an IP address conflict and will lose their connectivity or work intermittently.

To connect any machine to the Internet, we need to specify (either statically or dynamically through a DHCP server) 4 different addresses. On a Linux server, you will need to setup two more, however we will list them and forget about them as we are not setting up such servers in this series of posts.

An IP address 192.168.1.11
The Subnet mask 255.255.255.0
The default gateway 192.168.1.1
One or more DNS servers 8.8.8.8

Like we said, on Linux machines with a static IP, we need to specify two more addresses

The Network address 192.168.1.0
The broadcast address 192.168.1.255

In our tutorial, we are going to setup the 192.168.1.0 network. I chose this because traditionally Airtel, MTNL and BSNL modems have been shipping with modems configured with a static IP address of 192.168.1.1. In case we change this address, there will be chaos and your network will break every time the service technician comes to repair any fault or to troubleshoot your modem.

In this network range, you can address up to 254 different machines. This is because the highest number 255 is reserved as the broadcast address and the lowest 0 is reserved as the network address. In addition it is good practice to reserve the first few IP addresses for devices requiring static IP addressing. I reserve the first 10 to be on the safe side. This leaves you with an effective IP address range from 192.168.1.11 to 192.168.11.254 – 244 addresses, more than sufficient for a small office network.

Coming back to the 4 essential addresses listed above, the first, the IP address is unique for each computer. If the first one ends with 11, the nest one ends with 12 and so on up to a maximum of 254.

You can forget about the subnet mask, the default gateway and the DNS server as you can safely use the given values and expect your network to work, so don’t break your head over it. For the above service providers, the gateway is always 192.168.1.1. The DNS server 8.8.8.8 is the address of Google’s public DNS server so it should work everywhere. So apart from the main IP address, all the other settings will be the same as shown above for all the computers on the network.

We will look at DHCP (automatic addressing) in more detail when we actually configure our network. This is enough theory to get started.

Remember that you can have a working office network with addresses 1 and 2 stated above, but you will not have Internet access, until the 3 and 4 addresses are in place. The gateway tells the client computers through which device it needs to send its external (Internet) requests to, while the DNS address is the address of the DNS (Domain Name Translation) server which translates Internet domain names such as www.eha-health.org to an IP address such as 207.58.183.47

What is a server?

Benjy — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 03:32:22 +0000

Back to Networking Simplified

This is something I get regularly quizzed about. When the server is installed in a networking cabinet and looks radically different from a desktop in its form factor, people have no questions about it. However when its form factor changes for example in the lower range servers and someone looks at a tower server, which more or less resembles the CPU (box) of a desktop computer, or if they know that a server operating system can be installed on a Desktop computer and it can then be used as a server, then a lot of questions arise in people’s minds. These questions often come into the minds of the bean counters or that of the top level management who are not well versed in this field of operation, so it becomes difficult for them to justify the cost of a server when presented with the fact that theoretically the same software will run on a desktop as well .

Just a note before we proceed… Remember that when we speak of servers and desktops, it can mean either the hardware or the software. When a server operating system is installed on a desktop, it performs the role of a server and is therefore a server although practically it is only a Desktop masquerading as a server.

A desktop operating system also has some server functions built into it. When a Windows, Mac or Linux desktop shares a printer with other clients on the network, it works as a print server, when it shares folders over the network it emulates (with limitations) a file server and when it shares its Internet connection with other computers it acts as a proxy server.

A server is a machine that is dedicated on the network or Internet to provide services to its designated clients. Its services depend on the configuration of its Operating system (e.g Windows 2008, Linux, Unix, etc…) and applications if any running on it.

So why not run from a Desktop?

For the sake of illustration, let us assume that a certain company runs its web site, email and some other critical services from a single server (Not a very good practice). This now becomes a single point of failure for the services required by that company. Although the same server operating system will install on a Desktop computer and run the required services, the reliability and performance of the services will be poor which would become a liability for the company. Let us look at some of the major differences between a Desktop machine and a server.

The server is designed to run 24 x 7 x 365. While it is possible that a Desktop can do that too, the desktop was never specifically designed for it.
A server and desktop are designed for different applications, so they perform as they are designed in those areas. Installing a Windows or Linux desktop operating system on a server and using it as a desktop will be a miserable experience with bad graphics performance. Similarly running a server on a Desktop will result in poor performance as that machine was not tuned in specific areas required for working as a server.
Because a server is designed to run 24 x7 x 365, the air flow passages, position of boards and fans are designed keeping that in mind. A desktop has no such design consideration as most users shut down after work. In fact some of the assembled desktops overheat even under normal operation.
A server supports a faster multi-core processor and oodles of RAM and has very reliable high speed network interfaces. It can usually read and write from disk much faster too.
A server boots slower and intensively tests its hardware before starting up. Our server takes close to 5 minutes to start up, but when it is up, it is blazing fast.

