Ed's Tech Tips

If you have bought a new computer or were adventerous enough to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007  you need to be aware of the issues exchanging files with others that do not use Office 2007. While files created in Office 2003 can be easily read in Office 2007, files created in the new Office 2007 file format cannot be opened by users with Office version 2003 or older, nor can they be read by any Macintosh version of Office at all. IMHO, I would avoid upgrading until it is absolutely necessary. I have not found anything in Office 2007 worth the hassle and learning curve.I would strongly encourage a review of OpenOffice.org or Google Docs, but that's a topic for another blog. However, if you have here are some recommendations from Mount Holyoke College LITS department:

1. OFFICE 2007 USERS - “SAVE DOWN"
Users of Office 2007 should remember to “save down” to the Office 2003 format when saving their documents. This will ensure that others who are still using Office 2003 will be able to open their files. In all Office 2007 applications, select the Office Button in the upper left corner, select “save as”, select “97-2003” option. (Note: You can set your Office applications to automatically save in this format. Select the “Options” button at the bottom of the same menu. Select the “Save” category, Under Save files in this format, click on the dropdown arrow and  select “97-2003&rdquo

2. OFFICE 2003 USERS - INSTALL MICROSOFT’S COMPATIBILITY PACK.
The Pack is for PC users only; there is nothing currently available for the Macintosh. Once installed in the Office 2003 directory, Office 2003 users can open, edit and save Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 files.  For more information and to download the Compatibility Pack from the Microsoft site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923505

Some staff at the Alumnae Association received the following email supposedly from PayPal even though they do not have a PayPal account:

Dear PayPal customer,

We recently reviewed your account, and we suspect an unauthorized use
of your account. Therefore as a preventive measure we have temporary
limited your access to sensitive PayPal features. To ensure that your account is not compromised please log on to your PayPal Online Account, verify your account information and your online account will be reactived by our
system.

What you need to do:
Log On to your Online Account

Enter your Account Information

**************************************
IMPORTANT CUSTOMER SUPPORT INFORMATION
**************************************

We are committed to delivering your quality service that is reliable and highly secure. This email is one of many components designed to ensure your information is safeguarded at all times.

Please do not reply to this message. For any inquiries, contact Customer Service.

Document Reference: (9205120.

The links in the email take you to the following address:

http://mstudio2.aknet.it/.../.www.paypal.com/cmd=_login-run.html

This page is located on a web site for a furniture store company in Italy which is probably unaware that their server has been hacked and is being used this way. If you have the latest version of Firefox, you should get a warning if you try to visit the page that it is a fruadlent site.

The email message is very typical and unfortunately all too common. 

Here are some tips to help protect yourself: (More)

I use a great little open source program called Logwatch that sends me a daily analysis report of who accesses our web server and from what IP address they are coming from. There is at least one list that shows up each day listing numerous failed log in attempts with user names from A to Z (see a typical list below). These are from hacker programs or scripts that go through a list of typical names and various simple passwords or lack of passwords. It's an attempt to find a weak link in my defenses.  This is not a clever attack. It is a blunt brute force attack. Don't think that no one would be interested in your server or web host account, because someone somewhere is interested. Your basic defense is a good password that you change often, atypical user names and none standard port addresses for SFTP and SSH. Do not use telnet or plain FTP.

Here is a list of failed login names from October 15th, 2007:

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Warning: This article is technical, but it pertains to something I have been working on for the past week and is pretty important: the backing up of data on the network.

You may have heard it said before, but it bears repeating: It is not a matter of "if" your hard drive or computer is going to crash but "when".  Therefore, you should be prepared if you care about the data on your computer. Our file/print/intranet server has four 250 GB hard drives configured in a RAID-5 configuration, so that if one drive fails the other drives pick up the slack. It works, I experienced a failed drive in a 3 drive array. Because of the redundent data the drives actually store 650 GB. The data is backed up to another four drive terabyte RAID-5 server that is remotely located. There are many backup strategies, but today I am just going to cover what I do with a free open source program called Rsync. 

From the rsync web site:

rsync is a file transfer program for Unix systems. rsync uses the "rsync algorithm" which provides a very fast method for bringing remote files into sync. It does this by sending just the differences in the files across the link, without requiring that both sets of files are present at one of the ends of the link beforehand.

Some features of rsync include

• can update whole directory trees and filesystems
• optionally preserves symbolic links, hard links, file ownership, permissions, devices and times
• requires no special privileges to install
• internal pipelining reduces latency for multiple files
• can use rsh, ssh or direct sockets as the transport
• supports anonymous rsync which is ideal for mirroring

This command line utility is very powerful and is relatively easy to use. The following command will backup up one directory to another: rsync -av /src/foo /dest. However, for useful daily incremental backups more options are required. There are some very complex scripts written around rsync, however, with the backup option the following script will backup multiple directories to a remote server via ssh (a secure connection), retain 29-31 days of incremental backups (depending on the month), store information in a log  and email the network admin when the job is complete. The first backup may take a while, but the following ones will be much faster since only the items that have changed will be transferred.

Here is the script with comments. You'll want to schedule it via cron, a scheduling application. Here is an article on how to generate and share a ssh key.

