Data Center

Michael Jackson - The Music Legend

2009-07-05T05:52:00.001-07:00

Michael Joseph Jackson, the seventh child of the Jackson family,was a successful American artist known for his contribution to world music industry. He is know in the music world as Singer, songwriter, record producer, arranger, dancer, choreographer, actor, author, businessman, financier, philanthropist.Jackson married twice and was father of three children. MJ was born on August 29, 1958 at Gary, Indiana. MJ died at age of 50 at Los Angeles, California. MJ was preparing for "This Is It", a series of 50 concerts, before he died on July 25, 2009. "That Is It" concert series was planned to be held in London starting from July 13, 2009. MJ was among few artists who have been inducted

into the "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame" twice, his other achievements include multiple Guinness World Records—including one for "Most Successful Entertainer of All Time"—13 Grammys Awards, 13 number one singles in his solo career, and the sale of 750 million records worldwide.

MJ made his debut in 1968 while he was just 11 years old. His debute was as a member of "The Jackson 5". MJ was also known as "King of Pop". MJ's 1982 album "Thriller" is world's the best-selling albums. "Off the Wall (1979)", "Bad (1987)", "Dangerous (1991)" and "History (1995)" are four of his other solo studio albums which are among the world's best-selling records.

In the early 1980s, MJ was among dominant figures in popular music. MJ's music videos such as "Beat It", "Billie Jean" and "Thriller" airing on MTV made the relatively new channel well known in Music World. "Black or White" and "Scream" made Jackson an enduring staple on MTV in the 1990s. MJ was also know of performing a number of physically complicated dance techniques, such as the robot and the moonwalk.

While Jackson donated and raised millions of dollars for beneficial causes, he found himself in significant controversies damaging his public image arising out of his often changing appearances and eccentric behavior. MJ raised millions of dollars for good cause through his foundations, charity singles, and support of 39 charities. In 1993 MJ was accused of child sexual abuse. However,due to lack of evidence the criminal investigation was closed. In 2005, Jackson was tried and acquitted of sexual abuse allegations and several other charges.

How The ClickBank Marketplace Works?

2009-06-17T13:47:00.001-07:00

ClickBank has about 100,000+ affiliates. These affiliates earn a percentage of every sale, of any ClickBank product, made by them. The affiliate referal sales generates over 50% of the sales of Clickbank's top selling products. The repository of digital products available for sale at ClickBank is referred to as The ClickBank Marketplace. A sale is done by refering the traffic to products pitch page of the product. The pitch page describes the Features and Benefits of the product. In the Marketplace products are ranked by their "productivity score" which is internal to Clickbank and is not published officially.

Every product to get listed in the ClickBank Marketplace must have a sales commission rate as percentage, of product price, that should range from 1% to 75%. The absolute value of the commission however, should not be lower than minimum commission of $0.25 and the maximum is $100.00.

The ClickBank Marketpalce has products listing consisting of following qualitative parameters...

$Earned/Sale: refers to the average net amount (impacted by refunds, chargebacks, and sales taxes) earned by an affiliate/referred sale.
Future $: refers to the average total rebill revenue earned by the affiliate due to sales from a site. Generally this value is the average sum of all rebills.
Total $: refers to (all initial sales + rebills)/(the number of initial sales). Hence it is the average total $/sale, including all future rebills.
%Earned/Sale: refers to average percentage commission earned by an affiliate/referred sale. This number whould usually vary if the product vendor changes its payout percentage over time.
%Referred: is the fraction of product vendor's total sales and the sale referred by ClickBank affiliates.
Gravity: refers to the weighted sum and not an actual total. It is the number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the vendor's products at ClickBank Marketplace. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks ClickBank adds an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total gavity value. The value added depends on the recency of the last referral. Therefore, the more recent referal is directly related the higher the value added.

All factors are combined, and adjusted such that more recent sales activity is given greater weight. To improve their Marketplace ranking a product must show a history of reliable convertion of referred traffic to paying customers over the past 8 weeks. Products that are able to maintain a higher ranking naturally attract more affiliates, and make more sales overall.

Scan your PC for Virus absolutely Free

2009-06-17T13:41:00.001-07:00

About Anti-virus and Free of Cost Online Scans.

Though there are plenty of options when it comes to Anti Virus solutions. There are two most popular brands in the antivirus industry viz. McAfee and Symantec. Both commercial softwares require yearly subscriptions. For a regular user of AV it is very difficult to distinguish on quality of Detection abilities of a particular AV.