In addition to this, a server may have any or all of the following features.

More than one fan. In higher end servers, the fan speed and temperature is monitored. In addition, the fans can be hot swapped -pulled out and replaced while the server is running so that the server needn’t be turned off for fan replacement.
RPS -short for Redundant Power Supply. This means it has more than one power supply. Often these are hot swappable too, which means that you can unplug and pull out the damaged RPS unit and replace it with a spare with the server continuing to run from the other power supply.
Hot swappable hard disks usually using some kind of redundancy like hardware RAID. Without going in to too many details, RAID (or rather some levels of RAID) allow you to write to more than one disk at a time thus preventing data loss if one of the hard drives fail. The failed disk can be (if hot swappable) ejected out of its bay and then replaced with a spare after which the new RAID member (disk) can be rebuilt or synced to the state of the failed disk without data loss and without turning off the server for disk replacement.
Advanced diagnostics and fault alert systems and a remote console for administering the server from another machine on the network. This enables you to in addition to many other tasks to forcibly shut down or restart an unresponsive server without going through the operating system or having to go to the server room.

A server would usually be housed in an air conditioned cabin to keep it running within its optimal temperature range. This would also reduce the amount of dust which is as great an enemy as high temperature is.

In the next post in this series we will be looking at Networking basics.

How a computer works

Benjy — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:12:43 +0000

Back to Networking Simplified

We can divide the logical parts of a computer into five horizontal slices.

Hardware (Right at the bottom)
Firmware or BIOS software (Basic Input/Output System)
The Operating System
Driver Software ( Device drivers)
Application Software (Topmost)

The Hardware is obviously what you can see, feel and touch. We can sub divide this into two parts.

Hardware belonging to the computer without which it won’t run.
and Hardware peripherals that extend the use of the computer like scanners, printers, pen drives etc…

The firmware or BIOS software is software that is flashed electronically into the BIOS chip. When the computer is first turned on and electricity starts flowing through its components, the computer wakes up. The CPU or the Processor -the heart of the computer, in spite of having the ability to do things at tremendous speeds wakes up more or less like Mr. Bean -or for those of you who hate him, like a new born baby which only knows to suckle (apart from cry). The CPU too knows only to look up a certain address and execute the first available instruction there (more or less). This address falls in the range allocated to the BIOS software or rather the address belongs to the first instruction of the BIOS software.

Once the BIOS software is loaded and executed, the computer gains enough brain power to do simple things like a POST (Power On Self Test) a memory test and numerous other things. If any of these fail, before it attains the capability to inform the user in a better way -like printing it on screen, it beeps in a coded way to let the user know what part failed like RAM, Display etc… just like a baby cries due to its inability to use words for communication.

If all went well, it starts the boot process. It checks the boot order saved in the BIOS settings by the user and tries the boot devices (e.g, DVD drive, Hard drive, USB stick, Network) one by one in the set order until it can successfully boot from one of them. If none of them work, it terminates the process with a boot failure message. In case it succeeds, the BIOS program hands over control of the computer and its resources to the Operating System.

It doesn’t matter what your operating system is -Windows, the Mac, Linux, they all do the same job -of that of an operating system. They interact with the hardware on the users behalf and on behalf of the driver software and application software.

Driver software aka device drivers, describes the capabilities of hardware to the operating system and allows the operating system to optimally control the hardware. The hardware could be part of the computer or could be an external device like a printer, scanner, Bluetooth dongle, mobile phone -any extra hardware connected to the Computer. You should be aware that quite a lot of hardware drivers are integrated into the Operating System. Newer Operating Systems like Windows Vista and 7 try to connect to the Internet and try to get the driver software for you while Linux seems to recognize a large percentage of hardware on its own.

You can think of driver software like the air in air brakes. The Operating System here is the drivers foot on the brake pedal and the hardware peripheral is the brake drum on the wheel. If the air (driver software) is missing, the brake will not be able to be operated. It will remain a cosmetic add-on on the vehicle, exactly like your inoperative printer on your desk whose driver CD you lost.

Application software, anything you install on the Operating System like MS office, Open office, your antivirus software, web browser and of course software like Limewire and Bittorrent (I know you do that you crooks!)

Now that we have a general idea of how a computer works, we can proceed to the networking theory after a quick look at servers.

Networking Simplified

Benjy — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:01:15 +0000

I work for an organization which is an association of about 20 odd mission hospitals spread out over suburban and rural India. Although our hospitals are spread out more over North, Central and North Eastern India, there are other similar organizations who call me up for consultancy regularly who cover some of the parts left out by us.

