wooway, Author at woodaway.ca

Before booking a hotel room, you may want to read user reviews of the particular hotel and location — frequently, guests who’ve had bug problems report them online. Bear in mind that a report about one hotel does not mean the issue wasn’t isolated to one room, or that hotel management hasn’t since exterminated.

Still concerned? Concerned travelers may want to check their bed for telltale signs of the bugs, a more common practice years ago. Before jumping into bed, here are a few spot check tips:

Peel back the bedsheets and check the mattress, running your fingers along the upper and lower seams. Make sure to check the mattress tag, bed bugs often hide there.

Experts recommend removing and examining the headboard if possible. Check for tiny black spots (excrement) that are smaller than poppy seeds. You may also see translucent light brown skins or, in the case of an infestation— live bugs.

Check the bedside table. Look for signs of bed bugs in the drawers and along the wall on the side of the bed that is less likely to be disturbed by cleaning staff and guests.

You may want to elevate suitcases and keep them off the floor, like on a luggage stand.

If you see powder in the drawers or on the headboard, it is likely that the room has already been treated for bed bugs by an exterminator.

If bed bugs are detected, travelers should request for another room. Be sure to inform hotel management.

Just moving to a different room may not be the total answer. You should repeat the thorough inspection of any new or different room you are offered.

When you pack to leave, inspect your luggage carefully first, and inspect every item as you pack to help detect any bugs or their signs. Laundering most cloth items with typical hot water and detergent followed by drying on low heat for at least 20 minutes (or standard dry cleaning) should kill all bed bugs in or on such items. Sealing freshly-laundered items inside a plastic bag should help keep any more bed bugs from getting in those items later to hide (and be carried back with you).

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11877871/

TCP connection established using Firewall client may close unexpectedly

Posted on 2007-12-18 by wooway

Firewall Client software uses a control channel for communication between the Firewall client and ISA Server (UDP or TCP port 1745). If a client application wants to connect to an external computer on TCP port 23 (i.e. telnet protocol) , the control channel is used to negotiate a new dynamic port for this specific traffic (after ISA rule verification, of course). After this negotiation, telnet traffic goes through the above negotiated port. Let’s call this the data connection.

Now, what happens to the control channel TCP connection? It is left open until one of the peers closes the data connection.

To leave the control channel open, the Firewall client has to periodically send a KeepAlive packet to ISA Server. This is done by the Firewall client every 10 minutes. If a device between the client and ISA Server has an idle connection timeout configured for less than 10 Minutes, then this device will force the closing of the control channel, with the result that ISA Server and the firewall client drop the data connection shortly thereafter (depending on the third party device timeout value).

To correct this behavior always ensure that the third party device has an idle timeout greater than 10 minutes.

Franck Heilmann

Escalation Engineer EMEA ISA team

Published Thursday, January 18, 2007 11:35 AM by isablog

source: http://blogs.technet.com/isablog/archive/2007/01/18/tcp-connection-established-using-firewall-client-may-close-unexpectedly.aspx

ref: http://blogs.isaserver.org/pouseele/2007/01/19/tcp-connection-established-using-firewall-client-may-close-unexpectedly/

IE7Pro

Posted on 2007-11-21 by wooway

Talking about NEWS: eWeek – “Is VMWare a dead duck?”

Posted on 2007-11-21 by wooway

NEWS: eWeek – "Is VMWare a dead duck?"

Looks like Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols from eWeek sees the writing on the walls.

Is VMWare a Dead Duck?
Microsoft, Red Hat, Citrix, Novell and now Oracle are all offering free or open-source virtualization of one sort or another. Can VMware survive?
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2216435,00.asp

This market space is evolving so rapidly. Why would any company ‘bet the farm’ on one virtualization technology and rush into virtualizing their infrastructure when this technology hasn’t matured yet? Buying virtualization products today is like buying a car in a town where there’s only one car dealership. All the cars sold are bare bones Chevrolet Pick-up trucks and everything sold is an additional nickel-and-dime option that you have to pay for.

Meanwhile look at the "new dealerships" that are opening up just over the horizon:

Microsoft’s Hyper-V
Microsoft’s virtualization hypervisor has a negligible cost associated with it while providing better performance than traditional virtualization technologies. Additionally, it’s compatibility with all Windows Server hardware platforms make it the easy choice for customers looking to virtualize their datacenter on the hardware that they’ve already chosen – as opposed to being forced to purchase specific servers in which VMWare has developed drivers for.
Because VMWare has it’s own proprietary driver model, you can not use Windows drivers for VMWare ESX – it requires that a custom driver be available for the hardware platform you are to virtualize on.
…meanwhile all servers that support Windows Server can leverage Hyper-V.
XenSource
Open Source virtualization has collaborated to standardize with Microsoft on a set of virtualization formats and interfaces to insure management tool interoperability and performance making XenSource a perfect solution for traditional "UNIX shops".
Virtualization-on-hardware
Intel & AMD are all working on virtualization-done-in-hardware where all virtualization operations are handled in a chip. This is a magnitude of power greater than today’s piddly "VT" technologies that are in today’s processors which simply assist virtualization software. How long before the entire market of core virtualization software rendered moot?

IT Managers that decide against rushing into this market just so that they can "virtualize their datacenter" regardless of the costs of doing so and regardless of how the market evolves toward a low-to-no cost virtualization technology strategy will find themselves poised as visionaries and keen strategists in comparison to those that rushed to implement a virtualization architecture.

The cost of virtualization software will be one of the first things people consider cutting when they look at cost mitigation within IT.

Talking about eLearning – Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering

Posted on 2007-11-21 by wooway

eLearning – Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering

Microsoft recently published a two hours online course on Failover Clustering for Windows Server 2008 (formerly known as Longhorn).

You can access this content here and for $39.99, you can spend as much time as you want for the next three years reviewing the content.

This course, Course 6051: Implementing High Availability and Virtualization in Windows Server 2008 is part of a larger group of courses that can be purchased as a group, or you can purchase this individual course separate from any other eLearning course.

Rod Fournier and I are working on very similar material, with much more depth for our ClusterHelp.com course. However, we will not be releasing it until Windows Server 2008 is released to manufacturing. Look for more information here as Windows Server 2008 comes closer to release.