However there are options to scan you computer free of cost from various online scanners including Trend Micro. Scan your computer without installing an Anti Virus. Here are the lists of free online virus scanner, these online virus scanner may require ActiveX and have dependency on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

However, if you want a free antivirus program, you may want to try AVG (the Free Edition). It’s a small in footprint, fast and of course FREE. AVG is runs at significant speed, even on lower end computers.

Note: I do not recommend using a computer with no antivirus protection installed and correctly configured to give true protection.

Network Firewall - Access Control

2009-06-17T13:31:00.001-07:00

About Types of Firewall

Network Firewalls control access to Networks by permitting or denying network traffic and/or users based on a Network Security Policy defined in the firewall by the Security Administrator. Firewalls can be used to establish identity of the user by integrating them with other security tools. Firewall segments the network in zones and establishes different layers of trust, to ensure critical resources are better protected and help contain traffic to specific network segments.

There are different types of firewalls to secure your network…

1. Stateful Inspection Firewall

2. Packet Filter Firewalls

3. Application Proxy Firewall

Stateful Inspection Firewall

Stateful Inspection collects information on various components in a packet header including Source IP Address, Destination IP Address, Source port, Destination port, packet sequence numbers. This is how the State Table is maintained by Statefule Inspection Firewall for TCP based sessions. For UDP it implements technology to create pseudo-session traversing firewall. Usually the first reply is accepted and then the connection is closed by firewall in case of UDP traffic. Stateful Inspection technology compares the aforementioned information i.e. IP, Port and Packet Sequence in the response packet against the state table to enhance security by allowing only matching packet to traverse the firewall. TCP reassembly may be performed to ensure accurate interpretation of TCP communication. Stateful Inspection Firewall focus on Network Layer of OSI model.

Usually all ISA certified firewalls in modern days by default drop all traffic unless explicitly permitted. Checkpoint, CISCO PIX, Juniper as among the leading companies in Firewall Technologies.

Packet Filter Firewall

A packet filter may check source and destination IP Address and Port details to permit or deny connection. Since it does not maintain the state table it is easy to highjack the session and access server on open port. Also systems can be compromised by sending traffic for a protocol other than the one assigned on the port. E.g. Potentially any protocol traffic can be sent on port 80 generally used by http or web traffic. Therefore packet filter firewall pose a potential security threat. Performance wise packet filtering would be faster than Stateful Packet Inspection.

Application Proxy Firewall

Proxy firewall is different in their functionality than the Stateful Inspection and Packet Filtering. Proxy firewall terminates all connections from clients and then act as broker between client and server. Proxy firewall broker all connections between client server architecture.

Proxy firewalls usually implement complete client/server implementations of protocol which results in performance degradation. Hence proxy firewalls many a time fail to meet the linear multi-gigabit throughput requirements of network segments. However, application proxy firewalls can provide much enhanced security based on application protocol as against the Stateful Packet Inspection firewall which operates at Network Layer in OSI model abbreviated for Open Systems Interconnection.

The second major drawback of proxy firewalls stems from variations in protocol implementation by different vendors. Proxy firewalls also suffer from issues associated with support for new protocols and scalability on one hand whereas fault tolerance and HA abbreviated for High Availability on the other hand.

Project Management

2009-06-15T23:14:00.001-07:00

We all have executed thousands of projects consciously or unconsciously in our daily life, in profession and every activity that we have planned, executed and reviewed.

What is a project?

A project is essentially a set of activities that has a defined purpose, is temporary in nature with a start and end date/time associated with the activities and requires resource for its completion. The resource could be human, mechanical, machinery or anything required to deliver the project. A project must have following feature.

Project: Features

Is Temporary i.e. it has specific duration and it must end at some point in time.

Has Defined Purpose

Must have Start and End Time

Human and Other Resource are required to deliver the project

Project Management

Project Management concepts have evolved over a period of time. The Project Management Institute abbreviated as PMI is an International, Non-Profit, group of Volunteers is associated with researching and propagating Project Management (PM) best practices.

Project Management is systematic application of Skills and Methods to complete the project

on time

on budged

to specification

A project has certain parameters for its evaluation as a successful or failed project as enlisted below.

Project Success Criteria

Absolutely well defined scope

Sponsor –

Someone having Business Need/Pain, power, Authority,

Budget

Will to Succeed – Sponsor must have willed to succeed in project.