As a charitable organization, our IT struggles are different from that of the cash rich corporates. Our solutions too cannot always be bought at a price as that price is usually beyond our reach or grossly unjustified for the kind of work that we do. Open source software has opened the door to us for mainstream technology, but to get enterprise level technology to work for us takes a lot of hacking and re-shaping to fit a product into our mold. In addition we struggle with issues like erratic power supplies -blackouts, brownouts, surges and spikes that not even industrial level PLC’s have been able to handle reliably.

This series of posts has come about by popular demand and I have striven to keep it as simple as possible for people with the aptitude, to be able to follow the instructions successfully. While reading these posts, don’t read the text and the descriptions too hard but soak in the basics as the absolutes keep changing with every product that is released while the underlying concepts change much more slowly. I know of IT managers who throw up their hands in despair if the replacement modem came with a firmware update which showed the same menu in green instead of blue. In short -don’t emulate them.

Finally stop short where you feel that the complexity is too much for you to handle as although we start off with easy things, we must tackle the complex issues sooner or later.

Most of the voltages we will encounter will be below 12 volts which makes it pretty safe to handle, but that is no reason to let your guard down as all of the devices are plugged into the ac mains. It also pays to remember that most integrated circuits of today are sensitive to static electricity, don’t handle them without grounding the static charge from your body.

INDEX TO POSTS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

How a computer works
What is a server?
Networking basics
Components of a Network
How it connects together
The infrastructure :: Network wiring and termination
Crimping and punching
Configuring the network
Cheap Hacks

Getting rid of Tata Photon’s browser start page hijack

Benjy — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 06:17:45 +0000

I’ve been using the Tata Photon Plus for a while now. In spite of my rant on its TV services some time back, I’ve found its mobile broadband and customer service more or less reliable and polite relative to my long experiences and dealings with Reliance.

However, one of their “features” has rubbed me the wrong way for quite a while. This is the Huawei dialer which insists on opening up a start page which has been set to a Yahoo page with mixed content from Tata & Yahoo. Tata is undoubtedly enjoying some monetary advantage by facilitating this. In addition it also opens up -or at least tries to open, annoying pop up windows. This is a cheap trick from Tata and they descended a few rungs from my credibility list for this stupid stunt. I have no interest in knowing who the look alike’s of Aishwarya Rai are nor who is hooking up with whom in the filmi world. Neither do I want to know what’s happening in any of the professional sports.

I remedied this “feature” for a while by pressing the ESC key as soon as Firefox opened, but this was only a stop gap solution. I started off by going through the Windows registry and the Huawei program files folder with a fine toothed comb and found nothing. Searching Google and finding that there were no solutions to date and noticing other Photon users looking for a solution re-kindled my interest in finding a way out.

When I did this post on setting up the Photon on Linux, I realized that there was no annoying browser re-direction (In fact I count this stunt as a start page hijack) on Ubuntu. This confirmed the fact, that the browser call to this link was programmed into the dialer. I’m sure a smart cracker could patch the dialer for good, but a search turned up nothing and forced me to look for alternative solutions to the problem.

All these mobile broadband dialers basically use the same dial up connection as was used a decade ago for connecting through those noisy 33/56K modems. The instructions given below are for Windows 7. You will need to adapt these settings for older versions of Windows. What we will be doing is throwing out the Huawei dialer and connecting through the Windows dialer on our own instead of asking the Huawei dialer to do it.

Firstly please delete the Huawei dialer shortcut from your Desktop or wherever you normally run it from to prevent you from accidentally clicking on it from habit. You can always run it from its Program menu if required, such as when you need to troubleshoot with Tata and they ask you to run the dialer. If you do this however, remember that the dialer overwrites some changes, so it might be necessary for you to re-do these changes by following this tutorial again. Do not however uninstall the dialer as it might also uninstall the drivers required for the Photon.

Make sure that you have installed the Photon software and that it is working ok with the provided dialer. Windows Vista and 7 have a weird round about way to get to the network properties, on XP we could get there by double clicking the network icon. So,

Click on the Network icon in the Taskbar and click "Open Network and sharing Center"

Click on “Change Adapter settings”

Right Click your Tata Indicom dialer icon and click on properties

Select Internet Protocol Version 4 and click properties

The next step is optional, but I found Google’s DNS servers more reliable that the ones Tata automatically assigned to me.

Under the general Tab, select Use the following DNS servers and type in 8.8.8.8

In the Options Tab, remove the check mark from the last 3 checkboxes. If you want to see the connection progress, leave the first box checked.

Click OK. That completes your setup. From now on, instead of using the Tata Indicom dialer, use the method shown in the screenshot below to connect and disconnect.

This is how you connect and disconnect from now on

Connected! WIthout that annoying Tata-Yahoo Page

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