The Ramblings of Ken

So I am considering blogging about my gaming on World of Warcraft. I see a lot of other sites out there where people tell about their experiences in the game. Since I don't seem to be updating the site very often, maybe this would give me a good excuse to update it. I'm on WoW a lot and I could talk about it a lot.

Yesterday was a fun evening of WoW. I got in a raid group that went and killed the Alliance leaders in Stormwind, Ironforge, Darnassus, and Exodar. It was way fun! I've been in groups before a couple of times, but they always failed at Stormwind. Way too many Alliance players were warned and were waiting for us. This time, however, we started in Stormwind, got King Varian Wrynn with no problems, quickly moved into the Deeprun Tram and took care of business in Ironforge, then ported to Orgrimmar and flew to Ashenvale to go up and finish the job in Darnassus and Exodar. It went very smoothly.

So, I got my Reigns of the Black War Bear. It's fun to have something that my other friends and guildmates don't have yet.

Today I finished up the Merrymaker achievement. I finally got a group to go to Blades Edge Mountains and finish the Ogri'la pre-req chain so that I could do Fa-la-la-la-Ogri'la. So, I now have the Merrymaker title. It's not the coolest title, but it is a title nontheless. Plus, it is one step closer to the Violet Proto-Drake.

I have noticed for awhile now that my download speeds have substantially increased. I decided to do a few speed tests and I was surprised by the results!



I am getting over 16 mbit downstream and 1 mbit upstream! I thought I was only paying for 8 mbit down and 256 kbit up. After testing out speeds on other Comcast customers it appears that they have increased speeds across the board. Nice! I'll take it. :)

EDIT: It only seems to get better :)

I neglected to write about something that happened this summer. Someone hacked my server through a vulnerability in Wordpress. I was hosting a site for a friend and I let it be. I never monitored the site or did security updates on it at all. I don't know why I didn't think to be responsible about what I hosted. The version of Wordpress that was running was almost two years old and it did indeed get hacked through a vulnerability in the upload function. My server was completely trashed. Somehow the hacker got enough access to delete most of the files on the drive. Luckily, I was able to recover everything that was important to me.

That brings us to my strategy at present. I put a new hard disk drive in my server and installed a minimal Gentoo installation. Then I installed VMware Server on it and built a Windows Server virtual machine. It's been running great for about six months now. If anyone ever manages to do something bad to my server again I just have to roll back to my latest snapshot of the server and I am good to go. There's no dealing with installing the operating system and reconfiguring PHP/Apache and all the other server goodies.

I highly recommend server virtualization to even the casual home server administrator. If you aren't doing it, you should! Go get [url=http://www.vmware.com/products/server/]VMware's free server[/url] now!

For probably about the past year I have been stuck listening to my favorites playlist that I made about a year or two ago. I've added a song to it here and there, but for the most part I've been listening to stuff from the 2004-2005 era. I decided last night, however, that I needed to give stuff from today a chance.

Today I have discovered [url=http://www.secondhandserenade.net]Secondhand Serenade[/url]. They freaking rock! "Fall For You" is so good! Give them a listen!

(Image copyright Secondhand Serenade - from the album "A Twist in My Story")

Just a while ago I figured out a problem that had been giving me fits for quite awhile! At work when I was working on someone else's computer there were times when I wanted to access files on my own work computer. I kept getting errors saying that my computer was not accessible or that access was denied. It was so weird!

I finally tracked down the culprit! It was VMware! VMware Workstation installs two other network adapters, vmnet1 and vmnet8. These are only used when you configure your virtual machines to use NAT or host-only networking. I don't use these configurations, I only use bridged networking. After disabling these adapters I now have Windows file sharing working perfectly on Vista!

It sure makes me happy when I can access the files on my work computer like I should be able to :)

(Image taken from vmware.com)

For the last several months I have been working on a solution for the company I work for to push out Windows installations quickly and effectively over the network. We used to use Microsoft's old Remote Installation Services, but that quickly became obsolete with newer computers and especially now that Windows Vista is becoming mainstream. We were forced to find something else. I installed the next generation of RIS, Windows Deployment Services. It worked well for Windows Vista installs, but you had to create an image of a Windows XP computer in a .wim format to deploy it via WDS. When attempting to deploy that image to computers with different hardware 90% of the time you would get a bluescreen when the computer attempted to boot.

Now I have moved on to Microsoft's Business Desktop Deployment 2007. It works in conjunction with WDS to automate the installation of Windows XP and Windows Vista and the deployment of applications to these installs. It really has been fun to get up and running.

I used nLite to integrate the new Serial ATA drivers that are required to be slipstreamed into the Windows source files. However, when Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released nLite became broken when using Business Desktop Deployment to install the operating system. Come to find out, I am breaking the terms of nLite's license agreement by using it at work anyway.

[code]5. nLite is free for personal use only, you cannot use it for any company or business purposes at this time.[/code]

So now I have finally been learning how to integrate drivers into my Windows source files by hand. It isn't that difficult. The instructions at this page really helped out a lot. I was able to easily get my textmode drivers to integrate into the setup routine and XP installed without any problems whatsoever.

Fun times!

(Image is copyrighted by Microsoft Corporation)

So over at KVNU's For the People website [url=http://www.kvnuforthepeople.com](http://www.kvnuforthepeople.com)[/url] I discovered a new website called [url=http://www.stickam.com]Stickam[/url]. It is a free service where you can have live streaming video! It's awesome! KVNU uses it to broadcast content throughout the day, specifically the "For the People" program. I started to watch the webcam to see the guys and what goes on at the station. I then realized that I could use this on my own blog! So, now we have live video again here at The Ramblings of Ken... it won't ever be anything interesting, but it is here... Thanks Tom for introducing me to Stickam! Even more importantly, thanks for the great show on KVNU's For the People!