Approval

Other Factor include – Special Tools/Equipments, Knowledge, Team, Technical Skills

Registry Hive and Description

2009-06-15T13:39:00.003-07:00

Registry Hive and Description

HKEY_CURRENT_USER Contains the root of the configuration information for the user who is currently logged on. The user's folders, screen colors, and Control Panel settings are stored here. This information is associated with the user's profile. This key is sometimes abbreviated as "HKCU."

HKEY_USERS Contains all the actively loaded user profiles on the computer. HKEY_CURRENT_USER is a subkey of HKEY_USERS. HKEY_USERS is sometimes abbreviated as "HKU."

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE Abbreviated as "HKLM." contains configuration information particular to the computer (affect all users). HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT abbreviated as "HKCR." is a subkey of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software and stores File Types along with associate program to open/edit/brose the files. Windows 2000 onwards HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER keys store the same information mentioned above. The HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes key contains settings that override the default settings and apply only to the interactive user.

HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG Contains information about the hardware profile that is used by the local computer at system startup.

Registry Editing Tool

Windows Registry editing tools include both GUI and Console based tool. The GUI tools include REGEDIT.EXE and REGEDT32.EXE where as the console based tool include reg.exe. On a command prompt you may want to check the usage of the tool using REG/?. It can be used in batchfile to ADD/DELETE/QUERY/EXPORT OR IMPORT REGISTRY HIVES OR KEYS.

Windows Registry Security

2009-06-15T13:39:00.001-07:00

Windows Registry Security

The security concept in windows registry dates back to Windows NT operating system that was essentially the Windows Server OS. There were no security features in early version of client OS from microsoft including Windows 9x and ME editions. Security features in Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista let an administrator control access to registry keys by setting user ACLs on registry keys. Windows NT and Windows 2000 OS included seperate tools for registry editing viz. REGEDIT.EXE and REGEDT32.EXE. REGEDT32.EXE was the tool used to registry permissions.

Windows Registry Files

2009-06-15T13:37:00.003-07:00

Windows Registry Files

The windows registry architecture in Windows XP and later versions has changed as lot from it predecessors including Windows 9x and Winodws ME. A hive in a windows Registry contains groups of keys, subkeys, and values in the registry that has a set of supporting files that contain backups of its data. The supporting files for all hives except HKEY_CURRENT_USER are in the %SystemRoot%\System32\Config folder on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista. The supporting files for HKEY_CURRENT_USER are in the %SystemRoot%\Profiles\Username folder.

Registry Hive	System Files
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SAM	Sam, Sam.log, Sam.sav
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security	Security, Security.log, Security.sav
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software	Software, Software.log, Software.sav
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System	System, System.alt, System.log, System.sav
HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG	System, System.alt, System.log, System.sav, Ntuser.dat, Ntuser.dat.log
HKEY_USERS\DEFAULT	Default, Default.log, Default.sav

In Windows 98, the registry was stored in files named User.dat and System.dat whereas Windows Millennium Edition, the registry files were named Classes.dat, User.dat, and System.dat. The new installation of Windows 98 created a files called System.1st. This file stored all the configuration about hardware and was used by skilled technicians to restore registry to recover corrupt registry and resulting hardware issues

Windows Registry Cleaner

2009-06-15T13:37:00.001-07:00

Windows Registry Cleaner

A registry cleaner software can diagnose problems such as application runtime errors, poor application startup times, slow Windows start-up, extremely slow shut down, slow system performance, failed un-installation of an application and many more..

Cleaning a registry manually though not impossible is difficult beyond limits for sure. In essence registry cleaner software can make the complex process of cleaning your registry lot more simple with few clicks of a button.

Here are the benefits of having a registry cleaner:

Avoid Windows crashes

Improve slow performance

Remove various error messages on startup

Improve PC Performance

Safely clean and repair Windows Registry

Safely backup your registry

Improve startup times by up to 70%

There are several registry cleaning software available out there including freeware, shareware and trialware. Microsoft also provides a registry cleaning tool called Regclean.exe. You can google for regclean.exe to download the tool.

What is Windows Registry?

2009-06-15T13:35:00.001-07:00

What is Windows Registry?

The registry is a central hierarchical database used in Microsoft Windows 98, Windows CE, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista used to store information that is necessary to configure the system for one or more users, applications and hardware devices.

Windows registry is a database or central repository of configuration and parameters used by OS and various applications and softwares installed on the Windows Operating System (OS). Windows Registry is proprietary to Microsoft Windows OS alone. Windows registry replaces the need for .ini files methodology of storing application configuration parameters. It typically stores the entire windows configuration, hardware profiles, software profiles, user profile configurations and much more. With every install and uninstall programs in your computer, you make changes to the registry. Over time, the registry becomes cluttered and causes all sorts of PC performance problems.

