JAUHARI

I just installed a new PC (with Windows) and wanted to backup the C (System) drive using Norton Ghost 2003. Don’t ask me why I am still using the old version instead of the new one, since this is the only one I have in my hand. The installation was just fine as well as the backup setting, then it asked me to reboot the PC. OK. Click and reboot..

After the blank screen, the ghost process notified me that there was an error and can not continue the task. It asked me to run “ghreboot“. No doubt, I run it and nothing happened.

Norton Ghost help on the web returned me nothing, except that the problem is caused by a virtual partition created by Norton Ghost as an active partition. I contacted my old friend asking for this problem and gave me a direction.  He said that Norton Ghost 2003 is not compatible with SATA devices.

Here is how to solve the problem if you face it.

1. Boot from any bootable CD from where you can run fdisk
2. After it give you a command prompt, run: fdisk
3. Choose to display partition and you will see a partition labeled : –VPGHOST–
4. Delete this partition
5. Activate your Bootable Partition
6. Exit fdisk
7. Reboot

Voila. You should notice your Windows loading screen. Then you can install the new version of Norton Ghost

Warning:  Use it at your own risk. I used Windows XP and Windows 98 for the Boot CD.

Sometime it is necessary to limit outgoing email size for you who have a limited bandwidth, especially for Indonesian . Being honest folks, the price for bandwidth is expensive here. It can be a nightmare for companies with crowded email traffic.

I use MDaemon to either send or download emails (from the web hosting provider) for company and distribute them to local mail account. The advantage of using this method is to avoid high internet traffic in the morning and to use unused bandwidth after office hour.

Office staff sends email trough MDaemon which is available on LAN and MDaemon will relay the email to company’s SMTP account in the web hosting provider. It will safe staff from waiting email to be sent (yes, because of using LAN connection) rather than sends directly to hosted SMTP.

Without prediction, this method kicked me back. Put me in a problem. Because the connection between client and MDaemon SMTP server is using LAN, then all email with any size can be sent to MDaemon in a blink of eyes, even a 50MB email
Searched on Google, pointed me to this web.Here is a step by step on how to limit incoming SMTP email size on MDaemon Mail Server:

1. Click Security -> Content Filter
2. Click New Rule button
3. Give a name for Rule, e.g.: Limit Incoming SMTP
4. Check option “If the MESSAGE SIZE is greater than”
5. Click link “is greater than ‘10k’” (with blue color in Rule Description) and enter the maximum email size that allowed to send trough SMTP, e.g.: 1500.
6. Check option “Send a note 1 to …”
7. Click link “specify information” (with blue color in Rule Description)  and enter “$SENDER$” in the To field, “[REJECTED] $SUBJECT$” in the Subject field dan type your notification message in the Message Text. If you want to include the original message, check option “Include the original message”. Click OK.
8. Check option “Delete the message”
9. Klik OK to save Rule.
10. Done

That’s it.

Now every staff can only send email with 1.5 MB in size. The next thing you should do is monitoring the log and MDaemon outgoing email queue.

A few days ago I need to reconfigure office proxy server (I am using Squid) to avoid certain users accessing Internet during work hour. Sound extreme huh? But it’s a company policy. I can not deny.

They are not allowed to access during 08:00-12:00 and 13:00-16.30. After configuring and apply the ACL (Access Control List)  to my PC for trial, the ACL did not work. I ever did this before. I just did a copy and paste. It should work. Search result on the Internet to find the right configuration convinced me that mine was correct.

It must be caused by another problem, I guessed. It’s true. I did “touch test” and “ls-l” showed that the file was not created in the correct clock time. The “date” command told that the time on the server was not coorect.

I need to adjust server clock setting. Here is the command.

# date -s ‘MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS’ <– change with actual date and time eg: ‘12/24/2007 16:25:00′

# clock -w  <– to set the hardware clock (CMOS)  to match the kernel time

# echo “clock -s” /sbin/hwclock  <– to make sure that the time is always correct on reboot, link the kernel time to hardware clock

# chmod +x /sbin/hwclock  <– make the script executable

Voila. The time is adjusted and my ACL worked like a charm.

Now, it’s time to wait for the complain

I have many social bookmark and every social bookmarks have unique value, so it’s not easy to compare each social bookmarks media. One of my favourite is StumbleUpon.com, they main layout is simple easy to browsable. The other things is, StumbleUpon.com firefox extension toolbar is really great. This extension make more easy for me to bookmarks our favourites address, I can add some tags, add some flags (like or dislike), channel, friends tools and many more. There are toolbar for Internet Explorer too.

To make my StubleUpon.com account more better, I try to Blog walking and found nice article from Seoptimise.com is a SEO company, they give some tips how to increase our website traffic use StumbleUpon.com bookmars services. This is some of they tips that you can read more detail on SEO Blog.

Rating websites

By getting involved in the community and rating some of the websites I visit helps my website appear for StumbleUpon users who have similar interests to my own, therefore they will be more likely to rate my site with a thumbs up! StumbleUpon is time-based, although not to the same extent as Digg, which means the more votes you can get in a short period of time the more traffic you will receive.

Adding friends

By adding friends you will increase the amount of users who will see your newly added webpages, making them more likely to give your site the thumbs up.

Submit new webpages

Once I have created a new blog post for example I will submit the URL to StumbleUpon using the toolbar, it is perfectly fine to promote your own website providing you don’t overdo it. This will help to increase the amount of my webpages I have present in the StumbleUpon database and improve the likelihood of my site being ’stumbled upon’.

Go to Seoptimese Blog to read more detail about how to increase traffic with Stumbleupon.com