#!/bin/bash
# usage: backup.sh [ -d ]
BACKUPS=user@domainname:/c/archive
TIME_STAMP=$(date %d)
RSYNC_OPTS="-avz --timeout=600 --force --ignore-errors --delete --backup --backup-dir=/c/archive/$TIME_STAMP"
DEBUG=0
LOG_FILE=/var/log/your_rsync.log     ## Keeps a copy in /var/log
TMP_LOG_FILE=/tmp/your-tmp-rsync.log  ## Mails the current session's log
rm $TMP_LOG_FILE

CURRENT_DATE=`date`


# this option allows me to easily do a test run when I make changes
if [ "x$1" == "x-d" ]; then DEBUG=1; fi
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then RSYNC_OPTS="$RSYNC_OPTS --dry-run"; fi

# the following line clears the last months incremental directory
[ -d $HOME/emptydir ] || mkdir $HOME/emptydir
rsync --delete -aq -e "ssh -i /your-ssh-key" $HOME/emptydir/ $BACKUPS/$TIME_STAMP
rmdir $HOME/emptydir


#Clearly shows me in the log the the start of each backup
echo "Starting Backup of your server on : $CURRENT_DATE" >> $TMP_LOG_FILE


#this is a for loop to go through each of the directories I want backed up
for DATA in /etc /var/flexshare /var/www /home
do
rsync $RSYNC_OPTS -e "ssh -i /your-ssh-key" $DATA $BACKUPS   2>1 1>>$TMP_LOG_FILE
done

#separate lines for mysql database backup, because mysql needs to be stopped 
#This step backs up th entire  database
/etc/init.d/mysqld stop
rsync $RSYNC_OPTS -e "ssh -i /your-ssh-key" /var/lib/mysql $BACKUPS 2>1 1>>$TMP_LOG_FILE
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

#appends the log for the current session to the main log file. 
cat $TMP_LOG_FILE >> $LOG_FILE
cat $TMP_LOG_FILE | mail you@domainname.com -s  "Rsync Backup Results"

exit $?

I would have included the ssh command into the RSYNC_OPTS variable, but when I did I always got the error from rsync that "-i" is not a known option. And yes I did try various combinations of single qoutes inside double and vice versa to no avail. However, the above solution works fine.  The reason for the ssh command is that your connection is secure and you do not have to manually enter your password and the job can be scheduled to run any time of the day. 

This job only takes a few minutes to run after the initial backup (which took a few hours) and I run it nightly, however if you are really paranoid you could set it up to run every hour. If you do so, change the time stamp to include the hour, as well as the day to preserve your incremental backups of which you will have many more so make sure you have the free space. 

Email can be a blessing or a burden. It is cheap instant communication with others around the world that you can access from almost any where, however, the flip side is that you can get too much of it. Recently I have had to consolidate and organize my email situation.

First, I'm a bit overwhelmed with email, as many people probably are. I subscribe to too many newsletters and lists. I have four active email accounts. Then I keep old emails, especially at work, for reference and back up. I originally attempted to file everything in either categorical or project folders. I also created folders for inidvidual family, friends and co-workers. However, I found that searching sub-folders is a hassle, because I do not always remember if I moved an email to a person or topical folder. In addition, my favorite email cleint, Thunderbird does not search through sub-folders. Then there are the inbox size restrictions, which I have been pretty good about staying under, but some of co-workers are constantly bumping into the inbox ceiling largely due to large attachments.

I found a couple solutions...

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Linked to the Alumnae to Alumnae Message Boards is a photo gallery where alumnae can create their own photo albums and upload their own pictures on or off campus via a web browser from their digital cameras. This not to be confused with the Alumnae Association Photo Gallery that staff upload photos to.

Alumnae can browse photos, post comments, watch a slide show of the images or send e-cards of the images. In order to upload images alumnae will need to complete a separate quick on line registration for either the message board or the photo galleries. There is a short how-to video that I created that shows you how to register and easily upload your pictures.

The photo gallery is based on a free open source program called Coppermine. The software will resize photos that are uploaded, the upload process will be faster if the images are resized prior to transferring them to the web site. I set the size limit to 1024 pixels wide. An excellent program for resizing a group of images at one time is Irfanview. It is a popular free program for viewing and converting images. However, do not ask me to explain the name.

We are featuring a new screen saver, titled Spring 2006 in our new Virtual Cafe which is a new area on the web site that will feature interactive and multimedia content including photos, video, audio, wallpaper and screen savers. This particular screen saver features numerous full-screen images of plants in bloom and campus buildings. It also features a songtrack consisting of the College Alma Mater and Bread & Roses, performed by the M&C's a cappella group. They did a very nice performance, but after the 32nd unexpected playing when your computer automatically turns on the screen saver while you are tyring to talk on the phone, it might start to get old. Therefore the music volume can be lowered in the screen saver settings options tab. I created a Flash tutorial to show you how to easily adjust the sound if you are using Windows XP. The steps are similar for other versions of Windows and Macs as well. Click More to the view it.

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Help2Go is a community committed to offering free computer help, technical support, tutorials, and spyware removal in a way that everyone can understand, not "geek-speak". It's free, no strings attached. (Note: you must have an account in order to ask a question). Volunteers maintain the site. There is a forum, newsletter and tutorials on a wide variety of subjects. There are some very helpful tips on this site.