How Outlook's Deleted Items folder works

2009-06-14T06:36:00.001-07:00

How Outlook's Deleted Items folder works

A PST is a database. Items are records within the database and there is an index that points to each item. When you empty the Deleted Items folder, Outlook doesn't actually delete the items, it just deletes the items' listings from the index. The item is still in the PST, but unrecoverable because Outlook has no idea where it is without the pointer in the index. The space the item takes up is called "whitespace".

When you Compact a PST, the item is finally removed permanently and the whitespace is recovered, often shrinking the PST by many megabytes. Once the PST has 20% "whitespace", Outlook begins compacting the PST. If the Deleted Items folder contained a lot of messages, Outlook may begin compacting the PST immediately and the items will be deleted forever within a few minutes.

To recover the items which are no longer in the index you need to force Outlook to rebuild the index by causing corruption. You can cause corruption by using a Hex editor to delete some characters from the beginning of the PST file. If you delete the wrong ones you'll cause corruption but not in the index and Outlook won't rebuild the index.

Recover Deleted Messages from Outlook PST

2009-06-14T06:12:00.001-07:00

Recover Deleted Messages from Outlook PST

Note: Microsoft Exchange server users may be able to recover deleted items using “Deleted Items recovery” options, if the administrator has it enabled.

If the “Deleted Items Recover” options is enable one can also use Outlook Web Aceess (OWA) to recover delted items. You may also use Microsoft Outlook Client if an only if following Windows Registry Settings exists

Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.

Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options

On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.

Type DumpsterAlwaysOn, and then press ENTER.

Double-click DumpsterAlwaysOn.

Type 1 in the Value data area, click Decimal in the Base area, and then click OK.

Close Registry Editor.

Restart Outlook.

The Outlook’s Default recovery options may not work if any of the following exists…

It may not be p ossible if one has permanently deleted the messages using Shift + Delete key combination.

You have not NOT deleted messages from Deleted Items folder in outlook.

If the Outlook has started compacting PST, it is likely to fail

Despite all the facts mentioned above you may still be able to recover the deleted message using a commercial email recovery product. You may rely on google for the most recent recovery tool.

How to Delete your yahoo account?

2009-06-14T06:11:00.001-07:00

How to Delete your yahoo account?

Warning:

As a result of deleting your Yahoo account, you will lose your Yahoo! ID, eMail address, and Profile(s) you may have created. All your account data and settings across the Yahoo! network, will also get deleted, which includes your HotJobs, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Address Book, Yahoo! Small Business, Yahoo! GeoCities, Yahoo! Briefcase, My Yahoo! and many more. Account deletion will also terminate any paid services associated with your yahoo id. You would loose the payments remitted for any of the paid services along with all the data in paid or free services associated with Yahoo ID.

If you are sure you want to delete your yahoo account simply visit Delete My Yahoo ID. If you are not able to click the below link for whatever reasons then copy and pasted below link in your browsers address bar. https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.slogin=&.intl=us&.src=&.bypass=&.partner=&.done=https%3a//edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user&pkg=&owd=

You will be asked to confirm by entering Captch Text to rule out any robotic deletion of the account.

Data Center Design -Capex and Opex Elements

2009-04-15T00:53:00.000-07:00

Data center is expected to deliver a high speed, high availability and high demand Infrastructure Services to business. A properly designed data center delivers Availability, Reliability, Scalability and off course Accessibility. Data Center availability is calculated as 24 (Hours) by 365 (Days) per year minus any Scheduled Maintenance Downtime.

Typical Capex elements in designing a high speed, availability & demand Data Center generally include....

Non-IT Elements:

Physical Layout Elements: Rectangular Space for optimized planning.

Physical Security Elements: CCTV, Proximity Cards and Biometric/Retina based access control systems, Water Leakage Detection System, Smoke/Fire Detection System, Water Sprinklers, FM200 Fire Suppression System, CO2 based Fire Extinguishers, Rodent Repellents

IT Equipments Elements

Networking Communication Systems

SAN (Storage Area Networks)

NAS (Network Attached Storage)

File/Application/Web Server Farms

Database Server Farms

Network Security Element (Firewall, NIDS/NIPS, HIDS/HIPS, Anti-Virus, VA etc.)

Typical Opex elements in designing a high speed, availability & demand Data Center include....

Salary of IT Admin Staff.

Salary of Non-IT Admin Staff

Consumable Costs like Backup Tape, Diesel, Electricity Cost

Maintenance and Repair Costs.

Type of Data Centers

2009-04-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

Data Centers are primary categorized into two:

CDC: Abbreviated for Corporate Data Center. CDC is an institutional data center usally owned, operated and managed by Corporate bodies for their in house IT infrastructure needs. It could be in the shape of small server room or reasonably sized data centers in a corporate world.
IDC: Abbreviated for Internet Data Center. IDC is generally owned, operated and managed by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Corporates generally host their internet based services in an IDC. IDC usually provides services like Cloudbased Hosting, E-Mail Hosting, Website Hosting, Colocation facilities etc. Cloudbased services are the latest buzz words in the managed hosting services

Data Center - Floor Planning

2009-04-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

A data center floor planning is neceesary to achieve following among other benefits...

Cooling predictability
Power Density Calculation
Electrical Efficiency
Efficient Space Allocation

A Data Center Floor Plan consists of the Structural layout and the Equipment layout.

Structural Layout: The room layout includes the location of walls, doors, support columns, the height of the raised floor, location of accessramps, lifts etc.

Equipment layout: The equipment layout shows the footprint of IT equipments and the Non-IT (power and cooling) equipments including their footprint. IT equipment is usually measured as rack locations. Rack locations are not affected by no of devices installed within the rack.

Cooling Data Center with Hot and Cold Aisles

2009-04-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

Cooling Data Center is one of the most critical requirements of any data center design and management. There are various approaches to cooling which includes perimeter and rack based cooling methodologies. In perimeter cooling an important approach is "Creating Hot and Cold Aisles" to create natual air flow. In this methodology cold air is released from perforated tiles placed in raised floor while hot air retruns from ducts in false ceiling.

The Cold and Hot aisle design is achieved by stacking equipment racks in a row in alternate position such that cold intake and hot discharge from equipments in rack rows face each other. This facilitates zoning of cold air in-take for equipments placed inside the rack and hot air released from equipments inside rack.

Benefits of Hot and Cold Aisle Cooling Methodology.

The Cold Air in-take of equipment always receives cold air released from perforated tiles used in raised floor.
The hot Air Discharch side of the equipment face each other resulting efficient processing of hot air inside the data center.

Thus the efficient and optimized cooling is achieved by creating hot and cold aisles.

Raised Flooring-Facts

2009-04-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

What is Raised Flooring?

Raised Flooring is a framework of horizontal and vertical bars mounted on the Data Center's true floor, creating an elevated grid. Flat panels are placed in these grids to create a raised floor surface. A typcial raised flooring in a modern data center is about 24" to 30" in height.

A raised floor provides flexibility in electrical and network cabling, and help control cooling inside data center. Alternatie to raised flooring is to lay power & network cabling on the floor while cooling can be delivered through ducts in the false ceiling. There are both pros and cons of having raised flooring and not having it.

Pros and Cons of No-Raised-Flooring in Data Center.

In ISP/CoLolocations wire fencing can be installed to physically seperate cages that can go floor to ceiling and prohibits people from crawling beneath the raised floor and gain unauthorized access.
Loss of cooling to one cage closer to the HVAC unit having many open tiles decreasing subfloor pressure is ruled out.
Inefficient cooling as it can not easily be rerouted to other areas
Problems associated with exposed power and network cabling

Pros and Cons of Raised-Flooring in Data Center

Dedicated space allows to channel cooled air through by strategically placing perforated or grated floor tiles.
Network and Power cabling beneath raised floor is safe and less prone to accidents.
Provides easy accessibility to network and power cables lying beneath raised floor.
The drawback is associated with the cost of raised flooring in a small data center admeasuring less than 1000 Sq.Ft.

Data Center Design Consideration

2009-04-12T07:11:00.000-07:00

Data centers must be planned carefully to ensure compliance with standards/codes governing the technical, physical, environmental and legal aspects. Design considerations to be taken into account prior to building an effective & efficient Data Center includes but is not limited to following...

Local Law laid by Municipal Corp/similar governmental body
Site/location Selection Condiseration
Space available/required for DC
Electrical Power factors
Cooling Considerations
Floor load & height
Redundancy Level required by Business
Future Growth and Expansion

Assigning roles and responsibilities before starting a Data Center project is must to succeessfully rollout the DC commissioning project. Some of the practices that can help in designing a data center could include....

Clearly define deadlines and instructions
Chalk out Roles and Responsiblities
Order Data Center materials in advance
Plan contingencies for inevitable delays
Document communications, changes
Visit datacenter site often during construction